On 28 June 1914, Poincaré was at the Longchamps racetrack when he received news of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Poincaré was fascinated by the report but stayed on to watch the race.

In 1913, it had been announced that Poincaré would visit St. Petersburg in July 1914 to meet Tsar Nicholas II. Accompanied by Premier René Viviani, Poincaré went to Russia for the second time (but for the first time as president) to reinforce the Franco-Russian Alliance. On 15 July, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, Count Leopold von Berchtold, used a back channel to informed foreign countries of Austria-Hungary‘s intention to present an ultimatum to Serbia. When Poincaré arrived in St. Petersburg on 20 July, the Russians told him by 21 July of the Austrian ultimatum and German support for Austria. Although Prime Minister Viviani was supposed to be in charge of French foreign policy, Poincaré promised the Tsar unconditional French military backing for Russia against Austria-Hungary and Germany. In his discussions with Nicholas II, Poincaré talked openly of winning an eventual war, not avoiding one. Later, he attempted to hide his role in the outbreak of military conflict and denied having promised Russia anything.

Poincaré arrived back in Paris on 29 July and at 7 am on 30 July, with Poincaré’s full approval, Viviani sent a telegram to Nicholas affirming that:

in the precautionary measures and defensive measures to which Russia believes herself obliged to resort, she should not immediately proceed to any measure which might offer Germany a pretext for a total or partial mobilization of her forces.

In his diary entry for the day, Poincaré wrote that the purpose of the message was not to prevent war from breaking out but to deny Germany a pretext and thereby obtain British support for the Franco-Russian alliance. He approved of Russian mobilization. A French covering force, five army corps strong, was deployed on the German border at 4:55 pm, as per normal premobilization procedure. Poincaré and Viviani demanded that the covering force be installed ten kilometers from the border, for the sole reason that France would look innocent in the eyes of Britain.A note was immediately sent to London to tell the British about the maneuver and gain their sympathy against Germany.

On 31 July the German ambassador in Paris, Count Wilhelm von Schoen, presented to Viviani a quasi-ultimatum warning that, if Russia did not end its mobilization within twelve hours, Germany would mobilize. Mobilization meant war. That same day, the Chief of the General Staff of the French Army, General Joseph Joffre appealed for general mobilization, falsely claiming that Germany had been secretly mobilizing for two or three days. Poincaré backed Joffre’s request. French general mobilization was decreed at 1600 hours on 1 August.On 1 August, Poincaré lied to Francis Bertie, the British ambassador to France, claiming that Russian mobilization had only been decreed after Austria’s.

After Germany declared war on France on 3 August, Poincaré said: “Never was a declaration of war received with such satisfaction”. He appeared before the National Assembly at 3 pm on 4 August to announce that France was now at war forming the doctrine of the union sacrée in which he announced that: “nothing will break the union sacrée in the face of the enemy. “Dans la guerre qui s’engage, la France […] sera héroïquement défendue par tous ses fils, dont rien ne brisera devant l’ennemi l’union sacrée” (“In the coming war, France will be heroically defended by all its sons, whose sacred union will not break in the face of the enemy”). During the meeting, Poincaré and Viviani were silent on Russia’s mobilization, claiming instead that Russia had been negotiating to the end.

Later war

Poincaré became increasingly sidelined after the accession to power of Georges Clemenceau as Prime Minister in 1917. He believed the Armistice happened too soon and that the French Army should have penetrated far deeper into Germany. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, he wanted France to wrest the Rhineland from Germany to put it under Allied military control.

Ferdinand Foch urged Poincaré to invoke his powers as laid down in the constitution and take over the negotiations of the treaty due to worries that Clemenceau was not achieving France’s aims. He did not, and when the French Cabinet approved of the terms which Clemenceau obtained, Poincaré considered resigning, although again he refrained.

First Battle of the Somme, (July 1–November 13, 1916), costly and largely unsuccessful Allied offensive on the Western Front during World War I. The horrific bloodshed on the first day of the battle became a metaphor for futile and indiscriminate slaughter.

On July 1, 1916, after a week of prolonged artillery bombardment, 11 divisions of the British Fourth Army (recently created and placed under Sir Henry Rawlinson) began the attack north of the Somme on a front extending for 15 miles (24 km) from Serre and Beaumont-Hamel southward past Thiepval, Ovillers, and Fricourt (east of Albert) and then eastward and southward to Maricourt, north of Curlu. At the same time, the French attacked with five divisions on a front of 8 miles (13 km) mainly south of the river (from Curlu toward Péronne), where the German defense system was less highly developed.

WESTERN FRONT EVENTSkeyboard_arrow_left

Battle of Verdun

February 21, 1916 – December 18, 1916

First Battle of the Somme

July 1, 1916 – November 13, 1916

Second Battle of the Somme

March 21, 1918 – April 5, 1918

Second Battle of the Marne

July 15, 1918 – July 18, 1918

battles of the Meuse-Argonne

September 26, 1918 – November 11, 1918

• 1
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Whereas the French had more than 900 heavy guns, the British had barely half this number for a wider front. Additional handicaps were recounted in the History of the Great War Based on Official Documents (British Official History), which states that the problem that confronted British Commander in Chief Douglas Haig was, fundamentally, that of “storming a fortress…It must be confessed that the problem was not appreciated at G.H.Q. (general headquarters).” Instead, “the failures of the past were put down to reasons other than the stout use of the machine-gun by the enemy and his scientifically-planned defences.” Thus was produced an atmosphere of false confidence. It encouraged Haig to gamble on a breakthrough, while Rawlinson’s more reasonable doubts led to the plan’s becoming a compromise, suited neither to a swift penetration nor to a siege attack. Rawlinson desired a long bombardment and a short advance. He was eventually allowed the first but was overborne by Haig on the second, being instructed that on his left he should take both the German first and second positions in a single stroke. Haig was warned even by his own artillery adviser that he was “stretching” his available gun power too far. “Rawlinson assured the Commander-in-Chief that he would loyally carry out ‘these instructions’ but privately he was convinced that they were based on false premises, and on too great optimism.” The battle’s outcome was to show the danger of this kind of loyalty.

“Increasing optimism” was shown by Haig as the day of battle drew nearer, though the resources of the French and, consequently, their prospective contribution were steadily shrinking because of the drain of the Battle of Verdun. Haig’s optimism appeared even in the additional instructions that he issued: British cavalry was to ride through to Bapaume on the first morning, into open country. More curious than Haig’s opinion was the way in which Rawlinson joined him in assuring their subordinates repeatedly that the bombardment would swamp all resistance and that “the infantry would only have to walk over and take possession.” In the early discussions Haig had also said that the “corps were not to attack until their commanders were satisfied that the enemy’s defences had been sufficiently destroyed; but this condition seems to have been dropped as time passed.”

The question that remained was whether the British infantry could cross no-man’s-land before the barrage lifted. It was a race with death run by nearly 60,000 troops. The whole mass, made up of closely packed waves of men, was to be launched together, without determining whether the bombardment had really paralyzed the resistance. Under the Fourth Army’s instructions, those waves were to advance at “a steady pace” symmetrically aligned, like rows of ninepins ready to be knocked over. “The necessity of crossing no-man’s-land at a good pace, so as to reach the parapet before the enemy could reach it, was not mentioned.” Yet to do so would have been physically impossible, for “the infantryman was so heavily laden that he could not move faster than a walk.” Each man carried about 66 pounds (30 kg) of equipment, a load that often amounted to more than half the soldier’s own body weight, “which made it difficult to get out of a trench, impossible to move much quicker than a slow walk, or to rise and lie down quickly.”

The race was lost before it started and the battle soon after. More than 60,000 men were casualties of the plan that failed. The 20,000 killed in action marked the heaviest day’s loss that a British army had ever suffered. That result and its causes cast a strange reflection on the words which Haig had written on the eve of the attack: “I feel that every step in my plan has been taken with the Divine help.” Behind the front, commanders had been rendering reports rosier than the facts warranted and also, apparently, than the commanders themselves believed. “Captures of prisoners, but not the heavy casualties, were regularly reported.” Ignorance in such conditions was natural but deception less excusable.

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The Allies failed to capitalize on the success that had been obtained in the south by the British right wing and more conspicuously by the French. “No orders or instructions were issued during the day by Fourth Army Headquarters” save on a few minor details, reported British Official History. At 10:00 PM on July 1, Rawlinson merely ordered his corps to “continue the attack” uniformly. “No suggestion was made to utilize the successes gained by some to assist in improving the situation of those who had failed.” The unconcealed preparations and the long bombardment had given away any chance of surprise, and, in the face of the German resistance, weak in numbers but strong in organization, the attack failed along most of the British front. Because of the dense and rigid wave formations that were adopted, the losses were appallingly heavy. Only on the south of the British front, near Fricourt and Montauban, did the attack gain a real footing in the German defenses. The French, with slighter opposition and with far more heavy artillery—as well as aided by the fact that they were less expected—made a deeper advance.

This setback removed the possibility of a fairly rapid penetration to Bapaume and Cambrai, and Haig adopted the attrition method of limited advances aimed to wear down the German strength. Haig rejected the plan of the French commander, Joseph-Jacques-Césaire Joffre, that he should again throw his troops frontally on the Thiepval defenses. The attack was resumed on the southern British flank alone, and on July 14 the capture of the Germans’ second line (Longueval, Bazentin-le-Petit, and Ovillers) offered a chance for exploitation, which was not taken. From that point a methodical but costly advance continued, although little ground was gained.

In one respect, the Somme shed a significant light on the future, for on September 15, 1916, the first tanks appeared. Their early employment before large numbers were ready was a mistake: it forfeited the chance of a great strategic surprise, and, because of tactical mishandling and minor technical defects, they had only a limited success. Though the higher military authorities lost faith in them (with some going so far as to urge their abandonment), more-discerning eyes realized that here was a key which, when properly used, would unlock the trench barrier.

The Somme offensive foundered in the mud when November came, though its dismal finale was partially redeemed by a stroke delivered on November 13 by Gen. Hubert Gough on the still untouched flank of the main 1916 offensive. The four months’ struggle had certainly imposed a severe strain on the German resistance as well as on the attackers. Both sides had lost vast numbers of men who would never be replaced. The British losses amounted to some 420,000. The French, who had played an increasing part in the later stages, had raised their own war casualty bill by 194,000. Against this Allied total of more than 600,000, the Germans had suffered rather more than 440,000 casualties. This number had been much increased by Prussian Gen. Fritz von Below’s order that every yard of lost trench must be retaken by counterattack.

The Gallipoli campaign, the Dardanelles campaign, the Defense of Gallipoli or the Battle of Gallipoli (Turkish: Gelibolu Muharebesi, Çanakkale Muharebeleri or Çanakkale Savaşı) was a military campaign in the First World War on the Gallipoli peninsula (now Gelibolu) from 19 February 1915 to 9 January 1916. The Entente powers, Britain, France and the Russian Empire, sought to weaken the Ottoman Empire, one of the Central Powers, by taking control of the Ottoman straits. This would expose the Ottoman capital at Constantinople to bombardment by Entente battleships and cut it off from the Asian part of the empire. With Turkey defeated, the Suez Canal would be safe and a year-round Entente supply route could be opened through the Black Sea to warm-water ports in Russia.

The attempt, in February 1915, by the Entente fleet to force a passage through the Dardanelles failed. The naval action was followed by an amphibious landing on the Gallipoli peninsula in April 1915. In January 1916, after eight months’ fighting, with approximately 250,000 casualties on each side, the land campaign was abandoned and the invasion force withdrawn. It was a costly campaign for the Entente powers and the Ottoman Empire as well as for the sponsors of the expedition, especially the First Lord of the Admiralty (1911–1915), Winston Churchill. The campaign was considered a great Ottoman victory. In Turkey, it is regarded as a defining moment in the history of the state, a final surge in the defence of the motherland as the Ottoman Empire retreated. The struggle formed the basis for the Turkish War of Independence and the declaration of the Republic of Turkey eight years later, with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who rose to prominence as a commander at Gallipoli, as founder and president.

