Gallipoli to Captivity

In the hands of the Turks during the Great War



The author of this book, John Still, was an officer in the 6th Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment and was part of the imaginative, but ultimately disastrous, amphibious assault on the Gallipoli peninsula in the Dardanelle's as part of the Middle Eastern Campaign in 1915 which was intended to initiate the fall of Germany's ally, the ailing Ottoman Empire. Winston Churchill, then First Sea Lord, had a penchant for devising unusual military initiatives and the consequences of this unfortunate brainchild were fated to chillingly revisit him in the Second World War during the Anzio landings in Italy. The experiences of the soldiers on the ground in both episodes also proved remarkably similar. Far from storming ashore to launch themselves in a rapid advance, they found themselves virtual prisoners within a confined beachhead where every attack of the invaders was poorly coordinated and doomed to failure from the outset. So it was that Still and his Yorkshire men were doomed to failure as they tried to achieve their objective both without support and hours after the time originally allotted to them. The outcome was predictable with appalling loss of life and capture and incarceration for the few survivors which included the author of this account. There followed a long journey into captivity followed by years as prisoners of the Turks. How Still and his comrades survived an ordeal that cost so many British soldiers their lives through neglect, poor or non-existent medical care, over work and starvation makes engrossing reading. This book was originally entitled A Prisoner in Turkey.

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