Queen to mark 100th anniversary of doomed Gallipoli campaign

Updated

The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh will lay wreaths to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the doomed First World War Gallipoli campaign.

The Queen and Prince Philip will today place their floral wreaths at the Sandringham war memorial cross in Norfolk - their first official public engagement of the year.

Erected by the monarch's grandparents King George V and Queen Mary, it honours the local men and officers of the 5th Battalion Norfolk regiment and those from the royal estate of Sandringham who died in the Great War.

Among those remembered by the memorial are a number of men who died in the Gallipoli campaign.

It was backed by Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and began in 1915 with the aim of knocking one of Germany's main allies, the Ottoman Empire, out of the war.

But it failed, despite more than half a million Allied servicemen pouring on to the Gallipoli peninsula, at a cost of around 58,000 lives either in battle or from disease.

The last Allied troops were withdrawn on January 9, 1916.

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