When I was in high school, my mom brightly suggested my dad and I should go see the movie Gallipoli. Dad looked over at me with horror for a second, trying to figure out what to say, other than “that does not sound uplifting.”
Later, he leveled his game up, and someone asked him if he had seen Titanic. His response, “I already know how it ends.”
Around the time the movie came out, I was regularly going to sci fi cons, and gaming cons, and in the Baltimore area those were generally hosted at the Hunt Valley Marriott, a place I came to know very well. It was a short 15 mile bicycle ride. There was a group of filksingers called “Clam Chowder” and one of their staples was Eric Bogle’s The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, so I knew something of Gallipoli (or at least Souvla Bay) by then.
The algorithm on youtube coughed this up and I decided to watch it because I thought that drone shots of the battlefield would be interesting. That’s putting it semi mildly.
One nice thing is I don’t have to worry about spoilers because, presumably, you already know how it ends.
What I really enjoyed about the documentary was the down close view of what was going on, and the realization that all this stuff took place in a very small area. Like the battlefield at Waterloo, you look around and go, “this is it?” Then you realize that all these people were basically determining the fate of the known world at a range that would have only seemed long to one of Henry V’s archers.
As someone who has always been interested in military intelligence, I was fascinated to learn how much the British actually knew about the area they were attacking, which was a great deal. They just ignored it. I couldn’t tell whether it was because they mostly didn’t give a shit about their men (naturally) or whether they were a bunch of racists who assumed the Turkish forces were incompetent. You know, the Ottoman Empire, which had held that area for longer than the English Empire had existed, and then some. One does not do that through sheer incompetence.
Like pretty much anything about World War I British military history, this is mostly a story of incompetence. One thing I kept thinking was “did the Turks figure out something was afoot when British planes kept flying over their gun emplacements?” and “did the British think that, in an area frequented by zillions of small fishing boats, nobody was going to mention to the authorities that the British/French were ‘hiding’ a bunch of battleships on the other side of an island just out of visual range?” I started to feel that the operation was run by great strategic minds like Paul Manafort and Tucker Carlson – which, upon reflection, is about right.
As usual, for a documentary made for the current generation, it is way too slow and wordy. But the drone shots of the battlefield at the end were captivating.
I suppose this is “revisionist history” since the overall impression I had was that the ANZACs floundered ashore in a welter of bullets and bursting shells. But that’s apparently not how it went down – it was the British who did that, because that’s how British military buttheadedness did things at that time.
The fellow who plays the German commander really works his eyebrow Teutonically. He’s great.
The documentary is fascinating. Thanks.
So, the British Army runs recruitment ads on tv. At least, it used to back when I watched tv. I’d guess some time in the 90s there was a run of “what is our greatest asset? X? Y? Z? No! Night! Aren’t we clever for attacking the enemy when they can’t see us!”. So I guess *eventually* at least some of the stupidity got beaten out of them.
Ah! here it is.
xohjoh2n@#2:
I’d guess some time in the 90s there was a run of “what is our greatest asset? X? Y? Z? No! Night! Aren’t we clever for attacking the enemy when they can’t see us!”. So I guess *eventually* at least some of the stupidity got beaten out of them.
I suppose it’s evolution in action – the leaders who were prone to signaling attacks in advance eventually died out of service, and the survivors developed more effective techniques?
I always used to wonder about this: you pull up with a bunch of ships and aircraft and blast away for hours. Then, your people go “over the top” once the enemy is thoroughly aware that an attack is in the offing. We know that artillery, even naval artillery, is not particularly effective against dug in hostiles – the main time artillery “works” is when you get infantry and soft targets in the open. Anyhow, once you’ve got everyone riled up and ready, you charge across no man’s land and die like lemmings. This ought to have been obvious after the first few battles in WWI.
Night vision versus non-night vision troops has to be horrifying for the non-night capable troops, but I’ve read accounts of attempts at night actions that are really sobering. It sounds like a lot of people would just shoot at any sign of movement and assume it was hostile. So the British were probably chuffed by their improvements, and thought “you are much less likely to get shot by your own side” would be a suitable recruitment message.
