WW1: Battle of Gallipoli?

Question

why was the battle of gallipoli AT gallipoli? (meanin why was that area strategic, for both the British and the Turks?)
I think it's strategic for the Turks because they were on higher grounds than the British, but for the British it provided a sea passageway which provided easy transportation of soldiers and weaponry...is this correct?
please helpp
thnx

Answer 1

The landings at Gallipoli were an Allied attempt to clear a supply path thru the Dardanelles to help supply Russia on the Eastern Front and would also put pressure on Turkey by threatening Constantinople.
The Russians were fighting a multi-front war against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey.

Answer 2

Britain and Russia were allies. However the Battle of Gallipoli was between forces of the British Empire and the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which was allied to the Central Powers. Assisting Russia would also have helped relieve some of the pressure on the Western Front, where Britain and France were bogged down in trench warfare that was costing them thousands of soldiers' lives. The Gallipoli strategy was at least partly authored by Winston S. Churchill, at that time a member of the Admiralty. Churchill always believed in a strategy in which the Central Powers (Germany, Austria Hungary and some lesser allies) could be defeated by an invasion from the south. Also, Gallipoli, a peninsula along the Dardanelles, was a choke point that prevented access between the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea, which has numerous Russian ports.

Answer 3

The British and Empire troops were attempting to gain control of the Dardanelles which is the channel that connects the Black Sea and Mediterranean so that they could release the part of the Russian Navy which was blocked in the Black Sea by the Turks. The Russians were allies in WW1.
It would have enabled supplies to flow between southern Russia and the Middle East and would probably have removed Turkey from the war,.
They underestimated the difficulties of moving and supplying a large seaborne invasion and the British did not get far off the coast also the Turks were better fighters than they expected.
In the end they had to withdraw after suffering huge casualties

Answer 4

By the spring of 1915, combat on the Western Front had sunk into stalemate. Enemy troops stared at each other from a line of opposing trenches that stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss border. Neither opponent could outflank its enemy resulting in costly and unproductive direct attacks on well-fortified defenses. The war of movement that both sides had predicted at the beginning of the conflict had devolved into deadly stagnation.

Allied leaders, including Winston Churchill and Lord Kitchener, scoured their maps to find a way around the impasse. The Dardenelles Strait leading from the Mediterranean to Istanbul caught their eye. A successful attack in this area could open a sea lane to the Russians through the Black Sea, provide a base for attacking the Central Powers through what Churchill described as the "soft underbelly of Europe", and divert enemy attention from the Western Front.

The Campaign was a fiasco, poorly planned and badly executed. It began in February 1915 with an unsuccessful naval attempt to force a passage up the Dardenelles. The flotilla retreated after sustaining heavy damage from Turkish guns lining both shores and from mines strewn across the channel.

In April, a landing on the Gallipoli Penninsula attempted to secure the shores and silence the Turkish guns. Trouble brewed from the beginning. Amphibious operations were a new and unperfected form of warfare leading to poor communications, troop deployment and supply. The Turks entrenched themselves on the high ground pouring artillery and machine gun fire down upon the hapless Australian, New Zealand, Irish, French and British troops below. The battleground soon resembled that of the Western Front - both sides peering at each other from fortified trenches, forced to spill their precious blood in futile frontal attacks on well defended positions. The stalemate continued through the fall of 1915 until British forces withdrew at the end of the year.

Casualties were high - approximately 252,000 or 52% for the British/French while the Ottoman Turks suffered about 300,000 casualties or a rate of 60%. The failed campaign gained little and badly tarnished both Churchill's and Kitchener's reputations