To: c.hinton who wrote (238829 ) 8/4/2007 2:01:30 AM From: Nadine Carroll Read Replies (2) | Respond to The French/Algerian war is a prime example of a war won on the ground but lost decisively in the realm of perceptions. Here's a good book:amazon.com The French Army's war in Algeria has always aroused passions. This book does not whitewash the atrocities committed by both sides; rather it shifts the focus to the conflict itself, a perspective assisted by the French republic's belated official admission in 1999 that what happened in Algeria was indeed a war. Each contributor made use of the increasingly liberalised French archives of the war since the early 1990s. The book re-evaluates counter-terrorism in the cities; the methods used in the "battle for hearts and minds" in the villages of the interior; the hitherto neglected roles of French air and naval power in supporting the army's counter-insurgency offensives against the Armee de Liberation Nationale; and the battles that France decisively lost for both world opinion and for support from her major Western allies. March 18 was a significant victory for Turkey. Nevertheless, there were calls amongst the British to press on with the naval attack, and de Robeck initially planned to do so after several days. With the exception of the Inflexible, the ships that were lost or damaged were old, ill-equipped for modern naval combat and, in the eyes of some, expendable. There have been theories that the Turkish forts had nearly exhausted their ammunition so that if the naval attack had resumed, the Allies would have met little opposition. Moreover the crews of the sunken battleships had replaced the civilians on the trawler minesweepers, making them much more willing to keep sweeping under fire, and the fleet had several modern destroyers fitted with 1 1/2" minesweeping hawsers that could have handled the task with ease. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_operations_in_the_Dardanelles_Campaign
