Gallipoli

After Istanbul we toured Gallipoli, the World War I battlefield located on the Dardenelles/Hellespont Strait near Troy. The conflict pitted the Allied forces against the Ottoman Turks, but most of the allies were ANZACs (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps).
We brushed up on our history by watching at the hotel Peter Weir's (early 80s?) drama Gallipoli featurıing a young Mel Gibson (not a bad film except for the horrendous synthesizer soundtrack), and a dry documentary with interviews with Australian war vets.

Apparently it's unusual to have any foreigners who aren't from Australia or N.Z. tour the battlefields. We had an excellent tour guıde: a retired Turkish naval captain, university lecturer and military historian whose grandfather had been killed in Gallipoli. Although the battles caused an absurd number of casualties and highlighted the stupidity and carnage of WWI-style trench warfare, our guide said that both sides won some victory: for the Anzacs, their victory was the 'Anzac Spirit,' which led to Australia and N.Z. feeling less like British colonies and more like independent nations; and for the Turks their victory was Ataturk.

Ataturk (Mustafa Kemal) was a commander at Gallipoli who correctly guessed where the Anzacs would attack, and disobeyed the orders of his German superior to be in the right place at the right time. In one battle, a piece of shrapnel hit his pocketwatch which would have otherwise pierced his heart.

One example of the type of fighting and casualties is the battle of Lone Pine, where 2,200 Anzacs and 4,000 Turks died for a piece of ground (as our guide repeated incessantly) 'not bigger than 2 tennis courts.' But our guide also said that it was a 'gentleman's war,' that both sides came to respect each other, with some firing into the air instead of at the enemy, and both sides lobbing gifts instead of grenades into the enemy trenches. Despite estimates that as many as half of the 120,000 allied troops would be killed when they finally decided to evacuate, not a single allied troop was killed during the evacuatıon, which our guide said was the Turks keeping their tradition of not firing on a retreating enemy.