A Peace to End all Peace (18 page)

I

London was dealing quickly with the political consequences of the impending victory at the Dardanelles but, at the scene of battle, the fleet moved slowly. The weather kept the warships from bringing their full fire power to bear. As the days went by, the Turkish troops along the shore began to regain their confidence, and learned to harass the British minesweepers by firing on them with howitzers and small mobile guns. On 13 March Churchill received a cable from Carden saying that minesweeping was not proceeding satisfactorily due to what Carden claimed was heavy Turkish fire, although no British casualties had been suffered. This, noted Churchill, “makes me squirm” “I do not understand why minesweeping should be interfered with by fire which causes no casualties. Two or three hundred casualties would be a small price to pay for sweeping up as far as the Narrows.”
¹

Part of the problem—and it was one of the defects in Admiral Carden’s original plan—was that the minesweepers were manned by civilian employees, who were not willing to operate under fire; but the major problem was that Admiral Carden was losing his nerve. Churchill had cabled him on 13 March reporting that “we have information that the Turkish Forts are short of ammunition and that the German officers have made desponding reports,”
²
to which Carden replied that he would launch the main attack into the straits and wage the battle for the crucial Narrows on or about 17 March, depending on the weather; but the admiral worried, and could neither eat nor sleep. He had lost no ships and reported that he had suffered no casualties, but the strain of anxiety proved too much for him and suddenly his nerves broke.

On the eve of the main battle for the straits, Admiral Carden told his seconds-in-command that he could no longer go on. He summoned a fleet physician, who examined him and certified that he was suffering from indigestion and that he should be placed on the sick list for three or four weeks. On 16 March Carden cabled Churchill “Much regret obliged to go on the sick list. Decision of Medical Officer follows.”
³

Churchill promptly appointed John de Robeck, the second-in-command, to take his place. De Robeck, according to his cabled report to the Admiralty, then commenced the main attack at 10:45 on the morning of 18 March.

The day began to go badly when a French battleship mysteriously exploded and disappeared just before 2:00 in the afternoon. Two hours later two British battleships struck mines. A vessel sent to rescue one of them, the
Irresistible
, also struck a mine; and it and the
Irresistible
both sank. Then a French warship damaged by gunfire was beached. De Robeck reported to the Admiralty, however, that the rest of his ships would be ready to recommence action in three or four days. At the Admiralty in London, there was elation, for Naval Intelligence had discovered that when the action recommenced, the enemy would collapse. On the afternoon of 19 March, Captain William Reginald Hall, the Director of Naval Intelligence, brought Churchill and Fisher an intercepted, decoded message from the German Kaiser; they grasped its significance immediately. Churchill cried out in excitement that “they’ve come to the end of their ammunition,” as indeed they had. Fisher waved the message over his head and shouted, “By God, I’ll go through tomorrow” and then repeated “Tomorrow! We shall probably lose six ships, but I’m going through.”
⁴
Churchill and Fisher did not tell the Cabinet, for fear of compromising their intelligence sources, nor did they tell de Robeck; they merely cabled him that it was important not to give the impression that operations were suspended.

Unknown to Churchill and Fisher, at Maurice Hankey’s suggestion, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Captain Hall, had initiated negotiations with Talaat Bey, the young Turk leader, aimed at inducing the Ottoman Empire to leave the war in return for a large payment of money. The British and Turkish negotiators met at a seaport in European Turkey on 15 March.
⁵
The negotiations failed because the British government felt unable to give assurances that the Ottoman Empire could retain Constantinople—so deeply were the British now committed to satisfying Russia’s ambitions. Captain Hall had not yet learned of the collapse of the negotiations when, on the night of 19 March, he told Churchill of the plan to offer four million pounds to Turkey if she would leave the war. Churchill was aghast and Fisher was furious. At their insistence, Hall cabled his emissaries to withdraw the offer. Hall later recalled that Fisher started up from his chair and shouted “Four million? No, no. I tell you I’m going through tomorrow.”
⁶

II

All that stood between the British-led Allied fleet and Constantinople were a few submerged mines, and Ottoman supplies of these were so depleted that the Turks were driven to catch and re-use the mines that the Russians were using against them.

Morale in Constantinople disintegrated. Amidst rumors and panic, the evacuation of the city commenced. The state archives and the gold reserves of the banks were sent to safety. Special trains were prepared for the Sultan and for the foreign diplomatic colony. The well-to-do sent wives and families ahead to the interior of the country. Talaat, the Minister of the Interior, requisitioned a powerful Mercedes for his personal use, and equipped it with extra petrol tanks for the long drive to a distant place of refuge. Placards denouncing the government began to appear in the streets of the city. The Greek and Armenian communities were expected by the authorities to welcome the Allies, but now the police began to arrest suspects within the Turkish-speaking community as well.

Meanwhile those members of the Enver-Talaat faction who had supported it to the bitter end gathered up petrol and prepared to burn down the city when the Allies arrived, and wired St Sophia and the other great monuments with dynamite. The
Goeben
made ready to escape into the Black Sea.

Enver bravely planned to remain and defend the city, but his military dispositions were so incompetent that—as Liman von Sanders later recalled—any Turkish attempt at opposing an Allied landing in Constantinople had been rendered impossible.

