News report on 25.4.1998 in the Daily Telegraph.

The private papers of a Daily Telegraph journalist who exposed the horrors of the Gallipoli landings have been released to coincide with their anniversary.

Today is Anzac Day, when Australians and New Zealanders remember their was dead. It was first celebrated on April 25, 1916, the first anniversary of the Gallipoli landings.

The Gallipoli operation was carried out largely at the instigation of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. Allied forces were sent to the Dardanelles early in 1915 with the objective of inflicting defeat on Turkey, relieving pressure on Russia and strengthening the Balkan front.

Around 15,000 Anzacs, members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, were landed on the wrong beach and were faced by an enemy firing from steep hills above them. A total of 8,709 Australians and 2,701 New Zealanders died.

The man who made the extent of both the disaster and the bravery of the Anzacs known was Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, The Daily Telegraph’s correspondent with the Allied Forces.

He had made his name as a war correspondent, before fighting unsuccessfully in two elections for the Conservatives. But it was his reports from Gallipoli that were to make him famous.

Ashmead-Bartlett was one of only two reporters who covered the campaign from the start. His early reports spoke of "splendid organisation and skilled leadership" and "plucky officers",

His reports on the action of the Anzacs, many of whom were killed before their boats reached the beaches, led to a surge in recruiting in Australia.

"The courage displayed by the wounded Australians will never be forgotten," Ashmead-Bartlett wrote. "I have never seen anything like these wounded Australians in war before.

"Though they were shot to bits, without hope of recovery, their cheers resounded throughout the night. There has been no finer feat in this war than this sudden landing in the dark and storming the heights."

Ashmead-Bartlett appears to have been provided with a bottomless expense account.

He brought over the manager of a Paris restaurant to supervise his catering and had his own supply of champagne as well as purchasing rum and brandy from the Navy. But as the months dragged on and the Allied soldiers remained pinned down on the beaches, he became increasingly disenchanted with the situation and what he saw as the incompetence of the British Commanders. Privately in his diary, he recorded the campaign as "a series of blunders" fought in dreadful conditions. "The wounded never ceased to come ashore in an endless stream."

His attempts to report that state of affairs back to London failed to get through the censors. "It is heartrending work having to write what I know to be untrue," he recorded in his diary.

The answer to his problems arrived in the unlikely form of Keith Murdoch, an Australian journalist en route for England, and the father of Rupert Murdoch, the Australian newspaper proprietor.

Ashmead-Bartlett took Murdoch under his wing, telling him in great detail of the various "blunders and ineptitude" displayed by the British commanders.

They agreed that Ashmead-Bartlett should write what he really wanted to say about the campaign in a special dispatch which Murdoch would carry past the censors and hand to Herbert Asquith, the British Liberal Prime Minister, in London.

The Military Authorities got wind of the idea. Military police boarded Murdoch’s ship in Marseilles and confiscated Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter.

The War Office ordered Ashmead-Bartlett out of the Dardanelles, but once back in London he published his allegations in full, praising the Anzac troops but criticising virtually every other aspect of the campaign.

Ashmead-Bartlett’s praise for the Anzacs led an Australian soldier to note that "future generations will note that Australia was discovered, not by Captain Cook, explorer, but by Mr Ashmead-Bartlett, war correspondent."

More than a quarter of a million Allied Servicemen died in the whole of the campaign.

A subsequent enquiry, which called Ashmead-Bartlett as its first witness, concluded that the campaign had been a grave mistake.

In a letter to Churchill which is among the papers now held in the University of London’s Institute of Commonwealth Affairs, Ashmead-Bartlett derided the British Generals.

"There never was an army worse looked after than the one in Gallipoli," he wrote.

"The hospital arrangements were awful and thousands of wounded were left to die between the lines who might have been saved.

"When the true history of the events in the Dardanelles comes to be written, it will amaze the world that any staff should have piled blunder upon blunder in the way they did and the manner in which thousands of lives were thrown away to absolutely no purpose at all," he wrote.

With the possible exception of the Crimean War, the Gallipoli expedition was the most poorly mounted and ineptly run British military operation.

In late 1915, as the full extent of the disaster sunk in General Ian Hamilton, the British Commander-in-Chief, was relieved of his command.