The first man to die on the beaches of Gallipoli never set foot on them alive. His body drifted in with the tide, face down, wearing a life belt that should have saved him.Sailors noticed him the way you notice wreckage after a storm. He was not a symbol yet. Not a statistic. Just one dead man in a campaign that had barely started, in a war that was not supposed to reach this forgotten corner of the Ottoman Empire.By the time the fighting ended on that peninsula, more than four hundred eighty thousand men would be killed, wounded, or fall sick. For a strip of land barely seventy kilometers long, a place with no gold, no oil, and no famous cities, the price seems insane. Yet the cost was not just measured in bodies or acres. Gallipoli changed how empires fought, how nations saw themselves, and how the war on the Western Front was decided, even though its guns were thousands of kilometers away.That dead man bobbing in the surf was the first hint of the price. The real bill had not even arrived.In the winter of nineteen fourteen, London stank of coal smoke and optimism. The war in Europe had bogged down into trenches, barbed wire, and blood, but the British political elite remained convinced they could think their way out of the mud. At the center of that optimism stood a man who loved bold plans and hated stalemates, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill.

Churchill looked at the map of Europe the way a chess player studies an opponent who has overcommitted all his powerful pieces to one side of the board. Germany and Austria Hungary were locked in a deadly grip with France and Britain on the Western Front, while the vast Russian Empire struggled in the east. Churchill saw a weak link in the chain, the Ottoman Empire, which had thrown its lot in with Germany but remained fragile, overstretched, and technologically behind.If the Allies could knock the Ottomans out of the war, several miracles might happen at once. Russian grain and raw materials could flow safely through the Black Sea and out into the Mediterranean, keeping Russia in the fight. Pressure on the Western Front might ease if German troops had to rush east to help their Ottoman partners. Britain and France might even carve up Ottoman territories in the Middle East and add them to their growing empires.The way to make that happen, Churchill argued, was not another slow, grinding land campaign. It was something the British believed they understood better than anyone else, a naval operation. The Straits of the Dardanelles, a narrow waterway guarding the path from the Aegean Sea to the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, looked like a keyhole on the map. Put enough steel and firepower at that keyhole, and perhaps the Ottoman door would swing open.Plenty of people warned him that the lock might be tougher than it looked. The Ottomans had forts lining the straits, minefields in the water, and narrow channels that forced ships into perfect firing lanes. Naval officers questioned whether battleships alone could force their way through without help from soldiers on land to silence the guns on the cliffs. Churchill waved away doubts with the confidence of a man who had never yet paid the full price of his own ideas.He pushed the plan through a reluctant war cabinet. A fleet would sail to the Dardanelles and batter its way through to Constantinople. Victories that had eluded generals in Flanders might come quickly to admirals in the Aegean. It sounded like an elegant shortcut around the horror of trench warfare. Instead, it became a long detour through a different kind of hell.On eighteenth March nineteen fifteen, the sea between the European and Asian shores of the Dardanelles boiled under the fire of some of the most powerful warships the world had ever seen. British and French battleships advanced in lines, hurling shells at Ottoman forts that had existed, in some cases, since the era of sailing ships and gunpowder barrels.From the decks of those modern steel monsters, the operation must have looked like an engineer’s dream. Rangefinders calculated distances. Spotters called corrections. Guns slammed, roared, and recoiled with the predictable rhythm of industrial power. Brick forts crumbled, dust and smoke rose, and observers signaled back to London that the enemy seemed close to breaking.There was a flaw in that vision of neat, mechanical victory. The Dardanelles were not a shooting gallery built for the convenience of the Royal Navy. They were a trap that geography had handed to the defenders. The channel narrowed and twisted. Strong currents pushed ships off course. Mines, invisible under the gray surface, waited for heavy hulls to pass above them.

