Gallipoli 1915 – Churchill´S Greatest Gamble

Gallipoli  1915 – Churchill´s Greatest Gamble.

The game system emphasizes command and control. Players command by Brigade and Regiment. To be successful, a player must plan for the eventual exhaustion of their troops, rotating them out of line to rest and recover stragglers. The result is an accurate modeling of the tempo of these battles.

Infantry combat is ranged rifle and MG fire, culminating in close assault. Artillery is powerful but ultimately limited. Shrapnel from the standard field guns is deadly against troops in the open, but only the rare howitzers firing high-angle HE can deal with trenches.

The map scale is 400 metres per hex. Tha map covers the entire southern section of the peninsula from the Sari Bair range to Cape Helles (i.e. from Anzac to Helles, including all the forts in between). Daylight turns are two hours, night turns are four hours.

On 25th April 1915, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, launched a hastily assembled force of British, Australian, New Zealand and French troops against the Turkish defenses on the Gallipoli peninsula. Their goal was to capture the forts that guarded the Dardanelles. With that achieved, the British and French Fleets would sail to Constantinople, topple the Ottoman government, and open up a supply line to Russia.

However, defending the beaches was an equal number of Turkish divisions, hardened in the recent Balkan Wars, led by well-trained Turkish officers, supported by advisors from the German General Staff.

An hour before dawn, in complete silence, the Anzacs rowed ashore at Ari Burnu, a place later to be famous as Anzac Cove. The Royal Navy had landed them in the wrong place! Huge dirt cliffs and scrub-choked washouts confronted them, rather than a beach and low dunes. Nevertheless inland they went, overrunning the Turkish pickets, only to become hopelessly confused by the night landing, jigsaw terrain, and inexperience.