Battle Of Gallipoli
Top 2 in Top 12 Major Battles of World War I
The Battle of Gallipoli, which lasted eight months and was initiated by a coalition of British, French, Indian, New Zealand, Australian, and Canadian forces to eliminate Turkish Ottoman Empire forces siding with Germany, was one of the major battles of World War I. The British and their allies planned to sail a massive fleet through the Dardanelles, a 65-mile sea channel connecting the Mediterranean with Istanbul, the Ottoman capital. The plan's goal was to compel the Ottoman Empire to submit. The strategy failed badly, owing in part to the allies' out-of-date fleet and the many ships sunk by Ottoman artillery and mines.
The Battle of Gallipoli claimed the lives of 58,000 Allied men. There were 29,000 British and Irish troops, as well as 11,000 Australian and New Zealand troops. There were also over 300,000 Ottoman Turkish troops killed and injured on both sides. The battle of Gallipoli was memorialized in Mel Gibson's 1981 film Gallipoli. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the lieutenant colonel of the 19th Turkish division, rose to prominence as a result of the Ottoman triumph. In 1923, he became the modern-day Turkish Republic's founding father.
When: 1915 - 1916
