Despite suffering heavy casualties, they managed to establish two beachheads: at Helles on the peninsula’s southern tip, and at Gaba Tepe on the Aegean coast. On April 25, 1915, the Allies launched their invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula. The war pitted the Central Powers mainly Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey against the Alliesmainly France, Great Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan, and, from 1917, the United States. Meanwhile, the Turks boosted their defenses under the command of the German general Liman von Sanders, who began positioning Ottoman troops along the shore where he expected the landings would take place. World War I, also called First World War or Great War, an international conflict that in 191418 embroiled most of the nations of Europe along with Russia, the United States, the Middle East, and other regions. British War Secretary Lord Kitchener appointed General Ian Hamilton as commander of British forces for the operation under his command, troops from Australia, New Zealand and the French colonies assembled with British forces on the Greek island of Lemnos. In the wake of the failed naval attack, preparations began for largescale troop landings on the Gallipoli Peninsula. If successful, capture of the straits would allow the Allies to link up with the Russians in the Black Sea, where they could work together to knock Turkey out of the war.
(The Ottoman Empire had entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, by November 1914.) In response, the Allies decided to launch a naval expedition to seize the Dardanelles Straits, a narrow passage connecting the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara in northwestern Turkey. Early that year, Russia’s Grand Duke Nicholas appealed to Britain for aid in confronting a Turkish invasion in the Caucasus. With World War I stalled on the Western Front by 1915, the Allied Powers were debating going on the offensive in another region of the conflict, rather than continuing with attacks in Belgium and France. Evacuation began in December 1915, and was completed early the following January.
By mid-October, Allied forces had suffered heavy casualties and had made little headway from their initial landing sites. Lack of sufficient intelligence and knowledge of the terrain, along with a fierce Turkish resistance, hampered the success of the invasion. The campaign began with a failed naval attack by British and French ships on the Dardanelles Straits in February-March 1915 and continued with a major land invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula on April 25, involving British and French troops as well as divisions of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC). The Gallipoli Campaign of 1915-16, also known as the Battle of Gallipoli or the Dardanelles Campaign, was an unsuccessful attempt by the Allied Powers to control the sea route from Europe to Russia during World War I.
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