THE GALLIPOLI CAMPAIGN 1915

         The allied objectives in the Gallipoli Campaign were, by capturing Istanbul, toforce Turkey out of the war to secure and icefree sea supply route to Russia and to open another front against Germany and Austria-Hungary.
     The campaign fell into four phases; the first being the naval operations of early 1915 culminating, on 18th March, in the unsuccessful attempt by battleships to 'force' the Dardanelles
   The second was the landings,beginning on 25th April, by the British and French armies on Cape Helles and by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (The Anzacs) on the Anzac Beaches. Some headway althought at heavy cost, was made from the Helles landings in operations extending to 5th June, but the precipitous and strongly defended terrain limited to one kilometre, the penetration from the Anzac Landings.

       In the third phase,further British landings to the north of Anzac and at Suvla Bay on 6th August, simultaneously with offensives mounted from both the Helles and Anzac aereas, came near to success but after this failure to achieve a breakout,the opposing armies remained deadlocked in static trench warfare.
       In teh fourth phase, -the withrawal-, the peninsula was evacuated in two stages from Suvla and Anzac on the night of 19-20th December 1915 and from Helles on that of 8-9th January 1916, in operations in which not one life was lost. .
       The Royal Navy, with the assistance of ships of the French Navy,playeda vital part troughout the Campaing. The Navy was responsible for landing and finally for evacuating the troops and their stores,for protecting the wholly seaborne lines of communication, for giving support to the troops by bombardment from thesea and principally, by a series of daring exploits by submarines in the sea of Marmara, for effectivelypreventing intervention by the Turkish Fleet. Onland,the sailors of the

Royal Naval Division and the Royal Marines fought and suffered equally with the soldiers.
      Under the terms of the cease-fire agreement with Turkey, the British Army reentered the Peninsula at the end of 1918 and cleared the battlefield of the bodies still unburied. In the nine months of this bitterly fought campaign, the commonwealth lost more than 36.000 dead. The 31 war cemeteries on the Peninsula contain 22.000 graves, but it was possible to identify only 9.000 of these. The 13.000 who rest in unidentifed graves in the cemeteries, together with the 14.000 whose remains were never found are commemorated individually by name on the Helles memorial British Australian and Indian names, The Lone Pine Memorial (Australian and New Zeland names) and Twelve Tree Copse, Hill 60 and Chunuk Bair Memorials (New Zeland names).