THE ONLY GOOD IDEA OF THE ENTIRE WAR:

The great and worthy goal of the campaign has been obscured by its retelling in a myth of courage and futility that is only half true. Gallipoli was all about Russia. [...]

The tsar pleaded with London and Paris for grain and guns. Others in the war cabinet saw Russia as a distraction from the German armies in nearby France but Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, recognised the gravity of the tsar's position. He knew that if Russia fell, the entire German war machine would be hurled at the West and an ally would be cast into the abyss.

Russia offered no easy supply lines. The North Sea was too close to Germany and too often frozen and the Far East too distant.

Churchill forcefully argued for the least worst option: bust through the Dardanelles - the narrow sea passage from the Mediterranean leading towards the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, and the Black Sea.

Churchill's proposal bitterly divided the war cabinet and the military - Gallipoli has been political from the start. After seven weeks of rancorous debate he prevailed over his detractors but planning and execution of the campaign suffered.

Three naval-only attempts failed to secure the Dardanelles so troops (principally Aussies and Kiwis at first) landed on Ottoman soil on April 25, 1915. This attack on the heart of a great empire produced intense resistance from the "sick man of Europe". The very same day a far more bloody episode of history began: the systematic slaughter of the Armenian Christian minority in Ottoman lands, spawning the word ''genocide''.

Churchill would later write: ''The clearance of the Christians from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act, on a scale so great, could well be.''

The first land attack stalled and reports quickly reached London and Sydney of unprecedented carnage. Gallipoli would fall to become the seventh bloodiest campaign of the war but at the time it had no peer in casualties. Outraged critics, the public, the press and his own prime minister turned on Churchill and within a month of the first troops hitting the beaches he was sacked from the war cabinet.

Churchill was relentless, publicly calling for 95,000 more troops to be sent to Gallipoli but securing only 25,000. Fresh boots made few gains and opposition to the campaign intensified. In October 1915 the British commander, General Ian Hamilton, was instructed to consider withdrawal but refused and was dismissed.

Hamilton's replacement, General Charles Monro, arrived at Gallipoli and was sufficiently appalled to order immediate evacuation. Churchill said of Monro: ''He came, he saw, he capitulated.''

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