He provides an astute, unflinching assessment of the leaders as well. Hart, a historian with the Imperial War Museum and a battlefield tour guide at Gallipoli, 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.

Drawing on unpublished eyewitness accounts by individuals from all ranks-not only from Britain, Australia and New Zealand, but from Turkey and France as well-Peter Hart weaves first-hand stories into a vivid narrative of the battle and its aftermath. Gallipoli forced the young Winston Churchill from office, established Turkey's iconic founder Mustafa Kemal (better known as 'Ataturk'), and marked Australia's emergence as a nation in its own right. This then is the story of how the Gallipoli garrison escaped to fight another day.One of the most famous battles in history, the WWI Gallipoli campaign began as a bold move by the British to capture Constantinople, but this definitive new history explains that from the initial landings-which ended with so much blood in the sea it could be seen from airplanes overhead-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.

A spell of bad weather in the final days might have destroyed the flimsy piers, leaving thousands trapped helpless should the Turkish guns open up and their infantry swarm over No Man’s Land. But the evacuation plans were brilliant, especially the early introduction of ‘silent periods’ to confuse the Turks. With every day that passed the Turks moved up more guns, threatening to blast to pieces the flimsy piers, breakwaters and blockships that acted as makeshift harbours to feed and supply tens of thousands of men. Who would take the responsibility for the hard decisions to be taken? The soldiers? Or the vacillating politicians busy ‘passing the buck’ back home in London?

The invaders found themselves caught in a nightmare scenario: they could not advance, but how was it possible to retreat from trenches overlooked by the Turks? Now in December 1915, some 135,000 men, nearly 400 guns and 15,000 horses were collectively trapped in the bridgeheads at Anzac, Suvla and Helles. The expedition to wrest the Narrows from the Turks had failed, and Constantinople remained an impossible dream. The evacuation of Gallipoli was a life or death gamble.

Gallipoli by Peter Hart