An Ottoman minelayer named Nusret had laid a line of mines in a spot the Allies thought was safe, parallel to their intended path. The mines were not impressive to look at, just metal spheres chained to weights on the seabed, but they sat exactly where turning ships would drift while trying to avoid coastal fire.As the afternoon dragged on, the Allied fleet sailed into that unseen barricade. The French battleship Bouvet was the first to pay. One moment, she steamed through the smoke, guns firing. The next, a mine tore open her hull. Witnesses later remembered her heeling over sharply, then capsizing within a couple of minutes. There was no time for a graceful evacuation, only chaos as more than six hundred men drowned or were crushed before lifeboats could reach them.The British ship Irresistible struck another mine and limped, listing, while crew abandoned her under continued shelling. The Ocean tried to tow her to safety, struck a mine herself, and had to be abandoned in turn. Another French ship, the Gaulois, was badly damaged. In the space of a single afternoon, the Allies lost or crippled enough ships to make the admirals question the entire premise of the operation.The forts had not been completely silenced, the minefields were still lethal, and no one could promise that another push would not end with even greater losses. The fleet withdrew. Political and military leaders debated what that failure meant, each trying to avoid responsibility. Churchill still wanted to force the issue, but his colleagues were less certain. Naval gunfire alone, they decided, was not enough. If the Dardanelles were to be taken, soldiers would have to go ashore and fight their way along the peninsula.The shortcut had already turned into something slower and far uglier. Yet the worst decisions were still ahead.The man who would command the land invasion was General Sir Ian Hamilton, a veteran of colonial wars who arrived in the eastern Mediterranean with vague orders and almost no reliable information. His staff had to build a plan on outdated maps, incomplete intelligence, and overconfident assumptions.They knew the basic geography. The Gallipoli peninsula was a long finger of land pointing southwest between the Aegean Sea and the Dardanelles. The narrowest point of the straits, near Kilitbahir on the European side, was the true objective, because artillery there controlled the passage to Constantinople. To reach it, Allied troops would need to secure landings on the tip and along the western shore, then push inland through ridges and gullies that nobody in the British high command had ever walked.On paper, Ottoman forces seemed weaker. Many in London still saw the empire as the “sick man of Europe”, held together by habit and fear rather than efficiency. In reality, the Ottomans had something that numbers on a sheet never reveal, the determination of people defending their own soil and the leadership of a few commanders who understood exactly what was at stake.One of those commanders was a forty year old officer from Salonika named Mustafa Kemal. He was not yet famous, not yet the founding father of modern Turkey. He was just another officer who took his duties seriously, studied terrain carefully, and believed that the key to victory lay in being where the enemy did not expect you in the moment before they arrived.Hamilton’s plan, as it finally took shape, relied on surprise and on the assumption that the Ottomans would be too weak or too confused to respond quickly. The main British landings would target several beaches on the southern tip of the peninsula, collectively known as Cape Helles. Their mission was to secure the point and advance northeast toward the Dardanelles. Further up the western coast, near a small cove that appeared on maps as a gentle curve of sand, soldiers from Australia and New Zealand would go ashore. This Anzac force, named from the initials of Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, was supposed to climb to a plateau inland and threaten the Ottoman flank.The plan relied on tight timing and smooth coordination between navy and army, between different national contingents, between theory and reality. The men who would actually do the landing had never seen the beaches. The officers planning the routes to the interior had never walked the ridges. The maps looked comforting in headquarters rooms, with neat contour lines and colored arrows. The real peninsula waited, indifferent to their ink.On the Ottoman side, the higher command believed the main Allied attack would come near the narrowest part of the Dardanelles, not at the remote coves further south and west. Yet Kemal, studying the same maps and the same logic, drew a different conclusion. If you are attacking by sea, he reasoned, you choose places where ships can land troops and where cliffs do not tower directly over the surf. He pushed to position his forces where he expected the enemy to come ashore, even though some of his superiors remained unconvinced.

