Gallipoli and the Turks

This week we and the British and to an even greater extent the Australians have been commemorating the centenary of the Gallipoli campaign, an eight month long campaign of World War I considered a great national victory by the Turks and the national baptism of fire by the Australians and New Zealanders. The campaign began one hundred years ago yesterday on April 25, 1915. In the course of the campaign there were a quarter million casualties on the Allied side alone, nearly 60,000 killed by enemy fire, with even more dying of disease.

I only became aware of it recently but on September 23, 1915 a young Australian reporter, Keith Murdoch, father of Rupert, after spending four days crawling through the trenches, scrambling over the countryside, speaking with soldiers, and generally surveying the campaign wrote a 25 page typewritten letter to Andrew Fisher, the Australian Prime Minister, that is considered influential if not instrumental in bringing the disastrous campaign to an end. You can read the letter here at the Australian National Library and I think it should be mandatory reading, not only for its clear reporting but for its rhetorical excellence. Here is its most famous passage, its peroration:

I hope I have not made the picture too gloomy. I have great faith still in the Englishman. And, as I have said, the enemy is having his own troubles too. But this unfortunate expedition has never been given a chance. It required large bodies of seasoned troops. It required a great leader. It required self-sacrifice on the part of the staff as well as that sacrifice so wonderfully and liberally made on the part of the soldiers. It has had none of these things. Its troops have been second class, because untried before their awful battles and privations of the peninsula. And behind it is a gross selfishness and complacency on the part of the staff.

In the commemorations too little has been written about the Turks’ experience of the campaign. They suffered as many or more casualties as the Allies did, both by enemy fire and disease. Just as the Australians attributed their high casualty rate to the recklessness and indifference to their lives of the general staff so too did the Turks attribute their even higher casualty rate to the recklessness and indifference to their lives of the German officers that commanded them.

Here is what Keith Murdoch wrote of the Turks in his letter:

The Turks by the way are as generous in their praise of our men as the British and French are. Certainly the Turks are positively afraid of our men, and one of their trenches–that opposite Quinn’s Post–is such a place of fear, owing to the indomitable way our snipers and bomb-throwers have got their men down, that Turks will not go into it unless they are made corporals. So say our Intelligence Officers. I saw many strange and remarkable instances of the humanity and courage of the Turks. Certainly his trenches are better than anything we can do, and he makes them remarkably quickly.

A young Turkish officer of the campaign, Mustafa Kemal, later called “Atatürk”, rose to prominence in the campaign for his gallant and courageous leadership. He is best known now for having founded something of a rarity among majority Muslim countries, a secularist state. Nineteen years after the campaign in 1934 he wrote this in tribute to the Aussies and New Zealanders killed in it:

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives … You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours … You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.