Gallipoli Diary, Volume 1

This is not history from the sidelines. It is war as seen from the command post, the deck of a transport ship, the anxious hours before dawn on a foreign shore. General Sir Ian Hamilton arrived in the eastern Mediterranean in 1915 to lead an expedition that Churchill called the key to the war: a naval assault on the Dardanelles that would knock Ottoman Turkey out of the conflict and open a vital supply route to Russia. What Hamilton found was a campaign already faltering, Allied forces unprepared for the fortified heights of Gallipoli, and a military gamble spiraling toward catastrophe. Written in diary form, this volume captures the confusion, the desperate adaptations, the terrible human cost of an operation that would claim over 100,000 casualties before the evacuation. Hamilton records troop deployments and strategy, but also the smaller moments: his assessment of subordinates, his worries about supply lines, his dawning recognition that the campaign may have been doomed from the start. This is primary source material for anyone who wants to understand how a noble idea became a bloodbath, told by the man who stood at the center of it all.