The story of the highly controversial First World War campaign that nearly destroyed Churchill's reputation for good and of his decades-long battle to set the record straight--a battle which ultimately helped clear the way for Churchill's appointment as Prime Minister in Britain's "darkest hour."

Based on exclusive access to Turkish archives, Defending Gallipoli reveals how the Turks reacted and defended Gallipoli. Author and Turkish language expert Harvey Broadbent spent five years translating everything from official records to soldiers' personal diaries and letters to unearth the Turkish story. It is chilling and revealing to see this famous battle in Australian history through the 'enemy' lens. The book commences with a jihad, which sees the soldiers fighting for country and God together. But it also humanises the Turkish soldiers, naming them, revealing their emotions, and ultimately shows how the Allies totally misunderstood and underestimated them Defending Gallipoli fills a huge gap in the history of the Gallipoli campaign.

This book, based on comprehensive archival research in official and private papers, offers a new history of the infamous British disaster at Gallipoli in 1915. Contrary to all previous accounts, it shows that the campaign originated not in the search for an alternative to the Western Front, but in the need to lower the price of bread in Britain.

Den britiske generalløjtnant, der på et tidspunkt var stabschef for 'the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force', 1915, der mente, at politikere ikke var i stand til at beskæftige sig med såvel land- som sømilitær strategi, illustrerer dette ved at fremhæve katastrofen for briterne med deres angreb på dardanellerfæstningerne i 1915.

The noted historian’s decisive and devastating history of the WWI Battle of Gallipoli “sets a new standard for assessing the Allied Dardanelles campaign" (Mustafa Aksakal, American Historical Review). The Gallipoli campaign of 1915–16 was an ill-fated Allied attempt to take control of the Dardanelles, secure a sea route to Russia, and create a Balkan alliance against the Central Powers. A failure in all respects, the operation ended in disaster, and the Allied forces suffered some 390,000 casualties. In this conclusive study, military historian Robin Prior assesses the many myths about Gallipoli and provides definitive answers to questions that have lingered about the operation. Prior proceeds step by step through the campaign, dealing with naval, military, and political matters and surveying the operations of all the armies involved: British, Anzac, French, Indian, and Turkish. Relying on primary documents, including war diaries and technical military sources, Prior evaluates the strategy, the commanders, and the performance of soldiers on the ground. His conclusions are powerful and unsettling: the naval campaign was not “almost” won, and the land action was not bedeviled by “minor misfortunes.” Instead, the badly conceived Gallipoli campaign was doomed from the start. And even had it been successful, the operation would not have shortened the war by a single day. Despite their bravery, the Allied troops who fell at Gallipoli died in vain. A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2009

Gallipoli: the mere name summons the story of this well-known campaign of the First World War. And the story of Gallipoli, where in August 1915 the Allied forces made their last valiant effort against the Turks, is one of infamous might-have-beens. If only the Allies had held out a little longer, pushed a little harder, had better luck—Gallipoli might have been the decisive triumph that knocked the Ottoman Empire out of the First World War. But the story is just that, author Rhys Crawley tells us: a story. Not only was the outcome at Gallipoli not close, but the operation was flawed from the start, and an inevitable failure. A painstaking effort to set the historical record straight, Climax at Gallipoli examines the performance of the Allies’ Mediterranean Expeditionary Force from the beginning of the Gallipoli Campaign to the bitter end. Crawley reminds us that in 1915, the second year of the war, the Allies were still trying to adapt to a new form of warfare, with static defense replacing the maneuver and offensive strategies of earlier British doctrine. In the attempt both the MEF at Gallipoli and the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front aimed for too much—and both failed. To explain why, Crawley focuses on the operational level of war in the campaign, scrutinizing planning, command, mobility, fire support, interservice cooperation, and logistics. His work draws on unprecedented research into the files of military organizations across the United Kingdom and Australia. The result is a view of the Gallipoli Campaign unique in its detail and scope, as well as in its conclusions—a book that looks past myth and distortion to the facts, and the truth, of what happened at this critical juncture in twentieth-century history.