Gallipoli - Softcover

James, Robert Rhodes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0712665374 ISBN 13: 9780712665377

Publisher: Pimlico, 1999

Synopsis

A classic study of one of the most disastrous campaigns in British military history which has never ceased to enthral the imagination. On 15 April 1915, British and Dominion troops landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula. The campaign which followed lasted over eight months, and cost the terrible total of nearly half a million Allied and Turkish casualties. The eventual failure of the Gallipoli campaign, after heart-breaking opportunities had been missed, was a disastrous set-back to Allied hopes. It remains one of the most engrossing and poignant tragedies in British military history. In this acclaimed study Robert Rhodes James sheds an entirely new light on the campaign and discounts many of the legends which still surround Gallipoli. Making brilliant use of the diaries and letters of the men who fought there and the photographs they took, he brings vividly to life the conditions and cicumstances of a campaign which has never ceased to enthral the imagination.

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Review

As we approach the end of a century marred by too many tragically ill-conceived battlefield operations (and it seems there may still be time for one or two more before we move into the next millennium), Gallipoli still stands out as one of the most evocative in British history. As Robert Rhodes James writes "it is not difficult to see why Gallipoli exerts such a powerful grip on the interest and imagination of the British people. The setting, the challenge, the response to that challenge are alike enthralling." No campaign has aroused fiercer controversy, both in its planning and execution, and, over the years, in the accounts of historians and those who played an active part in the events. Since its first publication in 1965, Robert Rhodes James's detailed and balanced study has come to be recognised as one of the definitive accounts of the eight-month campaign to overrun the Gallipoli peninsula. Early chapters reveal the fascinating manoeuvrings within the War Council that led to the ill- fated plan, setting the scene for an extensively researched and thoroughly balanced account of the actual operation. Diaries and letters of men who fought in the action are brilliantly used to bring home the realities, as much as that is genuinely possible, of being involved in such a hard and bloody campaign, while the book is well supplied with genuine photographs from the time and has no lack of explanatory maps which are particularly vital to any proper understanding of Gallipoli's significance. This Pimlico paperback edition brings a welcome new lease of life to a history classic. --Alisdair Bowles

Book Description

A classic study of one of the most disastrous campaigns in British military history which has never ceased to enthral the imagination.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pimlico
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0712665374
• ISBN 13: 9780712665377
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384