The Dandarnelles Disaster (17 page)

The Admiralty war staff accordingly started to plan an attack with a target date of 15 February. Fisher's doubts grew. Churchill claimed he was unaware of them until the old admiral sent a dissenting memorandum to Asquith on 25 January; but Fisher had told Jellicoe, the Grand Fleet commander, on the 19th that he was thinking of resigning because he disagreed with the navy-only plan; Jellicoe urged him to stay on. Two days later the First Sea Lord told him that he ‘abominate[d]' the idea unless it became a combined operation, preferably with 200,000 troops.

Fisher sent a copy of his prime-ministerial memorandum to Churchill, saying he had three main objections: the Baltic option was better; the Grand Fleet would be indirectly weakened; and only a combined operation could secure the Dardanelles. On the 27th Fisher told Asquith that he did not want to come to the War Council meeting on the following day because he disagreed with his political chief. The Prime Minister therefore called Fisher and Churchill to his office before the meeting began on the morning of 28 January. Having listened to both his leading naval advisers, Asquith said that as far as he was concerned, Zeebrugge was off and the Dardanelles was on. He did not say it would be done by the navy alone.

The War Council met three times on the 28th, their deliberations marked by high drama. The first session began at 11.30 at Number 10, Downing Street. Churchill said he had heard from both the Russians and the French that they were in favour of a British naval attack on the Dardanelles starting in the middle of February. Fisher objected that he had understood from the Prime Minister before the meeting that the matter would not be raised on this day. He then got up to leave. Kitchener all but jumped to his feet and cut him off before he could reach the door, engaging Fisher in an animated conversation in a window bay: ‘I am never going back to that table,' the admiral said. The field marshal with uncharacteristically visible emotion pointed out that he, Fisher, was the only opponent of the plan, and it was his duty to remain: Kitchener actually begged him to stay. Fisher returned to his seat.

Kitchener now waxed enthusiastic about the naval plan, which he thought could be worth the same as a major victory on land if successful. Once again he said the attack could always be broken off if it did not make progress. After lunch Churchill invited Fisher to his office and persuaded him to supervise the preparations. As usual, albeit against his better judgement, he threw himself into the task:
totus porcus
, he promised. He was utterly loyal to Churchill, not least because the First Lord had recalled him from retirement for one of the most important posts in the conduct of the war. But his reservations remained, as subsequent events would show, even if he kept them to himself for now. He had only recently initiated a vast naval building programme for some 600 ships; and he took comfort in the fact that the War Council agreed with Kitchener that the operation, by ships that could be spared, could be broken off at any time if it faltered. Nobody of importance seems to have questioned this extraordinary piece of wishful thinking at the time. If the Royal Navy called off a major operation for ‘lack of progress' there was only one way the enemy would quite reasonably interpret it: as a victory for the defence. The damage to British prestige would be incalculable.

The War Council met again at four p.m. on 28 January. Fisher was not present. The main topic was the isolation of Serbia and the possibility of helping that beleaguered ally via Salonica. The day's third session began at 6.30 p.m. Fisher was present this time, along with Admiral Henry Oliver, the Admiralty's Chief of War Staff. Churchill announced that the Admiralty was going ahead with preparations for a naval attack on the Dardanelles, as agreed by the War Council on 13 January. Oliver said the first shot
would be fired in about two weeks, say 3 February. The main base for the enterprise would be the spacious harbour of Mudros on the island of Lemnos, well placed off the mouth of the Dardanelles but not too close. The Admiralty was exploiting the limbo status of the island in international law. It had been taken from the Turks by the Greeks during the Balkan wars, along with other Aegean islands. As it had not been ceded to, but was only occupied by, the Greeks, it was in law Turkish and therefore enemy territory, which the British could take over (Greek consent was readily granted: their garrison withdrew). Some 45 minesweepers, 24 French, 21 British (actually requisitioned trawlers complete with their civilian fishermen-crews), along with 16 destroyers, were gathering at Mudros. Rear-Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss was appointed Senior Naval Officer in command of the base, which had almost no facilities either for maintaining ships or for troops.

