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

April 24, 2026 — 3:30pm

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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........

© The Age