The campaign is often considered to be the beginning of Australian and New Zealand national consciousness. The anniversary of the landings, 25 April, is known as Anzac Day, the most significant commemoration of military casualties and veterans in the two countries, surpassing Remembrance Day (Armistice Day).

Background

Main articles: Middle Eastern theatre of World War I and Ottoman entry into World War I

On 29 October 1914, two former German warships, the Ottoman Yavûz Sultân Selîm and Midilli, under the command of German officers, conducted the Black Sea raid, in which they bombarded the Russian port of Odessa and sank several ships. On 31 October, the Ottomans entered the war and began the Caucasus campaign against Russia. The British briefly bombarded forts in Gallipoli, invaded Mesopotamia and studied the possibility of forcing the Dardanelles.

Entente strategy and the Dardanelles

Before the Dardanelles operation was conceived, the British had planned to conduct an amphibious invasion near Alexandretta on the Mediterranean, an idea originally presented by Boghos Nubar in 1914.This plan was made by the Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Earl Kitchener, to sever the Turkish capital from Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Alexandretta was an area with a Christian population and was the strategic centre of the Ottoman railway network; its capture would cut the empire in two. Vice Admiral Sir Richard Peirse, Commander-in-Chief, East Indies, ordered Captain Frank Larkin of HMS Doris to Alexandretta on 13 December 1914. The Russian cruiser Askold and the French cruiser Requin were also present. Kitchener was working on the plan in March 1915, the beginning of the British attempt to incite an Arab Revolt. The Alexandretta landing was abandoned because militarily it would have required more resources than France could allocate and politically France did not want the British operating in their sphere of influence, a position to which Britain had agreed in 1912.

By late 1914, on the Western Front, the Franco–British counter-offensive of the First Battle of the Marne had ended and the Belgians, British and French had suffered many casualties in the First Battle of Ypres in Flanders. The war of manoeuvre had evolved into trench warfare. The German Empire and Austria-Hungary closed the overland trade routes between Britain and France in the west and Russia in the east. The White Sea in the Arctic and the Sea of Okhotsk in the Far East were icebound in winter and distant from the Eastern Front; the Baltic Sea was blockaded by the Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial German Navy) and the entrance to the Black Sea through the Dardanelles was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. While the Ottomans remained neutral, supplies could still be sent to Russia through the Dardanelles but prior to the Ottoman entry into the war, the straits had been closed; in November the Ottomans began to mine the waterway.

The French Minister of Justice, Aristide Briand, proposed in November to attack the Ottoman Empire but this was rejected and an attempt by the British to bribe the Ottomans to join the Entente side also failed. Later that month, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed a naval attack on the Dardanelles, based in part on erroneous reports of Ottoman troop strength. Churchill wanted to use a large number of obsolete battleships, which could not operate against the German High Seas Fleet, in a Dardanelles operation, with a small occupation force provided by the army. It was hoped that an attack on the Ottomans would also draw Bulgaria and Greece (formerly Ottoman possessions) into the war on the Entente side. On 2 January 1915, Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia appealed to Britain for assistance against the Ottomans, who were campaigning in the Caucasus. Planning began for a naval demonstration in the Dardanelles, to divert Ottoman troops from Caucasia

Attempt to force the Straits

Main article: Naval operations in the Dardanelles campaign

On 17 February 1915, a British seaplane from HMS Ark Royal flew a reconnaissance sortie over the Straits. Two days later, the first attack on the Dardanelles began when an Anglo-French flotilla, including the British dreadnought HMS Queen Elizabeth, began a long-range bombardment of Ottoman coastal artillery batteries. The British had intended to use eight aircraft from Ark Royal to spot for the bombardment but all but one of these, a Short Type 136, were unserviceable. A period of bad weather slowed the initial phase but by 25 February the outer forts had been reduced and the entrance cleared of mines. Royal Marines were landed to destroy guns at Kum Kale and Seddülbahir, while the naval bombardment shifted to batteries between Kum Kale and Kephez.

Frustrated by the mobility of the Ottoman batteries, which evaded the Entente bombardments and threatened the minesweepers sent to clear the Straits, Churchill began pressuring the naval commander, Admiral Sackville Carden, to increase the fleet’s efforts. Carden drew up fresh plans and on 4 March sent a cable to Churchill, stating that the fleet could expect to arrive in Istanbul within 14 days. A sense of impending victory was heightened by the interception of a German wireless message that revealed the Ottoman Dardanelles forts were running out of ammunition. When the message was relayed to Carden, it was agreed the main attack would be launched on or around 17 March. Carden, suffering from stress, was placed on the sick list by the medical officer and command was taken over by Admiral John de Robeck.

18 March 1915

On the morning of 18 March 1915, the Entente fleet, comprising 18 battleships with an array of cruisers and destroyers, began the main attack against the narrowest point of the Dardanelles, where the straits are 1 mi (1.6 km) wide. Despite some damage to the Entente ships by Ottoman return fire, minesweepers were ordered along the straits. In the Ottoman official account, by 2:00 p.m. “all telephone wires were cut, all communications with the forts were interrupted, some of the guns had been knocked out … in consequence the artillery fire of the defence had slackened considerably”. The French battleship Bouvet struck a mine, causing her to capsize in two minutes, with just 75 survivors out of 718 men. Minesweepers, manned by civilians, retreated under Ottoman artillery fire, leaving the minefields largely intact. HMS Irresistible and HMS Inflexible struck mines and Irresistible was sunk, with most of her surviving crew rescued; Inflexible was badly damaged and withdrawn. There was confusion during the battle about the cause of the damage; some participants blaming torpedoes. HMS Ocean was sent to rescue Irresistible but was disabled by a shell, struck a mine and was evacuated, eventually sinking.

The French battleships Suffren and Gaulois sailed through a new line of mines placed secretly by the Ottoman minelayer Nusret ten days before and were also damaged. The losses forced de Robeck to sound the “general recall” to protect what remained of his force. During the planning of the campaign, naval losses had been anticipated and mainly obsolete battleships, unfit to face the German fleet, had been sent. Some of the senior naval officers like the commander of Queen Elizabeth, Commodore Roger Keyes, felt that they had come close to victory, believing that the Ottoman guns had almost run out of ammunition but the views of de Robeck, the First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher and others prevailed. Entente attempts to force the straits using naval power were terminated, due to the losses and bad weather. Planning to capture the Turkish defences by land, to open the way for the ships, began. Two Entente submarines tried to traverse the Dardanelles but were lost to mines and the strong currents.

Prelude

Entente preparations

Main article: Order of battle for the Gallipoli campaign

After the failure of the naval attacks, troops were assembled to eliminate the Ottoman mobile artillery, which was preventing the Entente minesweepers from clearing the way for the larger vessels. Kitchener appointed General Sir Ian Hamilton to command the 78,000 men of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF). Soldiers from the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) were encamped in Egypt, undergoing training prior to being sent to France. The Australian and New Zealand troops were formed into the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), commanded by Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood, comprising the volunteer 1st Australian Division and the New Zealand and Australian Division. The ANZAC troops were joined by the regular 29th Division and the Royal Naval Division. The French Corps expéditionnaire d’Orient (Orient Expeditionary Corps), initially consisting of two brigades within one division, was subsequently placed under Hamilton’s command.

Over the following month, Hamilton prepared his plan and the British and French divisions joined the Australians in Egypt. Hamilton chose to concentrate on the southern part of the Gallipoli peninsula at Cape Helles and Seddülbahir, where an unopposed landing was expected. The Entente initially discounted the fighting ability of the Ottoman soldiers. The naïveté of the Entente planners was illustrated by a leaflet that was issued to the British and Australians while they were still in Egypt,

Turkish soldiers as a rule manifest their desire to surrender by holding their rifle butt upward and by waving clothes or rags of any colour. An actual white flag should be regarded with the utmost suspicion as a Turkish soldier is unlikely to possess anything of that colour.

The underestimation of Ottoman military potential stemmed from a “sense of superiority” among the Entente, because of the decline of the Ottoman Empire and its poor performance in Libya during the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912 and the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. Entente intelligence failed to adequately prepare for the campaign, in some cases relying on information gained from Egyptian travel guides. The troops for the assault were loaded on transports in the order they were to disembark, causing a long delay which meant that many troops, including the French at Mudros, were forced to detour to Alexandria to embark on the ships that would take them into battle. A five-week delay until the end of April ensued, during which the Ottomans strengthened their defences on the peninsula; although bad weather during March and April might have delayed the landings anyway, preventing supply and reinforcement. Following preparations in Egypt, Hamilton and his headquarters staff arrived at Mudros on 10 April. The ANZAC Corps departed Egypt in early April and assembled on the island of Lemnos in Greece on 12 April, where a small garrison had been established in early March and practice landings were undertaken. The British 29th Division departed for Mudros on 7 April and the Royal Naval Division rehearsed on the island of Skyros, after arriving there on 17 April. That day, the British submarine HMS E15 tried to run the straits but hit a submarine net, ran aground and was shelled by a Turkish fort, killing its commander, Lieutenant Commander Theodore S. Brodie and six of his crew; the survivors were forced to surrender. The Entente fleet and British and French troops assembled at Mudros, ready for the landings but poor weather from 19 March grounded Entente aircraft for nine days and on 24 days only a partial programme of reconnaissance flights were possible.

Ottoman preparations

The Ottoman force prepared to repel a landing on either side of the Straits was the 5th Army. This force, which initially consisted of five divisions with another en route, was a conscript force, commanded by Otto Liman von Sanders. Many of the senior officers in the 5th Army were also German. Ottoman commanders and senior German officers debated the best means of defending the peninsula. All agreed that the best defence was to hold the high ground on the ridges of the peninsula. There was disagreement as to where the enemy would land and hence where to concentrate forces. Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal was familiar with the Gallipoli peninsula from his operations against Bulgaria in the Balkan Wars and forecast that Cape Helles (the southern tip of the peninsula) and Gaba Tepe were the likely areas for landing.

Mustafa Kemal believed that the British would use their naval power to command the land from every side at the tip of the peninsula; at Gaba Tepe, the short distance to the eastern coast meant that the Entente could easily reach the Narrows (the right-angled bend in the middle of the Dardanelles). Sanders considered Besika Bay on the Asiatic coast to be the most vulnerable to invasion, since the terrain was easier to cross and was convenient to attack the most important Ottoman batteries guarding the straits and a third of the 5th Army was assembled there. Two divisions were concentrated at Bulair at the north end of the Gallipoli peninsula, to protect supply and communication lines to the defences further down the peninsula. The 19th Division (Kemal) and the 9th Division were placed along the Aegean coast and at Cape Helles on the tip of the peninsula. Sanders kept the bulk of the Ottoman forces inland in reserve, leaving a minimum of troops guarding the coast. The 3rd Division and a cavalry brigade arrived from Istanbul in early April, bringing the front line strength of the Ottomans to 60,000–62,077 men, which Sanders concentrated in three groups. A maximum effort to improve land and sea communications was ordered, to move reinforcements swiftly to danger points; troops moved at night to avoid Entente air reconnaissance. Sanders’ strategy was opposed by Ottoman commanders, including Kemal, who believed that the defenders were too widely dispersed to defeat the invasion on the beaches. Kemal thought Sander’s classic strategy was suitable when there was strategic depth to the front, but Gallipoli did not offer that. His commander Esat Passa was not forceful enough in making the objection. Sanders was certain that a rigid system of defence would fail and that the only hope of success lay in the mobility of the three groups, particularly the 19th Division near Boghali, in general reserve, ready to move to Bulair, Gaba Tepe or the Asiatic shore.

