Would We Have Lost Gallipoli With 58 Jets?

Thank you Ben. We must always be prepared for the attack from the north. The godless aisatic horde at the ready to sweep down and swamp our country.  The Australia of the white fella Anzac dreaming. The pure white men who sacrificed all to save this country from the Turk , the Hun , the yellow peril. Who will be the next them? God only knows, but they Re there lurking to the north. Even now they may be approaching in boats, yes humble fishing boats, but boats all the same. Never forget a flood begins as a small trickle, as opposed to a big trickle.

Our men in Singapore suffered and were captured due to inadequate air cover!  We failed to plan and Churchill had other priorties But will that number truly protect us!! 

Ben, not sure if your story does anything useful. There is another book on Anzac, discussed with Phillip Adams today. It is about the role of Australian and British intelligence before and during the Gallipoli landings. There were spy flights over the area for 2 months before the landing, allowing a very good assessment of the Turkish positions and strength. Contrary to our legends, it was not a case of incompetent British generals sending ANZACs to their doom. It was just that the attacking force was too small to win the battle. One interesting piece of information - the British forces landed at dawn and were massacred by the Turkish artillery etc. The ANZACs landed at night and took their beach area successfully. Can't remember the book title, something about 36 days. Worth reading if you are interested in the subject.

I thought they landed at the wrong beach, and had to climb up steep cliffs raked with Turkish defensive machine gun fire.

My idea of a successful campaign is not to throw men in the way of harm as machine gun fodder until someone finally makes it through and heroically destroys the nest, but find ways to bombard the enemy at a safe distance and soften them up completely, then saunter in unmolested.  That's assuming there's anything like a 'just' war, which there usually isn't.

My understanding is that the colonies were used to take Turkey simply because Britain wanted middle eastern oil.  In 1913, Winston Churchill made the decision to switch the British Navy from coal to oil -- because oil had twice the energy per unit weight of coal -- in other words, you could travel twice as far on a tank of fuel.  The only problem was that Britain didn't have any known oil reserves of its own at the time, and didn't want to rely on other known sources such as Russia or even the US.  But lo, there were huge known oilfields in the middle east, full of brown people, so Britain already as good as owned them!   All they had to do was figure out a pretext to attack the already weakening Ottoman empire centred in Turkey, then appropriate half the middle east in league with France to create 'spheres of influence'.  At one point, in carving up the middle east between France after the war was over, Britain realised they'd let a lucrative pocket of oil stray into the agreed French territory -- so quickly renegotiated a little lump in the line to get it back.  The British forces already had Basra at the time of the Gallipoli campaign, which became a logistical centre.

The rest was history -- the creation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co, later to become BP -- which Winston Churchill conveniently owned a shedload of shares in, with remarkable prescience.  A couple of Anglo-Iraqi wars later when they wouldn't obligingly capitulate, the creation of a few puppet leaders, the removal of Mohammed Mosaddegh in Iran, a few more orchestrated coups and false front organisations and scares about communism, and the colonial expeditionary adventure was all worthwhile!  Founded this great nation, apparently -- being used as colonial cannon fodder as a willing extension of the empire to further overseas energy interests.  Meanwhile, back in the middle east, more than a few locals were immensely displeased at having their national sovereignty and right to self-determination repeatedly taken away from them in the interests of extracting oil cheaply to power the West...

Yes, Barney, I'm not talking about early 20th century artillery, I was anachronistically moving Air to Surface ordnance vectors like A10 Warthogs and battleships with over the horizon artillery into the past...  I'm pretty sure REAL 'shell shock', i.e. being too close to landing shells, and not just suffering PTSD from battle, was a real thing, so they were accurate some of the time.   The thing is, there were always thousands more expendable troops to push into the gaps made by dead bodies.  The generals were presumably always in a hurry to advance, so they could just push a few more thousand bodies forward as sacrifical cannon fodder to make some progress any ol time they felt like it.  Honour and duty is honour and duty, after all.

The sacrifice of individuals in the interests of European elites vs today's understandings of human rights and the sanctity of the individual stand in marked contrast.  Although I've heard a lot of the diggers posted to Afghanistan are pretty peed off about the unnecessary levels of danger officers placed them in time after time, and the blind adherence to rituals like how to bury ppl and send them off etc meant they came under further timed attacks.  Shades of wearing red jackets into combat!

With the populations to our north numbered in their billions, 58 fighter planes might stop the first two invasion waves, but like the ocean rollers they would still keep on coming until we are swamped.

The whole world should work towards ending all wars so that we can peacefully share all that we have.

I can't understand how people continially gather to remember their war dead without condemning  the despots and tirants who sent them to war in the first place. In fact quite often these same instigators of war are in charge of the rememberance celebrations themselves!