(no subject)
I haven't posted here in a while, but I saw an article in SMH that made my blood boil with a furious rage. History nerd is ANGRY!
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/gallipoli-was-not-churchills-great-folly-20110413-1ddzb.html
here is my reply:
On August 4, 1914, Britain joined France and Russia in a war against the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. One significant European power was yet to declare its allegiances.
Turkey was neither a European power, nor a significant power.
…the Ottoman Empire had ruled the Middle East - and at times, large parts of Europe - for 600 years.
Key word: had. Sure, the Ottoman Empire at one stage stretched from Austria to India. But that was a long, long time ago. Much like Russia, Turkey spent the 19th century stuck in a cocoon while the Western European powers accelerated their economic and technological developments at exponential rates.
Three months into the war the Germans were winning everywhere.
Until just after that first three months, when the trench lines were settled in, and then nobody moved much for the next five years.
Russia was now surrounded.
Um, I seem to remember there being this big thing called “Asia”, actually.
He knew that if Russia fell, the entire German war machine would be hurled at the West and an ally would be cast into the abyss.
A reasonable proposition. But Russia’s fall had nothing to do with Turkey. It had to do with Russia being completely shit at everything, and being essentially a 17th century power trying to fight a 20th century war.
Russia offered no easy supply lines. The North Sea was too close to Germany and too often frozen and the Far East too distant.
“Too distant”? For what? Trains go pretty fast. Anyway, supplies weren’t really the problem. Sure, many of the Russian soldiers didn’t have guns, but neither did the British (their conscripts trained with walking sticks because they didn’t have enough rifles to go around, true story). The problem was that their troops were so backward that they thought their own planes were “flying demons” and tried to shoot them down. Also a true story.
Churchill forcefully argued for the least worst option: bust through the Dardanelles - the narrow sea passage from the Mediterranean leading towards the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, and the Black Sea.
“Bust through the Dardanelles”, eh? Sounds great, Biggles! But to do what exactly? To distract one tottering feeble power from feebly clawing at another tottering feeble power?
After seven weeks of rancorous debate [Churchill] prevailed over his detractors but planning and execution of the campaign suffered.
The planning and execution “suffered”? From what ? This disingenuous paragraph seems to subtly imply that the planning and execution “suffered” from the “rancorous debate”. This is blatantly untrue. It “suffered” from being completely terrible, which was largely Churchill’s fault.
This attack on the heart of a great empire produced intense resistance from the "sick man of Europe".
“Sick man of Europe”? A few paragraphs ago Turkey was a “significant European power”. What gives?
Churchill was relentless, publicly calling for 95,000 more troops to be sent to Gallipoli but securing only 25,000.
So people dared to question his decision to throw more meat into the grinder to be slaughtered? Seems reasonable to me.
The Allies were out by January 1916 and the deeply unpopular Churchill spent the rest of the war near the front line in France.
Poor guy. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t exactly slumming it in the trenches, however.
Russia had been warming to the world in the decades before the war and moving towards a democratic constitutional monarchy.
Sorry, this deserves a “WTFLOL”. Sure, Nicholas II seemed like a relative modernist, as opposed to say Nicholas I, but he was no democrat. See: aborted Russian revolution of 1905, where people wanting reforms were ruthlessly crushed by the army, under his orders.
But its promising future was cruelled by post-Gallipoli isolation.
I honestly have absolutely no idea what that sentence means. It makes no sense.
A year later Russia crumbled, the tsar abdicated and the world's first communist state was born. Its first act was surrender. More Russians died in the war than Germans and Britons combined -
But not more than the French, who this article callously ignores. The French lost 8% of their adult male population in the war. They fought longer and harder than any other power, and it was their tenacity that caused Germany’s defeat.
With Russia out, Germany hurled its fury at France and by mid-1918 was within sight of Paris.
They got within 120 kms; I’d hardly call that within “sight”. And they were pushed back almost immediately.
The Allies were saved years more carnage by a late American rescue.
