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Early on the morning of 25 April 1915, Allied forces landed on the Gallipoli peninsula in Ottoman Türkiye. This marked the start of the Gallipoli Campaign, a land-based element of a broad strategy to defeat the Ottoman Empire. Over 8 months, the Anzacs advanced little further than the positions they had taken on that first day of the landings. By November 1915, it was clear that the stalemate was not likely to be broken. Lord Kitchener, the British chief of staff, recommended an evacuation.

The brave but futile charge at the Nek was made famous by the movie Gallipoli. Yet the day before, the Australians attacking Lone Pine had a rare success in some of the fiercest fighting they ever experienced.

The 6th August 2020 marks the 105th anniversary of the Battle of Lone Pine, so the Cove Team have put together a deeper look into the Battle of Lone Pine and some other less known facts about this special Australian military history event.

In 1924, Charles Bean, Gallipoli veteran and Australia's official war historian, would describe the battle fought on Kaiajik Aghala (Hill 60) in August 1915 "as one of the most difficult in which Australian troops were ever engaged" (1). Like many of the actions fought on Gallipoli, the battle was confused and inconclusive. This paper aims to focus on the final phase of the battle of Hill 60, the fighting that occurred before sunrise on Sunday morning, 29 August 1915 around a position marked on British maps as D-C Trench.

This article outlines the massacre of the 18th Battalion at Gallipoli in August 1914 and argues that the soldiers of that unit were needlessly lost as a result of being sent unprepared into battle and that their Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Chapman was made a scapegoat for the debacle.

The British Empire and the Ottoman Empire fought in Mesopotamia from 1914 to 1918. The Allied force included British and Indian troops and some Australians and New Zealanders. Many men died from disease and the harsh climate. Two Australian units served in the campaign: the 1st Australian Wireless Signal Squadron and the Mesopotamia Half Flight (Australian Flying Corps).

In 1917, the troops entered Palestine. In 1918, the EEF advanced into modern-day Jordan and Syria. The campaign ended on 31 October 1918, a few weeks after the capture of Damascus.

The battle of Beersheba took place on 31 October 1917 as part of the wider British offensive collectively known as the third Battle of Gaza. The final phase of this all day battle was the famous mounted charge of the 4th Light Horse Brigade.

While most of the Australian Imperial Force went to France in 1916, the bulk of Australia’s mounted forces remained in Egypt to fight the Turks threatening the Suez Canal. After 1916 the threat to the canal was over, and with victory at Romani in August 1916, the Light Horse advanced into Turkish territory. In 1917 they entered Palestine and in 1918 advanced into Jordan and Syria.

Battles, maps and timelines of Australians fighting in France.

World War I became known as the 'Great War', the 'war to end all wars'. The most important battleground was the Western Front, in Belgium and France.

Collection of World War I primary documents (diaries, letters, photographs and artworks) that can be viewed online.

In the early morning of 1 July 1916, more than 100,000 British infantrymen were ordered from their trenches in the fields and woods north of the Somme River in France, to attack the opposing German line.

The Somme offensive, also known as the battle of the Somme, is the term given to series of battles fought between 1 July and 18 November 1916 along the Somme Valley in France.

In late July 1916, the Australians fought their first action in the Battle of the Somme. At this point the British strategy focused on the seizure of the ridge east of Pozières village.

In July 1916, the battles of Fromelles and Pozières marked Australia's entry onto the Western Front of the Great War. These were two of many battles fought during the Somme Offensive, in which for nearly half of 1916, British and its Dominion's soldiers fought alongside their French Allies, in a bid to break through the German's entrenched positions to the north and south of the Somme River.

Germany’s Operation Michael thundered into Allied lines in April 1918. Here’s how Australian troops at the Battle of Villers-Bretonneux helped stop it in its tracks.

When a massive German offensive swept across northern France in March 1918, it seemed for a time that German troops might reach the Channel coast. The Australian Corps, most of whose infantry was concentrated in the area around Messines in Flanders, was spared the bloody fighting of the offensive’s opening days but was soon sent south to plug gaps in the disintegrating British line.

For most Australians and New Zealanders, the focal points of the war were Gallipoli, Palestine, and France and Belgium on the Western Front. However, the war was also fought in a number of other theatres, including the Balkans.