The Council formally approved the attack, for political more than military reasons. The politicians felt that, given the stalemate on the Western Front, something had to be done somewhere, and there had been no major initiative against the Turks, despite the promise to the Russians. The Balkan states had no Allied success to admire as a reason for joining the Entente, and Bulgaria was clearly leaning towards the Central Powers, which would mean no help for the Allies from the friendly Greeks. Romania was losing interest in the Entente cause, and Serbia was in danger from the Austrians. Despite the fact that all the admirals, the politicians and even ‘no-troops' Kitchener believed that a combined operation was the only realistic strategy, the War Council was by all accounts carried away by the rhetoric, the persuasive skill, the enthusiasm and energy of Winston Churchill.

Ironically, indeed sadly in the light of what happened, Churchill told parliament and the Dardanelles Commission long after the event that if he had known in February 1915 that an army of 100,000 was available (as Kitchener at the time still insisted was not the case), he would not have ordered a navy-only attack. As will be shown, troops were indeed available but Kitchener refused to allocate them to the Dardanelles. At the time of the War Council's decision Churchill was clearly dazzled by the prospect of bursting into the Sea of Marmara in a naval cavalry charge and pointing the huge guns of the fleet at Constantinople to force a Turkish surrender. He recalled the success of the big German guns in Belgium, apparently not appreciating the significance of the short range, high angle of fire and associated high trajectory of the big howitzers. Churchill played down or ignored the at best lukewarm enthusiasm of his naval advisers and
presented his view as that of the Admiralty as a whole. Fisher never spoke of his doubts to the War Council as such (though nobody there could have been unaware of his misgivings after the contretemps with Kitchener), believing that the role of advisers was analogous to that of Victorian children, to be seen but not heard, to speak only when asked. He had given his advice to his chief elsewhere and if it was discounted or ignored, that was that: he had done his duty. No advice was sought from army artillery experts, nor was the General Staff consulted about the plans. The navy's leading gunnery expert, Admiral Sir Percy Scott, was sceptical. His inconvenient opinion was discounted.

British naval guns of the time had a maximum elevation of 15 degrees (the
Queen Elizabeth
however had 20; German capital ships, including
Goeben,
had 30 degrees, which considerably increased the maximum reach of their lighter guns, making howitzer-like falling shot a possibility at extreme distance). At anything much less than extreme range, British naval shells had an almost flat trajectory, although falling shot could be achieved to some degree at shorter ranges by reducing the explosive charge behind the shell; but the necessary calculation of the quantity of propellant required was neither simple nor reliable. The politicians knew nothing of these things. Churchill was a rarity on the War Council in that he had been an army officer in Africa as a young man (which however did not make him an expert on naval matters); even so he privately dismissed his ministerial colleagues as ‘ignorant'. The sage advice against letting ships attack forts given by Lord Nelson, the greatest hero of the Royal Navy, and supported by almost every admiral in 1915, was ignored by Churchill. Nelson knew what he was talking about, because he had tackled the forts at Copenhagen in April 1801 and had a very hard time of it, even though he emerged victorious (but then Nelson's success as a commander was often based on ignoring precepts and even direct orders).

Nelson's battle was however fought within the relatively short range of the naval cannon of the day (perhaps 4,000 yards), which meant that the gunners could at least see what they were shooting at. This would not be the case at the Dardanelles, where fire would be opened from many miles away, and the precise positions of the defending guns would only be revealed when they opened fire themselves. These would also have the advantage of a stable firing platform whereas the ships, even if not constantly on the move to evade incoming shells, would be clearly visible and had to contend with the often turbulent surface of the sea. British naval gunnery was generally poor, as demonstrated by Sturdee's squadron, not
least because admirals were often disinclined before the war to expend expensive ammunition on exercise and did not like their gleaming ships to be sullied by gun smoke. Nobody on the British side took the threats from the mobile howitzer batteries or even the mines sufficiently seriously, though both were known to exist in ever-growing numbers and in spite of the spectacular successes of mines against the battleships of both sides in the Russo-Japanese War just ten years earlier. Submarines were recognised as a threat, a little prematurely since there were as yet no U-boats in the area. None of the foregoing can be dismissed as hindsight: all of it was known at the time the operations were being planned. Even Duckworth had complained about mobile batteries a century earlier.

