The Strategy Behind Gallipoli

Release of Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) Strategic Insight No. 15/2005 

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has today released a new ASPI Strategic Insight publication, which examines the strategic origins of the Gallipoli operation under the direction of the First Lord of the British Admiralty, Winston Churchill. 

Authored by Head of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at ADFA in Canberra, Professor Robin Prior, and titled ‘The Strategy behind Gallipoli: Strategic decision-making in the Dardanelles and Gallipoli‘, the paper is the first in an occasional series of Strategic Insights re-examining key strategic policy decision-making in the past. 

“Although Churchill’s schemes were many and various they had one factor in common: they sought not just to defeat the German fleet but to use British naval power to shorten the duration of the war on land.”

“In the willingness of the British War Council and many of its advisors to believe that sea power could achieve this end, it lead to the grave underestimation by all concerned on the determination with which the enemy (Turkey) would defend its homeland.” Robin states.

Prior says that after the ill-fated naval attack in the Dardanelles that lasted from 19 February to 18 March, Prior notes that “Not for the first time during the First World War a strategic concept had come unstuck because the tactics required for its successful implementation were beyond the abilities of the force employed.”

In other words hopes of victory lay in the conviction that Turkish morale would crumble in the face of British sea power. When it did not the game was up.

The Insight assesses the strategic thinking behind the First World War Gallipoli operation that led a powerful British and Commonwealth army to defeat. 

Professor Prior also argues that an allied victory in Turkey would, in fact, have had little impact on the broad course of the war.