The Dandarnelles Disaster (32 page)

The first serious bombardment of the outer forts took place on 19 February 1915. Carden said in evidence that ‘the result of the day's action … showed apparently that the effect of long-range bombardment by direct fire on modern earthwork forts is slight'. Guns that seemed to have taken hits opened fire when the ships came within range. The demolition parties had found that some 70 per cent of the targeted guns were still in working order when they landed, even though the forts were in a terrible state. Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, a gunnery specialist and flag officer of the Dover Patrol, told the Commission that ‘if they actually destroyed 30 per cent in the short time they did very well'. Even this modest and conjectural figure was too high.

Around the time of the first major bombardment Kitchener underwent a change of heart. He told the War Council on 24 February that if the navy did not get through unaided, ‘the army ought to see the business through'. He recognised that Britain's prestige would be badly damaged in the East after all by a withdrawal that would be seen as a failure. Churchill told the same meeting that he was not contemplating a land attack, but the naval one might be held up by mines, making a ‘local military operation' necessary. The Admiralty had prepared to start moving the 29th Division to the Aegean on 22 February, but on the 20th Kitchener said it would not be leaving, provoking a row with Churchill, who all but begged for its release and warned that it would not be his fault if a disaster resulted from the lack of sufficient troops. Was this a disguised acknowledgement that a purely naval assault was not going to be a pushover after all? But the War Council, as usual, took Kitchener's side on 26 February; yet he told General Birdwood that very evening to consult with the navy as to how best the ANZAC and RN divisions and Royal Marines might be used if needed. Clearly at this confused juncture the viability of a solely naval assault was generally in doubt and the deployment of as many as three divisions of troops, some 50,000 men, was regarded as an option, though not yet decided. On 5 and 6 March Birdwood told Kitchener at some length that he did not believe the navy could break through on its own; these messages and better news from Russia and the Western Front prompted Kitchener to announce on 10 March that he would release the 29th to the Aegean after all. The
Commission agreed with Churchill that his long delay had been a major contribution to the failure of the entire enterprise.

We may note that three valuable weeks had indeed been thrown away, and the troopships could not start to leave until 16 March. Had they left on 22 February they might have been on hand for the navy's ‘big push' on 18 March; but surely not ready for an invasion, because their supply ships would still have been wrongly loaded and a regrouping in Egypt would have been no less necessary. This suggests the army could have been ready at the earliest on about 24 March rather than the actual date of 14 April. No doubt the fleet could have waited a mere extra week until the troops were ready; but
there is no indication that de Robeck and Hamilton would therefore have changed their strategy in favour of a combined operation
– simultaneous and co-ordinated attacks by navy and army – or that their chiefs in London, Kitchener and Churchill, would have done so either. The interval between the rebuff to the navy and the ensuing army attack might well have been much shorter, but Kitchener's long-standing view preceded and outlasted his vacillations over the 29th Division:
only
if the fleet could not do it alone would the army come to its aid. In that way he was entirely consistent. So was his insistence that he would not let the 29th go until general war conditions permitted. Perhaps he was over-cautious, as the Commission concluded; but it was Churchill who lost patience and went ahead without him. By drifting along with this piecemeal approach the British government allowed the bold Churchillian strategy of a flank attack on the Central Powers via Turkey to fall between the two stools of early withdrawal after a naval demonstration and a full-scale combined assault. This was an unwise course anyway, but especially when the defence was in the hands of the disciples of Clausewitz. After all, the advice of that great evangelist of Prussian militarism was to ‘Pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination'.

The hurried dispatch of General Hamilton and his orders from Kitchener dated 13 March 1915 did not portend a change of strategy. His orders were vague. The army would go in only if the fleet attack failed; it would go in
en bloc
; there could be no question of abandoning the project after that; yet minor military operations ashore were not excluded. Hamilton fairly emphasised to the Commission that no plan of operations had been drawn up and he had left for the Aegean without information or arrangements for a water supply or staff preparation. Only on 19 March, the day after the navy
failed, did Kitchener expressly order him to capture the Gallipoli peninsula. Just before his illness forced the handover to de Robeck, Admiral Carden had signalled that he expected a major army landing immediately after he had broken through the strait. He would confer with Hamilton on his arrival. De Robeck testified that he took over Carden's plan, did not alter it and decided to carry it out as ordered: he would have preferred a combined operation but he understood he was under orders to force the strait with the fleet regardless, so he tried to do so. In effect the problem of supply, assuming he overcame the minefields and got through to Constantinople, was discounted because it was assumed that the Turks would surrender under the guns of the Royal Navy. ‘That was what we were always given to understand.' But if that had not occurred, ‘we should have had to come down again. Yes, like Admiral Duckworth …' To the causes of the Dardanelles disaster we can therefore add to Asquith's indecisiveness, Kitchener's vacillation and Churchill's over-optimism a general underestimation of the enemy.

