The Dandarnelles Disaster (26 page)

By the second week of May 1915 the army had incurred nearly 20,000 casualties at Gallipoli, the equivalent of an entire division and more. Hamilton wanted reinforcements and extra ammunition. De Robeck cautiously signalled the Admiralty that he was contemplating another major naval effort. But he was about to lose a squadron of four old battleships to counter the Austrians in the Adriatic. Churchill and Fisher on 11 May discussed a limited operation to clear a new section of the Dardanelles minefield and provoke the defence into wasting its ammunition. Fisher suspected Churchill still wanted to rush the strait and opposed any major naval initiative. The result was a compromise: de Robeck was ordered on 13 May to seek express permission from London before undertaking any new operation. The night before the final abandonment of a leading role for the navy at the Dardanelles, the old battleship
Goliath
was sunk in a fog by a Turkish torpedo-boat with a largely German crew. Some 570 sailors drowned in the kind of tragedy Fisher was most concerned to avoid: the loss of an entire trained crew. This was a reminder of the vulnerability of battleships to torpedoes, whether fired by surface vessels or U-boats: they struck the hull below the heavy belt of armour round a ship's vitals, the same lightly protected area beneath which mines detonated. The Allies were aware that U-boats were on their way or already in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. On land the British Army suffered more losses in abortive attacks on the Western Front – and a new crisis was developing over the acute shortage of shells (and high proportion of duds), which now became a major scandal prompting more attacks on the ‘bunglers in high places'.

At this bleak juncture Fisher, shocked by the
Goliath
catastrophe, announced the withdrawal from the Aegean of the
Queen Elizabeth
, to be replaced by two more old battleships plus two of the new monitors, each equipped with 14-inch guns. Kitchener went to the Admiralty on the 12th and objected to the recall of the super-dreadnought, describing it as a desertion. Fisher exploded: he threatened to walk out of the Admiralty never to return unless the ship left for home and the North Sea that very night. Churchill consented, without enthusiasm, and that evening de Robeck ordered her out of the Aegean in response to the Admiralty's telegram. It was a purely operational decision, and Fisher had every right to make it, and indeed to expect the First Lord's unconditional consent, if not approval.

Two evenings later, Churchill paid a brief visit to Fisher's office before dinner. As the two men normally got on very well, it was an amiable
half-hour's conversation on routine questions of supply and replacements in the Aegean. As usual the admiral went to bed early. When he returned to his office at about dawn on 15 May, there were no fewer than four notes from Churchill, containing decisions on operational matters. He wanted to send two of the latest submarines to the Aegean, then two big 15-inch howitzers, extra 9.2-inch guns and more monitors. This was too much for the First Sea Lord, who had gone to bed thinking everything had been settled, only to find, as so often, that one could never be sure when it came to Churchill and the Dardanelles. For the ninth time Fisher announced his resignation, and this time he was going to make it stick. He told the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, of his intention; the Chancellor told Asquith, who immediately sent a note to the admiral, ordering him in the King's name to stay in place. Fisher went to see him and said he would not be dissuaded. Churchill himself could not talk him out of it this time. In a note on the 16th even more excitable than usual, littered with capital letters and underlinings and exclamations, Fisher accused his chief of still being intent on driving the fleet through the Dardanelles: ‘I know you so well …
You will remain.
I SHALL GO. It is better so.' He stayed in his official apartments at Admiralty Arch, determined this time to keep out of reach of Churchill's overwhelming persuasiveness and planning to get away to his friend the Duke of Hamilton's estate in Scotland.

