The Australians and New Zealanders were in Egypt, preparing for a mission to France, when suddenly they joined the French and English in participating in the Gallipoli Campaign. This means their preparation was already useless and inappropriate. Also, the soldiers did not know the specific terrain nor its military characteristics. Much information was drawn from travelogues. Generally, it was believed that the Turks would not be very difficult opponents, since they had lost the two Balkans Wars , but also because the Ottoman Empire was generally in a bad state. The problem was that this information was very general and essentially vague for this specific situation. On the other hand, the Turks and the Germans prepared themselves intensely at the tactical and strategic levels, electing to, of course, maintain control of the heights, which commanded the Straits. The problem of the Allies was that on the one hand, they clearly did not accurately evaluate the forces of the Turks and on the other, they did not take into account at all that they faced German strategy and not Turkish. Therefore, the flexibility of the defence proposed by von Sanders surprised them and caused great cost and damage. Another terrible error was that they left four weeks for the defence to organise even more successfully. With these facts, the landing was condemned to have great losses and this is what happened. Even once the Allies succeeded in seizing the beaches, they did not have the momentum to expand successfully to the strongpoints of the defence. As a consequence, these strategic errors would cause more and more damage at a tactical level, resulting in thousands of soldiers dying.