Gallipoli Campaign

The Gallipoli campaign was an Anglo-French operation against the Ottoman Empire, fought from the landings of 25 April 1915 to the final Allied withdrawal on 9 January 1916. Conceived as a naval and then amphibious effort to force the Dardanelles Strait, take Constantinople, and knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war, the campaign was the first major amphibious operation of modern warfare: some 480,000 Allied troops, under the overall command of General Sir Ian Hamilton and drawing heavily on Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) units alongside British and French forces, landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula against determined Ottoman defense organized in large part by a rising Ottoman officer, Colonel Mustafa Kemal, later known as Ataturk. The Allies suffered over 220,000 casualties without securing the peninsula, and Ottoman losses ran nearly as high; the campaign ended in a full Allied withdrawal, conducted, unlike the landings, without significant further loss of life. Strategically a defeat for the Allies, the campaign rejuvenated Ottoman morale and the military standing of Mustafa Kemal, and remains a formative national memory in Australia and New Zealand, marked annually as ANZAC Day.