The Dandarnelles Disaster (22 page)

Carden and his staff decided on one more try on the night of the 13th, with navy men in direct command of the trawlers. The performance of the minesweepers was much more determined, but so was the gunfire from both shores, as the sweepers struggled against the current, as they turned and tried to put out their equipment and as they tried to sweep downstream. Battleships, cruisers and destroyers fired back copiously, to no noticeable effect. Only two out of seven sweepers were able to start work. One trawler was hit 84 times, though not by heavy shell, her crew saved by the steel-plate screens fitted as part of the conversion for sweeping. The five picket boats did better, cutting many mines loose which were later set off by rifle fire in daylight. The light cruiser
Amethyst
of the escort, however, deliberately drawing fire away from the trawlers, was hit by a heavy shell and suffered 24 dead and 36 wounded. Aboard the trawlers, the toll ran to just five killed and four wounded, but there was considerable damage: four minesweepers and one picket boat were put out of action. Carden decided to give up night sweeps. On 14 March Churchill, obviously still unaware that the trawlermen and their naval colleagues had put up their best performance so far, signalled to the admiral: ‘I do not understand why minesweepers should be interfered with by firing which causes no casualties.' The First Lord, in a misguided attempt to lift Carden's spirits, added that the Admiralty had heard the forts were running out of ammunition and in ‘despondent reports' German officers were asking for more. It was time to press on: ‘The unavoidable losses must be accepted. The enemy is harassed and anxious now.' The last sentence contained at best an element of truth but read more like wishful thinking.

Carden responded stoutly enough to the signals urging him on by telling the Admiralty that he proposed to initiate an all-out attack, including a massive bombardment as well as minesweeping, by daylight on 17 March, weather permitting. He apparently remained confident that he could break through into the Sea of Marmara and requested fleet minesweepers (purpose-built or adapted naval vessels) to support his subsequent operations in the Marmara. Meanwhile he decided to use destroyers for the purpose temporarily, since more than a quarter of the trawlers had been sunk or knocked out. The Admiralty earmarked 30 more Suffolk trawlers
as an interim reinforcement and ordered torpedo-boats from Suez to join Carden's fleet as minesweepers. Two old battleships he had detached for operations off Smyrna were called back to join him, raising his force back to its maximum of 18 battleships (including the four French) by 16 March. Two more from the Channel Fleet were ordered to stand by for detachment to the Aegean as possible reinforcements, in anticipation of losses. Commander C. R. Samson, RN, the distinguished naval air pioneer, was ordered with a squadron of 14 new, land-based naval aeroplanes to the Aegean via Marseilles to solve the observation problem that had plagued the whole Dardanelles operation; he and his aircraft would sail with General Hamilton on the
Phaeton
(see below). All these positive developments would have been of rather greater benefit had they been decided earlier. Carden's renewed suggestion that troops should land in strength on the peninsula at the same time as he mounted his great attack was met with the instruction to confer with the general who was coming out to take command of a force that would amount to 60,000 by 18 March (Kitchener's vacillation had ensured that the 29th Division would not be present in time).

Sir Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton, General Officer Commanding Home Forces, was working in his room at Horse Guards, London, on 12 March 1915 when a messenger arrived with a summons to Kitchener's office. The general was 62 years old, tall, slender, elegant and erudite, not the most useful attributes for popularity in the officers' mess. He had nevertheless distinguished himself in one of the British Army's many inconclusive entanglements in Afghanistan in 1878 and rose to be Kitchener's chief of staff at the end of the Boer War in 1901. His photographs give an effete impression. He was regarded by his peers as both passive and over-confident.

‘We are sending a military force to support the fleet now at the Dardanelles, and you are to have command,' Kitchener told him, without preamble. In his
Gallipoli Diary
Hamilton drily noted: ‘At that moment Kitchener wished me to bow, leave the room and make a start … My knowledge of the Dardanelles was nil; of the Turk nil; of the strength of our own forces next to nil.' There had been no previous hint of the appointment. Kitchener looked up and barked, ‘Well?' A reticent man, Kitchener was reluctant and curt when Hamilton started asking questions, but then opened up and became almost garrulous. Hamilton was told that he would have under command ANZAC (General Birdwood), the 29th (Major-General Hunter-Weston) and RN (Major-General Paris) divisions and a French
division (
Général de division
d'Amade). Hamilton asked for four territorial divisions as well and was answered in the negative, with expletives. He also asked for submarines to stop the Turks supplying their forts by sea: a good idea but they were not in his chief's gift. He was told that his chief of staff would be Major-General W. P. Braithwaite.

