Word: gallipoli
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...bombarded the launches loading on Namsos' concatenated waterfront. They dumped rack after rack of bombs at transports and warships steaming away from shore. How many boatloads sank in the inferno the Nazis poured on them may not be known until the post-war opening of archives. At Gallipoli the British suffered 50,000 casualties out of 120,000 troops landed. The N. W. E. F. affair, a pint-sized Gallipoli, will probably lag far behind that proportion of losses. The rating of those who ordered it, and then countermanded it, will be even lower. The Germans saluted its departure...
Last week fell the 25th anniversary of that grim dawn when 80,000 Allied troops started swarming ashore at the Dardanelles to storm the Turkish positions in the hills of Gallipoli. Stupid staff work and indecision spoiled that venture and cost some 9,000 casualties, but the man mostly blamed was Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, then as now First Lord of the Admiralty. Turkish and Allied troops, now fraternizing in the Near East, observed the occasion last week by exchanging salutations, especially Major General Bernard Cyril Freyberg, chief of the Anzac Command,* and Marshal Fervi Cakmak, Chief of the Turkish...
...London, this Gallipoli Day was another bad one for Winston Churchill and his war colleagues in the Chamberlain Government. For out of Scandinavia crackled a story which, on a smaller but similarly bloody scale, charged another blunder like that of the Gallipoli beachheads. It was a story written at white heat by white-haired War Correspondent Leland Stowe of the Chicago Daily News, after he visited the Northwestern Expeditionary Force near its beachhead at Namsos, Norway (see p. 22). Mr. Stowe wrote, in indignation, of two advance battalions of raw British troops, without artillery, antiaircraft, supporting planes or even white...
...sponsor of the Allied expedition at Gallipoli 25 years ago-turned into a blood bath by poor planning-Mr. Churchill this time took no chances on lack of preparation, manpower, support. Germany's initial invading forces outside the Oslo area could not be more than 15,000 men, scattered from Narvik to Stavanger, of which perhaps one-third were based on Trondheim. Observers in London estimated the Allied Expeditionary Force's first wave as at least three divisions (30-45,000), exclusive of naval and marine personnel. All these were reported landed in the Trondheim area...
...responsible? Easy it is for Monday morning quarterbacks to throw in their happy afterthoughts, their "should-have done's." Perhaps the Allis "should have" decided earlier to bolster the Finn forces, but the gamble was a dangerous one. Gallipoli taught Mr. Churchill the costs of a troop-landing on unknown coasts. Britain could ill violate Scandinavian neutrality while posing as the enemy of international banditry. And an Allied expedition of at best 80,000 slodiers would hardly have withstood a Russo-German onslaught. As for Sweden, her unwillingness to serve as Lebensraum for frustrated World War II is certainly understandable...