Mavi Boncuk |Gallipoli, the Turkish Defence The Story from the Turkish documents by Harvey Broadbent
PUBLISHED 2 February 2015 | ISBN 9780522866643 | PAGES 528
SIZE 240mm x 183mm
Harvey Broadbent is a leading authority on Turkey and its history. He is the author of Gallipoli, the Fatal Shore (2005), The Boys Who Came Home, Recollections of Gallipoli (1990/2000) and Voices of the First World War (2014). In a 23-year career at the ABC, he produced four documentaries on Gallipoli for ABC Television and several radio features. Since 2005 he has been using his expertise as a Senior Research Fellow and Associate Professor at Macquarie University, where he directed the Gallipoli Centenary Research Project, a partnership between the university, the Australian War Memorial and the Australian Research Council.
A line of Turkish soldiers preparing to defend their homeland at Gallipoli.CREDIT:AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIALREVIEW | Defending Gallipoli: the Turkish Story by HARVEY BROADBENT
Melbourne University Press, $27.95
Over the past 30-odd years Australians have come to accept – indeed to embrace – a Turkish view of Gallipoli. Australians' credulous acceptance of the misleading Atatürk quotation – the one supposedly but not actually addressed to "Anzac mothers" in 1934 – indicates how completely their former enemies have won them over.
Australian popular sympathy, if not sycophancy, was symbolised for me at the recent ANU-AWM Gallipoli conference when thanks expressed to Turkey for allowing Australians to mark the Gallipoli centenary on the site of the 1915 campaign was greeted with applause. In fact under the post-war treaties the allies have the right to commemorate their dead in the cemeteries in perpetuity. The mistaken belief accompanies the common misapprehension that Turkey has ever cared for Australia's war dead.
But for all that Turkey has displaced Britain and (surprisingly but actually) New Zealand in its popular understanding of Gallipoli, we still understand relatively little of the other side of no man's land.
During the campaign commanders strove to learn how their enemy thought and acted. Since, historians have attempted to penetrate the fog of war and indeed, of peace: until very recently Turkish records were almost entirely closed to foreign researchers.
Enter Harvey Broadbent, one of the few Australian writers on Gallipoli to possess Turkish, and to have the energy not only to win the trust of secretive Turkish authorities but also to gain Australian research funds. (I'm not sure which task was harder.) As an independent scholar, not an established academic, that Harvey got his project off the ground at all was extraordinary.
(A disclaimer: in 2006, shortly before I left the Australian War Memorial, where I had been its principal historian, I signed up to Broadbent's application for Australian Research Council funding as a "partner investigator", as the ARC's jargon had it. But then I left and, as I fell out with my former employer, had nothing to do with the project.)
Broadbent's task was massive. Turkish military archives are extensive, poorly indexed and in Ankara, and they were written in Ottoman script, a language only specialists now possessed. He and his Turkish colleagues translated them into modern Turkish and then into English. Only then could he begin interpreting documents that might alter our understanding of the Turkish side of the campaign, and by extension perhaps change how we understand allied commanders' decisions and actions. Broadbent's project has produced, simultaneously, a pricey scholarly tome (entitled, confusingly, Gallipoli: The Turkish Defence) and this popular version.
The project is a triumph. It enables us to answer important questions that have obsessed generations of historians who have been hampered by seeing only one side of the picture. What did Ottoman commanders know of the invaders' plans? How were they able to react so swiftly to stymy the invaders, in April and in August? How were they able to sustain their costly but ultimately successful defence? Above all: what did they know of allied plans to evacuate the peninsula, in December 1915 and January 1916?
Broadbent has assembled the Ottoman evidence to narrate the campaign as it looked from Ottoman headquarters. He confirms what we have suspected – that Mustafa Kemal was not the only energetic Turkish commander – Australians have fallen for the Atatürk legend as much as they have swallowed the Monash legend. He shows that Mehmet Şefik deserves credit for helping to hold the Anzac landings. Above all, he confirms that it seems that the elaborate ruses that preceded both the evacuations of Anzac-Suvla and Helles succeeded without the Turks realising that the evacuations they expected were happening.
The sensation of reading about familiar events but narrated from a different point of view is unsettling. Even place-names are different – Quinn's Post is Bombasirt ("bomb ridge") – and the focus for once is on the defenders.
As a pioneering work Defending Gallipoli has inevitable but minor flaws, and it is marked by the nature of the official material on which it is based. Twice-boiled translations often have a gloopy consistency, but rare and vivid individual accounts supplement the stodgy official records.
A century on, Defending Gallipoli (and its scholarly stablemate) will at last enable us to begin to understand Gallipoli in the round. The next stage is for scholars from both sides to begin to compare the two narratives and the documents underpinning them. This has already started, in that my UNSW Canberra colleagues Chris Roberts and Mesut Uyar are comparing the events of April 25 and commenting on each other's versions.
Now, to do the same for Britain and New Zealand … Yes, they were there too.
Peter Stanley is research professor at UNSW Canberra. His next book, Die in Battle, is about Indians at Gallipoli.
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