ABSTRACT
Nothing is but thinking makes it so. As Ian Beckett concluded in his review of the military historian and the popular image of the Western Front, ‘when the legend becomes fact print the legend’.1 This has always been the case with the Anzacs and the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. Today in Australia and New Zealand it is difficult to identify the performance of the original Anzacs and the nature of their achievement in the Gallipoli campaign because of the legend that surrounds them. This chapter will review the origins of the Anzac image and assess the nature of their combat effectiveness on Gallipoli, that is, their effectiveness as fighting soldiers and the effectiveness of the Anzac Corps as a fighting formation. In early May 1915 Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett’s despatches trumpeted a
legend of Anzac achievement to the world, writing:
It has cost us dearly to get astride the Gallipoli peninsula, but there is no finer tale in our history than that of the deeds which were performed on Sunday, 25 April, by Australian, New Zealand and British troops, supported with equal gallantry by the officers and men of the warships.2