Having caused so much delay himself, Kitchener chided Hamilton on 23 March, the day de Robeck advised that the army should be called in for a combined operation, for saying that the troops would not be ready to land until 14 April: ‘I regard any such postponement as far too long. I should like to know how soon you could act on shore.' Until de Robeck's recommendation, the consensus at the Admiralty and the War Council was that the fleet should carry on despite the losses of 18 March. De Robeck agreed until he changed his mind after meeting Hamilton on 22 March, so advising London the next day; from then on Churchill alone wanted to press on without the army, whereas Fisher, Wilson and Jackson disagreed, believing that they should heed the advice of the commanders on the spot. ‘I bowed to their decision,' said Churchill, ‘but with regret and anxiety.'

The Commission looked for crumbs of comfort amid the ruination of British hopes at the Dardanelles. The Russians had asked for a diversion, and they had achieved considerable success in that respect. There had been no victory to seduce the Balkan neutrals, but Bulgaria's adhesion to the Central Powers had been delayed for months. And the Turks had been made to keep 300,000 troops for several months on the Gallipoli peninsula who might otherwise have been deployed elsewhere against the Allies, including Russia. Enver Pasha said that if the fleet had pressed ahead despite its losses on 18 March, it might well have got through; as it was he had six whole weeks to deploy 200 new artillery pieces from Austria-Hungary in the peninsula. But the Commission, not unreasonably, took the
view that after three battleships had been sunk and three or four knocked out on a single day, with the minefields uncleared further attempts would have been attended by further serious losses; if the fleet had managed to force a passage in this way, there would not have been much of it left with which to threaten Constantinople.

In the overall conclusions of its first and principal report the Dardanelles Commission focuses on our main concerns, the decision to mount a solely naval attack on the Dardanelles, its preparation and execution (the final report concentrates on the ensuing land campaign at Gallipoli). The main points include the following:

•  The War Council was wrong in uncritically accepting Kitchener's statements that no troops were available for a combined operation without investigating them. Had this been done it would have emerged that there were enough troops in the region after all, and that they would have been ready rather sooner.

•  Churchill overstated the degree of enthusiasm shown by his expert advisers. These were not asked for their views by the War Council, nor did they proffer any, which was wrong. Churchill, Asquith and the other politicians should have insisted that they speak and give their views to the full Council.

•  The potential reward of a successful, surprise combined attack at the Dardanelles was so great that it was a major mistake to throw it away by staging a purely naval assault, which could not possibly have succeeded on its own.

•  Once the decision to prepare an attack was taken on 16 February and troops were gathered in the region, it was clear to all the world that abandonment of the project must entail serious damage to British prestige. There could be no compromise between withdrawal after an unsuccessful naval probe and a full-blown combined assault.

•  Churchill was not informed of Kitchener's decision on 20 February not to send the 29th Division after all, resulting in the loss of three weeks and much damage to the prospects of the eventual invasion.

•  The decision to abandon the purely naval assault after 18 March was inevitable.

•  The fact that the War Council did not meet between 19 March and 14 May, despite the invasion on 25 April, was ‘a serious omission': it should have met to reconsider the entire project. The Prime Minister, or failing
him the other politicians on the Council, should have pressed for a meeting.

•  Kitchener failed to make use of the General Staff, rendering his workload impossible and causing confusion and inefficiency.

•  Fisher was wrong to believe that he should remain silent at War Council meetings or resign, if he did not agree with his chief. Such a principle would if adopted cause damage to the public service.

•  Some advantage was gained from the overall failure at the Dardanelles, mainly in tying down so many Turkish divisions; but whether this was worth the ‘loss of life and treasure involved is, and must always remain, a matter of opinion'.