The time needed by the British to organise the landings meant that Sanders, Colonel Hans Kannengiesser and other German officers, supported by Esat Pasha (III Corps) had more time to prepare their defences.Sanders later noted, “the British allowed us four good weeks of respite for all this work before their great disembarkation … This respite just sufficed for the most indispensable measures to be taken”. Roads were constructed, small boats built to carry troops and equipment across the Narrows, beaches were wired and improvised mines were constructed from torpedo warheads. Trenches and gun emplacements were dug along the beaches and troops went on route marches to avoid lethargy. Kemal, whose 19th Division was vital to the defensive scheme, observed the beaches and awaited signs of an invasion from his post at Boghali, near Maidos. The Ottomans created Ottoman Aviation Squadrons with German assistance and had four aircraft operating around Çanakkale in February, conducting reconnaissance and army co-operation sorties. From 11 April, an Ottoman aircraft made frequent flights over Mudros, keeping watch on the assembly of the British naval force and an airfield was established near Gallipoli.

Landings

Main articles: Landing at ANZAC Cove and Landing at Cape Helles

The Entente planned to land and secure the northern shore, capture the Ottoman forts and artillery batteries for a naval force to advance through the Narrows and the Sea of Marmara towards Istanbul. Scheduled for 23 April but postponed until 25 April due to bad weather, landings were to be made at five beaches on the peninsula.^] The 29th Division was to land at Helles on the tip of the peninsula and then advance upon the forts at Kilitbahir. The ANZACs, with the 3rd Australian Infantry Brigade spearheading the assault, were to land north of Gaba Tepe on the Aegean coast, from where they could advance across the peninsula, cut off the Ottoman troops in Kilitbahir and stop reinforcements from reaching Cape Helles. This sector of the Gallipoli Peninsula became known as ANZAC; the area held by the British and French became known as the Helles sector or Helles. The French made a diversionary landing at Kum Kale on the Asian shore before re-embarking to hold the eastern area of the Helles sector. The Royal Naval Division simulated landing preparations at Bulair and a New Zealand officer, Bernard Freyberg, swam ashore under fire to light flares to distract the defenders from the real landings; Freyberg was later awarded the Distinguished Service Order.

Arrangements for naval gunfire support to the landings had originally included bombarding the beaches and approaches but was changed to engagement of the ridges during the landings, with the beaches only to be shelled prior to the landings. No decision was ultimately made on the issue of close support and it was left to the initiative of ships’ captains. A reluctance to approach the shore later affected the landings at “V” and “W” beach where some of the worst losses among the infantry occurred, while naval gunfire was of some assistance at “S”, “X” and ANZAC. Even then its effectiveness was limited by the initial confusion ashore, the broken terrain, thick vegetation and the lack of observation. Kitchener had ruled that air requirements must be met by the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) and the Entente employed a small force of seaplanes and other aircraft from 3 Squadron, RNAS (Commander Charles Samson) which arrived at Tenedos at the end of March. The aircraft were unopposed by the small Ottoman air force at first and during the planning, the force had been used to provide aerial reconnaissance, although this ultimately proved inadequate to meet the Entente’ intelligence needs and make up for the lack of adequate maps. After the landings, Entente aircraft conducted photographic reconnaissance, observed naval gunfire, reported on Ottoman troop movements and conducted a small number of bombing raids.

ANZAC Cove

Allocated the northern landing, Birdwood’s force included the 1st Australian Division (Major General William Bridges) and the New Zealand and Australian Division (Major General Sir Alexander Godley), about 25,000 men. The force was to land and advance inland to cut the lines of communication to the Ottoman forces in the south. The 1st Australian Division would land first, with the 3rd Infantry Brigade leading as a covering force moving inland to establish positions on Gun Ridge. The 2nd Infantry Brigade was to follow and to capture the higher ground on Sari Bair. The 1st Infantry Brigade would land last as the divisional reserve. The New Zealand and Australian Division was to come ashore and form up to advance across the peninsula. The force was to assemble at night and land at dawn to surprise the defenders and on the evening of 24 April, the covering force embarked on battleships and destroyers, with the follow on forces in on transports. The troops would disembark from the transports into ships’ boats and be towed close to the shore by steamboats and then row ashore.

At around 2:00 a.m., an Ottoman observer on a hill at Ariburnu saw a multitude of ships far on the horizon. Captain Faik, in charge of a company from the 27th Infantry Regiment verified it with his binoculars and immediately informed his commanding officer, Ismet Bey, at Kabatepe. By 3:00 a.m., the moon was covered and the ships were no longer visible to the Ottomans. The Ottomans were not sure if this was a real landing or a diversion. Once the intense artillery was heard, at around 6:00 a.m. the two remaining battalions of the 27th Infantry Regiment were ordered to make their way to Ariburnu urgently. Sanders had left his HQ and was at Bulair, distracted by the few Entente ships that had appeared; he had been confident that this was where the landings would take place. For two days, he remained at Bulair with the 5th Division waiting for the real landing. His absence created problems in chain of command and delays in decision making which negated his defence scheme that relied on rapid movement of troops.

At 4:00 a.m. on the morning of 25 April, the first wave of troops from the 3rd Brigade began moving towards the shore on lighters and ships’ boats. The covering force landed approximately 1.2 mi (2 km) too far north, in a bay just south of Ari Burnu, due to undetected currents or a navigational error. The landing was more difficult, over ground which rose steeply from the beaches, unlike the objective to the south, which was more open. The landing site was garrisoned by only two Ottoman companies but from positions on commanding ground, the Ottomans inflicted numerous casualties on the Australians before being overcome. The broken terrain prevented a coordinated drive inland, with the Australians on unfamiliar ground and with inaccurate maps. In the maze of steep ravines, spurs and dense scrub, Australian parties that got forward quickly lost contact and were broken up into small groups. Some Australian troops reached the second ridge but fewer still reached their objectives and, having become dispersed, the covering force could provide little support to the follow-up force.

The 1st and 2nd Brigades, then the New Zealand and Australian Division, landed on the beaches around Ari Burnu but became entangled, which took time to sort out. About four hours after the landings began, the bulk of the 1st Australian Division was ashore safely and its leading elements were pushing inland. By mid-morning, Kemal had reorganised the defenders for a counter-attack on the commanding heights of Chunuk Bair and Sari Bair. The right flank of the small lodgement taken by the Australians was driven in at 10:30 a.m., with most of 400 Plateau being lost. During the afternoon and evening, the left flank was pushed back from Baby 700 and the Nek. By evening, Bridges and Godley recommended re-embarkation; Birdwood agreed but, after receiving advice from the navy that re-embarkation was impossible, Hamilton ordered the troops to dig in instead. The Ottoman counter-attack was eventually repulsed and the Australians established a perimeter roughly from Walker’s Ridge in the north to Shell Green in the south. ANZAC casualties on the first day numbered around 2,000 men killed or wounded. The failure to secure the high ground led to a tactical stalemate, with the landings contained by the defenders in a perimeter less than 1.2 mi (2 km) long.

The Australian submarine HMAS AE2 (Lieutenant Commander Henry Stoker) penetrated the Straits on the night of 24/25 April. As landings began at Cape Helles and ANZAC Cove at dawn on 25 April, AE2 reached Chanak by 6:00 a.m. and torpedoed a Turkish gunboat believed to be a Peyk-i Şevket-class cruiser then evaded a destroyer. The submarine ran aground beneath a Turkish fort but the Ottoman gunners could not bring their guns to bear and AE2 was manoeuvred free. Shortly after refloating, the periscope was sighted by a Turkish battleship firing over the peninsula at Entente landing sites and the ship ceased fire and withdrew. AE2 advanced toward the Sea of Marmara and, at 08:30, Stoker decided to rest the boat on the seabed until nightfall. At around 9:00 p.m., AE2 surfaced to recharge batteries and sent a wireless report to the fleet. The landing at Cape Helles was going well but the landing at Anzac Cove was not as successful and the Anzac commander, Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood, contemplated the re-embarkation of his troops. The success of AE2 was a consideration in Birdwood deciding to persist and reports about AE2 were relayed to the soldiers ashore to improve morale. Stoker was ordered to “generally run amok” and, with no enemies in sight, he sailed into the Sea of Marmara, where AE2 cruised for five days to give the impression of greater numbers and made several attacks against Ottoman ships, which failed because of mechanical problems with the torpedoes.

Cape Helles

Further information: Landing at Cape Helles

The Helles landing was made by the 29th Division (Major General Aylmer Hunter-Weston). The division landed on five beaches in an arc about the tip of the peninsula, named “S”, “V”, “W”‘, “X” and “Y” Beaches from east to west. On 1 May, the 29th Indian Brigade (including 1/6th Gurkha Rifles) landed, took and secured Sari Bair above the landing beaches and was joined by 1/5th Gurkha Rifles and 2/10th Gurkha Rifles; the Zion Mule Corps landed at Helles on 27 April. At “Y” Beach, during the first engagement, the First Battle of Krithia, the Entente landed unopposed and advanced inland. There were only a small number of defenders in the village but, lacking orders to exploit the position, the “Y” Beach commander withdrew his force to the beach. It was as close as the Entente ever came to capturing the village as the Ottomans brought up a battalion of the 25th Regiment, checking any further movement.

The main landings were made at “V” Beach, beneath the old Seddülbahir fortress, and at “W” Beach, a short distance to the west on the other side of the Helles headland. The covering force of Royal Munster Fusiliers and Hampshires landed from a converted collier, SS River Clyde, which was run aground beneath the fortress so that the troops could disembark along ramps. The Royal Dublin Fusiliers landed at “V” Beach and the Lancashire Fusiliers at “W” Beach in open boats, on a shore overlooked by dunes and obstructed with barbed wire. On both beaches, the Ottoman defenders occupied good defensive positions and inflicted many casualties on the British infantry as they landed. Troops emerging one by one from sally ports on River Clyde were shot by machine-gunners at the Seddülbahir fort and, of the first 200 soldiers to disembark, 21 men reached the beach.

The Ottoman defenders were too few to defeat the landing but inflicted many casualties and contained the attack close to the shore. By the morning of 25 April, out of ammunition and with nothing but bayonets to meet the attackers on the slopes leading up from the beach to the heights of Chunuk Bair, the 57th Infantry Regiment received orders from Kemal: “I do not order you to fight, I order you to die. In the time which passes until we die, other troops and commanders can come forward and take our places”. Every man of the regiment was either killed or wounded.

At “W” Beach, thereafter known as Lancashire Landing, the Lancashires were able to overwhelm the defenders despite the loss of 600 casualties from 1,000 men. Six awards of the Victoria Cross were made among the Lancashires at “W” Beach. A further six Victoria Crosses were awarded among the infantry and sailors at the “V” Beach landing and three more were awarded the following day as they fought their way inland. Five squads of Ottoman infantry led by Sergeant Yahya distinguished themselves by repulsing several attacks on their hilltop position, the defenders eventually disengaging under cover of darkness.After the landings, so few men remained from the Dublin and Munster Fusiliers that they were amalgamated into The Dubsters. Only one Dubliner officer survived the landing while, of the 1,012 Dubliners who landed, just 11 survived the Gallipoli campaign unscathed. After the landings, little was done by the Entente to exploit the situation, apart from a few limited advances inland by small groups of men. The Entente attack lost momentum and the Ottomans had time to bring up reinforcements and rally the small number of defending troops.