The stage was set for a collision between a confident but improvised invasion and a defense that mixed misjudgments with flashes of sharp clarity. The men who would bleed for those decisions spent their last evening on the ships, writing letters home, cleaning rifles, and listening to the thud of waves against metal hulls, unaware that the first critical mistake had already been made on both sides.Dawn on twenty fifth April nineteen fifteen came to Gallipoli as it had for centuries, with a pale wash of light over steep hills rising from a dark sea. On the transports offshore, soldiers woke to shouted orders, lukewarm tea, and the strange quiet that sometimes falls before catastrophe, as if the world inhales and holds its breath.For the British at Cape Helles, the landing zones had been given code names that sounded bland and safe, V Beach, W Beach, X, Y, and S. In reality, some of them were perfect killing grounds. V Beach, below the village of Sedd el Bahr, was a narrow strip of sand overlooked by a crumbling fortress and trenches cut into the slopes beyond. The plan was to run a grounded collier, a transport ship named River Clyde, straight onto the beach, then pour men out of openings cut in her sides, using barges and gangways.It was an industrial age version of a medieval storming of city walls, brave in theory and brutal in practice. As the first boats approached the shore, Ottoman machine guns and rifles opened fire from positions that pre invasion bombardments had not destroyed. Men fell in the water before they ever touched sand, weighed down by packs and equipment, vanishing under the red tinged waves.At V Beach, the River Clyde herself became a kind of improvised fortress and graveyard. Hundreds of men were trapped on board, pinned down by continuous fire whenever they tried to rush out. Bodies floated between the ship and the shore, sometimes forming grotesque, human sandbars that other soldiers crawled over, because there was no other cover.W Beach, a little farther along, turned into a scene of similar horror. Ottoman barbed wire entanglements had been laid under the shallow surf, invisible until boats became snarled in them and men jumped into water that suddenly felt like a net designed to hold them in place for the bullets. Casualties mounted by the minute, and officers who had been told they would face disorganized resistance realized that they were charging into an enemy that had prepared carefully and would not break easily.The one small mercy for the British that day was that, through sheer persistence and sacrifice, some units managed to gain a foothold on the cliffs above the beaches. They inched forward, yard by yard, paying for each rise in the ground with lives, but they did not get far enough or fast enough to meet the ambitious objectives scribbled on planning documents.Further up the coast, the Australians and New Zealanders were having their own rude awakening. Their landing was supposed to take place at a broad beach north of Gaba Tepe, but in darkness and confusion, naval officers put the tows slightly off course. When the dawn light grew strong enough to show the coastline, the men in the boats saw steep ridges and narrow strips of shore instead of the gentle slopes they had been promised.The place would soon become known as Anzac Cove, a small indentation in a shoreline that rose quickly into tangled ravines and knife backed ridges. Instead of deploying in neat lines and advancing across open ground, the first waves scrambled up scrub covered slopes, using hands and knees, dragging rifles and packs, trying to find any path that led upward. Some reached partially prepared Ottoman trenches where surprised defenders fired wildly; others wandered into dead ends where gullies ended in cliffs.News of the landing reached Mustafa Kemal at his headquarters some distance inland. He did not wait for detailed orders from above, which were slow and confused. Instead, he marched his men toward the sound of the guns. When he encountered Ottoman soldiers retreating from the high ground, out of ammunition and shaken by the sudden arrival of enemy troops on their flank, he famously told them to fix bayonets and lie down.Witnesses later recalled that the sight of a line of bayonets suddenly appearing on the ridge gave the attacking Anzac soldiers pause. The charge lost its momentum. In that brief window, Kemal organized a counterattack and hurled his units into the fight for the crest.At one point during the desperate struggle for a key ridge, later called Chunuk Bair, Kemal reportedly told his men that he was not ordering them to attack in order to live, but to attack in order to die, because in the time it would take them to be killed, other forces behind them could come up and hold the line. Whether every word of that speech is exact or burnished by memory, the outcome is clear. The Ottomans held the heights. The Anzacs dug in on the slopes below.

