The French Army at Gallipoli
Jun 2005, Vol. 150, No. 3
By Matthew Hughes
Reading the major English-language books and articles on the Gallipoli campaign, one could almost be forgiven for thinking that France played no part in the fighting on the peninsula. Her contribution to the fighting, if discussed at all, is typically relegated to a footnote in the literature. This is despite the large troop deployment detailed in this article and despite the fact that the French army lost more men killed in Gallipoli than the combined total for Australia and New Zealand (c.10,000 dead). Moreover, French forces, while excluded by the British from the planning of both the naval and land battles around Gallipoli, fought right through the Dardanelles/Gallipoli campaign, contributing significantly to both the naval and land campaigns.
This gap in the literature is not restricted to the Anglo-Saxon world. With the exception of the multi-volumed French official histories and some dated memoirs, there is little in French to match the scholarship emerging on the Western Front. This is, perhaps, a reflection of the fact that, in France, popular interest in the First World War is focused on the great battles of the Western Front – the battlefield of Verdun being an obvious case in point. As one French author has remarked, the men of the Army of the Orient are the 'victims of a selective memory of the Great War'.
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By Matthew Hughes
Reading the major English-language books and articles on the Gallipoli campaign, one could almost be forgiven for thinking that France played no part in the fighting on the peninsula. Her contribution to the fighting, if discussed at all, is typically relegated to a footnote in the literature. This is despite the large troop deployment detailed in this article and despite the fact that the French army lost more men killed in Gallipoli than the combined total for Australia and New Zealand (c.10,000 dead). Moreover, French forces, while excluded by the British from the planning of both the naval and land battles around Gallipoli, fought right through the Dardanelles/Gallipoli campaign, contributing significantly to both the naval and land campaigns.
This gap in the literature is not restricted to the Anglo-Saxon world. With the exception of the multi-volumed French official histories and some dated memoirs, there is little in French to match the scholarship emerging on the Western Front. This is, perhaps, a reflection of the fact that, in France, popular interest in the First World War is focused on the great battles of the Western Front – the battlefield of Verdun being an obvious case in point. As one French author has remarked, the men of the Army of the Orient are the 'victims of a selective memory of the Great War'.
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