Land campaign

Early battles

On the afternoon of 27 April, the 19th Division, reinforced by six battalions from the 5th Division, counter-attacked the six Entente brigades at Anzac.With the support of naval gunfire, the Entente held back the Ottomans throughout the night. The following day the British were joined by French troops transferred from Kum Kale on the Asiatic shore to the right of the line near ‘S’ Beach at Morto Bay. On 28 April, the Entente fought the First Battle of Krithia to capture the village. Hunter-Weston made a plan which proved overly complex and was poorly communicated to the commanders in the field. The troops of the 29th Division were still exhausted and unnerved by the battles for the beaches and for Seddülbahir village, which was captured after much fighting on 26 April. The Ottoman defenders stopped the Entente advance halfway between the Helles headland and Krithia around 6:00 p.m., having inflicted 3,000 casualties.

As Ottoman reinforcements arrived, the possibility of a swift Entente victory on the peninsula disappeared and the fighting at Helles and Anzac became a battle of attrition. On 30 April, the Royal Naval Division (Major General Archibald Paris) landed. The same day, Kemal, believing that the Entente were on the verge of defeat, began moving troops forward through Wire Gulley, near the 400 Plateau and Lone Pine. Eight battalions of reinforcements were dispatched from Istanbul a day later and that afternoon, Ottoman troops counter-attacked at Helles and Anzac. The Ottomans briefly broke through in the French sector but the attacks were repulsed by massed Entente machine-gun fire, which inflicted many casualties on the attackers. The following night, Birdwood ordered the New Zealand and Australian Division to attack from Russell’s Top and Quinn’s Post towards Baby 700. The Australian 4th Infantry Brigade (Colonel John Monash), the New Zealand Infantry Brigade and Royal Marines from the Chatham Battalion took part in the attack. Covered by a naval and artillery barrage, the troops advanced a short distance during the night but got separated in the dark. The attackers came under massed small-arms fire from their exposed left flank and were repulsed, having suffered about 1,000 casualties.

On 30 April, the submarine AE2 began to rise uncontrollably and surfaced near the Ottoman torpedo boat Sultanhisar, then dropped precipitously below the safe diving depth, then broke the surface again at the stern. Sultanhisar immediately fired on the submarine, puncturing the pressure hull. Stoker ordered the company to abandon ship, scuttled the submarine and the crew was taken prisoner. AE2‘s achievements showed that it was possible to force the Straits and soon Ottoman communications were badly disrupted by British and French submarine operations. On 27 April, HMS E14 (Lieutenant Commander Edward Boyle), entered the Sea of Marmara on a three-week patrol, which became one of the most successful Entente naval actions of the campaign, in which four ships were sunk, including the transport Gul Djemal which was carrying 6,000 troops and a field battery to Gallipoli. While the quantity and value of the shipping sunk was minor, the effect on Ottoman communications and morale was significant; Boyle was awarded the Victoria Cross.Following the success of AE2 and E14, the French submarine Joule attempted the passage on 1 May but struck a mine and was lost with all hands. (Several weeks earlier another French boat, Saphir, had been lost after running aground near Nagara Point.)

Operations: May 1915

On 5 May, the 42nd (East Lancashire) Division was dispatched from Egypt. Believing Anzac to be secure, Hamilton moved the Australian 2nd Infantry Brigade and the New Zealand Infantry Brigade, along with 20 Australian field guns, to the Helles front as reserves for the Second Battle of Krithia. Involving a force of 20,000 men, it was the first general attack at Helles and was planned for daylight. French troops were to capture Kereves Dere and the British, Australians and New Zealanders were assigned Krithia and Achi Baba. After 30 minutes of artillery preparation, the assault began at mid-morning on 6 May. The British and French advanced along the Gully, Fir Tree, Krithia and Kereves spurs which were separated by deep gullies, fortified by the Ottomans. As the attackers advanced, they became separated when trying to outflank Ottoman strong points and found themselves in unfamiliar terrain. Under artillery and then machine-gun fire from Ottoman outposts that had not been spotted by British aerial reconnaissance, the attack was stopped; next day, reinforcements resumed the advance.

The attack continued on 7 May and four battalions of New Zealanders attacked up Krithia Spur on 8 May; with the 29th Division the attackers managed to reach a position just south of the village. Late in the afternoon, the Australian 2nd Brigade advanced quickly over open ground to the British front line. Amidst small arms and artillery-fire, the brigade charged towards Krithia and gained 600 m (660 yd), about 400 m (440 yd) short of the objective, with 1,000 casualties. Near Fir Tree Spur, the New Zealanders managed to get forward and link up with the Australians, although the British were held up and the French were exhausted, despite having occupied a point overlooking their objective. The attack was suspended and the Entente dug in, having failed to take Krithia or Achi Baba.

A brief period of consolidation followed; the Entente had almost run out of ammunition, particularly for the artillery and both sides consolidated their defences. The Ottomans relieved troops opposite the Australian line, which was reinforced by the Australian Light Horse operating as infantry. Sporadic fighting continued, with sniping, grenade attacks and raids, the opposing trenches separated in places by only a few metres.The Australians lost a number of officers to sniping, including the commander of the 1st Division, Major General William Bridges, who was wounded while inspecting a 1st Light Horse Regiment position near “Steele’s Post” and died of his injuries on the hospital ship HMHS Gascon on 18 May.

At the end of April Birdwood told GHQ MEF (General Headquarters Mediterranean Expeditionary Force) that he could not land 6,000 horses at Anzac Cove as there was no water for them. GHQ MEF was unhappy that the ANZAC force would be immobilised on the beachhead, but they would have been no use. Some of the thousands of men and horses remained on board ship for up to a month. Birdwood signalled on 17 May that 17 transports would be returning to Alexandria to offload 5,251 horses accompanied by 3,217 men. GHQ MEF insisted that some of the men remain in Alexandria to look after the horses and guard ANZACs “many vehicles and mountains of baggage”.

Ottoman counter-offensive: 19 May

Main article: Third attack on Anzac Cove

On 19 May, 42,000 Ottoman troops launched an attack at Anzac to push the 17,000 Australians and New Zealanders back into the sea. Short of artillery and ammunition, the Ottomans intended to rely on surprise and weight of numbers but on 18 May, the crews of a flight of British aircraft spotted the Ottoman preparations.The Ottomans suffered c. 13,000 casualties in the attack, of which 3,000 men were killed; Australian and New Zealand casualties were 160 killed and 468 wounded.The dead included a stretcher bearer, John Simpson Kirkpatrick, whose efforts to evacuate wounded men on a donkey while under fire became famous amongst the Australians at Anzac; afterwards, his story becoming part of the Australian narrative of the campaign.Ottoman losses were so severe that a truce was organised by Aubrey Herbert and others on 24 May, to bury the dead lying in no man’s land, which led to a camaraderie between the armies, much like the Christmas truce of 1914 on the Western Front.

A witness account from Private Victor Laidlaw of the Australian 2nd Field Ambulance described the day,

The armistice was declared from 8:30 a.m. this morning till 4:30 p.m. it is wonderful, things are unnaturally quiet and I felt like getting up and making a row myself, the rifle fire is quiet, no shell fire. The stench round the trenches where the dead had been lying for weeks was awful, some of the bodies were mere skeletons, it seems so very different to see each side near each other’s trenches burying their dead, each man taking part in the ceremonies is called a pioneer and wears 2 white bands on his arms, everybody is taking advantage of the armistice to do anything they want to do out of cover and a large number are down bathing and you would think today was Cup Day down at one of our seaside beaches.

The truce was not repeated formally.

The British advantage in naval artillery diminished after the battleship HMS Goliath was torpedoed and sunk on 13 May by the Ottoman destroyer Muâvenet-i Millîye, killing 570 men out of a crew of 750, including the ship’s commander, Captain Thomas Shelford. A German submarine, U-21, sank HMS Triumph on 25 May and HMS Majestic on 27 May. More British reconnaissance patrols were flown around Gallipoli and U-21 was forced to leave the area but ignorant of this, the Entente withdrew most of their warships to Imbros, where they were “protectively tethered” between sorties, which greatly reduced Entente naval firepower, particularly in the Helles sector. The submarine HMS E11 (Lieutenant Commander Martin Nasmith, later awarded a Victoria Cross) passed through the Dardanelles on 18 May and sank or disabled eleven ships, including three on 23 May, before entering Constantinople Harbour, firing on a transport alongside the arsenal, sinking a gunboat and damaging the wharf.

The Ottoman forces lacked artillery ammunition and field batteries were only able to fire c. 18,000 shells between early May and the first week of June. After the defeat of the counter-attack at Anzac in mid-May, the Ottoman forces ceased frontal assaults. Late in the month, the Ottomans began tunneling around Quinn’s Post in the Anzac sector and early in the morning of 29 May, despite Australian counter-mining, detonated a mine and attacked with a battalion from the 14th Regiment. The Australian 15th Battalion was forced back but counter-attacked and recaptured the ground later in the day, before being relieved by New Zealand troops. Operations at Anzac in early June returned to consolidation, minor engagements and skirmishing with grenades and sniper-fire.

Operations: June–July 1915

In the Helles sector, which had been extensively entrenched by both sides, the Entente attacked Krithia and Achi Baba again, in the Third Battle of Krithia on 4 June, with the 29th Division, Royal Naval Division, 42nd Division and two French divisions. The attack was repulsed and with it, the possibility of a decisive breakthrough ended; trench warfare resumed, with objectives being measured in hundreds of yards. Casualties were approximately 25 percent on both sides; the British lost 4,500 from 20,000 men and the French 2,000 casualties from 10,000 troops. Ottoman losses were 9,000 casualties according to the Turkish Official History and 10,000 according to another account.

In June, the seaplane carrier HMS Ben-my-Chree arrived and the Entente air effort increased from a squadron to No. 3 Wing RNAS.The 52nd (Lowland) Division also landed at Helles in preparation for the Battle of Gully Ravine, which began on 28 June and achieved a local success, which advanced the British line along the left (Aegean) flank of the battlefield. Sanders credited the defence to two Ottoman officers, Faik Pasa and Albay Refet On 30 June, the French commander, Henri Gouraud who had earlier replaced Albert d’Amade, was wounded and replaced by his divisional commander, Maurice Bailloud. Between 1 and 5 July, the Ottomans counter-attacked the new British line several times but failed to regain the lost ground. Ottoman casualties for the period were estimated at 14,000 men. On 12 July, two fresh brigades from the 52nd Division attacked at the centre of the line along Achi Baba Nullah (Bloody Valley), gained very little ground and lost 2,500 casualties out of 7,500 men; the Royal Naval Division had 600 casualties and French losses were 800 men. Ottoman losses were about 9,000 casualties and 600 prisoners.

At sea, the submarine E14 made two voyages into the Marmara. The third tour began on 21 July, when E14 passed through the straits despite a new anti-submarine net placed near the Narrows. The next attempt was made by Mariotte on 27 July, which was caught in the net, forced to the surface and bombarded by shore batteries; Mariotte was scuttled.On 8 August, E11 torpedoed the battleship Barbaros Hayreddin with the loss of 253 men and sank a gunboat, seven transports and 23 sailing vessels.