By the end of that first day, the Allied plan lay in ruins. The British at Cape Helles had failed to break out decisively from their narrow perimeters. The Anzacs were crammed into a small, precarious beachhead, overlooked almost entirely by Ottoman positions. The quick thrust inland to take the vital ridges and threaten the Dardanelles never happened.Instead, the peninsula began to sprout a different kind of landscape, one that had already come to define the war in France and Belgium, a maze of trenches, dugouts, and barbed wire, stretching from cliff edge to ravine, from cove to crest. The campaign that had been sold as a bold alternative to trench warfare had turned, within twenty four hours, into trench warfare in a place chosen by the enemy.For the soldiers who survived those first landings, Gallipoli settled into a kind of nightmare routine. Days blended together, marked by the thud of artillery, the crack of rifle fire, and the constant background buzz of flies. The peninsula in summer was hot, dry, and unforgiving. Water had to be brought by ship and laboriously hauled up from the beaches. Latrines overflowed or were placed too close to living quarters. Corpses, often impossible to retrieve from no man’s land, rotted in the open.Disease moved through the trenches almost as fast as bullets. Dysentery, spread by contaminated food and water and by those endless flies, weakened thousands. Lice turned uniforms into crawling shells. Men fought when ordered, but they also fought their own bodies, trying not to lose too much strength before the next attack or counterattack.The lines separating Allied and Ottoman positions were, in many sectors, astonishingly close. At places like Quinn’s Post and the Nek, trenches sat just a few dozen meters apart. Soldiers could hear the enemy talking, coughing, even snoring. This proximity created a strange mix of hatred and reluctant familiarity. At night, some men threw food or cigarettes across the lines. Occasionally, truces were arranged to bury the dead, brief intervals when the war paused and both sides confronted the human cost lying between their holes in the ground.One Australian described the scene during a burial truce in terms that never left him. The ground, he wrote, looked as if it had been sown with bodies instead of seeds, so dense was the carpet of dead in front of the trenches. Men from both sides worked together to cover them, exchanging nods or brief words, then returned to their own positions to resume the business of trying to kill one another.Commanders on both sides kept ordering attacks, because that was what the logic of the war demanded. Politicians back home wanted progress. Staff officers believed that one more push, properly planned and supported, might break the deadlock. Yet each offensive on the peninsula ran into the same brutal math that had already been demonstrated on the Western Front. Defenders with machine guns and artillery, dug into prepared positions on high ground, could slaughter attackers advancing over exposed slopes.At Cape Helles in early May, Allied troops assaulted the village of Krithia and the heights beyond three separate times. Each attempt cost thousands of casualties. None achieved a decisive breakthrough. Men advanced, fell, and crawled back, leaving bodies in the scrub that, in some cases, would not be found until years later.For the Anzacs, one of the most haunting episodes came on seventh August nineteen fifteen at the Nek, a narrow ridge where their trenches lay only tens of meters from Ottoman lines. The attack was supposed to be part of a larger effort to break out of Anzac Cove by seizing key heights. Coordination failures and misunderstandings turned it into a tragic symbol of how disconnected plans and reality could be.Wave after wave of Australian light horsemen were ordered to go over the top from their shallow trenches, straight into dense Ottoman fire. Within seconds of climbing out, many were cut down. Bodies piled in front of the parapets. Yet the orders did not stop. Surviving officers and men begged for the assault to be called off, pointing to the carnage visible just beyond the sandbags. Signals from other parts of the battlefield, which might have justified continuing the attack, had been delayed or misread. Commanders, operating on old assumptions, believed they had to press on.By the time the final wave was cancelled, it was too late for hundreds of young men whose lives had been spent in minutes for no gain beyond a few extra meters of no man’s land covered in khaki and blood. For Australians and New Zealanders, stories like the Nek became central to how they remembered the war, examples of courage twisted by flawed leadership.Ottoman soldiers paid their own staggering price. They fought on home soil, which gave them a powerful motive, but they faced hunger and shortages at least as severe as anything in the Allied trenches. Many came from rural backgrounds and had been dragged into a modern war that chewed up their units with mechanical regularity. In Turkish memory, Gallipoli became not just a story of victory, but of shared sacrifice across different regions and ethnicities of the empire, a rare moment of unity in a state otherwise tearing at the seams.

