What Gallipoli means a century on

Thousands turn out for Anzac Day commemorations. Gallipolli has a special resonance for New Zealand. Picture / Sarah Ivey.

When the sun rises over the Gallipoli Peninsula on April 25, 2015, around 10,000 people from Australia and New Zealand will be there to greet it. They will have been waiting all night for this moment.

These are the lucky ones who were selected by ballot and will have paid thousands to get there. Many others missed out. About 42,582 Australians applied for the 8000 tickets In New Zealand, more than 10,000 people applied for just 2000 places.

Meanwhile, back home, hundreds of thousands of people will rise before dawn to attend Anzac Day services. What motivates so many to do this, and what makes this day so special?

The Gallipoli campaign of 1915 holds a peculiar fascination. Gallipoli has assumed a cultural significance out of all proportion to its military reality. It was a serious defeat for the Allies, a costly failure with no significant outcome on the war. It was a military endeavour marked with muddle and command incompetence. It is unusual for nations to associate one of their most defining moments with a military campaign with all these failings.

Professor Sir Hew Strachan, the Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford University and a world authority on World War I, has written that the national identity of three nations - Australia, New Zealand and Turkey - is woven around the Gallipoli experience. New Zealand soldiers believed it was on Gallipoli they started to discover themselves as New Zealanders.

Gallipoli has cast a very long shadow. The Somme battle of 1916, still New Zealand's most costly military encounter, will not receive anything like the attention Gallipoli has attracted.

It is doubtful whether any one event can create such an elusive and changing entity as a country's national identity; where it begins and ends is impossible to say as the process is so complex. But what happened at Gallipoli 100 years ago cannot be ignored, nor can it be separated from Australian, New Zealand and Turkish national histories or cultural identities. So important has this campaign become to each nation's heritage that most New Zealanders and Australians have developed a sense of place about Gallipoli without ever having been there.

Gallipoli has become something bigger and better than just its military reality. It has been transformed into a type of victory, albeit not a military one. It is a victory for comradeship, endurance and a determination to succeed against all the odds, values that still resonate. Ultimately, Gallipoli is a victory of the human spirit over death, suffering and the futility of war. It is an imagined one but is more powerful and enduring than the real thing.

• Glyn Harper, Professor of War Studies at Massey University.