When the latter joined other generals (who were as amazed as Hamilton by the appointments) in Kitchener's office, he asked for some of the latest army aircraft, to which Kitchener snapped: ‘Not one!' The army's role in the Aegean, the field marshal said, was to be a ‘second string', on the assumption that the navy would succeed: ‘But if the admiral fails, then we will have to go in.' There were to be no piecemeal operations: the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF) was to be used as a whole and only on the European side of the strait. It would have no reserves of manpower (the normal practice on the Western Front was an initial extra allowance of 10 per cent for the inevitable casualties). Kitchener believed that once the fleet broke through and threatened Constantinople, there would hardly be any need to land troops anyway. The French and the Russians could be left to get on with occupying the city while British imperial troops controlled the railways and strategic points to south and west while the fleet dominated the Marmara, so that the 29th and RN divisions could be sent to France. Kitchener was a one-man band, unable to delegate yet with no interest in organised staffwork. His ‘plans' for the MEF were vague to non-existent. At least Hamilton was able to dissuade him from tempting fate by naming the new command the Constantinople Expeditionary Force … The Secretary for War, indulging his penchant for oracular pronouncements, terminated the interview with the words: ‘If the fleet gets through, Constantinople will fall of itself and you will have won, not a battle but the war.'

Hamilton left London's Victoria station for Dover on a special train at five p.m. the next day. Churchill himself came to see him off. In his pack the general had a textbook on the Turkish Army dated 1912; a pre-war report on the Dardanelles defences from the late British naval mission; an out-of-date map; and two small guidebooks. He had no staff yet, apart from Braithwaite. Waiting at Dover was a destroyer with the unintentionally ironic name of HMS
Foresight
to take him to Calais. The port was, not inappropriately, fogbound for hours. Hamilton finally reached Calais at 10.30 p.m. and entrained for Marseilles, where the light cruiser
Phaeton
was waiting to take him on to the Aegean. He arrived at Tenedos, the small island between Lemnos and the Dardanelles used by the Allies as a forward base, at
three p.m. on 17 March. Earlier in the day the
Phaeton
had passed another British cruiser conveying Vice-Admiral Carden in the opposite direction, to Malta.

The two commanders never met. Vice-Admiral Carden had been in pain for some days, and on 16 March doctors advised him to give up the command and take sick leave as a matter of urgency. The symptoms were similar to those of duodenal ulcers, their presence hardly surprising after the unaccustomed strain on an administrator of protracted and unsuccessful command of a very large fighting force. The problem of the succession was quickly resolved. There were two rear-admirals on hand: the senior, Rosslyn Wemyss, was in command at Mudros, the main base for Dardanelles operations, and could not be spared from a complex task; John de Robeck was however the obvious choice because he had been Carden's deputy, knew the plans, understood the problems and was well known in the fleet. Wemyss gracefully stood back as de Robeck was promoted over his head to acting vice-admiral on 17 March and ordered to take over, with Wemyss as his deputy, though remaining in charge of the vital task to expand the Mudros base as swiftly as possible. De Robeck was asked by the Admiralty if he approved of Carden's plan and was expressly given the choice to reject or amend it. He replied that it would go ahead unaltered and as intended on 18 March if the weather was suitable.

John Michael de Robeck was a scion of the Anglo-Irish nobility who joined the navy as an officer cadet at the usual age of 13 in 1875. A rear-admiral since 1911, he had begun the war as flag officer of the Cape Verde and Canary Islands station before his assignment as Carden's deputy in January 1915. Unlike his predecessor he was an imposing figure, tall and broad, popular with both superiors and inferiors and noted for his charm and resolve. He was younger than Hamilton. Keyes stayed on as chief of staff, a happier man now that a rather more convincing commander was in charge.