In the middle of that grinding stalemate, generals kept searching for a lever that might shift the balance. The biggest of those attempts would once again hinge on the element that had failed the Allies from the very beginning, the belief that surprise and audacity could rewrite the basic rules of this battlefield.By midsummer nineteen fifteen, the allied high command faced an uncomfortable truth. The initial landings had failed to seize the commanding heights. Repeated attacks from the existing beachheads had failed to break the stalemate. Casualties were mounting with no visible sign of progress. Yet admitting defeat and pulling out seemed politically impossible.Instead, they chose escalation. The new plan, conceived in London and refined on the spot, called for a fresh landing further north at Suvla Bay, coupled with renewed attacks by the Anzacs to capture the high ridges inland, particularly Chunuk Bair and Hill Sixty. If everything went well, the new Suvla troops would pour inland onto relatively flat ground, link up with the Anzacs pushing from the south, and roll up the Ottoman lines along the spine of the peninsula.The key, as always, lay in timing and execution. The Suvla landing, under General Frederick Stopford, would have to move rapidly off the beaches to seize the surrounding hills before Ottoman reinforcements could arrive. Meanwhile, the Anzacs would undertake complex night marches up treacherous ravines, guided by local scouts, to reach their objectives under cover of darkness.The plan depended on a level of initiative and speed that the Allied command structure on the spot was not built to deliver. Stopford, cautious and more comfortable with staff work than with battlefield improvisation, chose to remain aboard ship rather than onshore during the crucial early hours. Confusion over orders, uncertainty about the terrain, and simple human hesitation combined to slow the Suvla advance to a crawl.When dawn broke on seventh August, Allied troops at Suvla Bay had captured the beaches with relatively light opposition and stood within reach of the surrounding high ground. Yet many units stopped to dig in or wait for further instructions instead of driving forward. There were no clear, aggressive orders pushing them on, and officers feared overextending their lines.On the Ottoman side, Mustafa Kemal again recognized the danger more quickly than some of his superiors. He moved to take charge of the response in the sector, urging his men toward the crucial hills overlooking Suvla. Once Ottoman forces occupied those ridges in strength, the chance for an easy Allied breakout evaporated.Simultaneously, the Anzacs at Anzac Cove launched their own assaults up the steep gullies toward Chunuk Bair and neighboring heights. Night marches went wrong. Guides became lost, units tangled in the dark, men stumbled into unexpected cliffs and ravines. Some reached their objectives late and exhausted. Others never reached them at all.For a brief, flickering moment, New Zealand troops did hold the summit of Chunuk Bair. From there, they could look down toward the Dardanelles and almost see the shipping lanes that were the entire point of the campaign. Yet their position was precarious. Ottoman counterattacks, supported by artillery, slammed into the thin line of defenders. After two days of savage fighting, the New Zealanders were driven from the crest. The high ground returned firmly to Ottoman control.The Suvla force, which was supposed to have blasted its way inland and relieved pressure on the Anzacs, never delivered the decisive push. By the time British leaders in London replaced Stopford with a more aggressive commander, the window had closed. Ottoman defenses had solidified. Another chance had been squandered in a pattern that began to feel grimly familiar.The August offensives cost tens of thousands of additional casualties on both sides. They left the front lines altered only slightly, with pockets of ground changing hands at enormous cost but the overall strategic picture unchanged. The Dardanelles remained firmly closed. Constantinople remained out of reach. The Allied forces were still clinging to narrow strips of coast under constant threat.At this point, the logic of the campaign inverted. What had begun as a daring attempt to break the stalemate in Europe now threatened to become a trap that tied down Allied troops, ships, and political capital for no meaningful gain. Each additional soldier sent to Gallipoli could not be sent to the Western Front or other theaters. Each new plan to crack the peninsula risked repeating the same dismal sequence of overconfidence, miscommunication, and underestimation of the defenders.Meanwhile, in the Ottoman Empire, a different kind of calculation took shape. Gallipoli had become a hard earned symbol of resistance, but the empire as a whole remained under enormous strain. Russian armies pressured eastern Anatolia. Internal tensions simmered, especially as the government in Constantinople pursued brutal policies against Armenian and other minority populations, policies that would culminate in mass deportations and killings that historians now recognize as genocide.

