Gallipoli's Deep Secrets (ATOM Study Guide)

Gallipoli's Deep Secrets (Julia Redwood, 2010) is a 52-minute documentary exploring the Gallipoli campaign through the discovery of several sunken ships lost during the campaign.

In what was to become one of the bloodiest and most futile battles of the modern era, the discoverer of the Titanic, Dr Robert Ballard, wants to find out why the campaign went so horribly wrong. Some of the answers lie not on the battlefields but beneath the waves.

Ballard reveals the story of Gallipoli as it has never been told before. Notorious as a land campaign, Ballard is looking for evidence at the bottom of the sea. There he finds shipwrecks from a David and Goliath contest where the might of an Allied fleet was outwitted by a weakened Ottoman Empire, unleashing a terrible carnage where hundreds of thousands of young lives would be wasted.

In 1915, the war on the western front was deadlocked. In the fields of France, millions were dying. To break the stalemate, an audacious plan was proposed by the British Admiralty, headed by a young and ambitious Winston Churchill. If successful, it could have shortened the war, saving millions of lives. But it was to fail, almost ending Churchill's career.

First, Ballard finds the ship that started it all, the former German ship the Breslau. At the start of the war, Turkey was neutral, but when they accepted the Breslau into their Navy, Britain declared war on them. A few months later the Gallipoli campaign would begin.

In the Dardanelles Strait, Ballard discovers a battleship that was part of a large Allied fleet that attempted to bowl the Turks over. But the naval battle ended in just one catastrophic day – three Allied battleships would be on the bottom of the sea and three more crippled. How did a depleted Turkish force defeat the might of an Allied fleet led by the mighty British Navy? As Ballard examines the wreck of HMS Irresistible the answers are revealed.

Joining Ballard for the first time is his fifteen-year-old son, Ben. It's a proud moment but also a poignant one as so many lives lost at Gallipoli were young boys, including the youngest ever to have served in the Australian forces aged only fourteen.

At the most famous site at Gallipoli, Anzac Cove, Ballard discovers a small but significant wreck that helps to unlock the failure of the subsequent land campaign. But amongst the tragedy, Ballard discovers tales of heroism including a lone Australian submarine that achieved what no Allied ship could do – break through the narrows of the Dardanelles. However, its success was a double-edged sword. On hearing the news, the troops were encouraged to dig in and fight harder. The result was that the campaign dragged on for a further seven months, killing hundreds of thousands.

By the end of his journey, Ballard has uncovered that every catastrophic turn of the Gallipoli campaign can be traced back to events at sea.

Curriculum Applicability

Gallipoli's Deep Secrets is a reference that can be used to explore the Gallipoli campaign in the SOSE/HSIE curriculum areas at middle and senior secondary levels.