At Gallipoli, a Campaign That Laid Ground for National Identities - The New York Times - 0 views
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In March 1915, the Western Allies, locked in stagnant trench warfare in Europe, seized on an ambitious strategy orchestrated by Winston Churchill, then Britain’s first lord of the admiralty, to open a second front here. In securing control of the Dardanelles and conquering Constantinople, now Istanbul, the Allies hoped to knock the Turks, who had recently entered the conflict on the side of the Germans, from the war.
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After nine months of grueling trench warfare, and after suffering tens of thousands of casualties while gaining little ground, the Allies evacuated. More than 40,000 British military personnel were killed, along with nearly 8,000 Australians and more than 60,000 Turks.
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The campaign also proved crucial in the careers of two of the 20th century’s greatest statesmen: Churchill, who was demoted for his role in the military disaster, and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, then a young Turkish officer, whose battlefield success at Gallipoli propelled him to fame, which he built on to become the founder of the modern Turkish republic.
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In recent years, though, Turks have been engaged in an ideological contest over Gallipoli’s legacy. With the rise of the country’s Islamist government under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan have come efforts to diminish the role of Ataturk, who established Turkey under secular principles. The military, which once had a predominant role over politics in Turkey, has also been pushed aside under Mr. Erdogan.
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In victory, the Turks ended decades of Ottoman defeats on the edges of the empire and emerged with a new sense of nationalism — and a leader, Mustafa Kemal, later known as Ataturk, who would lead the country to independence after the war ended. Mustafa Kemal, then a young officer, met the invading Australians with his men on the day of the landing and earned a reputation as a military genius for his success.
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In defeat, the Australians gained what many historians have described as the first embers of a national consciousness, apart from their British colonial legacy. “It’s certainly seen today as the beginning of a real Australian self-identity,” Rupert Murdoch said.
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The trenches are still there, carved in the green hills of the slim Gallipoli Peninsula just across the Dardanelles,
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Almost a hundred years ago, it was the place where World War I was supposed to turn in the Allies’ favor, but instead it became one of the great slaughters of the Great War.
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Gallipoli campaign has taken on an outsize importance as the bloody event that became the foundation of a modern national identity.
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In September 1915, with the slaughter unfolding on Gallipoli but news limited in Australia because of military censorship
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When the commanding general at Gallipoli, Sir Ian Hamilton, learned of Keith Murdoch’s plan to evade the censorship rules, he had him detained at a port in France and the letter was destroyed.
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“As he was writing his letter, the editor of The Times looked in and said, ‘What are you doing, young man?’ ”
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The 8,000-word letter, detailing what Keith Murdoch called “one of the most terrible chapters in our history,”
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Keith Murdoch later came under sharp criticism in Britain for breaking the censorship rules, and many in the British establishment, including Churchill, never forgave him,
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The Australian government recently selected 8,000 people from a lottery to attend anniversary commemorations next year at the beaches in Turkey.
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named for the acronym of the force that landed there, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, just as thousands of his fellow Australians do each year.
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“Gallipoli is the place that for the first time, after a century of defeats, the Turks were successful,”
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Many conservative Turkish municipal governments have been organizing free battlefield tours, with a message delivered
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In 1934, Ataturk famously wrote a letter to Australian mothers, saying, “having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.”
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The truth is, they just wanted to kill one another and win the war, something evident in the letters from the front.
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“Everything is so quiet and still one would never dream that two opposing forces, each eager for the other’s blood, were separated by only a few yards – and in places only a few feet.”