Turkey, Old Foes Look Back on Gallipoli

Seventy-five years after the epic Gallipoli battle, Turkey and its World War I foes plan to join forces to commemorate a campaign that produced both chivalry and mass slaughter.

Some 120 veterans in their 90s, Australian, British, French and Turkish warships and national leaders will converge on Gallipoli for the April 25 ceremonies, organizers said.

It will probably be the only time that such a ceremony will be held for the battle, which saw the rise of modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and gave Australia and New Zealand their first real sense of nationhood.

Officials said Turkish President Turgut Ozal, Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, New Zealand Governor-General Sir Paul Reeves, other government ministers, diplomats and senior officers are likely to attend.

Preparations are being conducted with military precision, down to doctors for the veterans and accommodations on land and at sea off the sparsely populated peninsula.

“Australia and New Zealand are the only Western countries which have a positive image of Turkey. The reason is common experiences in battle,” a Foreign Ministry official said.

“Their first encounter was in a battle that commanded respect on both sides from the way they fought and the way they endured,” the official told Reuters.

Most of the veterans are expected to come from Australia and New Zealand, which mark April 25 as a public day of remembrance.

“We have asked Turkey to identify any of their vets (veterans) but we don’t think they have many because of lower life expectancy here,” an Australian diplomat said.

For Britain, which headed the Allied force, which also included soldiers from India, the campaign--originally inspired by Winston Churchill--was a fiasco brought about largely by poor intelligence, questionable command and ill-equipped troops.

The plan was to send warships up the narrow Dardanelles straits to reach Constantinople, now Istanbul, and so take Ottoman Turkey, a German ally, out of the war.

However, Turkish forces, led by German Gen. Limon von Sanders, ripped into the Allied fleet in March, 1915, putting out of action or destroying six of nine battleships.

At dawn a month later, on April 25, Allied troops landed at what is now known as ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) Cove and elsewhere at the start of trench battles involving a total of some one million troops from both sides.

Official records said there were 46,000 deaths among British and French troops while 86,692 Turks were killed. Unofficial estimates put Turkish deaths at up to 250,000.

Reports of the prolonged battle, in which machine guns held sway against advancing troops, tell of instances when charity overcame hostility between the two sides.

After one engagement, Turkish troops held up placards from their trenches saying they were hungry. ANZAC soldiers threw over tins of beef and received Turkish cigarettes in return.

The campaign ended Jan. 8, 1916, with an ignominious Allied withdrawal.

Although dwarfed by the carnage on the war’s Western Front, Gallipoli was horrific by previous standards of modern warfare and a shock to the young nations of Australia and New Zealand.

“Gallipoli is very much part of the national character of both countries. It signified for many people the start of Australian and New Zealand nationhood,” one diplomat said.

The Allies have marked each April 25 with ceremonies at cemeteries and sites whose names, including Ari Burnu, Chunuk Bair and Lone Pine, have passed into Australasian folklore.

The Turkish military traditionally celebrates March 18, when its guns and mines halted the Allied fleet.

Ataturk, who played a major role as a senior officer at Gallipoli, founded the Turkish republic from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire seven years after the battle.