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Andrew Timpner
Virginia Military Institute
Subject Listing - History
Advisor: Brigadier General Charles F. Brower IV
Saturday, Oral Session 7, Presentation 4, New Hall 013
OUR FATHERS LIED: THE GRAND STRATEGIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DARDANELLES CAMPAIGN
In 1915, faced with a stalemate on the Western Front, the British Empire sought an alternative to what Churchill called "chewing barbed wire in Flanders" in order to defeat the Central Powers. The Cabinet government of Prime Minister Asquith thought they had found such an alternative in the Dardanelles, a narrow strip of water separating the European from the Asian territory of the Ottoman Empire. In researching this paper, I used primarily print media, relying on both primary and secondary sources found in the VMI Library and online resources such as JSTOR. The concept behind the Dardanelles Campaign was simple: Great Britain would attack the Central Powers in a place they did not expect, that she could easily take, and would force them to significantly alter how they prosecuted the war on the Western Front. This would create the possibility of a breakout from trench warfare which could win the war for the western allies. Though well conceived, the campaign proved a failure of monstrous proportions. While the Dardanelles Campaign offered many strategic advantages to Great Britain and the entire allied war effort, it was ultimately doomed due to poor execution, missed opportunity, and naivet‚. This failure was to have profound repercussions on allied, and particularly British grand strategy for the remainder of the war. The British venture in the Aegean, though a failure at the time, had impact beyond the First World War, since it was studied in detail by the US Marine Corps during the 1920s and `30s in preparation for an amphibious war in the Pacific where its lessons were applied to victorious conclusion in 1945.
Advisor: Brigadier General Charles F. Brower IV, Ph.D., Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty, History, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, VA