Gallipoli TV Series 2015

Brendan Behan wrote a hilarious short story/magazine article about going to see Tell England (renamed Gallipoli for a Dublin audience) in the cinema as a child.

It was the talk of the town, even among Behan's IRA family and everybody went to see it. When Behan went, the climax of the soldiers storming the beaches was accompanied by howls of people all claiming to recognise their brthers, fathers, uncles, cousins etc because after all didn't everybody know the Irish served and died there in great numbers?

And RTE and The Irish Times have been telling everyone for the last few weeks that Ireland "forgot" about Gallipoli.

donaghs wrote: »

Compared to Australia and New Zealand, Ireland has "forgotten" about it. The Dublin Behan grew up in would have still have had WWI veterans alive, and people who knew first hand victims of Gallipoli. Which is different from today. Looking at some of the AUS/NZ coverage, you would think Gallipoli was a mostly ANZAC affair. No mention of the French either, not to mind the British (including Irish) troops who made up the majority of the Allies.

This gives rise to another question as to why Gallipoli has become such an obsession, almost a sacred cow, in Australia and New Zealand. This is playing out in the new recently in Australia as some people have dared to question what is being celebrated. A lot more ANZACS fought and died on the Western Front, and had far greater successes too. You could say it was the first big military test of both countries (excluding the smaller participation in the Boer War).

I haven't seen the mini-series, but have to admit unlike many others I wasn't impressed by the 1981 Gallipoli film. Online reviews seem a bit mixed.

I would hope we wouldn't attempt to "remember" Gallipoli like the Australians and New Zealanders do. Their's is not commemoration of history; it's the establishment and maintenance of a myth.

Which is not to say that ANZACs didn't fight and die there in their thousands; they did. But what has been constructed in the interim is a story of the forging of a national identity, a definition of national characteristics based on indomitable courage and good humour in the face of adversity and the sneaking suspicion that if it weren't for the incompetent and callous leadership (who were of course neither Australian nor New Zealander) they might have won anyway.

All that is as much a process of the imagination as it is a proper dispassionate rational analysis of what happened there.

More Irishmen died in Gallipoli than New Zealanders; that is a statement that is almost certainly true, no matter how narrowly you define "Irishman". Even if you count the admittedly quite small number of Irish-born men serving in New Zealand regiments of the ANZACs as Kiwis and not Irish, there are still likely to be many more truly Irish (born and bred) fatalities in that campaign.

What do we want to "remember" about Gallipoli?

That our compatriots served bravely? OK
That they were incompetently led? That's fairly irrefutable
That they were part of a noble cause? Hmm. That's a hard one to argue, especially if you "remember" the overall context in which that campaign was fought.

It was all part of a grand scheme by Britain and France to dismember the Ottoman Empire and share the spoils out between themselves. But that is hardly mentioned in today's press.

Admittedly, David Davin-Power in his article in the Irish Times, in advance of the showing of his documentary on RTE about the campaign, did allude to that analysis but he qualified it with the comment that only "Some people in Turkey" believe it. Which of course is intended to give it the same credibility as the Turkish view of the Armenian Genocide. ie not to be taken seriously.

But I think "some people in Turkey" are right about that. Or at least more right than the dishonest scene setting we have been reading about lately.

Hmm. What brought Turkey into the war?
Why did Britain go to war with the Ottomans for the first time since the crusades?
What made her turn her back on a country that had been a staunch ally for much of the 19th century? (Crimean War. Balkan Crisis of 1880s etc)
Why did Britain commit so much effort to defeating the Ottomans if it was just an attempt to "deprive Germany of an ally"?
If the Ottoman War was such a minor part of the overall conflict why did Britain and her subordinates attack it from four sides? (Gallipoli, Gaza, Mesopotamia, Aqaba)

Look at what the victorious Western Powers did to the Arab parts of the Ottoman Empire. Look at the mess they made. It's STILL not cleared up.

However gracious Ataturk's words on that famous inscription may be ("Your sons who died here are now our sons as well") it's not enough to draw a line under that terrible misadventure. The world is still living with the consequences.