Although on this occasion Kitchener resisted Churchill’s call for troops, gradually momentum for their employment at Gallipoli increased. Therefore when the naval attack finally collapsed in ignominious defeat on  March 18, there was virtually no discussion. Kitchener decreed that there would be a combined operation and such was the consensus that the War Council was not summoned to discuss its merits.

The combined operation was in fact no more sensible than the naval attack and a lot more dangerous. Britain could only raise about 75,000 troops to land in the first phase of an attack on Gallipoli. Yet the Turks had no less than 500,000.

It is true that Turkey was hardly a first-rate power. But the Turkish army was equipped with those two great killers of infantry—machine guns and artillery which were the determinants of victory in all the battles of the First World War. And on the Gallipoli peninsula the Turks would have the advantage of occupying all the high ground.

In short what was likely to happen was that the smaller Allied force would fight the Turkish Army in relays because it would be much faster for the Turks to rotate their forces in and out of the battle area than could a force with bases far from the theater of war.

Moreover, in one respect the combined operation was a much worse scenario for the Allies than the naval attack. After a naval defeat (as everyone said at the time) the ships could always sail away. Once there were "boots on the ground" it would be more difficult to withdraw if things went awry. There would be calls for additional forces for that one final push that would decide the campaign and cries of lost prestige if the operation was not seen through to a successful conclusion.

And one final fact must be noted. Both plans were based on the assumption that the defeat of Turkey would somehow have a cosmic influence on the war as a whole. This was far from the case. The defeat of Turkey would have meant the defeat of Turkey. The great engine of the war was the German army and its position in France and Flanders would be hardly imperiled by what happened far away in southeastern Europe.

Until the German army in the west was beaten the war would continue. In the First World War there was no way around. Strategists would have been better employed in devoting their attention to the tactics that would allow victory to be achieved on the only front that mattered—the Western Front.

This is an edited version of an ASPI Strategic Insight, ‘The Strategy behind Gallipoli: strategic decision-making in the Dardanelles and Gallipoli’, published April 2005 and on ASPI’s website here.