Alive with death

In December 1914, with their soldiers ‘chewing barbed wire in Flanders’, British politicians looked for alternatives to stalemate on the Western Front. Their gaze settled upon the Dardanelles.

The Turks, recently defeated by lesser powers, couldn’t resist the combined might of the British and French empires. They would run at the sight of the Allied fleet. Or so some chose to believe.

This book offers an unparalleled collection of first-hand accounts by those who made history and those who lived it, from prime ministers to private soldiers, from the offices of Whitehall to the dusty dugouts of the peninsula. All accounts were written at the time, without the benefit or bias of hindsight.

How did a naval demonstration to aid the Russians lead to the first amphibious landings on a defended shore in modern times? Was it a flash of strategic genius, a worthwhile gamble or did ‘criminal idiots attempt the impossible’?

Gain a new perspective on the Gallipoli Campaign as you watch the story unfold with each passing day.

This brilliant new book on the Gallipoli campaign expands our horizons as it explores the origins of the campaign reaching right back to Duckworth’s abortive mission through the Dardanelles in 1807.

The day-by-day format allows us to get right inside the dramatic events. The tension builds up to a nerve-jangling climax with the Gallipoli landings on 25 April 1915 and the immediate aftermath.

All the drama, the action, the courage, the tragedies and the pathos are here. You thought that story was done to death? Well, think again!

— Peter Hart, historian & author of Gallipoli

A  gripping read. On one page we read of the British War Cabinet, a paragraph later it’s the experience of a naval rating seeing his pals eviscerated by red hot steel... Extracts from official documents, memoirs, diaries, official reports, newspapers of the day, they’re all there, page after page... with only well chosen, laconic, and often amusingly sardonic introductory sentences to provide context. A remarkable achievement.

If there was ever an example of a slow-motion car crash, it was the Dardanelles Offensive. And telling the story of that cataclysm, day by day, brings the catastrophe into clear relief... I’m already looking forward to Volume 2.

— John Spencer, The Douglas Haig Fellowship, Records, Issue No. 27, December 2024

Sometimes size does matter... with 675 pages, four maps, and a wealth of photographs, this hefty volume can be classified as a substantial tome. What sets this work apart is the carefully curated collection of personal accounts that breathe life into the story. The voices of key figures such as Asquith, Churchill, Kitchener, Fisher, and Hamilton, as well as those of lesser-known individuals who fought at the sharp end of the conflict, create a vivid, human-centered narrative. Grundy deserves credit for uncovering a rich array of sources.

This book is an essential read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the campaign... I cannot recommend it highly enough.

— Stephen Chambers, The Gallipolian, journal of the Gallipoli Association