Gallipoli did not cause those atrocities, but the sense of existential siege and the emboldening effect of a rare military success contributed to a political environment in which the ruling elite believed that almost any measure might be justified in the name of survival. In that way, the guns on one peninsula echoed in decisions made far away, affecting people who would never see the Aegean.For the Allied governments, the question became unavoidable. How much longer could they pour men and material into a campaign that stubbornly refused to yield the promised breakthrough? The answer would arrive not through a bold decision to cut losses, but through the slow erosion of confidence, a shuffled set of political priorities, and the recognition that Gallipoli was no longer a lever to move the war, but a weight dragging it down.By late nineteen fifteen, the British government itself was changing. Criticism of the Dardanelles adventure, and of Churchill in particular, grew louder as casualty lists grew longer. Families in Australia and New Zealand, in Britain and Ireland, read the names of sons and brothers killed on beaches and hillsides they had never heard of before the war. In London, there were inquiries and quiet arguments over who should bear responsibility.A new commander, General Charles Monro, arrived on the peninsula with fresh eyes and fewer personal ties to the original plan. He toured the positions at Cape Helles, Anzac Cove, and Suvla Bay. What he saw was not promising. The enemy held the high ground almost everywhere. The Allied trenches were cramped, exposed to artillery, and difficult to supply. Winter was coming, which would turn already marginal conditions into something far more lethal.Monro’s recommendation was blunt. He advised that the entire force be withdrawn. Militarily, he argued, the positions did not offer enough advantage to justify the continued risk. Strategically, the troops could be better used elsewhere. Politically, such a withdrawal would be embarrassing, but continuing the campaign and losing even more men for no gain would be worse.Even then, London hesitated. The fear of a disastrous evacuation, with tens of thousands of men trying to embark under fire from Ottoman guns, haunted the discussions. The memory of the first landings, when boats had been scythed down in the surf, suggested what a reverse crossing might look like if things went wrong.Yet sometimes the same factors that make an attack impossible make a retreat unexpectedly easy. The Ottomans, too, were exhausted. Their ammunition stocks were low. Winter bit into their thin uniforms and limited rations as cruelly as it did into Allied lines. They did not expect their enemies, after so much sacrifice, simply to give up the ground voluntarily.Carefully, secretly, the Allies planned the withdrawal. They reduced activity in the trenches in ways designed to look like normal attrition rather than mass movement. Supplies and heavy equipment were moved out first where possible. Men were thinned gradually, with those remaining using tricks to make their trenches seem occupied even when they were almost empty.Among the more ingenious devices were the so called self firing rifles. Soldiers rigged rifles to discharge after a delay, using cans of water dripping through small holes into other containers tied by string to the triggers. As the water shifted weight from one container to the other over time, the string tightened and eventually pulled the trigger. At night and in the early hours, as men slipped away toward the beaches, these contraptions kept up an irregular pattern of shots, like the breathing of a beast that had already begun to die.The first phase of the evacuation, at Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay in December nineteen fifteen, stunned the men who participated in it with its relative smoothness. The weather held. Ottoman forces, deceived by the lingering rifle fire and other signs of occupation, did not mount a major attack. By before dawn on twentieth December, the last Allied troops had embarked, leaving behind only a landscape of trenches, discarded equipment, and mines.The second phase, from Cape Helles in January nineteen sixteen, proved more dangerous. The weather turned harsher, and Ottoman artillery eventually realized that something unusual was happening. Yet even there, the catastrophe many had feared did not occur. Though there were casualties during the final embarkations, the evacuation as a whole succeeded beyond expectations.In military history, Gallipoli is often remembered as a disaster. That is accurate when measured against the original goals and the appalling casualties for minimal territorial gain. Yet within that disaster, the evacuations stand out as an example of learning under pressure. The Allied command, which had botched so many aspects of the landings and subsequent offensives, finally planned and executed one major operation with precision and respect for the lives involved. It came too late to redeem the campaign, but it prevented a terrible situation from becoming even worse.

