The Aftermath
Although the campaign is still regarded as a disaster, with little or nothing to show for the loss of life , ships and equipment, the fighting at Gallipoli had come close to breaking the Turkish army which had lost thousands of its best infantry. Over 36,000 sailors and soldiers of the British Empire had died, of whom some 22,000 lie buried in the beautifully maintained Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s 31 cemeteries on the peninsula, of whom only 9,000 were actually identified when the Commission began to gather up the unburied dead in 1919. a further 14,000 men whose bodies were never found are commemorated on the memorials at Helles, Lone Pine and elsewhere on the old battlefields.
British and French troops had begun
to arrive at Salonika in the late summer of 1915 in a belated
attempt to help the Serbs who, having resoundingly defeated the
Austro-Hungarians earlier in the war, were now overwhelmed by the
entry of Bulgaria on the side of the Central Powers. Following
their harrowing retreat to the Adriatic the Serbs were taken off by
the Anglo-French fleet and the force landed at Salonika was forced
into an enclave where it remained bottled up for the rest of the
war in what the High Command called 'The Entrenched Camp' or, as
its inmates knew it, 'The Birdcage'. The first troops to go there
from Gallipoli were those of Mahon's 10th (Irish) division who left
the peninsula in September. During the next three years, malaria
killed many more of the garrison than did the enemy.
By the autumn of 1918 it was
evident that the Austro-Hungarian empire was on its last legs and,
as harvest time drew near, even the hard-fighting Bulgarian army
began to seep away from the battlefield. Greece had been on the
verge of civil war for some time, divided between the followers of
the Nationalist Prime Minister Venizelos and the King, who was
compelled to resign by the allies when it seemed he might throw in
his hand with the Central Powers. At one crucial stage the British
fleet opened fire on the royal palace.
The end for the central Powers drew
closer in the early autumn of 1918 when the Bulgarian chief of
Staff suggested to his royal master, Tsar Boris, that it would be
prudent to sue for peace, to be told to go out and die with his
troops, who beat off one final allied attack, inflicting such heavy
casualties on the British troops that their commander, General
Milne, informed the French Commander-in-chief that his men could do
no more. In one brigade alone, the 65th of the 22nd Division, only
200 officers and men remained. But this was the Bulgars' last throw
and they started to melt away. On 29 September their government
sued for an armistice. General Milne was directed to march his army
east through Thrace, towards Constantinople. The Turks had already
decided to call for an Armistice and used an unusual intermediary.
General Sir Charles Townshend who had been held on comfortable
captivity in Turkey since surrendering at Kut-al-Amara in 1915. he
was now invited by the Turkish government to go to Lemnos and
negotiate with the Senior naval Officer. Following the success of
his mission the allied fleet sailed unmolested through the
Dardanelles and on to Constantinople.
There followed a period of
political and social chaos throughout the Balkans, the eastern
Mediterranean and the tottering Ottoman empire. It was the moment
of destiny for Mustafa Kemal and he took it with both hands,
forming an alternative provisional government at Angora (Ankara)and
declaring it the new capital of turkey when he eventually secured
power. Before this, however, he had to deal with formidable
problems; the allies had stationed occupation forces at the
Dardanelles and in Constantinople to guarantee passage of the
Bosphorus. The British force established itself in Chanak and in
Constantinople. Many of the Nissen huts used to house the troops in
the Chanak and Maidos area are still to be seen, having been
swiftly 'liberated' by the local population after the allies
departed in 1923. By then, Kemal had established a firm grip on the
Turkish nation. He had conclusively defeated a Greek attempt to
advance on Ankara from its allotted enclave around Smyrna (a move
for which Venizelos and his colleagues, all apostles of the
'Greater Greece' movement, were ultimately responsible). As Smyrna
fell to the new Turkish army the city burned and there was terrible
loss of life as the allied fleet stood off, helpless to intervene.
Kemal now ordained what amounted to a major exchange of
populations, compulsorily sending the long-established Greek
communities back to Greece in exchange for Turkish communities
historically embedded in Grecian Thrace. Enormous suffering ensued;
in addition, there had been appalling scenes within Anatolia during
the war, when the Armenian population was driven from its
historical homelands, a tragedy which may not even now be discussed
openly in Turkey.
The reforms on which Kemal now
embarked must rank as one of the outstanding political and social
feats of all time. He established a firm boundary for the new
Turkish State, abolished the Arabic script and many traditional
forms of dress (including the Fez) and declared that henceforth
Turkey would be a secular republic. Scholars were put to work to
standardise the language in the Roman script, the education system
was thoroughly overhauled and modern agricultural methods
introduced. Mustafa Kemal Pasha, victor of Gallipoli, had become
the father of a new nation, and was now Kemal Ataturk, 'Father of
the Turks'.