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    Gallipoli: A Short History
    Gallipoli: A Short History
    Gallipoli: A Short History
    Ebook271 pages5 hours

    Gallipoli: A Short History

    By Michael McKernan

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    About this ebook

    A concise and very readable account of the whole Gallipoli campaign written in Michael's very personable style. Describes the planning, or rather the lack of planning, that went into the campaign; the actual campaign itself—while it does describe the main battles, the landing, and withdrawal, it doesn't get into the minute details that most other books have, and which can become incomprehensible to the general reader. It describes the impact of the campaign on the folk at home and the way the nation changed from a feeling of great pride early in the campaign to one of horror as the casualty list mounted, and it describes the agonizing that went into the decision to withdraw from the peninsular. While describing in graphic details the horrors of the campaign and the ultimate failure it does certainly also gets across the message that the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps did a fantastic job and against all odds nearly succeeded in their campaign.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAllen Unwin
    Release dateOct 1, 2010
    ISBN9781742691459
    Gallipoli: A Short History
    Author

    Michael McKernan

    Michael McKernan is a professional writer, reviewer, and commentator in the area of Australian history. He has written about war and society, the region, sport, and Australian politics. He was a senior lecturer in Australian history at the University of New South Wales before accepting the position of deputy director at the Australian War Memorial. Now working as a consultant historian, he is the author or editor of more than 20 books, including The Strength of a Nation, Here is Their Spirit, and This War Never Ends. He and his wife live in Canberra.

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      Book preview

      Gallipoli - Michael McKernan

      Chapter one

      ‘A gentleman’s game’

      Winston Spencer-Churchill, as he was known at school, lived the first quarter of his life in the reign of Queen Victoria. His father was a nobleman from a wealthy family, his mother an American beauty. Winston saw little of either of them and was brought up by a woman he adored, Mrs Everest, his beloved ‘Woom’. At the age of seven, Spencer-Churchill was sent to boarding school and so detested it that he became dangerously ill. At the age of twelve he began at Harrow, one of England’s finest schools, and did so poorly in class that he never advanced out of the lowest form. He also did poorly at games. Later he attended a ‘crammer’ in a desperate effort to pass into the Royal Military College Sandhurst. His father thought him too dumb for the law. ‘I might have gone into the Church,’ he wrote, ‘and preached orthodox sermons in a spirit of audacious contradiction to the age.’ But he went into the army instead.

      At Sandhurst he thrived, passing out with honours, eighth in his class of 150. It was the closing decade of the Victorian era, a period of such long, undisturbed peace for the British in Europe that young officers yearned for war. ‘There has never been a time’, he wrote, ‘when war service was held in so much esteem by the military authorities or more ardently sought by officers of every rank.’ In those leisured, last days of peace the military year was divided into a seven-month summer season of training and a five-month winter season of leave. Every officer received a solid two and a half months of uninterrupted repose.

      Desperate for war, Churchill travelled to Cuba to join the Spanish in putting down an armed rebellion against their colonial rule. This raised eyebrows in London: what business did Winston have there? Then he joined his regiment, the 4th Hussars, in India. For the average young British officer at the time, the daily routine was fixed and pleasant. Awakened early by his turbanned bearer, he would join the regiment on parade at six and watch his men drill and manoeuvre for an hour and a half. After washing and breakfast, the officer went to the stables or the orderly room at nine for another hour and a half. ‘Long before eleven o’clock all white men were in shelter’, breaking cover at half past one for luncheon and sleeping on until five. Then came polo, ‘the hour for which we have been living all day long … [then] as the shadows lengthened over the polo ground, we ambled back perspiring and exhausted to hot baths, rest and at 8.30 dinner, to the strains of the regimental band and the clinking of ice in well-filled glasses.’ This was Winston’s description of his life with the regiment in India.

      All of it tosh. This might have been the life lived by Reginald and Hugo, both of whom shared a substantial bungalow with him, and the life of most other young officers as well. But Churchill knew no such indolence. He was a restless, deeply ambitious man, and while the others were sleeping or playing their games he was hard at work, reading widely and carefully in British history—all of Gibbon and Macaulay for starters—studying contemporary politics and society, and writing and writing: despatches for the newspapers back home, his first book of military history, and his one and only novel. He tells us that he was playing polo, and maybe he was—a little, anyway—but his mind was on matters of much greater moment.

      Churchill, in fact, was unhappy and anxious in India because his awakening ambitions lay not with the army but with politics. ‘This is an abominable country to live long in,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘Comfort you get—company you miss. I meet few people worth talking to and there is every tendency to relapse into a purely animal state of existence.’ So he continued to read prodigiously and he, though more often his mother, petitioned senior officers and politicians for action and promotion. Churchill quoted Samuel Johnson with approval: ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,’ and he was already showing that he was no blockhead. On a ship to Egypt—or was it to Crete in the hope of war with the Turks?—anyway, on one of the voyages that Churchill was endlessly taking, seemingly free to roam the oceans despite being only a humble lieutenant in the Hussars, he met a colonel who attracted him: Ian Hamilton. This was in 1897, when Churchill was twenty-two and Hamilton was forty-four. They would meet again later.

      Long after the First World War, when Churchill was in his mid-fifties and in a wasteland of thwarted achievement and ambition—fearing, perhaps, that he would never make his mark on the world—he published a remarkable book, My Early Life. In its opening chapters he gives a highly romantic account of his military service that sets aside entirely the fact that he had, with deliberate and knowing foresight, used his brief life in the army as a springboard to his greater ambition, a political life. Yet it would be foolish to discount completely the picture of himself that Churchill presents in this self-serving book. ‘From very early youth,’ he wrote, ‘I had brooded about soldiers and war, and often I had imagined in dreams and day-dreams the sensations attendant upon being for the first time under fire.’ He wrote that war had once been ‘a gentleman’s game’. Picture him on the floor in his nursery, a very young fellow, with at least a thousand of his toy soldiers lined up in correct formation, waging war against his brother whom, because he was younger, Winston would not allow to have artillery and who was therefore at a horrible disadvantage. A Victorian upbringing, imperial service, excitement at the romance of war, a lust for the ‘gentleman’s game’ that had taken him to Cuba, the North-West Frontier and South Africa in search of its adventure, ruthlessly ambitious: Winston Churchill was perhaps not the best person to be a leader of men in war.

      Yet such he became. Through mistake and mischance, perhaps, Europe fell into war in August 1914. If those making the choice for war then had looked with even partial interest at the American Civil War of fifty years earlier, they might have seen Europe’s and the world’s looming fate clearly enough. The last stages of the Civil War had found men living in opposing trenches, hurling artillery shells at each other and suffering losses on a hitherto unimaginable scale. This was the best dress rehearsal for massed trench warfare that the world could possibly have had. It was entirely ignored. In the years after the Civil War artillery had grown steadily mightier, but trenches became no

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