Sterling Michael Pavelec

When I first learned that a book was coming out about the role of air power in the Gallipoli campaign, I made sure to order a copy. As its author, Sterling Michael Pavelec, points out in his introduction, the subject is one that receives almost no attention in the many books written about the operations there. With all that has been published about the naval effort and the land campaign, a book on the role of aircraft promised to provide something one does not often see in a much-covered conflict: a fresh perspective.

And Pavelec does indeed deliver In this respect. Though his book possesses an understandably British-centric focus given various issues with sources and languages, Pavelec makes a heroic effort to provide a well-rounded account of the use of air power by both sides. What comes across most is the novelty of the operations, as the British and the French employed the fledgling technology in a variety of ways. This effort was complicated by the logistical challenge of deploying them thousands of miles away from their home bases, in conditions which exacerbated the wear and tear on the fragile vehicles. Nonetheless, the pilots and their commanders strove to employ them in a diverse range of missions in support of the invasion effort.

By contrast, the Ottomans struggled to match the Allied effort, thanks to their limited industrial base and prewar indifference to building an air arm. Their greatest asset in this respect was their alliance with the Germans, who supplied the Ottomans with the planes and even the pilots necessary to stage operations of their own. Though the result was miniscule compared to the resources employed on the Western Front, over time the Ottomans and Germans gained an advantage thanks to the growing disillusionment of the Allied leadership with the campaign. This was foreshadowed on by the unwillingness of the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, to commit any units of the Royal Flying Corps to the campaign, leaving it to the Royal Naval Air Service to shoulder the burden of providing air support. As British interest waned and the French withdrew, the Germans supplied newer and better planes. Though these planes had been transferred from the Western Front due to their obsolescence, they were still more than capable of outclassing the older planes available to the RNAS, giving the Ottoman-German forces a qualitative edge by the time British forces withdrew in 1916.

In this book Pavelec does what historians should do, which is to broaden our understanding of our subject. Yet reading it raises the question of whether such an effort was warranted. Though the main text is barely more than a hundred pages it still feels extraordinarily padded, with information often repeated from chapter to chapter as though to fill space. And while he has undertaken considerable research in the available primary sources, Pavelec’s examination of the relevant published works was far less thorough, as is evidenced by his reference to Tim Travers’s 2003 book on Gallipoli as the “latest” book on the campaign and the absence of David Hobbs’s 2017 book on the RNAS in the First World War to cite just two examples. Most problematic, though, is Pavelec’s tendency to over-egg his pudding with grandiose claims of the achievements of attacks that “spoiled” Ottoman assaults which would otherwise have resulted in Allied defeats, or missed opportunities “that could have produced a much different set of outcomes” in the campaign.

Much of this can be chalked up to Pavelec’s clear enthusiasm for his subject. Thanks to it, though, what could have made for a sterling chapter in a larger work on the Gallipoli campaign is instead a strained effort to fill the pages of a slim book. It’s one that everybody interested in gaining a comprehensive understanding of the Gallipoli campaign will need to read, and it will undoubtedly be a useful resource for scholars writing on the subject in the future. In the end, though, it falls short of living up to its promise.… (mais)