August offensive

Main articles: Battle of Sari Bair, Battle of Krithia Vineyard, Battle of Lone Pine, Battle of Chunuk Bair, Battle of the Nek, Battle of Scimitar Hill, and Battle of Hill 60 (Gallipoli)

The failure of the Entente to capture Krithia or make any progress on the Helles front led Hamilton to form a new plan to secure the Sari Bair Range of hills at the Battle of Sari Bair and capture high ground on Hill 971 in the Battle of Chunuk Bair.Both sides had been reinforced, the original five Entente divisions having been increased to fifteen and first six Ottoman divisions to sixteen The Entente planned to land two fresh infantry divisions from IX Corps at Suvla, 5 mi (8.0 km) north of Anzac, followed by an advance on Sari Bair from the north-west. At Anzac, an offensive would be made against the Sari Bair range by advancing through rough and thinly defended terrain, north of the Anzac perimeter. This would be achieved by an attack on Baby 700 from the Nek by dismounted Australian light horsemen from the 3rd Light Horse Brigade, in concert with an attack on Chunuk Bair summit by New Zealanders from the New Zealand Infantry Brigade, who would traverse Rhododendron Ridge, the Apex and the Farm. Hill 971 would be attacked by Gurkhas of the 29th Indian Brigade and the Australians of the 4th Infantry Brigade. The Entente had 40 aircraft, mainly from 3 Wing RNAS at Imbros, which had replaced its Voisins with Farmans and Nieuport Xs; Escadrille MF98T had also been established at Tenedos. The Ottomans had 20 aircraft, of which eight were stationed at Çanakkale. Entente aircraft made reconnaissance flights, spotted for naval guns and conducted low-level bombing of Ottoman reserves as they were brought up to the battlefield Entente aircraft also undertook anti-shipping operations in the Gulf of Saros, where a seaplane from HMS Ben-my-Chree sank an Ottoman tug with an air-launched torpedo.

The landing at Suvla Bay took place on the night of 6 August against light opposition; the British commander, Lieutenant General Frederick Stopford, had limited his early objectives and then failed to forcefully push his demands for an advance inland and little more than the beach was seized. The Ottomans were able to occupy the Anafarta Hills, preventing the British from penetrating inland, which contained the landings and reduced the Suvla front to static trench warfare. The offensive was preceded on the evening of 6 August by diversions, at Helles, where the Battle of Krithia Vineyard became another costly stalemate. At Anzac, the diversionary Battle of Lone Pine, led by the Australian 1st Infantry Brigade, captured the main Ottoman trench line and diverted Ottoman forces but the attacks at Chunuk Bair and Hill 971 failed.

The New Zealand Infantry Brigade came within 500 m (550 yd) of the near peak of Chunuk Bair by dawn on 7 August but was not able to seize the summit until the following morning. On the morning of 7 August, the Australian 3rd Light Horse Brigade attacked on a narrow front at the Nek, to coincide with the New Zealand attack from Chunuk Bair against the rear of the Ottoman defences. The opening artillery barrage lifted seven minutes too soon, which alerted the Ottomans and the attack was a costly failure. An attack on Hill 971 never took place after the Australian 4th Infantry Brigade and an Indian brigade lost direction during the night. Attempts to resume the attack were easily repulsed by the Ottoman defenders, at great cost to the Entente.The New Zealanders held out on Chunuk Bair for two days before being relieved by two New Army battalions from the Wiltshire and Loyal North Lancashire Regiments but an Ottoman counterattack on 10 August, led by Mustafa Kemal, swept them from the heights. Of 760 men in the New Zealand Wellington Battalion who reached the summit, 711 became casualties. With the Ottoman recapture of the ground, the Entente’ best chance of victory was lost.

The Suvla landing was reinforced by the arrival of the 10th (Irish) Division on 7 August, the 53rd (Welsh) Division, which began landing on 8 August, the 54th (East Anglian) Division arriving late on 10 August and the dismounted yeomanry of the 2nd Mounted Division on 18 August. On 12 August, the 54th Division attacked Kavak Tepe and Tekke Tepe, crossing the Anafarta Plain. The attack failed and Hamilton briefly considered the evacuation of Suvla and Anzac.

Elements of the new Australian 2nd Division began arriving at Anzac from Egypt with the 5th Infantry Brigade landing from 19–20 August and the 6th Brigade and 7th Brigade arriving in early September. The 29th Division was also shifted from Helles to Suvla. The final British attempt to resuscitate the offensive came on 21 August, in the Battle of Scimitar Hill and the Battle of Hill 60. Control of the hills would have united the Anzac and Suvla fronts but the attacks failed. On 17 August, Hamilton had requested another 95,000 troops but a day earlier, the French had announced plans to Kitchener for an autumn offensive in France. A meeting of the Dardanelles Committee on 20 August determined that the French offensive would be supported by a maximum effort, which left only about 25,000 reinforcements for the Dardanelles. On 23 August, after news of the failure at Scimitar Hill, Hamilton went onto the defensive as Bulgarian entry into the war, which would allow the Germans to rearm the Turkish army, was imminent and left little opportunity for the resumption of offensive operations. On 20 September 1915, the Newfoundland Regiment was deployed at Suvla Bay with the 29th Division. On 25 September, Kitchener proposed detaching two British and one French division for service in Salonika in Greece, which was the beginning of the end of the Entente campaign at Gallipoli. Instead, a counter proposal from Sir Ian Hamilton was agreed to; only the 10th (Irish) Division and the 156th Infantry Division (France) were withdrawn from the peninsula. By the end of September these troops were concentrating at Mudros for conveyance to the new front.

Alan Moorehead wrote that during the stalemate, an old Ottoman batman was regularly permitted to hang his platoon’s washing on the barbed wire undisturbed and that there was a “constant traffic” of gifts being thrown across no-man’s land, dates and sweets from the Ottoman side and cans of beef and packs of cigarettes from the Entente side. Conditions at Gallipoli grew worse for everyone as summer heat and poor sanitation resulted in an explosion in the fly population. Eating became extremely difficult as unburied corpses became bloated and putrid. The precarious Entente lodgements were poorly situated, which caused supply and shelter problems. A dysentery epidemic spread through the Entente trenches at Anzac and Helles, while the Ottomans also suffered heavily from disease which resulted in many deaths.

Evacuation

After the failure of the August Offensive, the Gallipoli campaign drifted. Ottoman success began to affect public opinion in Britain, with criticism of Hamilton’s performance being smuggled out by Keith Murdoch, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and other reporters. Stopford and other dissident officers also contributed to the air of gloom and the possibility of evacuation was raised on 11 October 1915. Hamilton resisted the suggestion, fearing the damage to British prestige but was sacked shortly afterwards and replaced by Lieutenant General Sir Charles Monro. Autumn and winter brought relief from the heat but also led to gales, blizzards and flooding, resulting in men drowning and freezing to death, while thousands suffered frostbite. The Serbian defeat in the Serbian campaign in autumn 1915 prompted France and Britain to transfer troops from the Gallipoli campaign to Greek Macedonia; the Macedonian front was established to support the remnants of the Serbian army to conquer Vardar Macedonia.

On 4 September, the submarine HMS E7 was caught in the Ottoman anti-submarine net as it began another tour.Despite such reverses, by mid-September, Entente nets and mines had closed the eastern entrance to the Dardanelles to German U-boats and U-21 was thwarted when it tried to pass the straits to Istanbul on 13 September. The first French submarine to enter the Sea of Marmara was Turquoise but it was forced to turn back; on 30 October, when returning through the straits, it ran aground beneath a fort and was captured intact. The crew of 25 were taken prisoner and documents detailing planned Entente operations were discovered, including a scheduled rendezvous with HMS E20 on 6 November. The rendezvous was kept by the German U-boat U-14 instead, which torpedoed and sank E20, killing all but nine of the crew.

The situation at Gallipoli was complicated by Bulgaria joining the Central Powers. In early October 1915, the British and French opened a second Mediterranean front at Salonika, by moving two divisions from Gallipoli and reducing the flow of reinforcements. A land route between Germany and the Ottoman Empire through Bulgaria was opened and the Germans rearmed the Ottomans with heavy artillery capable of devastating Entente trenches, especially on the confined front at Anzac, modern aircraft and experienced crews. In late November, an Ottoman crew in a German Albatros C.I shot down a French aircraft over Gaba Tepe and the Austro-Hungarian 36. Haubitzbatterie and 9. Motormörserbatterie artillery units arrived, providing a substantial reinforcement of the Ottoman artillery. Monro recommended evacuation to Kitchener, who in early November visited the eastern Mediterranean.After consulting with the commanders of VIII Corps at Helles, IX Corps at Suvla and Anzac, Kitchener agreed with Monro and passed his recommendation to the British Cabinet, who confirmed the decision to evacuate in early December.

Due to the narrowness of no man’s land and the winter weather, many casualties were anticipated during the embarkation. The untenable nature of the Entente position was made apparent by a rainstorm on 26 November 1915. The downpour at Suvla lasted for three days and there was a blizzard in early December. Rain flooded trenches, drowned soldiers and washed unburied corpses into the lines; the following snow killed still more men from exposure. Suvla and Anzac were to be evacuated in late December, the last troops leaving before dawn on 20 December. Troop numbers had been slowly reduced since 7 December and ruses, such as William Scurry‘s self-firing rifle, which had been rigged to fire by water dripped into a pan attached to the trigger, were used to disguise the Entente departure.At Anzac Cove, troops maintained silence for an hour or more, until curious Ottoman troops ventured to inspect the trenches, whereupon the Anzacs opened fire. This incident successfully discouraged the Ottomans from inspecting when the actual evacuation occurred. A mine was detonated at the Nek, which killed 70 Ottoman soldiers. The Entente force was embarked, with the Australians suffering no casualties on the final night but large quantities of supplies and stores fell into Ottoman hands.

Helles was retained for a period but a decision to evacuate the garrison was made on 28 December. Unlike the evacuation from Anzac Cove, Ottoman forces were looking for signs of withdrawal. Having used the interval to bring up reinforcements and supplies, Sanders mounted an attack on the British at Gully Spur on 7 January 1916 with infantry and artillery but the attack was a costly failure. Mines were laid with time fuzes and that night and on the night of 7/8 January, under the cover of a naval bombardment, the British troops began to fall back 5 mi (8.0 km) from their lines to the beaches, where makeshift piers were used to board boats. The last British troops departed from Lancashire Landing around 04:00 on 8 January 1916.The Newfoundland Regiment was part of the rearguard and withdrew on 9 January 1916.Among the first to land, remnants of The Plymouth Battalion, Royal Marine Light Infantry were the last to leave the Peninsula.

Despite predictions of up to 30,000 casualties, 35,268 troops, 3,689 horses and mules, 127 guns, 328 vehicles and 1,600 long tons (1,600 t) of equipment were removed; 508 mules that could not be embarked were killed so as not to fall into Ottoman hands and 1,590 vehicles were left behind with smashed wheels As at Anzac, large amounts of supplies (including 15 British and six French unserviceable artillery pieces which were destroyed), gun carriages and ammunition were left behind; hundreds of horses were slaughtered to deny them to the Ottomans. A sailor was killed by debris from a magazine that exploded prematurely and a lighter and a picket boat were lost. Shortly after dawn, the Ottomans retook Helles. In the final days of the campaign, Ottoman air defences had been increased by a German–Ottoman fighter squadron, which began operations over the peninsula and inflicted the first British flying losses a couple of days after the evacuation of Helles, when three Fokker Eindeckers shot down two RNAS aircraft.

Casualty figures for the campaign vary between sources but in 2001, Edward J. Erickson wrote that in the Gallipoli Campaign over 100,000 men were killed, including 56,000–68,000 Ottoman and around 53,000 British and French soldiers. Using the Ottoman Archives, Erickson estimated that Ottoman casualties in the Gallipoli Campaign were 56,643 men died from all causes, 97,007 troops were wounded or injured and 11,178 men went missing or were captured. In 2001, Les Carlyon gave figures of 43,000 British killed or missing, including 8,709 Australians. In September 1915 Godley complained that too few of the recovered sick or wounded casualties from Gallipoli were being returned from Egypt, and General John Maxwell replied that “the appetite of the Dardanelles for men has been phenomenal and wicked”.