The account in the documentary of the River Clyde rumbling up and ashore, at what had to have been a snail’s pace, it sounds like a truly uninspiring scene. If you look at the view from Sedd El Bahr to the beach, it’s practically a handgun shot, and the Turks all had fine Mauser bolt action rifles. [I actually own a Turkish Mauser action that I was planning on building up into a tack-driver, but then I got my hands on a Swedish Karl Gustav/Husqvarna action, and the Turkish one is still on the shelf in butcher’s paper, where it has sat for 20 years…]
“This video is unavailable in your country”
Interesting given I’m Australian :P
The mythologisation of Gallipoli here is fucking weird. Like, surely the take home lesson is don’t get too invested in imperialist power’s BS *looks at local US military base*
dangerousbeans@#5:
don’t get too invested in imperialist power’s BS *looks at local US military base*
The US has managed to make you a collateral target if there’s a nuclear war.
Let’s hope that doesn’t happen, but nobody except the US believes that nuclear sub isn’t capable of mounting trident missile systems, basically the same game we played with the Brits. “those aren’t British missiles, they’re US missiles, they just live in a compatible British submarine that the British don’t know how to repair or maintain.”
From what I know of how wars have gone (hardly exhaustive knowledge, I admit), it sounds like stupidity has always been a big component of war.
* Barbara Tuchman’s account of how the British lost its (now US) colonies.
* The Vietnam war
* US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan
Contempt for the enemy (or any sort of foreigner) is one part of it. In the case of Britain, the upper classes’ (=officers) contempt of the lower classes (=soldiers, colonists) is another.
Allison@#7:
From what I know of how wars have gone (hardly exhaustive knowledge, I admit), it sounds like stupidity has always been a big component of war.
Absolutely agreed. There are commanders such as Alexander of Macedon, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Wellington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Hannibal (is that the list?!) that were genuine military geniuses, but even that elite collection made mistakes. I suppose Wellington never lost a battle, so perhaps he never made a mistake. Even Admiral Nelson lacked the sense to avoid the shooters in the top-masts of enemy ships, etc. Of course part of the problem is that those rarefied commanders inherited the stupidity of their subordinates, of which there is always a great deal to go around.
Contempt for the enemy (or any sort of foreigner) is one part of it
I think that is the main factor. After all, one wouldn’t go to war with someone they feared and respected. That’s dangerously close to asking for an ass-kicking. I heard a great thing the other day (you have to say it in JFK’s AI voice:) “We choose to do this things not because they are hard, but because we mistakenly thought they were easy.” To your point, very many of the great stupid failures were a result of someone deciding that ${whatever} would be a piece of cake.
In the case of Britain, the upper classes’ (=officers) contempt of the lower classes (=soldiers, colonists) is another.
Yes. Classism either results from worship of the wealthy (which is stupid) or notions of divine right of kings (which is stupid) or that there is such a thing as “good breeding” (which is stupid) – I’m going to say that a classist society, or a monarchy, is inherently stupid and therefore prepared for failure. In historical times, of course, every society was a monarchy, which meant that they were laboring under some absurd notion that there was an inheritable gene for being a good ruler or commander. Go back far enough and the ruler was the commander, so you wound up with some truly horrible decisions, often made because some idiot was given an army and told to “go do kingly stuff.”
I remember when I was a kid and first read Dune the thing that impressed me the most was the idea that there would be civilizations some day that treated ruling as a profession that you were raised to specialize in. Herbert even embedded a system for culling bad potential rulers, i.e.: the Bene Gesserit would test you with the gom jabbar and, oops, time to find another heir. Of course Herbert was mostly stealing from how Alexander of Macedon was raised (Aristotle as the king’s tutor, anyone?) One wonders what Olympias would have done, if Alexander didn’t look like he was going to make the cut…