An EMAIL NOTE from Mayura Botejue, in USA, 26 April 2025**
I have been to Gallipoli and read the following on a memorial: “Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives … You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore, rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours … You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”
These famous, heart-rending words, attributed to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who was a commander of Ottoman forces at the Dardenelles during the first world war and later the founder of modern Turkey, grace memorials on three continents, including those at Anzac Cove, Gallipoli.
The slaughter of the 1915 Gallipoli campaign resulted in the death of 8,700 Australian and more than 80,000 Ottoman troops.
** Mayura Botejue in response here to this item in TPS: https://thuppahis.com/2025/04/27/the-ceylonese-who-fought-died-at-gallipoli-in-1915/#more-89530. ….. .. Botejue now resides in USA and hasa brother Vipul who is a retired Lankan army officer…….. https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayura-botejue-9339753/?originalSubdomain=lk
Churchill said, History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
He was an aristocratic adventurer when he masterminded the Gallipoli disaster.
A couple of gunboats up the Dardanelle straits and Constantinople would be bared.
Churchill was a rank racist. Gunboat diplomacy was predicated on racial superiority.
When a couple of strategic Turkish gun emplacements barred progress, Churchill conceived of the landing.
Blame for Britain’s greatest WW1 disaster is today more diffused just as the historian predicted.
By the time WW2 came around, he was a drunken adventurer!
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