Casualties

There were nearly 500,000 casualties during the campaign, with the British History of the Great War listing losses including sick as 205,000 British, 47,000 French and 251,000 Ottoman troops (with some Turkish (sic) sources referring to 350,000 casualties.) Ottoman casualties have been disputed and in 2001, Tim Travers gave casualty figures of 2,160 officers and 287,000 other ranks (battle and non-battle); included among this may be 87,000 killed. Liman von Sanders estimated that the Ottomans suffered 218,000 casualties, including 66,000 dead and that 42,000 wounded returned to duty.

The New Zealand semi-official history (1919, by Fred Waite) estimated that 8,556 New Zealanders served at Gallipoli and contained an estimate of 251,000 Ottoman battle casualties including 86,692 dead In 2000, Ross McGibbon wrote that 2,721 New Zealanders had been killed, about a quarter of those who had initially landed on the peninsula; other estimates were 2,701 (Pugsley) or 2,779 (Stowers). A 2019 study by the New Zealand historians John Crawford and Matthew Buck arrived at a higher estimate for the numbers of New Zealand soldiers who served at Gallipoli, over 16,000, perhaps 17,000 (rather than earlier revised figures of 13,000 to 14,000 and the 1919 figure of 8,556).

Sickness

Many soldiers became sick due to insanitary conditions, especially from typhoid, dysentery and diarrhoea. Cecil Aspinall-Oglander, the British official historian, reported that 90,000 British Empire soldiers were evacuated for illness during the campaign. A total of 145,154 British troops fell sick, not counting Dominion or Indian troops; of these, 3,778 died, exclusive of those evacuated. The sick were transported from Gallipoli to hospitals in Egypt and Malta as quickly as possible as bases in the area of operations were insufficient. Approximately 2.84 percent of men removed as non-battle casualties died, against 0.91 percent in France and Flanders. The proportion of disease casualties to battle casualties was considerably higher in the Gallipoli campaign than it was on the campaigns of the Western Front. Aspinall-Oglander gave the number of Ottoman troops evacuated sick as 64,440.^[6] The largest cause of non-battle admissions to hospital for British troops was dysentery, with 29,728 men infected and another 10,383 men having diarrhoea. Other notable conditions were frostbite with 6,602 hospitalisations, gonorrhea 1,774 cases, and rheumatic fever 6,556 cases. French casualties during the campaign amounted to around 47,000. Of the French casualties, 27,169 were killed, wounded or missing with an implied 20,000 who fell sick.

Allegations were made that Entente forces had attacked or bombarded Ottoman hospitals and hospital ships on several occasions between the start of the campaign and September 1915. By July 1915, 25 Ottoman hospitals had been built with 10,700 beds, and three hospital ships were in the area. The French Government disputed these complaints through the Red Cross and the British responded that if it happened then it was accidental. Russia, in turn, claimed that the Ottomans had attacked two of their hospital ships, Portugal and Vperiod but the Ottoman Government replied that the vessels had been the victims of mines. No chemical weapons were used at Gallipoli, although the Entente debated their use throughout the campaign and transported to the theatre quantities of gas, which was used against Ottoman troops in the Middle Eastern theatre two years later, during the Second Battle of Gaza and the Third Battle of Gaza in 1917.

The aftermath of World War I saw cultural, economic, and social change across Eurasia, Africa, and even in areas outside those that were directly involved. Four empires collapsed due to the war, old countries were abolished, new ones were formed, boundaries were redrawn, international organizations were established, and many new and old ideologies took a firm hold in people’s minds. World War I also had the effect of bringing political transformation to most of the principal parties involved in the conflict, transforming them into electoral democracies by bringing near-universal suffrage for the first time in history, as in Germany (1919 German federal election), Great Britain (1918 United Kingdom general election), and Turkey (1923 Turkish general election).

Blockade of Germany

Through the period from the Armistice of 11 November 1918 until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles with the Weimar Republic on 28 June 1919, the Allies maintained the naval blockade of Germany that had begun during the war. As the German economy was dependent on imports, it is estimated that 523,000 civilians had lost their lives.N. P. Howard, of the University of Sheffield, says that a further quarter of a million more died from disease or starvation in the eight-month period following the conclusion of the conflict The continuation of the blockade after the fighting ended, as author Robert Leckie wrote in Delivered From Evil, did much to “torment the Germans … driving them with the fury of despair into the arms of the devil.” The terms of the Armistice did allow food to be shipped into Germany, but the Allies required that Germany provide the means (the shipping) to do so. The German government was required to use its gold reserves, being unable to secure a loan from the United States.

Historian Sally Marks claims that while “Allied warships remained in place against a possible resumption of hostilities, the Allies offered food and medicine after the armistice, but Germany refused to allow its ships to carry supplies”. Further, Marks states that despite the problems facing the Allies, from the German government, “Allied food shipments arrived in Allied ships before the charge made at Versailles”. This position is also supported by Elisabeth Gläser who notes that an Allied task force, to help feed the German population, was established in early 1919 and that by May 1919 Germany “became the chief recipient of American and Allied food shipments”. Gläser further claims that during the early months of 1919, while the main relief effort was being planned, France provided food shipments to Bavaria and the Rhineland. She further claims that the German government delayed the relief effort by refusing to surrender their merchant fleet to the Allies. Finally, she concludes that “the very success of the relief effort had in effect deprived the [Allies] of a credible threat to induce Germany to sign the Treaty of Versailles. However, it is also the case that for eight months following the end of hostilities, the blockade was continually in place, with some estimates that a further 100,000 casualties among German civilians due to starvation were caused, on top of the hundreds of thousands which already had occurred. Food shipments, furthermore, had been entirely dependent on Allied goodwill, causing at least in part the post-hostilities irregularity.

Paris Peace Conference

Main article: Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920)

After the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919, between Germany on the one side and France, Italy, Britain and other minor allied powers on the other, officially ended war between those countries. Other treaties ended the relationships of the United States and the other Central Powers. Included in the 440 articles of the Treaty of Versailles were the demands that Germany officially accept responsibility “for causing all the loss and damage” of the war and pay economic reparations. The treaty drastically limited the German military machine: German troops were reduced to 100,000 and the country was prevented from possessing major military armaments such as tanks, warships, armored vehicles and submarines.

Influenza epidemic

Main article: Spanish flu

Historians continue to argue about the impact the 1918 flu pandemic had on the outcome of the war. It has been posited that the Central Powers may have been exposed to the viral wave before the Allies. The resulting casualties having greater effect, having been incurred during the war, as opposed to the allies who suffered the brunt of the pandemic after the Armistice. When the extent of the epidemic was realized, the respective censorship programs of the Allies and Central Powers limited the public’s knowledge regarding the true extent of the disease. Because Spain was neutral, their media was free to report on the Flu, giving the impression that it began there. This misunderstanding led to contemporary reports naming it the “Spanish flu.” Investigative work by a British team led by virologist John Oxford of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and the Royal London Hospital, identified a major troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples, France as almost certainly being the center of the 1918 flu pandemic. A significant precursor virus was harboured in birds, and mutated to pigs that were kept near the front. The exact number of deaths is unknown but about 50 million people are estimated to have died from the influenza outbreak worldwide. In 2005, a study found that, “The 1918 virus strain developed in birds and was similar to the ‘bird flu’ that in the 21st century spurred fears of another worldwide pandemic, yet proved to be a normal treatable virus that did not produce a heavy impact on the world’s health.”

Ethnic minorities

The dissolution of the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires created a number of new countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Some of them, such as Czechoslovakia and Poland, had substantial ethnic minorities who were sometimes not fully satisfied with the new boundaries that cut them off from fellow ethnics. For example, Czechoslovakia had Germans, Poles, Ruthenians and Ukrainians, Slovaks and Hungarians. The League of Nations sponsored various Minority Treaties in an attempt to deal with the problem, but with the decline of the League in the 1930s, these treaties became increasingly unenforceable. One consequence of the massive redrawing of borders and the political changes in the aftermath of the war was the large number of European refugees. These and the refugees of the Russian Civil War led to the creation of the Nansen passport.

Ethnic minorities made the location of the frontiers generally unstable. Where the frontiers have remained unchanged since 1918, there has often been the expulsion of an ethnic group, such as the Sudeten Germans. Economic and military cooperation amongst these small states was minimal, ensuring that the defeated powers – Germany and Russia – retained a latent capacity to dominate the region. In the immediate aftermath of the war, defeat drove cooperation between Germany and Soviet Russia but ultimately these two powers would compete to dominate eastern Europe.

Approximately 1.5 million Armenians, native inhabitants of the Armenian Highland, were exterminated in the Ottoman Empire as a consequence of the Genocide of Armenians committed by the Young Turk Government.

Political upheavals

Main article: International relations (1919–1939)

New nations break free

German and Austrian forces in 1918 defeated the Russian armies, and the new communist government in Moscow signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. In that treaty, Russia renounced all claims to Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and the territory of Congress Poland, and it was left to Germany and Austria-Hungary “to determine the future status of these territories in agreement with their population.” Later on, Vladimir Lenin‘s government also renounced the Partition of Poland treaty, making it possible for Poland to claim its 1772 borders. However, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was rendered obsolete when Germany was defeated later in 1918, leaving the status of much of eastern Europe in an uncertain position.

Revolutions

Main article: Revolutions of 1917–1923

A far-left and often explicitly Communist revolutionary wave occurred in several European countries in 1917–1920, notably in Germany and Hungary. The single most important event precipitated by the privations of World War I was the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Germany

Main articles: German Revolution of 1918–19 and Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic

In Germany, there was a socialist revolution which led to the brief establishment of a number of communist political systems in (mainly urban) parts of the country, the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the creation of the Weimar Republic.

On 28 June 1919 the Weimar Republic was forced, under threat of continued Allied advance, to sign the Treaty of Versailles. Germany viewed the one-sided treaty as a humiliation and as blaming it for the entire war. While the intent of the treaty was to assign guilt to Germany to justify financial reparations, the notion of blame took root as a political issue in German society and was never accepted by nationalists, although it was argued by some, such as German historian Fritz Fischer. The German government disseminated propaganda to further promote this idea, and funded the Centre for the Study of the Causes of the War to this end.

132 billion gold marks ($31.5 billion, 6.6 billion pounds) were demanded from Germany in reparations, of which only 50 billion had to be paid. In order to finance the purchases of foreign currency required to pay off the reparations, the new German republic printed tremendous amounts of money – to disastrous effect. Hyperinflation plagued Germany between 1921 and 1923. In this period the worth of fiat Papiermarks with respect to the earlier commodity Goldmarks was reduced to one trillionth (one million millionth) of its value.^[ In December 1922 the Reparations Commission declared Germany in default, and on 11 January 1923 French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr until 1925.

The treaty required Germany to permanently reduce the size of its army to 100,000 men, and destroy their tanks, air force, and U-boat fleet (her capital ships, moored at Scapa Flow, were scuttled by their crews to prevent them from falling into Allied hands).

Germany saw relatively small amounts of territory transferred to Denmark, Czechoslovakia, and Belgium, a larger amount to France (including the temporary French occupation of the Rhineland) and the greatest portion as part of a reestablished Poland. Germany’s overseas colonies were divided between a number of Allied countries, most notably the United Kingdom in Africa, but it was the loss of the territory that composed the newly independent Polish state, including the German city of Danzig and the separation of East Prussia from the rest of Germany, that caused the greatest outrage. Nazi propaganda would feed on a general German view that the treaty was unfair – many Germans never accepted the treaty as legitimate, and lent their political support to Adolf Hitler.

Russian Empire

See also: Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War

The Soviet Union benefited from Germany’s loss, as one of the first terms of the armistice was the abrogation of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. At the time of the armistice Russia was in the grips of a civil war which left more than seven million people dead and large areas of the country devastated. The nation as a whole suffered socially and economically.

Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia gained independence. They were occupied again by the Soviet Union in 1940.

Finland gained a lasting independence, though she repeatedly had to fight the Soviet Union for her borders in the Winter War.

Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan were established as independent states in the Caucasus region. However, after the withdrawal of the Russian Army in 1917 and during 1920 Turkish invasion of Armenia, Turkey captured the Armenian territory around Artvin, Kars, and Iğdır, and these territorial losses became permanent. As consequence of invasions of Turkey and Russian Red Army all three Transcaucasian countries were proclaimed as Soviet Republics in 1920 and in 1922 were absorbed into the Soviet Union as the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic.

Romania gained Bessarabia from Russia.

The Russian concession of Tianjin was occupied by the Chinese Beiyang government in 1920; in 1924 the Soviet Union renounced its claims to the district.

Austria-Hungary

Main articles: Dissolution of Austria-Hungary, Treaty of Trianon, and Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1919)

With the war having turned decisively against the Central Powers, the people of Austria-Hungary lost faith in their allied countries, and even before the armistice in November, radical nationalism had already led to several declarations of independence in south-central Europe after November 1918. As the central government had ceased to operate in vast areas, these regions found themselves without a government and many new groups attempted to fill the void. During this same period, the population was facing food shortages and was, for the most part, demoralized by the losses incurred during the war. Various political parties, ranging from ardent nationalists, to social democrats, to communists attempted to set up governments in the names of the different nationalities. In other areas, existing nation states such as Romania engaged regions that they considered to be theirs. These moves created de facto governments that complicated life for diplomats, idealists, and the Western allies.

The Western forces were officially supposed to occupy the old Empire, but rarely had enough troops to do so effectively. They had to deal with local authorities who had their own agenda to fulfill. At the peace conference in Paris the diplomats had to reconcile these authorities with the competing demands of the nationalists who had turned to them for help during the war, the strategic or political desires of the Western allies themselves, and other agendas such as a desire to implement the spirit of the Fourteen Points.

For example, in order to live up to the ideal of self-determination laid out in the Fourteen Points, Germans, whether Austrian or German, should be able to decide their own future and government. However, the French especially were concerned that an expanded Germany would be a huge security risk. Further complicating the situation, delegations such as the Czechs and Slovenians made strong claims on some German-speaking territories.

The result was treaties that compromised many ideals, offended many allies, and set up an entirely new order in the area. Many people hoped that the new nation states would allow for a new era of prosperity and peace in the region, free from the bitter quarrelling between nationalities that had marked the preceding fifty years. This hope proved far too optimistic. Changes in territorial configuration after World War I included:

• Establishment of the Republic of German Austria and the Hungarian Democratic Republic, disavowing any continuity with the empire and exiling the Habsburg family in perpetuity.
• Eventually, after 1920, the new borders of Hungary did not include approx. two-thirds of the lands of the former Kingdom of Hungary, including areas where the ethnic Magyars were in a majority. The new republic of Austria maintained control over most of the predominantly German-controlled areas, but lost various other German majority lands in what was the Austrian Empire.

• Bohemia, Moravia, Opava Silesia and the western part of the Duchy of Cieszyn, large part of Upper Hungary and Carpathian Ruthenia formed the new Czechoslovakia.
• Galicia, the eastern part of the Duchy of Cieszyn, northern Árva County and northern Szepes County were transferred to Poland.
• the Southern half of the County of Tyrol and Trieste were granted to Italy.
• Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia-Slavonia, Međimurje, Dalmatia, Slovenia, Syrmia, parts of Bács-Bodrog, Baranya, Torontál and Temes Counties were joined with Serbia to form the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia.
• Transylvania, parts of Banat, Crișana, and Maramureș and Bukovina became part of Romania.
• The Austro-Hungarian concession in Tianjin was ceded to the Republic of China.

These changes were recognized in, but not caused by, the Treaty of Versailles. They were subsequently further elaborated in the Treaty of Saint-Germain and the Treaty of Trianon.

The 1919 treaties generally included guarantees of minority rights, but there was no enforcement mechanism. The new states of eastern Europe mostly all had large ethnic minorities. Millions of Germans found themselves in the newly created countries as minorities. More than two million ethnic Hungarians found themselves living outside of Hungary in Czechoslovakia, Romania and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Many of these national minorities found themselves in hostile situations because the modern governments were intent on defining the national character of the countries, often at the expense of the other nationalities. The interwar years were hard for religious minorities in the new states built around ethnic nationalism. The Jews were especially distrusted because of their minority religion and distinct subculture. This was a dramatic come-down from the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although antisemitism had been widespread during Habsburg rule, Jews faced no official discrimination because they were, for the most part, ardent supporters of the multi-national state and the monarchy.

The economic disruption of the war and the end of the Austro-Hungarian customs union created great hardship in many areas. Although many states were set up as democracies after the war, one by one, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, they reverted to some form of authoritarian rule. Many quarreled amongst themselves but were too weak to compete effectively. Later, when Germany rearmed, the nation states of south-central Europe were unable to resist its attacks, and fell under German domination to a much greater extent than had ever existed in Austria-Hungary.

Ottoman Empire

Main articles: Partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish War of Independence, and Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922)

At the end of the war, the Allies occupied Constantinople (Istanbul) and the Ottoman government collapsed. The Treaty of Sèvres, designed to repair damage caused by Ottomans during the war to the winning Allies, was signed by Ottoman Empire on 10 August 1920, but was never ratified by the Sultan.

The occupation of Smyrna by Greece on 18 May 1919 triggered a nationalist movement to rescind the terms of the treaty. Turkish revolutionaries led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, a successful Ottoman commander, rejected the terms enforced at Sèvres and under the guise of General Inspector of the Ottoman Army, left Istanbul for Samsun to organize the remaining Ottoman forces to resist the terms of the treaty. On the eastern front, after the invasion of Armenia in 1920 and signing of the Treaty of Kars with the Russian S.F.S.R. Turkey took over territory lost to Armenia and post-Imperial Russia.

On the western front, the growing strength of the Turkish National Movement forces led the Kingdom of Greece, with the backing of Britain, to invade deep into Anatolia in an attempt to deal a blow to the revolutionaries. At the Battle of Dumlupınar, the Greek army was defeated and forced into retreat, leading to the burning of Smyrna and the withdrawal of Greece from Asia Minor. With the nationalists empowered, the army marched on to reclaim Istanbul, resulting in the Chanak Crisis in which the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, was forced to resign. After Turkish resistance gained control over Anatolia and Istanbul, the Sèvres treaty was superseded by the Treaty of Lausanne which formally ended all hostilities and led to the creation of the modern Turkish Republic. As a result, Turkey became the only power of World War I to overturn the terms of its defeat, and negotiate with the Allies as an equal.

Lausanne Treaty formally acknowledged the new League of Nations mandates in the Middle East, the cession of their territories on the Arabian Peninsula, and British sovereignty over Cyprus. The League of Nations granted Class A mandates for the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon and British Mandate of Mesopotamia and Palestine, the latter comprising two autonomous regions: Mandate Palestine and the Emirate of Transjordan. Parts of the Ottoman Empire on the Arabian Peninsula became part of what is today Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire became a pivotal milestone in the creation of the modern Middle East, the result of which bore witness to the creation of new conflicts and hostilities in the region.

United Kingdom

Main articles: Interwar Britain, Irish revolutionary period, and Interwar unemployment and poverty in the United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, funding the war had a severe economic cost. From being the world’s largest overseas investor, it became one of its biggest debtors with interest payments forming around 40% of all government spending. Inflation more than doubled between 1914 and its peak in 1920, while the value of the Pound Sterling (consumer expenditure) fell by 61.2%. War reparations in the form of free German coal depressed local industry, precipitating the 1926 United Kingdom general strike.

British private investments abroad were sold, raising £550 million. However, £250 million in new investment also took place during the war. The net financial loss was therefore approximately £300 million; less than two years investment compared to the pre-war average rate and more than replaced by 1928. Material loss was “slight”: the most significant being 40% of the British Merchant Navy sunk by German U-boats. Most of this was replaced in 1918 and all immediately after the war. The military historian Correlli Barnett has argued that “in objective truth the Great War in no way inflicted crippling economic damage on Britain” but that the war “crippled the British psychologically but in no other way”.

Less concrete changes include the growing assertiveness of Commonwealth nations. Battles such as Gallipoli for Australia and New Zealand, and Vimy Ridge for Canada led to increased national pride and a greater reluctance to remain subordinate to Britain, leading to the growth of diplomatic autonomy in the 1920s. These battles were often decorated in propaganda in these nations as symbolic of their power during the war. Overseas possessions such as British India and Nigeria also became increasingly assertive, because of their participation in the war. The populations in these countries became increasingly aware of their own power and Britain’s fragility.

In Ireland, the delaying of the Government of Ireland Act 1914, which was enacted to resolve the Home Rule issue, later exacerbated by the Government’s severe response to the 1916 Easter Rising and its failed attempt to introduce conscription in Ireland in 1918, led to an increased support for separatist radicals. This led indirectly to the outbreak of the Irish War of Independence in 1919. The creation of the Irish Free State that followed this conflict in effect represented a territorial loss for the United Kingdom that was all but equal to the loss sustained by Germany, and furthermore, compared to Germany, a much greater loss in terms of its ratio to the country’s prewar territory. However, the new Irish Free State remained a dominion within the British Empire.

World War I also caused a major realignment in British parliamentary politics by leading to the rise of the democratic socialist Labour Party and to the break-up and decline of the social liberal Liberal Party. Liberal Prime Minister H. H. Asquith ran into disagreements with not only the Conservative Party opposition but members of his own party led by David Lloyd George who disagreed with his handling of the war. Although Asquith agreed to form a coalition government, the disputes continued and eventually Lloyd George led a faction of the Liberals to form a new coalition government with the cooperation of the Conservatives. During the 1918 “coupon” election Conservatives and Liberals endorsed by the Coalition won a landslide majority in the British Parliament. However, the split between Lloyd George’s National Liberals and Asquith’s Independent Liberals fatally weakened the party. On the other hand, the Labour Party remained unified despite tensions between pacifist and pro-war leaders, used the war to expand the British trade union movement, and benefitted from the establishment of universal suffrage under the Representation of the People Act 1918. As a result both Liberal factions performed poorly in the 1922 general election while Labour became the Official Opposition for the first time. The Liberals reluctantly collaborated with Labour to help it form a brief minority government under Ramsay MacDonald. The Liberals would not fully reunify until Asquith’s death in 1928, and thereafter primarily expressed influence through confidence and supply arrangements and coalitions in the event of a hung parliament.

United States

Main article: Interwar United States

While disillusioned by the war, it having not achieved the high ideals promised by President Woodrow Wilson, American commercial interests did finance Europe’s rebuilding and reparation efforts in Germany, at least until the onset of the Great Depression. American opinion on the propriety of providing aid to Germans and Austrians was split, as evidenced by an exchange of correspondence between Edgar Gott, an executive with The Boeing Company and Charles Osner, chairman of the Committee for the Relief of Destitute Women and Children in Germany and Austria. Gott argued that relief should first go to citizens of countries that had suffered at the hands of the Central Powers, while Osner made an appeal for a more universal application of humanitarian ideals. The American economic influence allowed the Great Depression to start a domino effect, pulling Europe in as well.

France

Main article: Interwar France

Alsace-Lorraine returned to France, the region which had been ceded to the Kingdom of Prussia in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War. At the 1919 Peace Conference, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau‘s aim was to ensure that Germany would not seek revenge in the following years. To this purpose, the chief commander of the Allied forces, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, had demanded that for the future protection of France the Rhine river should now form the border between France and Germany. Based on history, he was convinced that Germany would again become a threat, and, on hearing the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that had left Germany substantially intact, he observed that “This is not Peace. It is an Armistice for twenty years.”