Vice-Admiral de Robeck implemented the reorganisation of the fleet prepared by Carden. The 18 battleships were once again in three divisions, but the second and third were enlarged. The First consisted as before of the four strongest ships,
Queen Elizabeth
(fleet flag) and
Inflexible
, the two dreadnoughts, in the first subdivision, and
Agamemnon
and
Lord Nelson
in the second. The Second Division now included eight older British battle-
ships in three subdivisions of four, two and two, led by Captain Hayes-Sadler in HMS
Ocean.
The Third Division was led by Rear-Admiral Émile Paul Aimable Guépratte in
Suffren
(flag), and the three other French ships in the sixth subdivision, supported by two further British battleships in the seventh, placed under his flag. Carden's plan called for the attack to be opened by the First Division in Line A, starting some 14,000 yards from the Narrows forts, while Line B was formed by the French quartet. The seventh subdivision pair moved to flanking positions to cover both lines as they took it in turn to bombard the forts, the French advancing through the British line to fire at closer range from the limit of the swept area, so from about 8,000 yards. The minesweepers were ordered to start work under the big guns at the same time, after the first two hours of bombardment. The Second Division's third and fourth subdivisions plus the two flanking ships would relieve the French for the closest shelling. Picket boats were to dance attendance on the battleships, always on the lookout for floating mines. Planes would take off every hour to observe the fall of shot: their wireless sets could transmit but not receive. Troops from the RN Division were loaded on to seven transports to give the appearance of an imminent landing at the northern end of the Aegean coast of the peninsula. This feint was meant to draw enemy troops away from the scene of the attack.

The ships were to fire at six main forts which between them housed 42 guns of eight-inch or greater calibres, including six 14-inch. There was an unknown but doubtless profuse number of mobile batteries of howitzers and field guns on either side of the strait. All this and more was set out at a captains' conference chaired by de Robeck aboard his flagship,
Queen Elizabeth
, on the afternoon of 16 March. That night and the next, minesweepers swept the previously cleared area and found nothing new. Since Erenkeui Bay, a feature on the Asian side which offered extra sea-room for manoeuvre and turning, lay south of the innermost limit of sweeping it was not searched thoroughly. As far as the trawlermen were concerned, there were no mines in the Dardanelles before the notional 8,000-yard line chosen for the second stage of the bombardment.

General Hamilton managed to put together a staff of nine from army and marine officers on the 17th, when he was also conveyed to what he called ‘that lovely sea monster, the
Queen Elizabeth
', anchored off Tenedos, for a meeting in the afternoon with de Robeck, Wemyss, Keyes, Guépratte, d'Amade, Braithwaite and an army staff captain, all of whom were junior in rank to the general. Hamilton thought de Robeck ‘a fine-looking man
with great charm', whose main worry was the concealed and mobile artillery which had frustrated the minesweepers. Other pressing concerns were the minefields themselves, and the anticipated arrival of German or Austrian submarines, whose potential had been so vividly illustrated by Norman Holbrook, VC, in
B11
. Although no notable activity had been seen ashore since the small-scale marine landings against the guns, it was quite clear that the Turks were working very hard on the defences during darkness: the results were plain to see each morning. Seaplanes were still having difficulty rising above extreme rifle range (800–1,000 yards): ‘actually the d****d things can barely rise off the water'.

Hamilton went on to write in his diary:

[De Robeck] gave us … to understand that German thoroughness and forethought have gripped the old go-as-you-please Turk and are making him march to the
Parade-Schritt
[Prussian goose-step] …

The admiral would prefer to force a passage on his own, and is sure he can do so … He has no wish to call us [troops] in until he has had a real good try.

Ironically, this of course reflected precisely Kitchener's assessment thus far of the role of the army at the Dardanelles. De Robeck asked to see Hamilton's orders. When Braithwaite, the army chief of staff, read out Kitchener's instructions to Hamilton with their vague generalisations and reservations, an astonished Commodore Keyes blurted: ‘Is that all?' Hamilton admitted he had no means yet of landing a significant force – no transports, no lorries, no pack-horses, no mules. It would take weeks to assemble them. ‘Here, the peninsula looks a tougher nut to crack than it did on Lord Kitchener's small and featureless map.' Keyes wrote that the recital of Kitchener's orders ‘acted on us rather like a cold douche'.