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Peter Fitzsimons’ Gallipoli is very Australia-centric. This is one of most intriguing aspects of the book.
It does not try to suggest that only Australians fought at Gallipoli, but the flavour, the perspective, and the prose all have an Aussie accent and use of words − sometimes stark and brutal, other times colourful − that could only be from one country and one time.
There have, of course, been many books written about this failed military adventure, but this is not just “another Gallipoli book”. It is a fascinating, highly informative book, with deep emotive characteristics. The latter is something Fitzsimons is famous for. His other books, such as Kokoda, describe events now etched deeply into Australia’s culture.
Gallipoli is a lengthy tome, at 824 pages, including notes, references, bibliography and index. This may seem overlong. But Fitzsimons puts the landings at Anzac Cover and Cape Hellas and the subsequent eight months of bitterness, into the deep context of the politics that surrounded the ill-fated campaign; including the failure of the British and French navies to break past the Turkish guns lining each side of the Dardanelles, immediately prior to the campaign. He captures the historic context of Turkey as the Ottoman Empire is failing. The politics from the British, Australian and Turkish perspective are woven into the story, in relation to each significant point in the book. Thus, Churchill gets a bad rap, and Kitchener’s refusal to order the right type of high explosives, is one cause of his eventual downfall.
Of course, all of the familiar Gallipoli stories are covered. Did the landings take place at the right place? Probably not, if one of the simple maps included in the book is accepted. The “burial truce”, when Turks and Anzac worked together to bury their mountains of dead is another example of a familiar story. Although these and similar events are basically familiar, Fitzsimons adds considerable detail, often omitted from other accounts.
The oft-told story of the withdrawal of the ANZAC, Indian and British Forces from ANZAC Cove is an intriguing example of the added detail that Fitzsimons has brought to bear from his obviously extensive research, using archives, battlefield reports, and personal diaries and letters from every level of the combatant armies – from Turkish and Anzac privates to Imperial generals, politicians and journalists. The intensively detailed planning by Lieutenant-Colonel Cyril Brudenell White, one of the few officers that gets a good rap throughout the book, is illuminating to read, and the fact that it was so carefully and successfully followed by the evacuating armies is astounding.
There are many personal accounts and human touches from both sides of no-man’s land woven into the overall narrative. And the epilogue traces many of the characters, both ANZAC and Turk, beyond the Gallipoli experience to their respective post-war fates.
This may be an Aussie-centric book, but it adds to the overall understanding of what, why and how the Gallipoli campaign was fought and how the ANZAC legend was created.
Reviewed by Lincoln Gould
Gallipoli
by Peter Fitzsimons
Published by Random House
ISBN 9781741666595
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