On Saturday 11th of July John Wilson, the Gallipoli Association’s Education Officer, hosted the second Gallipoli Association International Online Conference and provides the following report.

Once again the event was well attended with a good number of overseas members joining the conference which started at 9am UK time to make it work for those people dialling in from the Southern Hemisphere.

The conference started with Vic Nurcombe standing in for Lewis Fredrickson, who as a member of the Australian armed forces had just been deployed. Vic’s talk 'Holding Quinn's Post: one of the finest feats at Anzac', covered many less well known aspects of these actions outside of Australia and New Zealand. The talk had some great maps which really brought home how small the Anzac area was and I have no doubt will be finding their way into some tour guides information packs!

The next speaker was Greg O’Reilly, whose talk 'Machine Guns at Anzac - April/May 1915' covered a lot of ground. This fascinating talk looked at the development of machine gun tactics both on the peninsula and the western front and the learning that was taken from Gallipoli to support the development of the tactics. The explanation of the siting of the various machine guns in the Anzac posts on second ridge and the reasons for how they were sited provided an important insight to the defence of Anzac.

The final speaker was Dr. Mesut Uyar with the talk 'The Ottoman Offensive at Anzac on 19 May 1915: Anatomy of A Disaster'. This talk was an opportunity to hear about the actions from the other side, which gave an important counter balance to the other speakers. Mesut’s talk looked at the Ottoman command structure for the 19th May attack and considered the strengths and weaknesses of a range of the Ottoman commanders, in an attempt to see who was to blame for what was one of the worst days for Ottoman casualties.

I would like to thank all of our speakers for this year's conference for taking the time to talk and making the event such a great success.