The Uncensored Dardanelles (c.1916) By Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett
 
The Gallipoli campaign has been written about by many authors. However, few have been as well placed to offer eyewitness testimony of the higher echelons of command as the famed War Correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. His dispatches from the field were instrumental in forming the public opinion of the campaign and were at the forefront of creating the enduring Anzac legend.

In this volume he recounts the pain and suffering of the troops in the field juxtaposed with bitterly critical vignettes of the commander’s errors. He moved in the highest and lowest circles of the expeditionary force, writing of the men as much as the dithering generals at the top. His acerbic dispatches, which were printed at the time, although highly censored, led to his dismissal as correspondent. He lobbied in the highest circles in London to get the troops recalled, in the British government starved sober information from the front listened, and his intervention was pivotal in ending the murderous campaign. After the war, he set his sights on ensuring that the events which he witnessed would be left to posterity without the pen of the censor, giving his account in this book.
 
Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett (1881–1931) worked for The Daily Telegraph covering the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, the French Army on the Western Front in 1916, and the revolutionary intrigues that were rife in Central Europe in 1919. After a period as a Conservative MP, he took up his reporting duties for the paper once more, travelling to the world’s trouble spots including China, Soviet Russia, Palestine and India. But it was for his work during the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 that he is best known.

Uniquely amongst the war correspondents of 1914–18, Ashmead-Bartlett sought to evade the constraints of censorship and alert Britain’s political leaders to the failure of the campaign. He asked a visiting Australian, Keith Murdoch (who went on to found a media empire now run by his son, Rupert), to smuggle his deeply critical letter back to London, thus playing a potentially pivotal role in bringing Gallipoli to an end.
 
The Book contains a foldout map of the Battlefield
 
Hard Cover
286 Pages 
In Fair Condition