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 Drawing on unpublished eyewitness accounts by individuals from all ranks-not only from Britain, Australia and New Zealand, but from Turkey and France as well-Peter Hart weaves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. 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.
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