The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, Grey, urged him to sit tight and say nothing. The shell crisis was about to bring down the Liberal government and Asquith felt obliged to form a coalition Cabinet with the Conservatives in order to stay in power. Could this mean that Churchill would not be in the new administration, or at least not at the Admiralty? Fisher seemed to weaken: he might stay on, he indicated, if neither Churchill nor Balfour, whom he disliked intensely, became First Lord. Meanwhile Churchill on 17 May chose the excessively malleable Admiral of the Fleet Sir Arthur Wilson to replace Fisher, a choice which appalled Jellicoe, the Grand Fleet commander, who described Churchill as a ‘danger to the empire' (Wilson accepted the offer but changed his mind on the 19th). Later on the 17th, Room 40 discovered that the High Seas Fleet was about to deploy in the North Sea arena. Fisher was told but still refused to return to duty, believing that the Germans were not about to make a major foray (in fact some battlecruisers came out, but only as distant cover for a large mine-laying operation near the Dogger Bank; the Grand Fleet came out too, but the Germans very soon turned for home). The Second Sea Lord,
Admiral Sir Frederick Hamilton, stood in at the operations room. The King, the Prime Minister and his government and the Admiralty classed Fisher's absence as desertion because his resignation had not yet been accepted. Some spluttered that he should be taken out and shot; but they all still wanted him to stay.

The news of the resignation leaked into the public domain on 18 May, and the entire national press urged him to remain: he should be made First Lord himself, on the model of Kitchener and the War Office. Most admirals wanted him to stay as the only man who could at least stand up to Churchill, if not restrain his wilder ideas
.
Buoyed up by the great breadth and depth of sympathy and support for him, Fisher finally overreached himself, setting out six imperious conditions for staying on in a long memorandum to Asquith on 19 May. No Churchill, no Balfour, no Wilson; the new First Lord to be kept out of operational matters, which must be wholly reserved to Fisher, along with appointments, dockyards and establishments; disband the RN Division, bring the two ‘Nelsons' back from the Aegean; more mines, more aircraft …

Asquith simply concluded that the old admiral was out of his mind, at least temporarily, but still refused to accept his resignation. He let Fisher know through an intermediary on 22 May that Churchill would not be First Lord in the new Cabinet. Sympathisers including Hankey advised the admiral to go away on leave before he completely destroyed himself. Asquith let him go to Scotland, even though he had still not accepted the admiral's resignation. But when Arthur Balfour was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty that very day, everybody in the know recognised that this would be the last straw for Fisher, who would never work under the Tory veteran. Asquith therefore finally accepted his resignation later on 22 May. It was a sad and embarrassing ending to the glorious career of the Royal Navy's greatest modern leader.

Winston Churchill was informed on 17 May of Asquith's plan to form a coalition government, preferably without him. The Conservatives expressly wanted the turncoat Churchill excluded from the Admiralty, especially if Fisher was not going to be there as a restraining influence. The King favoured the appointment of Balfour. Churchill held out for the War Office if he could not keep the Admiralty; he tried to persuade Fisher to stay on with a seat in the Cabinet if he could only stay on at the head of the navy, behaving as if he and not Asquith were forming a government. Fisher, still avoiding a direct encounter with his old chief, said no three times: he was not coming back in any capacity unless his arrogant conditions were
accepted (which he must have known could not happen; indeed it is possible that he produced them as a way of burning his boats, to ensure that his resignation was accepted). On 21 May Churchill conceded defeat and recognised that Asquith would not reappoint him. Retaining his dignity, he condescended to accept the post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a Cabinet sinecure. The press and the admirals were openly delighted with the fall of the pushy young minister: only the
Observer
predicted that he would be back, that ‘his hour of triumph will come'.

Admiral Sir Henry Jackson, aged 60, was appointed First Sea Lord.

CHAPTER 9

The Gallipoli Campaign

Hamilton, on his arrival in the Aegean, was contemplating a landing on the western side of the neck of the Gallipoli peninsula, at the Bulair line. As the
Phaeton
conveyed him along the coast of the peninsula and up the Gulf of Xeros towards Bulair at its neck, he could not fail to notice that every part of a generally difficult coastline where the ground was even remotely suitable for a landing had already been fortified, at least by trenches and barbed wire. He soon concluded that Kitchener's theory of a landing at Bulair, forcing the Turks to evacuate the peninsula and retire towards Constantinople, was baseless: their infantry and artillery were being supplied by sea on the Marmara side. If the peninsula is viewed as a pistol pointing at Constantinople, Suvla on the Aegean coast is the point at which the stock turns into the handle. Below Bulair and above Suvla Point there was almost nowhere suitable for a large-scale landing; below it there were several beaches open enough for invasion, particularly at the end of the ‘butt' from Tekke Burnu round Cape Helles to Morto Bay on the strait side.

