CANAKKALE, Turkey -- About 10,000 people, mostly backpackers from Australia and New Zealand, gathered at dawn Tuesday on a beach on the Gallipoli peninsula to commemorate a World War l campaign that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Honor guards and military bands marched and the crowd observed a minute of silence for the dead at Anzac Cove, named after the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps, whose soldiers came ashore on the north coast of the Turkish peninsula April 25, 1915."We shared the calamity of war," New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark told the crowd. "Things that happened here tied us together forever. We share the grief of our losses.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard and Turkish Forestry Minister Nami Cagan represented their nations before the thousands, mainly young people who made the annual pilgrimage to Gallipoli and camped on the beach.
"We feel very sad," said Rachel Garrett, an audio visual technician from London, as she overlooked the beach inside her sleeping bag. "The people who fell here made our history, but now we have to look for peace."
Clark also stressed the importance of peace.
"We gathered here to commemorate those who could not return home," the Anatolia news agency quoted Clark as saying. "Let's maintain our determination to keep the next generations away from the terror of war."
Australian and New Zealand volunteers known as ANZACs formed the backbone of a 200,000-man British-led army that landed at Gallipoli in an attempt to capture Istanbul, 180 miles away. They wanted to knock the German-allied Ottoman Empire out of the war and open the Turkish straits to Russia.
A total of 1 million men fought in the unsuccessful campaign, which military historians call the first combined naval and land operation of modern warfare. The Allies recorded 55,000 killed, 10,000 missing and 21,000 dead of disease, mainly dysentery. Turkish casualties were estimated at 250,000.
Many historians think that had the campaign succeeded, it would have shortened the war by several years and slowed or prevented the Bolshevik takeover in Russia.
But badly equipped, unprepared Turkish forces turned it into a frustrating nine-month battle of attrition fought in a spectacular cliff-top setting. It was the only victory for the Turks in World War I and provided the self-confidence they needed to salvage a nation from the dismembered empire.
The battle also gave them a war hero, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who later established predominantly Muslim Turkey as a secular republic with Western-style laws.
Battlefields at the tip and the north of the Gallipoli Peninsula have been turned into national parks that include dozens of monuments and well-tended cemeteries.