Gallipoli Submarine (ATOM Study Guide)

Gallipoli Submarine (Steve Westh, 2008) is a 52-minute documentary film about the incredible but true story of an Australian World War One submarine, the AE2, and its role in the Gallipoli landing.

Lost in the Dardanelles for nearly 100 years, the story of the AE2 is told with dramatic re-enactment accompanied by modern day footage of a hazardous archaeological expedition to determine if the submarine can be saved from slow destruction.

The AE2's mission in the Dardanelles is the stuff of submarine legend, but after the tragic failure of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, and the horrors of the Western Front, her story has been largely forgotten.

Her captain, 31-year-old Lt Commander Henry Stoker, and the thirty-one crew were attempting to break through the heavily defended Dardanelles Strait, a strategic waterway linking the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Stoker's orders were to disrupt Turkish supply lines and 'generally run amok'.

But after a damaging confrontation with a Turkish gunboat, Stoker opened her tanks and scuttled her. The crew spent the remainder of the war as prisoners-of-war.

AE2 lay undisturbed on the sea bed until her disvcovery in 1998 by Selçuk Kolay, a Turkish marine archaeologist. The submarine's deterioration is considerable, but as she is buried in fine, deep silt to her waterline, her main pressure hull may be preserved.

The Submarine Institute of Australia mounted an archaeological expedition in 2007 to see if the AE2 could be saved. Their assessment, told in Gallipoli Submarine, uses intimate documentary footage, dramatic re-enactment, archival footage, underwater photography and state-of-the-art computer-generated imagery both to re-tell the story of the AE2, and to provide evidence of her likely fate.

At the end of this study guide students will be able to make an informed decision about what they think should be done with the AE2 – and then see what decision has actually been made.

Additional keyword: Selcuk