Battle of Gallipoli Timeline

In February 1915, the Allied fleet failed to force a passage through the Dardanelles, an early setback that foreshadowed the difficulties of the entire campaign.

On 17 February 1915, a British seaplane from the seaplane carrier HMS Ark Royal flew a reconnaissance sortie over the Straits in preparation for naval operations.

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 only one mile wide. The Royal Navy was repulsed with heavy losses.

Between April and December 1915, nine British and four French submarines carried out 15 patrols, sinking one battleship, one destroyer, five gunboats, 11 troop transports, 44 supply ships and 148 sailing vessels, at a cost of eight Entente submarines sunk.

During the campaign there was always one British submarine in the Sea of Marmara, sometimes two; in October 1915 there were four Entente submarines in the region.

E2 left the Sea of Marmara on 2 January 1916, the last British submarine in the sea, ending the submarine campaign off Gallipoli.

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.

The Gallipoli campaign was a military campaign in the First World War on the Gallipoli Peninsula from 19 February 1915 to 9 January 1916. After eight months' fighting, with approximately 250,000 casualties on each side, the land campaign was abandoned and the invasion force withdrawn.

An amphibious landing on the Gallipoli peninsula began in April 1915, opening the land phase of the Gallipoli campaign against Ottoman defenders.

Image source: Landing at Anzac Cove

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.

By July 1915, 25 Ottoman hospitals had been built with 10,700 beds, and three hospital ships were in the area to treat the mounting casualties of the campaign.

The Commissioners of the Dardanelles Commission later found that Hamilton had been over-optimistic from the beginning and had added to Stopford's difficulties on 8 August 1915 during the Suvla operations.

In September 1915, Godley complained that too few recovered sick or wounded casualties from Gallipoli were being returned from Egypt; General John Maxwell replied that 'the appetite of the Dardanelles for men has been phenomenal and wicked'.

On 20 September 1915, the Newfoundland Regiment was deployed at Suvla Bay with the 29th Division as part of the British forces on Gallipoli.

Image source: Royal Newfoundland Regiment

Stopford and other dissident officers contributed to the air of gloom, and the possibility of evacuation was raised on 11 October 1915.

The untenable nature of the Entente position was made apparent by a rainstorm on 26 November 1915, which caused great hardship among the troops on the peninsula.

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.

The last British troops departed from Lancashire Landing around 04:00 on 8 January 1916 during the final stages of the evacuation.

The Newfoundland Regiment was part of the rearguard and withdrew on 9 January 1916, marking the end of the land campaign.

Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty and sponsor of the expedition, resigned in November 1915 and left London for the Western Front, where he commanded an infantry battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers early in 1916.

Image source: Winston Churchill

In Mesopotamia, the Ottomans surrounded a British expedition at Kut Al Amara, forcing their surrender in April 1916, another blow to British fortunes in the Middle East.

Image source: Siege of Kut

In March 1916, Murray took command of the forces in Egypt, forming them into the new Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) and reorganising the units for service in Europe, Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The first iteration of Anzac Day was celebrated unofficially in 1916 at churches in Melbourne, Brisbane and London, before being officially recognised as a public holiday in all Australian states in 1923.

The units withdrawn from Gallipoli moved to the Western Front in mid-1916, where they continued fighting against Germany.

Image source: Western Front (World War I)

Asquith was partly blamed for Gallipoli and other disasters and was ousted in December 1916, when David Lloyd George proposed a war council under his authority, with the Conservatives in the coalition threatening to resign unless the plan was implemented. Lloyd George formed a new government from which Churchill was excluded because of Conservative opposition.

Image source: David Lloyd George

The Dardanelles Commission was set up to investigate the failure of the expedition, the first report being issued in 1917.

Image source: Dardanelles Commission

In the summer of 1917, Churchill was eventually appointed to the cabinet-level post of Minister of Munitions but not to the War Cabinet, beginning his political rehabilitation after Gallipoli.

Image source: Minister of Munitions

Palestine and the northern Levant were captured from the Ottoman Empire during 1917 and 1918, before the Armistice of Mudros ended hostilities in the Middle Eastern theatre on 31 October 1918.

Image source: Armistice of Mudros

The final report of the Commission was issued in 1919, concluding that with the forces available, success was dependent on the government giving priority to the expedition and leaving the British Expeditionary Force in France to make do.

The occupation ended in 1923 following the Turkish War of Independence, the Armistice of Mudanya and the Treaty of Lausanne, reshaping the region after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Image source: Treaty of Lausanne

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who rose to prominence as a commander at Gallipoli, became the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. In Turkey the battle is thought of as a significant event in the state's emergence, remembered especially for the fighting around Çanakkale where the Royal Navy was repulsed in March 1915.

Image source: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Organised marches by veterans began in 1925, in the same year a service was held on the beach at Gallipoli; two years later the first official dawn service took place at the Sydney Cenotaph.

Image source: Anzac Day

The memory of Gallipoli weighed upon the Australians during the planning of the Huon Peninsula campaign in late 1943, shaping their approach to amphibious operations in the Second World War.

Image source: Huon Peninsula campaign

The lessons of the Gallipoli campaign were studied by military planners prior to amphibious operations such as the Normandy Landings in 1944 and during the Falklands War in 1982. Russell Weigley wrote that pre-war analysis led to a widespread belief that opposed landings could not succeed until Normandy proved otherwise.

Image source: Normandy landings

In 1971, Scottish-born Australian folk singer-songwriter Eric Bogle wrote 'And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda', an account from a young Australian soldier maimed during the Gallipoli campaign.