This is completely untrue. Not to belittle the US assistance, but Lundendorff launched the spring 1918 offensive out of utter desperation: their supply lines were fucked. It was their last throw of the dice. The French resilience, and arrival of US (and Australian) troops, accelerated the doom that had been approaching them for some time.
A modest force departed but Lenin prevailed and the USSR became HQ for every communist revolution of the 20th century.
That statement is so untrue I don’t even know where to begin.
Communism enslaved one-third of the world by 1980 but there was nothing inevitable about its advent… No nation was threatened by communism before 1917.
Huh? Are you now arguing that Churchill launched the Gallipoli campaign to stop communism taking hold in Russia? Quick history update: Gallipoli campaign launched in 1915. Russian Revolution happened in 1917. TWO YEARS LATER. Did Churchill have some magical insight that communists were going to take over two years in the future in a far away country? Not even Lenin believed a Russian Revolution was going to happen. He had to be dragged kicking and screaming away from sipping coffee in Paris when the Tsarist regime started crumbling. Churchill wanted to kick Turkey in the guts because he thought the Eastern Front was important, and that Russia somehow could be, and should be, saved. The fact that Russsia was largely irrelevant to the war, and Turkey far more so, didn’t prevent him from spilling the blood of thousands of other people’s children in a stupid, pointless and badly planned campaign.
Defeat at Gallipoli may have been disastrous for the Anzacs, the Allies, the Turks and 100 million innocents later killed by communism - but futile it was not.
Trying to connect the failure of the Gallipoli campaign to the rise of Soviet communism is ridiculous. You even said earlier in your piece that the Turkish decision to join on the Axis side was an “empire-ending decision”. It was indeed, irregardless of whatever transpired at Gallipoli, but only to the extent that their empire hadn’t already ended. The Ottomans barely had control of Turkey and Armenia, much less anywhere else. The fact is, Russia had lost the war before they had even started it, by being a thoroughly pre-modern power fighting against the most advanced and modernised military force on the planet, and “storming the Dardanelles” was an irrelevant and stupid schoolboy fantasy of Churchill’s that made no sense from a political or military perspective.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/gallipoli-was-not-churchills-great-folly-20110413-1ddzb.html
here is my reply:
On August 4, 1914, Britain joined France and Russia in a war against the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. One significant European power was yet to declare its allegiances.
Turkey was neither a European power, nor a significant power.
…the Ottoman Empire had ruled the Middle East - and at times, large parts of Europe - for 600 years.
Key word: had. Sure, the Ottoman Empire at one stage stretched from Austria to India. But that was a long, long time ago. Much like Russia, Turkey spent the 19th century stuck in a cocoon while the Western European powers accelerated their economic and technological developments at exponential rates.
Three months into the war the Germans were winning everywhere.
Until just after that first three months, when the trench lines were settled in, and then nobody moved much for the next five years.
Russia was now surrounded.
Um, I seem to remember there being this big thing called “Asia”, actually.
He knew that if Russia fell, the entire German war machine would be hurled at the West and an ally would be cast into the abyss.
A reasonable proposition. But Russia’s fall had nothing to do with Turkey. It had to do with Russia being completely shit at everything, and being essentially a 17th century power trying to fight a 20th century war.
Russia offered no easy supply lines. The North Sea was too close to Germany and too often frozen and the Far East too distant.
“Too distant”? For what? Trains go pretty fast. Anyway, supplies weren’t really the problem. Sure, many of the Russian soldiers didn’t have guns, but neither did the British (their conscripts trained with walking sticks because they didn’t have enough rifles to go around, true story). The problem was that their troops were so backward that they thought their own planes were “flying demons” and tried to shoot them down. Also a true story.
Churchill forcefully argued for the least worst option: bust through the Dardanelles - the narrow sea passage from the Mediterranean leading towards the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, and the Black Sea.
“Bust through the Dardanelles”, eh? Sounds great, Biggles! But to do what exactly? To distract one tottering feeble power from feebly clawing at another tottering feeble power?
