The Anglo-French March 18, 1915 naval bombardment of the Turkish forts on the European and Asian sides of the Dardanelles significantly reduced the forts. The loss of the French battleship Bouvet, which hit a mine and sank, and the severe damage to the British Irresistible and Inflexible, deterred further attempts.

Lively and engaging, with well-drawn portraits of the people on all sides, descriptions of the sheer beauty of the area, and the harsh demands it put on those fighting there, and how the campaign in the Dardanelles, the strait between Europe and Asia, developed from and fit into the broader war. Well illustrated with maps and photographs.

A chapter on the preparations for the landing at Gallipoli begins with an overwrought quotation from the young British poet Rupert Brooke, describes the cobbling together of the material for the campaign, the purchases in the shops of Cairo, the design and construction of landing craft, the improvisational nature of it all, and closes with the invasion force on its way and the receipt by its commander of notification of Brooke's death in a French hospital on the island of Skyros. A chapter on the initial attempt to force a fleet through the Dardanelles begins with a description of the sheer beauty of the strait separating Europe and Asia. An aging French battleship is compared to a medieval castle, a drawing by Braque. The confusion of the landing and initial allied assault is compared to a a Shakespearean drama, where one is taken from scene to scene, with hints of the confusion of those involved, their loss of direction, their death, and sometimes their simply falling, exhausted, asleep.

Publisher: Perennial Classics 2002 (HarperCollins Publications 1956), 2002 (1956)

Copyright: 1956 by Alan Moorehead