NI Remembers Gallipoli Bloodshed

The 21,000 British and Irish troops who died with the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force in the Gallipoli campaign during WWI will be remembered tomorrow in Northern Ireland.

Celebrated as part of Anzac Day - which is more traditionally recognised as commemorating Australians and New Zealanders who fought there - it now also recognises the other nations involved. Many men from the Royal Irish Fusiliers - now the Royal Irish Regiment - were wounded or died during the bloody, failed campaign, such as those pictured here in a trench at Gallipoli.

Over 3,400 Irish soldiers died at Gallipoli as part of the 21,255 British contingent to be killed while France lost 10,000.

In all, this was more troops than the Anzac countries (Australia 8,709; New Zealand 2,721) combined during the Gallipoli campaign, while the Turks against whom the battles were waged, lost 87,000 soldiers.

Tomorrow morning, Ballance House, the birthplace of one of New Zealand's Premiers, John Ballance, near Glenavy, is to be the location for a solemn commemoration of what was to have been a land-based assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

Around 200 people are expected to attend the remembrance which has been organised by the Ulster-New Zealand Trust.

Australian troops landed at Ari Burnu (now Anzac Cove) at dawn on April 25, 1915.

Their mission was to seize the beach and then secure the high ground.

But the steep, scrub-covered terrain gave the Turkish soldiers too great an advantage.

The Australians suffered heavy losses, as did other nations landing elsewhere on the peninsula. But, they secured the beaches and refused to budge.

The Allied soldiers spent the next eight months camped in atrocious conditions on a strip of coastline as narrow as 100m in parts.

It was here the Anzacs became known for their courage and good humour in the face of overwhelming adversity.

As hundreds of surviving Royal Irish Fusiliers withdrew from the Mediterranean heat around eight months later, the supreme irony was that many of them were to be wounded or to die in another bloody foreign field - just seven months after that - in the Battle of the Somme in France.

(BMcC)