EUCOM Battle Knowledge Centers

In The Fall of the Ottomans, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan brings the First World War and its immediate aftermath in the Middle East to vivid life, uncovering the often ignored story of the region's crucial role in the conflict. Bolstered by German money, arms, and military advisors, the Ottomans took on the Russian, British, and French forces, and tried to provoke Jihad against the Allies in their Muslim colonies. Unlike the static killing fields of the Western Front, the war in the Middle East was fast-moving and unpredictable, with the Turks inflicting decisive defeats on the Entente in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and Gaza before the tide of battle turned in the Allies' favor.

The book combines fresh perspectives from the world's leading authorities, including Turkish and German historians, together with soldiers' letters and diary accounts.

Raging for over four years across the tortured landscapes of Europe, Africa and the Middle East, the First World War changed the face of warfare forever. Characterised by slow, costly advances and fierce attrition, the great battles of the Somme, Verdun and Ypres incurred human loss on a scale never previously imagined. This book, with a foreword by Professor Hew Strachan, covers the fighting on all fronts, from Flanders to Tannenberg and from Italy to Palestine. A series of moving extracts from personal letters, diaries and journals bring to life the experiences of soldiers and civilians caught up in the war.

The Allied campaign against Gallipoli began in 1915 when the Turks went into World War I on Germany's side. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty in the British War Cabinet, conceived the plan of smashing through the Dardanelles with a fleet of old battleships and reopening the straits to Russian shipping. For years the Turks had been beaten in every battle they fought, and the project stood a reasonable chance of success. But what happened in the next nine months was a nightmare of lost opportunities, confused planning, and military incompetence. Here is an epic of gallantry and folly -- the whole story of the most controversial campaign of modern times.

The 1915 Gallipoli campaign of WWI began as a bold move by the British to capture Constantinople -- but as this definitive history shows, from the initial landings to the desperate attacks of early summer and the battle of attrition that followed, it was a tragic folly destined to fail from the start. Peter Hart provides a vivid, boots-on-the-ground account that brilliantly evokes the confusion of war, the horrors of combat, and the grim courage of the soldiers, as well as an unflinching assessment of those in charge. Gallipoli forced the young Winston Churchill from office, established Turkey's iconic founder Ataturk, and marked Australia's emergence as a nation in its own right. Capturing the sheer drama and bravery of the ferocious fighting, the chivalry demonstrated by individuals on both sides amid merciless slaughter, and the futility of the cause for which ordinary men fought with extraordinary courage and endurance, Gallipoli is a riveting account of a battle that continues to fascinate and horrify us a hundred years after that event.

The Gallipoli expedition of 1915, the brainchild of Winston Churchill, was designed to knock the Turkish Empire out of the First World War and open a supply route to Russia. The campaign is characterised by the military incompetence of the higher commands, particularly the Allies. However, in spite of this, Gallipoli deserves to be, and is, also remembered for the heroism and resourcefulness of both the British army and the men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. This book details the battles, hardships and eventual evacuation that these men had to go through, in this comprehensive guide to the Gallipoli landings of World War I (1914-1918).

Unique among World War I campaigns, the fighting at Gallipoli brought together a modern amphibious assault and multi-national combined operations. This book focuses on operational and campaign-level decisions and actions, which drove the conduct of the campaign.

In February 1915, beginning with a naval attack on Turkey in the Dardanelles, a combined force of British, Australian, New Zealand, Indian, and French troops invaded the Gallipoli Peninsula only to face crushing losses and an ignominious retreat from what seemed a hopeless mission.

While the world slumbered, monumental forces were shaken. In less than a month, a combination of ambition, deceit, fear, jealousy, missed opportunities, and miscalculation sent Austro-Hungarian troops marching into Serbia, German troops streaming toward Paris, and a vast Russian army into war, with England as its ally. As crowds cheered their armies on, no one could guess what lay ahead in the First World War: four long years of slaughter, physical and moral exhaustion, and the near collapse of a civilization that until 1914 had dominated the globe.