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Gallipoli is well known as one of the great disasters of the Great War. Now for the first time we can see just how bad it really was and why it all went wrong

About the Author

Richard van Emden has interviewed more than 270 veterans of the Great War and has written sixteen books on the subject, including The Trench and The Last Fighting Tommy, both of which were top ten bestsellers. He has also worked on more than a dozen television programmes on the First World War, including Prisoners of the Kaiser, Veterans, Britain’s Last Tommies, the award-winning Roses of No Man’s Land, Britain’s Boy Soldiers, A Poem for Harry, War Horse: The Real Story, Teenage Tommies with Fergal Keane, and most recently, Tommy’s War. He lives in London. Stephen Chambers has written three battlefield guides, Gully Ravine, Anzac The Landing and most recently Suvla: August Offensive. He is a military historian and a well-known tour guide to the battlefields. His books are currently being translated into Turkish to cater for the growing Turkish market.

Reviews

Combining previously unpublished photos and first-hand accounts, this is a haunting, humane look at a catastrophic World War I operation – the Gallipoli, or Dardanelles, Campaign – 100 years ago
*BBC History*

Handsome … Reproducing verbatim the testimony of combatants, from commanders down to a 15-year-old midshipman, alongside astonishing snapshots taken at the time. It is fascinating to have Turkish voices alongside British, Australian and New Zealand ones … These individual voices nevertheless provide an immediate and invaluable record of what it was like to participate in what the authors rightly call “the Dardanelles disaster”
*Spectator*

Of all the campaigns of the First World War, Gallipoli best justifies the poets’ view of the conflict as futile and pitiless. Only a few miles were gained at the cost of 250,000 Allied soldiers. This oral history, illustrated by the soldiers’ own photographs, argues that the humiliating evacuation was inevitable ****
*Sunday Telegraph*

[It is] wonderful good luck that so many soldiers wrote diaries, memoirs and letters. Equally valuable is that so many soldiers disobeyed orders and took cameras. Military authorities banned the possession of personal cameras. But many soldiers, particularly officers, disregarded the rules and the photographic archive from Gallipoli captures the horrors
*Irish Times*

[This is] a book breaking new ground concerning Gallipoli ... [and] one which surely stands alongside the other classic accounts on that distant peninsula far from the main theatre of the war.
*Bulletin of the Military Historical Association*