Casualty figures for the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns vary. The latter accounted for the lion's share. The official Turkish figures give, in round figures, 87,000 dead and 165,000 wounded. Some authorities round up the Turkish casualty total to 300,000. The Allied figures give 46,000 killed by all causes, including disease, drowning and accidents, and some 220,000 wounded or otherwise incapacitated. Roughly speaking we can probably agree on over a quarter of a million casualties on each side, half a million in all. This is a fraction of the butcher's bill on the Western Front; but it is no less horrifying, considering the small area involved and the numbers of men who fought on and over that appalling battlefield – and why.

CHAPTER 11

What Became of Them

Among the principal personalities involved in the Dardanelles campaign two figures stand out, one from each side: Winston Churchill, the initiator and greatest of all political survivors, and Mustafa Kemal, who became known as Atatürk, the father of his country. But in reviewing the fates of leading participants, including the Ottoman Empire itself, and other powers and personalities involved in the events of 1914–15 in the Aegean Sea and the Dardanelles, it seems appropriate to start with the two Germans and the two Turks who initiated those events: Ambassador Wangenheim and Admiral Souchon; War Minister Enver Pasha and Interior Minister Talaat Bey.

Hans Baron von Wangenheim, the larger-than-life diplomat who did not hesitate to use a mailed fist in negotiation but brought off the Turco-German secret pact in 1914 with aplomb, lived long enough to see the Allies rebuffed at the Dardanelles and held in check in the subsequent Gallipoli campaign. But he died on 25 October 1915, reportedly of overwork which probably exacerbated cardiovascular symptoms, before the Allied divisions withdrew. He was only 56 and had just returned from sick leave. To his credit, in July 1915 he delivered an official protest against the indiscriminate massacres of Armenians by the Turks, a genocidal crime which remains officially unacknowledged in Turkey nearly a century later. While expressing German sympathy for Turkish internal security concerns, he warned of the dangers likely to arise from ‘these rigorous measures' involving indiscriminate expatriation accompanied by ‘acts of violence, such as massacre and pillage'. General Liman von Sanders also protested.

Wilhelm Anton Theodor Souchon, flag officer of the Imperial German Navy's Mediterranean Division in 1914 and subsequently commander-inchief of the Ottoman fleet, was promoted to vice-admiral in the Imperial Navy in 1915 and was awarded the highest decoration in the Kaiser's gift, the Order
Pour le mérite,
in 1916. He managed to gain and retain maritime
supremacy in the Black Sea for Turkey, despite a series of increasingly desperate encounters with the Russian Black Sea fleet in which the
Goeben
and
Breslau
were often damaged, sometimes seriously, and despite the appearance of two new, locally built and heavily armed Russian dreadnought battleships in 1915: fortunately for Souchon they were a touch slower than the
Goeben.
In September 1917 he was recalled to Germany to take command of the Fourth Squadron of battleships in the High Seas Fleet. In August 1918 he was promoted full admiral and appointed the Kaiser's principal naval adviser, by then a sinecure. He retired from the truncated Reichsmarine in March 1919 and died in Bremen at the age of 81, having seen his country's second defeat in a generation, in January 1946.

The word ‘feisty' could have been coined for Enver Pasha, the restless revolutionary who took it upon himself to conclude the fateful treaty with Wangenheim. Enver had no compunction about squeezing the Germans financially during the First World War. ‘What have they done for us which compares with what we have done for them?' he would ask rhetorically. Turkey (with not inconsiderable help from the Germans) had defeated the British fleet and seen off the Allied armies from Gallipoli, had tied down large numbers of Russian troops in the Caucasus and British imperial troops in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Palestine, all of whom would otherwise have been deployed against the Central Powers. They even scored a few early victories against uninspired British generals, especially in Mesopotamia. But, although the Russians fared badly against the Turks in the last weeks of 1914, prompting the plea from Grand Duke Nicholas to Britain on 2 January 1915 for a demonstration against them, the situation was transformed by a Russian victory as early as 4 January, at the Battle of Sarikamish in Armenia. There Enver, having snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with an ill-judged divisional manoeuvre in the snow, narrowly escaped capture as 70,000 Turks froze to death. But the closure of the Dardanelles had undeniably crippled the Russian war effort and economy alike, increasing enormously the internal pressures that led to revolution in 1917 and military defeat in 1918. Churchill agreed with Ludendorff of the German General Staff that Turkey's intervention in the war had lengthened it by two years, or almost 100 per cent. Without it, Russia would surely have emerged on the winning side, perhaps with the Tsar still on his throne.