When Ottoman troops finally moved into the abandoned trenches, they found cooking fires still smoldering, empty shelters, and rifles that occasionally fired themselves, powered by the last few drops from suspended water cans. The enemy that had clung to the cliffs for months had vanished into the sea like a mirage.The peninsula fell silent except for the wind in the scrub and the cries of gulls. The ground, however, did not forget. Under the churned soil lay the remains of tens of thousands of men from across Europe, the Middle East, and the far reaches of the British Empire. The question that hung over that silence was simple and brutal. What had it all been for?The answer starts with strategy, but it does not end there. At the highest level, Gallipoli failed to achieve its stated aim. The Dardanelles remained closed to Allied shipping throughout the war. Constantinople stayed in Ottoman hands until nineteen eighteen, when the empire finally collapsed under the combined pressure of defeats on other fronts and internal disintegration.Some historians have argued that the campaign, despite its failure, tied down Ottoman forces that might otherwise have been used against Russia or in the Middle East, perhaps indirectly easing pressure elsewhere. That may be partially true, but the cost on the Allied side was immense, and many of the troops who died on the peninsula would otherwise have fought on the Western Front, where their presence might have changed the outcome of specific battles.Strategically, the more striking lesson is a negative one. Gallipoli demonstrated that even overwhelming naval power could not easily force a narrow, well defended strait in the age of modern mines and coastal artillery without coordinated and competent land operations. The idea of using ships alone as a magic key to unlock continental stalemates lost much of its shine. Future planners took note, even if, as always, each generation found new ways to overestimate the promise of technology against prepared defenses.For the Ottoman Empire, the campaign was a rare and precious victory in a war and an era that mostly brought humiliation. It showed that the state could still resist one of the most powerful coalitions in the world, at least on ground that favored the defender and under leaders who understood their terrain. That memory would become central to the story that emerging Turkish nationalists told about themselves.Mustafa Kemal, whose decisions on the ridges above Anzac Cove and later at Suvla Bay had been so crucial, emerged from the war as a hero. When the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed and foreign powers sought to carve up Anatolia, he led the Turkish War of Independence and founded the Republic of Turkey. In Turkish national mythology, the path from obscure officer to Ataturk, the father of the nation, runs straight through the rugged gullies of Gallipoli.In nineteen thirty four, now as president of Turkey, he addressed former enemies in a speech that has been quoted ever since in ceremonies on the peninsula. Speaking of the Allied dead buried on Turkish soil, he declared that they had become the sons of Turkey as well, resting in a friendly country. The exact wording and translation of that speech have been debated, but the sentiment captures part of what makes Gallipoli unique in the memory of those who fought there. It is a place where mutual respect grew from shared suffering, even as the reasons for that suffering remained contested.For Australia and New Zealand, countries that had become dominions within the British Empire only a few years before the war, Gallipoli took on a different kind of meaning. The Anzac forces were technically imperial troops, fighting under British command and for British strategic goals. Yet the experience of landing together, bleeding together, and dying together far from home helped crystallize a sense of distinct national identity.News of the landings and the brutal fighting that followed filtered back through letters and newspaper reports, often sanitized but still raw enough to convey the scale of the ordeal. The image of the stoic, irreverent Anzac soldier, resilient in the face of hardship and loyal to his mates, began to form in the public imagination. The fact that the campaign had ended in evacuation rather than victory did not erase that image. If anything, it sharpened it. Courage and sacrifice were no longer linked, in these new national stories, to triumphant outcomes alone.