The destruction brought upon French territory was to be indemnified by the reparations negotiated at Versailles. This financial imperative dominated France’s foreign policy throughout the 1920s, leading to the 1923 Occupation of the Ruhr in order to force Germany to pay. However, Germany was unable to pay, and obtained support from the United States. Thus, the Dawes Plan was negotiated after Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré‘s occupation of the Ruhr, and then the Young Plan in 1929.

Also extremely important in the War was the participation of French colonial troops (who amounted for around 10% of the total number of troops deployed by France across the war), including the Senegalese tirailleurs, and troops from Indochina, North Africa, and Madagascar. When these soldiers returned to their homelands and continued to be treated as second class citizens, many became the nuclei of pro-independence groups.

Furthermore, under the state of war declared during the hostilities, the French economy had been somewhat centralized in order to be able to shift into a “war economy“, leading to a first breach with classical liberalism.

Finally, the socialists’ support of the National Union government (including Alexandre Millerand‘s nomination as Minister of War) marked a shift towards the French Section of the Workers’ International‘s (SFIO) turn towards social democracy and participation in “bourgeois governments”, although Léon Blum maintained a socialist rhetoric.

Women in France

“But with its faceless state machinery and unremitting mechanized slaughter, the war instead collapsed these old ideals” (Roberts 2). When the war was over and the men returned home, the world was a vastly different place than it had been before the war. Many ideals and beliefs were shattered with the war. Those returning from the front lines, and even those who were on the Homefront, were left to pick up the pieces of what was left of those ideals and beliefs, and try to rebuild them. Before the Great War, many thought this war would be a quick war, like many before had been. With new technology and weapons though, the war was at a stalemate for a large part of it, dragging what many thought would be a quick war out into a long, gruelling war. With so much death and destruction done to France, it is not surprising when looking back that the way of life for French citizens was forever changed.

Many citizens saw the change in culture and blamed the war for taking away the rose tinted glasses that society had viewed things through. Many scholars and writers, such as Drieu la Rochelle, found many ways to describe this new view on reality such as stripping away clothes (Roberts 2). This comparison of the new reality and clothing being stripped away also ties into the fact that gender roles changed greatly after the war.

During the war many jobs had been left to women because many men were fighting on the front lines. This gave women a new sense of freedom that they had not been able to experience ever before. Not many women wanted to go back to how things were before the war, when they expected to stay at home and take care of the house. When the war was over many of the older generations and men wanted women to return to their previous roles.

At a time where gender roles were so heavily defined and intertwined with the culture of many places, for French citizens viewing how many women went against said roles after World War I, or the Great War as it was called at the time, it was ghastly. While gender roles had slowly been changing over time since the Industrial Revolution gave more work options outside of the home in factories, it had never been such a quick and drastic change as it was after World War I. During the war many men went off to fight, leaving behind factory jobs that were usually seen as a man’s job only. These jobs had to be filled and without men there to fill the jobs, it was women who stepped up to fill the hole instead. France suffered a great loss of life during World War I, leaving many jobs unable to be refilled even after the war.

Debates and discussions concerning gender identity and gender roles in relation to society became one of the main ways to discuss the war and people’s stances on it (Roberts 5). The war left people struggling to grasp the new reality. There were mixed reactions to the new way of life after World War I and how it affected both men and women. Some people were willing to completely embrace the new standards that were emerging following the war, while others harshly rejected the changes, seeing the changes as summarizing all the horrors they experienced during the war. Others looked for ways to compromise between the new and old way of life, tried to combine the ideals and beliefs from before and after the war to find a healthy middle ground.

Discussions pertaining to women during post-war debates often split the view of women into three categories—the “modern woman,” the “mother,” and the “single woman” (Roberts 9). These categories broke up the view of women by the roles they took on, the jobs they did, the way they acted, or by the beliefs they might hold. These categories also came to encompass the views of gender roles in relation to before and after the war. The “mother” category relates back to the role of women before the Great War, the woman who stayed at home and took care of the household while the husband was off at work. The “modern woman” relates to how many women were after the war, working jobs meant for men, engaging in sexual pleasures, and often doing things at a fast pace. The “single woman” was the middle ground between the other two that were very different from one another. The “single woman” came to represent the women who would never be able to marry because there were not enough men for every woman to marry (Roberts 10).

One thing that sparked much debate in regards to the postwar woman is fashion. During the war things like cloth material were rationed, with people being encouraged to not use as much fabric, so that there would be enough for the military. In response to these rations, women wore shorter dresses and skirts, usually about knee length, or pants. This change in apparel was something that many women continued to wear even after the war ended. It was such a drastic change to the clothing norms for women before the war. This change led to some “modern women” to be described in harsh lights, as if wearing dresses and skirts that short showed that those women were promiscuous.

Those coming back from the war, from the fighting, were very traumatized and had wanted to come back to a home that was not very changed in order to give themselves a sense of normalcy. When these men came back to a home that had changed a lot they did not know what to make of it. Gone were the times of very defined gender roles that most of society conformed to. It was often hard for these traumatized men to accept these new changes, especially the changes in how women behaved.

Italy

In 1882 Italy joined with the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to form the Triple Alliance. However, even if relations with Berlin became very friendly, the alliance with Vienna remained purely formal, as the Italians were keen to acquire Trentino and Trieste, parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire populated by Italians.

During World War I Italy aligned with the Allies, instead of joining Germany and Austria. This could happen since the alliance formally had merely defensive prerogatives, while the Central Empires were the ones who started the offensive. With the Treaty of London, Britain secretly offered Italy Trentino and Tyrol as far as Brenner, Trieste and Istria, all the Dalmatian coast except Fiume, full ownership of Albanian Valona and a protectorate over Albania, Antalya in Turkey and a share of the Turkish and German colonial empire, in exchange for Italy siding against the Central Empires

After the victory, Vittorio Orlando, Italy’s President of the Council of Ministers, and Sidney Sonnino, its Foreign Minister, were sent as the Italian representatives to Paris with the aim of gaining the promised territories and as much other land as possible. In particular, there was an especially strong opinion about the status of Fiume, which they believed was rightly Italian due to Italian population, in agreement with Wilson‘s Fourteen Points, the ninth of which read:

“A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality“.

Nevertheless, by the end of the war the Allies realized they had made contradictory agreements with other Nations, especially regarding Central Europe and the Middle-East. In the meetings of the “Big Four”, in which Orlando’s powers of diplomacy were inhibited by his lack of English, the Great powers were only willing to offer Trentino to the Brenner, the Dalmatian port of Zara, the island of Lagosta and a couple of small German colonies. All other territories were promised to other nations and the great powers were worried about Italy’s imperial ambitions; Wilson, in particular, was a staunch supporter of Yugoslav rights on Dalmatia against Italy and despite the Treaty of London which he did not recognize. As a result of this, Orlando left the conference in a rage. This simply favored Britain and France, which divided among themselves the former Ottoman and German territories in Africa.

In Italy, the discontent was relevant: Irredentism (see: irredentismo) claimed Fiume and Dalmatia as Italian lands; many felt the Country had taken part in a meaningless war without getting any serious benefits. This idea of a “mutilated victory” (vittoria mutilata) was the reason which led to the Impresa di Fiume (“Fiume Exploit“). On September 12, 1919, the nationalist poet Gabriele d’Annunzio led around 2,600 troops from the Royal Italian Army (the Granatieri di Sardegna), nationalists and irredentists, into a seizure of the city, forcing the withdrawal of the inter-Allied (American, British and French) occupying forces.

The “mutilated victory” (vittoria mutilata) became an important part of Italian Fascist propaganda.

In the lead-up to World War One Britain and Germany were engaged in a naval arms race. Archivist Louise Bruton examines how the war heralded a new form of naval warfare that featured dreadnoughts, submarines and trade blockades.

In the years leading up to the First World War Britain and Germany engaged in a naval arms race. Britain had peaceably enjoyed its status as the world’s dominant naval force since the Napoleonic Wars but Germany now sought to contest that dominance. A new generation of ships became central to the naval race: the dreadnoughts. Named after the Royal Navy’s HMS Dreadnought, these ‘castles of steel’ came to symbolise naval power in the early 20th century.

The dreadnoughts represented a revolution in warship design and yet their construction was based on the centuries-old definition of the purpose of naval campaigning as being the head-on confrontation of two opposing battle fleets. During the First World War, not only did senior naval officers trained in the days of sail learn to command brand new ships and weaponry untested in wartime; they also witnessed a transformation in warfare that turned the war at sea from a traditional surface encounter into a complex balancing act of defensive strategies and covert tactics involving two new and unforeseen dimensions: under water and in the air.

Design for battleship HMS Dreadnought from The Report of the Committee on Designs

Original designs for battleship HMS Dreadnought, produced by the British Royal Navy in 1905.

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Trade blockade of Germany

Britain was quick to capitalise on its enduring naval supremacy and geographical position by establishing a trade blockade of Germany and its allies as soon as war began. The Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet patrolled the North Sea, laid mines and cut off access to the Channel, curtailing the movements of the German High Seas Fleet and preventing merchant ships from supplying Germany with raw materials and food. The North Sea became ‘a marine no man’s land, with the British Fleet bottling up the exits’, as Richard Hough describes it in The Great War at Sea 1914-1918.

The effect of the blockade on Germany’s civilians after four years of war was noted by British Army MajorGeneral Sir Aylmer Gould Hunter-Weston in December 1918 during a visit to Germany: ‘the food situation is very serious indeed…The Germans are living entirely on their food capital now – they have eaten all their laying hens and are eating all their milch [sic] cows… [there is a] real scarcity.’

Account of a journey through Germany after the Armistice from the private war diary of Major General Hunter-Weston

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Private war diary of Major General Sir Aylmer Gould Hunter-Weston recounting his journey through Germany in December 1918.

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Submarine warfare and defensive strategy 

The simultaneous torpedoing of HMS Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy by a single German submarine in September 1914 shocked the Royal Navy and forced the Admiralty to recognise the threat that the U-Boats, as they became known, posed to the surface fleet.

Although the Allies had their own submarines, which were active in the Adriatic, the Baltic and the Dardanelles over the course of the war, defences against submarines were slow to be developed. The British Navy appealed both to its own personnel and to the wider public for ideas. Minefields, net barrages, depth charges and patrols were introduced but more often than not these defences could be evaded. U-Boats could roam virtually undetected, since the sighting of a periscope was the most reliable method of location at a time when sonar technology was still in its infancy.

In January 1916, in reply to an enquiry from former Prime Minister and then First Lord of the Admiralty Arthur Balfour, Commander-in-Chief of The Grand Fleet John Rushworth Jellicoe stressed the importance of playing to the Navy’s main strength – its size – to retain control of the North Sea: ‘…as to a possible naval offensive… I have long arrived at the conclusion that it would be suicidal to divide our main fleet…’ For the first two years of the war the Allies accordingly concentrated their naval efforts on a defensive strategy of protecting trade routes, developing anti-submarine devices and maintaining the blockade rather than actively seeking direct confrontation.

Conclusion

The war at sea was not characterised by monumental battles, glorious victories and haunting landscapes as was the war on land. The Battle of Jutland was the only full-scale direct action to occur between opposing navies and even this was indecisive. Yet the blockade of supplies to Germany weakened the country, directly contributing to the end of the war, as indeed the U-Boat campaign would have done in reverse had the convoy system not eventually succeeded in saving Britain from starvation. Control of the North Sea meant no less than the difference between independence and invasion. 

The war at sea was a test of nerves and ingenuity. Both sides had to master technologies and ways of fighting unimaginable just a few years earlier. It was a marathon of endurance and persistence, often thankless but always critically important.