Between April 1915 and January 1916, British, French, Australian, New Zealand, Indian, and Newfoundland forces battled the Ottoman Army in a campaign for the control of the Gallipoli peninsula. Located at the entrance to the Straits of the Dardanelles, the waterway that connects the Aegean to the Sea of Marmara and from there to the Black Sea, the peninsula’s age-old strategic significance possessed a particular importance in the geopolitical context of the First World War.

Determined to circumvent the strategic stalemate that had settled on the war’s principal front in France and Flanders after the failure of the belligerents’ initial war plans in 1914, senior political and military leaders of the Entente Powers (Britain, France, and Imperial Russia) sanctioned a major amphibious campaign whose principal focal ...