After seven weeks of rancorous debate [Churchill] prevailed over his detractors but planning and execution of the campaign suffered.
The planning and execution “suffered”? From what ? This disingenuous paragraph seems to subtly imply that the planning and execution “suffered” from the “rancorous debate”. This is blatantly untrue. It “suffered” from being completely terrible, which was largely Churchill’s fault.
This attack on the heart of a great empire produced intense resistance from the "sick man of Europe".
“Sick man of Europe”? A few paragraphs ago Turkey was a “significant European power”. What gives?
Churchill was relentless, publicly calling for 95,000 more troops to be sent to Gallipoli but securing only 25,000.
So people dared to question his decision to throw more meat into the grinder to be slaughtered? Seems reasonable to me.
The Allies were out by January 1916 and the deeply unpopular Churchill spent the rest of the war near the front line in France.
Poor guy. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t exactly slumming it in the trenches, however.
Russia had been warming to the world in the decades before the war and moving towards a democratic constitutional monarchy.
Sorry, this deserves a “WTFLOL”. Sure, Nicholas II seemed like a relative modernist, as opposed to say Nicholas I, but he was no democrat. See: aborted Russian revolution of 1905, where people wanting reforms were ruthlessly crushed by the army, under his orders.
But its promising future was cruelled by post-Gallipoli isolation.
I honestly have absolutely no idea what that sentence means. It makes no sense.
A year later Russia crumbled, the tsar abdicated and the world's first communist state was born. Its first act was surrender. More Russians died in the war than Germans and Britons combined -
But not more than the French, who this article callously ignores. The French lost 8% of their adult male population in the war. They fought longer and harder than any other power, and it was their tenacity that caused Germany’s defeat.
With Russia out, Germany hurled its fury at France and by mid-1918 was within sight of Paris.
They got within 120 kms; I’d hardly call that within “sight”. And they were pushed back almost immediately.
The Allies were saved years more carnage by a late American rescue.
This is completely untrue. Not to belittle the US assistance, but Lundendorff launched the spring 1918 offensive out of utter desperation: their supply lines were fucked. It was their last throw of the dice. The French resilience, and arrival of US (and Australian) troops, accelerated the doom that had been approaching them for some time.
A modest force departed but Lenin prevailed and the USSR became HQ for every communist revolution of the 20th century.
That statement is so untrue I don’t even know where to begin.
Communism enslaved one-third of the world by 1980 but there was nothing inevitable about its advent… No nation was threatened by communism before 1917.
Huh? Are you now arguing that Churchill launched the Gallipoli campaign to stop communism taking hold in Russia? Quick history update: Gallipoli campaign launched in 1915. Russian Revolution happened in 1917. TWO YEARS LATER. Did Churchill have some magical insight that communists were going to take over two years in the future in a far away country? Not even Lenin believed a Russian Revolution was going to happen. He had to be dragged kicking and screaming away from sipping coffee in Paris when the Tsarist regime started crumbling. Churchill wanted to kick Turkey in the guts because he thought the Eastern Front was important, and that Russia somehow could be, and should be, saved. The fact that Russsia was largely irrelevant to the war, and Turkey far more so, didn’t prevent him from spilling the blood of thousands of other people’s children in a stupid, pointless and badly planned campaign.
Defeat at Gallipoli may have been disastrous for the Anzacs, the Allies, the Turks and 100 million innocents later killed by communism - but futile it was not.
Trying to connect the failure of the Gallipoli campaign to the rise of Soviet communism is ridiculous. You even said earlier in your piece that the Turkish decision to join on the Axis side was an “empire-ending decision”. It was indeed, irregardless of whatever transpired at Gallipoli, but only to the extent that their empire hadn’t already ended. The Ottomans barely had control of Turkey and Armenia, much less anywhere else. The fact is, Russia had lost the war before they had even started it, by being a thoroughly pre-modern power fighting against the most advanced and modernised military force on the planet, and “storming the Dardanelles” was an irrelevant and stupid schoolboy fantasy of Churchill’s that made no sense from a political or military perspective.