Apart from the two battalions of Royal Marines and the 3rd Australian Brigade, already camping out at Mudros, Hamilton decided that all troops were to assemble at Alexandria (the French at Port Said), where their supply ships would be emptied and refilled or, in modern parlance, ‘combat-loaded', so that their contents were stored in the correct order – last in, first out – for supporting an opposed landing by troops. This was a logistical and logical principle new to the Admiralty's Director of Transport, Graeme Thomson, a civilian shipping expert appointed by Churchill against the advice of his admirals and the Secretary to the Admiralty, Sir Graham Greene. The Aegean Squadron also had to prepare for its new role of supporting operations on land, all of which meant that the enemy had several more weeks to get ready and that there was no possibility of strategic, and not much of tactical, surprise.

As Turkish Minister of War and commander-in-chief, Enver Pasha expected the Allied fleet to return as soon after 18 March as the weather
allowed. So did the inspector-general of the army, Otto Liman von Sanders. Soon after the withdrawal of the enemy ships on the 18th Enver asked Liman to his office and appointed him commander of the forces defending the Dardanelles – the Turkish Fifth Army. The two men had been at serious odds over Enver's dispositions, which had placed penny-packets of troops on each side of the strait under separate European and Asian commands. Until February there had been only one infantry division in the vicinity, divided into small detachments based at Bulair, Gaba Tepe on the Aegean coast south of Suvla, Maidos (now Eçeabat) opposite Chanak at the Narrows, Cape Helles at the southern tip of the peninsula and at Kum Kale, facing Helles on the Asian shore. On 19 February a second division arrived, so that there could now be one division on each side of the strait. If the Allies were indeed coming ashore, it was highly likely that they would land simultaneously on both sides. Liman had been arguing for drawing a line
across
the waterway rather than along it, with an integrated single command for the whole area under threat of invasion, and the autocratic Enver wanted to get rid of him. But the situation had become much more urgent in the light of the great bombardment and the apparent likelihood of its renewal. Given the command, Liman determined to do it his way and was given the go-ahead on 24 March. The German general immediately requested and was granted extra divisions, raising his total to six, and departed by sea on 25 March to the little town of Gallipoli (now Gelibolu) that gave its name to the peninsula. On the same day, as it happened, General Hamilton left for Alexandria to supervise his army's preparations.

Liman set up his headquarters in the abandoned French vice-consulate on the 26th. Like Hamilton, he had arrived in post in a rush and without a staff, but this was soon remedied: he had plenty of German officers already stationed in Turkey to choose from, although he relied in the main on Turkish staff officers, with a German artillery commander. He was also receiving detailed intelligence about enemy preparations at Mudros on Lemnos, at Tenedos island, just off the Asian side of the Dardanelles, and in Egypt. The general's dispositions were straightforward. Discounting a landing from inside the strait, he placed two divisions (the 11th and 3rd) to the south-west on the Asian shore where landing conditions were good; two – the 5th and 7th – at the north-eastern end of the peninsula near Bulair (Liman believed for a dangerously long time that this must be the main target); one, the 9th, to the south-west, covering Cape Helles, and one inland in the south under his direct command as a mobile reserve, ready to move to the most threatened area when the main thrust of the enemy attack
became clear. The head of this under-strength, newly formed reserve division, the 19th, was a certain Lieutenant-Colonel (later Lieutenant-General, finally Marshal) Mustafa Kemal. Divisional commanders, usually holding the rank of full colonel, were warned to be ready to move units to specially threatened areas: the chosen strategy was forward but not fixed defence with a mobile reserve, although as many as five lines of trenches had been dug, Western Front-style, complete with sandbags and wire, at the most likely landing areas. Apart from a small handful of aircraft based at Chanak, the defenders had no aeroplanes or seaplanes. By the beginning of April, Liman had some 60,000 infantry under command, plus about 25,000 support troops, including artillerymen. Cavalry was of no use on the peninsula's tortuous terrain.