Talk of ‘missed opportunities’ was rife, and there was much resentment among both troops and junior officers towards the politicians and senior officers behind the lines who had got them into the mess in the first place, and now seemed too incompetent to carry the campaign through. There were several occasions when the Allies thought they could have burst through with just a few more reinforcements, or better leadership, or a little luck. But many Turks did think it was possible, and indeed inevitable: the Royal Navy, which would be doing most of the forcing, was the greatest in the world.
One major of the Gurkhas thought that this might be the ‘one hope’ of its success: it was so crazy that the Turks would never believe the Allies would contemplate it, so they would be taken by surprise. The general verdict today is that it could never have worked. It will raise the whole tone of the war.’ As Peter Cook said in Beyond the Fringe, ‘we need a futile gesture at this stage. Gallipoli has become one of those military cock-ups – the Charge of the Light Brigade is another – that the British seem almost to revel in, even to gain strength from. Kitchener’s reputation ended up pretty battered too, though he was drowned before it became a problem. Churchill’s reputation didn’t recover for twenty-odd years – ‘What about the Dardanelles?’ they used to shout at him whenever he got up in Parliament – though that may have been unfair: most of the government and the high command, including Kitchener, were initially behind him. Wasn’t all that worth a gamble? In the end it failed miserably, with enormous losses on both sides, and the Allied forces evacuating the peninsula in December, leaving much of their matériel behind. It has been suggested that had it been successful it might even have forestalled the Bolshevik Revolution. The idea was to force open the straits between the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara, get to Constantinople, detach the Turks from the Germans, bolster the Russians and shorten the war by two years. Churchill’s cunning plan was to cut through the ghastly stalemate of the Western Front with a morale-boosting attack where Germany expected it least. The Gallipoli adventure of 1915, a disaster in every way, was dreamed up after Turkey sided with Germany in the Great War.
F rom the time of the Crusades onwards, Western military interventions in the Near and Middle East have nearly all been disastrous in the long run – just look at Iraq today – but usually in the short term too.
0 kommentar(er)
