The Defence of the Dardanelles

In 1915, in the midst of the First World War, the Allied powers attempted to force the Dardanelles, the narrow strait guarding the sea approach to the Ottoman capital, in order to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war and open a supply route to Russia. A great naval assault on 18 March 1915 failed with the loss of several battleships to Ottoman guns and mines, and the Allies then landed armies, British, French, Australian and New Zealand, on the Gallipoli peninsula in April. There followed nine months of brutal trench warfare on the steep ridges above the straits, an early and terrible example of the industrialised stalemate of the Great War, fought with machine guns, artillery, periscopes and field telephones in summer heat and winter cold, at enormous cost to both sides. The Ottoman defenders, in whom the young commander Mustafa Kemal rose to prominence on the heights of Anafartalar, held their ground, and at the end of 1915 and the start of 1916 the Allies evacuated, leaving the peninsula in Ottoman hands. The victory, remembered in Turkish as Canakkale, with the saying that the strait would not be passed, was a rare success for an empire that was otherwise being defeated and dismembered, and it is honoured as a defence of the heartland and as the graveyard of a generation. This scene depicts the Ottoman trench line on the ridges above the Dardanelles, with the Allied fleet in the narrows below.