CANAKKALE AND GALLIPOLI

We organised a tour with a guide of Gallipoli.  We were all up at 6 am and on the ferry by 8am.  We had our own mini bus and a very good guide who is a Historian and teaches 14 - 18 year olds in Istanbul in the term time and spends the summer being a guide in Gallipoli.  It was fascinating, very sad and very understandable why we lost this invasion.  Our soldiers were so very young, one only 17 years old.  The Turks had control of the higher ground., they knew the terrain, they had better communication, whereas the Brits were not so well organised.  The top picture is a statue of a Turkish soldier who held up a white flag when he went into no mans land between the trenches to rescue an Australian soldier who was lying injured between the Australian trenches and the Turkish trenches.  Everybody held fire until the Aussie soldier was returned to his side and the Turkish soldier was back in his trench.  The carving near the some of the graves is read out every year.  The next picture is the terrain that the soldiers had to capture and fight in the only difference is that it was April and freezing cold, it even snowed.