Gallipoli Campaign Overview

Each year on Anzac Day, New Zealanders (and Australians) mark the anniversary of the Gallipoli landings of 25 April 1915. On that day, thousands of young men, far from their homes, stormed the beaches on the Gallipoli Peninsula in what is now Turkey.

By the time the campaign ended, after eight months, more than 130,000 men in total had died.

In the wider story of the First World War, the Gallipoli campaign made no large mark. However, for New Zealand, along with Australia and Turkey, the Gallipoli campaign is often claimed to have played an important part in fostering a sense of national identity.

Gallipoli invasion

Prime Minister William Massey pledged New Zealand’s support as part of the British Empire after the outbreak of war between the United Kingdom and Germany in August 1914.

The New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) left Wellington in October 1914, linking up with the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), and were initially sent to Egypt to bolster the British forces guarding the Suez Canal.

In early April 1915, the NZEF’s were transported to the Greek island of Lemnos to prepare for the invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula - the entrance to the Dardanelles Strait – a strategic waterway leading to the Sea of Marmara and, via the Bosphorus, the Black Sea.

The Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF) was to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula. New Zealanders and Australians made up nearly half of the MEF’s 75,000 troops; the rest were from Great Britain and Ireland, France, India and Newfoundland.

The MEF launched its invasion of the Dardanelles on 25 April 1915. While British (and later French) troops made the main landing at Cape Helles on the southern tip of the peninsula, Lieutenant-General Sir William Birdwood’s Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) – soon to become known as Anzacs – made a diversionary attack 20km to the north at Gaba Tepe (Kabatepe).

Because of navigational errors the Anzacs landed about 2km north of the intended site. Instead of a flat stretch of coastline, they came ashore at Anzac Cove, a narrow beach overlooked by steep hills and ridgelines.

The landings never came close to achieving their goals. Although the Allies managed to secure footholds on the peninsula, the fighting quickly degenerated into trench warfare, with the Anzacs holding a tenuous perimeter against strong Ottoman attacks.

August offensive & Chunuk Bair

In August 1915, the Allies launched a major offensive in an attempt to break the deadlock. The plan was to capture the high ground, the Sari Bair Range, while a British force landed further north at Suvla Bay. The New Zealand and Australian Division played a prominent part in this offensive, with New Zealand troops capturing one of the hills, Chunuk Bair. This was the limit of the Allied advance; an Ottoman counter-attack forced the troops who had relieved the New Zealanders off Chunuk Bair, while the British failed to make any progress inland from Suvla.

In the aftermath of the Sari Bair offensive, the Allies tried to break through the Ottoman line north of Anzac, involving New Zealanders in costly attacks at Hill 60 in late August.

Hill 60 turned out to be the last major Allied attack at Gallipoli. The failure of the August battles meant a return to stalemate. In midSeptember 1915, the exhausted New Zealand infantry and mounted rifles were briefly withdrawn to Lemnos to rest and receive reinforcements from Egypt.

By the time the New Zealanders returned to Anzac in November, the future of the campaign had been determined. The British government began questioning the value of persisting at Gallipoli, and the new commander-in-chief of the MEF quickly proposed evacuation.

Aftermath

Gallipoli was a costly failure for the Allies.

By the time the campaign ended, more than 130,000 men had died: at least 87,000 Ottoman soldiers and 44,000 Allied soldiers, including more than 8700 Australians. Among the dead were 2779 New Zealanders, about a sixth of all those who had landed on the peninsula.

Shortly after the October 1918 armistice, British and dominion Graves Registration units landed on Gallipoli and began building permanent cemeteries for the dead of 1915-1916. During the 1920s, the Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission) completed a network of Anzac and British cemeteries and memorials to the missing that still exist on the peninsula today. In 1925, the New Zealand government unveiled a New Zealand battlefield memorial on the summit of Chunuk Bair. The battlefields are now part of the 33,000-ha Gallipoli Peninsula Historical National Park, or Peace Park.