Winston Churchill in 1912

Canadian Prime Minister Robert Borden (left) and Winston Churchill in 1912. Churchill had become First Lord of the Admiralty the previous year and held the position into the First World War.

Churchill was one of the political and military engineers of the Dardanelles campaign of 1915, which he anticipated would take the Ottoman Empire out of the war and allow the Western allies to support Russia more effectively. The failure of the Gallipoli landings of April 1915 was a major factor in his demotion later that year.