Gallipoli: When Britain Had Eyes in the Sky but Couldn’t See the Battlefield
The disaster at Gallipoli in 1915 is usually remembered as a story of soldiers, beaches, trenches and terrible decisions. Australian and New Zealand troops came ashore on the Gallipoli Peninsula and found themselves climbing through steep ravines, razorback ridges and dense scrub while Ottoman forces fought to hold the high ground.
But there is another story buried inside Gallipoli.
Britain had airplanes.
More remarkably, Britain had what amounted to an early aircraft carrier operating in the Dardanelles.
And before the troops ever landed, British aircraft were flying over the battlefield.
So how did thousands of soldiers still go ashore with maps that gave them a dangerously inadequate picture of the terrain?
The answer is a fascinating example of the difference between possessing a new technology and actually knowing how to use the information it produces.
Churchill’s Aircraft Were Already There
Winston Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty when Britain attempted to force its way through the Dardanelles and threaten Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
The Royal Navy had already begun experimenting with aviation at sea. HMS Ark Royal was not an aircraft carrier in the modern sense. There was no enormous flight deck with aircraft launching and landing one after another. It was essentially an aviation-support ship capable of carrying and operating seaplanes.
But the capability was real.
Aircraft from Ark Royal were conducting reconnaissance and helping observe naval gunfire during operations against the Dardanelles.
Then something particularly interesting happened.
When General Sir Ian Hamilton’s staff wanted modern aircraft, pilots and observers for the coming land campaign, Lord Kitchener initially refused the request.
Churchill, however, had independently arranged for Commander Charles Samson’s No. 3 Squadron of the Royal Naval Air Service to go to the Dardanelles.
The advance party arrived on 24 March 1915.
Four days later, on 28 March, British aircraft began reconnaissance flights over the Gallipoli Peninsula.
Those flights continued, weather permitting, right up until the Allied landings on 25 April.
So Britain did not attack Gallipoli completely blind.
It had eyes in the sky.
The Map Underneath Those Eyes Was More Than Half a Century Old
Here is where the story becomes extraordinary.
When Hamilton’s headquarters arrived in Egypt to prepare for the invasion, the principal map available to them was a British map produced in 1908.
That sounds reasonably recent.
Except that the 1908 map itself was based upon a French survey conducted in 1854, during the Crimean War.
The British enlarged this map and issued a 1:40,000 version to officers preparing to invade Gallipoli.
They were therefore preparing a modern amphibious assault, supported by battleships and airplanes, on top of geographical information whose foundations were roughly sixty years old.
Aerial reconnaissance was used to correct the maps and add information about Ottoman defenses.
But there was a fundamental problem.
An airplane flying over a battlefield does not automatically produce a useful military map.
And in 1915, militaries were only beginning to learn how to turn aerial observation into systematic battlefield intelligence.
Aerial Photography Was Almost an Experiment
The equipment sounds astonishingly primitive by modern standards.
The aircraft were underpowered. Some seaplanes required favorable sea conditions merely to get airborne. Wireless communication was primitive. There were too few trained observers.
And the cameras were hardly sophisticated reconnaissance systems.
Flight Lieutenant C. H. Butler became one of the pioneers of aerial photography at Gallipoli. Beginning in April, he photographed the peninsula using equipment that included a small folding camera. He later obtained a better camera from a French squadron.
Early cameras used glass plates. Photographers sometimes literally held the camera over the side of the airplane.
Yet Butler reportedly exposed around 700 photographic plates, assembling photographs into mosaics that could be used to improve maps.
That was remarkable technological improvisation.
But there wasn’t even a regular photographic section at Gallipoli until the end of August—four months after the original landings.
The British possessed aerial photography before they possessed the mature organization, equipment and doctrine necessary to exploit it efficiently.
Then the Soldiers Met the Real Gallipoli
On 25 April 1915, the first ANZAC boats came ashore bunched together, about a mile north of the designated beaches according to the Australian War Memorial’s account.
The soldiers immediately encountered something their maps had failed to communicate adequately:
the three-dimensional reality of Gallipoli.
Steep ridges.
Deep gullies.
Thick scrub.
Narrow razorbacks.
Confusing folds in the terrain.
Men looking at their maps believed some locations could be reached relatively easily. Once on the ground, they discovered otherwise.
One Australian War Memorial example is particularly revealing. The map appeared to show Plugge’s Plateau and Russell’s Top conveniently connected. Soldiers discovered that the connection was an extremely narrow and difficult razorback. They instead had to descend through scrub into Shrapnel Valley and climb again.
A journey that looked short on the map took more than an hour.
The maps even contained inaccurate hill elevations and a compass-bearing error that affected artillery calculations.
And despite discovering these deficiencies almost immediately, the 1:40,000 maps continued being used for months while better maps were produced.
Technology Was Ahead of the System
That may be the most interesting lesson of Gallipoli.
It would be easy to say that the British failed because they didn’t conduct reconnaissance.
But that isn’t quite true.
They did conduct reconnaissance.
They had ships carrying aircraft.
They had pilots flying over enemy territory.
They had aerial observers.
They had cameras.
They had hundreds of photographs.
They were correcting maps from the air.
What they did not yet possess was a mature system capable of rapidly converting all of those individual technological capabilities into an accurate, shared understanding of the battlefield for the soldiers who actually needed it.
Gallipoli occurred at an extraordinary moment in military history.
The Royal Navy belonged partly to the nineteenth century and partly to the twentieth. Battleships represented the pinnacle of traditional naval power while fragile aircraft were beginning to demonstrate that warfare could now be observed from above.
The technology had arrived before the doctrine surrounding it had fully developed.
And Gallipoli became one of the places where armies learned, at enormous human cost, why that distinction mattered.
The Churchill Paradox
That also makes Churchill’s role more complicated than the popular version of the story.
Churchill was one of the strongest political advocates of the Dardanelles operation, and the campaign became a political disaster for him.
But when it comes specifically to aviation, Churchill was not the man preventing aerial reconnaissance.
Quite the opposite.
When Kitchener initially declined to provide the aircraft Hamilton’s staff requested, Churchill had already arranged for Royal Naval Air Service aircraft to be sent.
The paradox is striking.
One of the architects of Gallipoli was also helping introduce one of the technologies that would eventually make operations like Gallipoli far easier to reconnoiter.
The problem was that Britain had not yet learned how to connect all the pieces.
Aircraft could fly over the battlefield.
Cameras could photograph it.
Observers could report what they saw.
But information still had to become intelligence, intelligence had to become accurate maps, maps had to reach commanders and soldiers, and commanders had to understand what those maps meant for operations on the ground.
Gallipoli demonstrated the enormous distance between seeing something and understanding it.
Australia ultimately suffered more than 26,000 casualties during the campaign, with the accepted official estimate putting Australian deaths at 8,709.
The airplanes over Gallipoli did not prevent that catastrophe.
But they were pointing toward the future.
Within a generation, aerial reconnaissance, specialized cameras, photogrammetry, dedicated intelligence organizations and increasingly sophisticated aircraft would transform military mapping.
By the Second World War, commanders planning amphibious invasions would study enormous quantities of aerial photography before troops approached a beach.
At Gallipoli in 1915, humanity possessed something revolutionary:
For the first time, an invading force could look down upon a battlefield from the sky before sending an army into it.
The British had acquired the eyes.
They were still learning how to see.
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