Only one old admiral, Sir Henry Jackson, ventured to ask what the fleet would do when it got to Constantinople. How could its voracious need for supplies be met when enemy artillery on the Gallipoli peninsula was free to fire on the unarmoured merchant ships that would have to deliver them? Under such circumstances the fleet would be forced to retire in a week or two. The War Council seemed airily to assume that the Turks would simply surrender under the threat of the broadsides aimed at the Golden Horn. Jackson's even more venerable colleague, Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, VC, thought a bombardment of Constantinople would unite Turkey rather than disable it.

To summarise: everybody on the War Council, at the Admiralty and the War Office, including Churchill and Kitchener, believed before the event that a combined operation was the right strategy for taking the Dardanelles, itself the right and only practicable strategy for outflanking the Central Powers. When Kitchener insisted that no British or imperial troops were available, and neither the Russians, the Greeks nor the Balkan states would provide any, Churchill pressed and won the case for a purely naval attack, with the positive support of only one or two fairly senior naval officers, by 28 January 1915, and planning for it went ahead. The First Lord, having been denied army help, also decided not to use his under-strength Royal Naval Division, still recovering from its futile deployment at Antwerp, in support of his operation, but on 6 February he did detach two Royal Marine battalions, 2,000 men, from the RND to Lemnos for brief tactical landings, such as to complete the destruction of guns and forts begun by the fleet (they arrived only on 23 February).

Yet in the opening days of February 1915 the strategic situation in the Middle East, and to some degree on the Western Front, changed sufficiently
to lead even Lord Kitchener into thinking the previously unthinkable: perhaps troops were available after all, and in unexpected numbers. In the Middle East, a feeble Turkish attempt to attack Suez from Syria under the German General Kress von Kressenstein was decisively beaten off, and the Turks moved troops from Syria and Palestine to the Caucasus; only three divisions were left to protect Constantinople. With the pressure off Egypt, the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), which had landed there in mid-December 1914, was underemployed. Although still in training, the two divisions, some 39,000 men in all, were the flower of their countries' youth.

At the War Council meeting on 9 February the plight of Serbia was discussed once again. Kitchener announced that the British 29th Division, consisting of seasoned regular soldiers who had been serving in various parts of the Empire, could be sent to Salonica. The offer was not taken up, but it revealed for the first time that the best division available in Britain was not now going to Egypt as planned, nor to France, the obvious alternative, and was effectively at a loose end. Kitchener also assured the Royal Navy that if it became necessary to land troops at Gallipoli, ‘assistance would be forthcoming'. The French, too, had a division of colonial troops available.

A week later, the War Council met again at Number 10, Downing Street. Among its conclusions were confirmation of the role of the two RND marine battalions, a decision to send the 29th as soon as possible to Lemnos, officially made available by the Greeks on 9 February, and an order to the Admiralty to build transports and lighters for 50,000 troops. Churchill reiterated his argument for the Dardanelles plan as the only means available to strike a blow at the enemy, given the stalemate on the Western and Eastern fronts against Germany. Now that the 29th was going, the rest of the RND, another ten battalions, could go too, along with the ANZAC divisions, which included 30,000 infantry. The Greeks had definitively refused to invade Gallipoli for fear of hostilities with Bulgaria and Romania. The Russians were not going to help either: indeed they had recoiled in horror at the prospect of the Greek Army occupying their eternal objective, Constantinople, their gateway to the Mediterranean. Their attitude was roundly condemned by the leading strategist and historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart, who wrote: ‘Russia would not help even in helping to clear her own windpipe. She preferred to choke rather than disgorge a morsel of her ambition.'