What do Winston Churchill and Pete Hegseth have in common? The answer came to me at Gallipoli

Two weeks out from this year’s Anzac Day, the peninsula was mostly deserted and entirely Turkish. Light rain was about, as it had been on April 25, 1915. Anzac Cove rang with the hammer-clanks of Turkish workers building the temporary aluminium seating for the annual Australian invasion. Up the escarpment a few hundred yards from the beach, the furthest the Australian soldiers reached in 1915, Turkish contractors for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission tidied up the Lone Pine cemetery.

When a tour bus came, out piled a class of Turkish schoolchildren to see Chunuk Bair, the highest peak of the battlefield and the prize the Anzacs wanted. In 1915, New Zealand soldiers held it for all of two days before the Turks threw them off. The school students had come to see the huge stone monument to Kemal Ataturk and the Turkish victory. Of all the memorials at Gallipoli – known to Turks as Canakkale Savasi, after the nearby town on the eastern side of the Dardanelles – the largest by far is the Turkish one at Chunuk Bair, towering defiantly over all the gullies and hollows and ridges through which Australian troops scrambled and failed to reach it.

Canakkale is a place of Turkish pride. The Australian symbolism of the place is complicated: here was where a young nation sought to prove itself “British” by blind obedience to British incompetence that is still tragically evident from the cliffs overlooking the first impossible landing place. For Turks, the pride is simple: here is where they defended their land. The Australian invasion lasts one day a year and then goes away.

Today at Anzac Cove, the problem with the historical parallel is that it’s too damned obvious. In 1915, a Western empire thought it would easily invade a Muslim country but was defeated by its own hubris. It deployed its pride and joy (the Royal Navy’s guns were the 1915 equivalent of today’s US Air Force bombers) to pound a people into surrender. It wanted to win, cost-free, from a distance. It failed when the locals mined their strategic strait and made it impassable. In the subsequent ground invasion, plan B, the leaders of the Western empire held the Muslim people in contempt, assuming that they, living under a corrupt and dying regime, would fold meekly and welcome their conquerors. Overconfident, the Western empire didn’t do its homework. Its aims were muddled and unrealistic. Its actions united the defenders around their regime. Its invasion became an eight-month siege until it could find a face-saving exit.

Too damned obvious. But nobody would accuse the current imperial leadership of paying any attention to history. Like Whitehall in 1915, Washington in 2026 thinks history is its to invent.

When you visit Anzac Cove today, as tempting as it is to join the dots between past and present, the overwhelming impression is of the place in itself: the sheer hell it must have been for the 16,000 Anzacs who landed on April 25 and the 50,000-plus who followed. The bluffs are so steep, how could anyone have thought success was possible? How must they have felt when they landed in the dark, crawled as far as they could up those ravines and gulches, and then, as the rain fell, dug themselves into their foxholes?

Up at Lone Pine, the Nek, and Hill 60, the fabled Gallipoli battlefields that are so cramped by the hopeless and confusing terrain, you marvel that the Anzacs got as far as they did but your mind boggles at the stupidity of the strategy. How could it have ended any differently when the Turks, on higher ground and defending their own land, held all the advantages? And Anzac Cove is 300 kilometres from Istanbul. Even to win at Gallipoli would have been like capturing Darwin and thinking they’d got Sydney and Melbourne. Could the Western empire’s contempt for a Muslim people have been any more total? Can it still be?

When you see Anzac Cove in person, as I did for the first time this month, you realise that this is our place to commemorate the futility of running into a war when an imperial master clicks his fingers. How can you not choke back tears at all that loss? How can you not think of the words of the Sydney-born sergeant of the 8th Light Horse Regiment, Cliff Pinnock, who, after his regiment was cut down for no gain in the infamous self-inflicted massacre at the Nek on August 7, wrote in his diary, “It was simply murder”?

Australians were far from the only ones murdered by their bosses over eight months on the Gallipoli-Canakkale peninsula. British and French soldiers died in greater numbers. For every Anzac who never left, there were 10 Turks. It was murder for all.

Now, 111 years later, Australia might just have become mature enough not to run off to war at its master’s beck and call. Today, when the imperial capital is consumed by an adventurist fever and an “Epic Fury”, Australia can say no.

Some wars are justifiable. The worst war – as in 1914-18 – is the one that the world, caught in an escalation trap, stumbles into, one accident at a time. Much is made of the similarities between today and the 1930s, not enough of the similarities between today and the 1910s. But we are better educated today. Information circulates well enough for us to know when we are being conned. In 1915 it was Winston Churchill, an ex-journalist who fancied himself a commander, saying the Muslim enemy would collapse in days, and Australians rushed to sign up. In 2026, the ex-journalist who fancies himself a commander is Pete Hegseth.

The Anzac Days I remember are those when the marchers were old men whose limbs and youth had given way to an implacable hostility to war. Years before their smiling grandchildren inherited their medals, there were actual Gallipoli veterans, bitter with the memory of what had been done to them and their mates. There were many who refused to take part in any ceremony that they felt was a celebration of war. For as long as the Gallipoli veterans marched, Anzac Day was unmistakably anti-war.

Two weeks ago, I was at that sombre place where so many bodies were never found. Murder for all. Nobody should have done this and nobody should ever do it again. We should remember it as it was known, as the Turks still know it: a war to end all wars.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, an author and a columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.

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