III

London rejoiced and Constantinople despaired, but in the straits of the Dardanelles, the mood of the British command was bleak. The casualties and losses from mines on 18 March had left Admiral de Robeck despondent. He feared for his career. According to one report, when evening came on the 18th and de Robeck surveyed the results of the day’s battle, he said “I suppose I am done for.”
⁷

De Robeck was unnerved because he did not know what had caused his losses. In fact his ships had run into a single line of mines running parallel to the shore rather than across the straits. They had been placed there the night before and had escaped notice by British aerial observers. It was a one-time fluke.

Fate now appeared in the charming person of General Sir Ian Hamilton, whom Kitchener had sent out in advance of the forthcoming troops. Hamilton was to be their commander, with orders to let the navy win the campaign and then to disembark and take possession of the shore. If the navy failed to win through on its own, Hamilton’s alternative orders were to invade the European shore of the straits, capture the Narrows, and let the navy through.

Once Admiral de Robeck realized that he had an alternative to going back into battle—that in London it was regarded as acceptable for him to turn over the responsibility to Hamilton and the army if he chose to do so—he saw no reason to run further risks. Whoever said it first, de Robeck and Hamilton agreed that the navy should wait until the army could come into action. Hamilton had already cabled his views to Kitchener, who on 18 March showed the cable to the Prime Minister; the cable persuaded Asquith that “The Admiralty have been over-sanguine as to what they cd. do by ships alone.”
⁸
De Robeck cabled Churchill, after meeting with Ian Hamilton on 22 March, that “having met General Hamilton…and heard his proposals I now consider” that the army has to enter the campaign.
⁹

On the morning of 23 March the War Group met at the Admiralty to discuss de Robeck’s decision. Winston Churchill was appalled and shocked, but the First Sea Lord, Admiral Fisher, took the view that the decision of the man on the spot had to be accepted, like it or not, and in this view he was supported by Admiral of the Fleet Sir Arthur Wilson and Admiral Sir Henry Jackson. Churchill violently disagreed, and took the matter to the Cabinet when the War Group meeting ended. He had drafted a strong cable to de Robeck which he brought along for the Cabinet’s approval, and which in no uncertain terms ordered the admiral to renew the attack. At the Cabinet meeting Churchill received support from both the Prime Minister and from Kitchener, who drafted appropriately strong cables to Sir Ian Hamilton.

Returning to the Admiralty that afternoon, Churchill found that Fisher, Wilson, and Jackson remained adamantly opposed to his sending the cabled order to de Robeck. As a civilian minister attempting to overrule the First Sea Lord and his fellow admirals on a naval matter, Churchill felt obliged to return to Asquith and ask for the Prime Minister’s consent. Asquith, however, refused to give it. His personal view was that the attack should be resumed, but he would not order it over the opposition of the Sea Lords at the Admiralty.

Knowing as he did that the ammunition crisis in Turkey meant that the road to Constantinople was open, Churchill fought back against the decision to let the navy abandon the campaign. Since he could not give de Robeck orders to resume the attack, he attempted to get him to do it through persuasion. He sent cables in which he attempted to reason with the admiral and to show him why a resumption of the naval attack was important. He spoke again with the Prime Minister who expressed his “hope” that the attack would resume soon.
¹⁰
It was to no avail. Only a few hundred casualties had been suffered, but the Admiralty’s Dardanelles campaign was over.

IV

After the battle of 18 March—the battle that so alarmed de Robeck that he decided to turn his ships around and steam away—the Ottoman commanders concluded that their cause was lost. While Admiral de Robeck, aboard ship, was giving his orders to give up the fight, on shore the Turkish defending forces, unaware of de Robeck’s decision, received orders to fire their remaining rounds of ammunition and then to abandon their coastal positions. If Admiral de Robeck, who had led his fleet in battle for only one day, had plunged back into battle for a second day he would have seen the enemy forces withdraw and melt away. In a few hours his minesweepers, working without interruption or opposition, could have cleared a path through the Narrows; and once the lines of mines surrounding the Narrows had gone, there were no more laid. The fleet would have steamed into Constantinople without opposition.

For Winston Churchill, who was only hours away from victory, the nearness of it—the knowledge that he was almost there, that it was within his grasp—was to become the torment of a lifetime. It was more than a personal triumph that had slipped through his fingers. It was also his last chance to save the world in which he had grown up: to win the war while the familiar, traditional Europe of established monarchies and empires still survived.
^*

It was also the lost last chance for Britain, France, and Russia to impose their designs on the Middle East with ease. Though they would continue to pursue their nineteenth-century goals in the region, thereafter they would do so in the uncongenial environment of the twentieth century.

The Ottoman Empire, which had been sentenced to death, had received an unexpected last-minute reprieve. Its leaders rushed to make use of the time that Britain had allowed them before the new trial of arms began.

I

Shaken by the Allied bombardment of 18 March, Enver Pasha announced an uncharacteristic and important decision: he relinquished command of the Ottoman forces at the Dardanelles to the German general, Liman von Sanders. It ran counter to all of Enver’s instincts to turn over his Moslem warriors to a foreign—and Christian—commander. Until that moment he had resisted pressures to turn over authority, even to the German experts who served as departmental and staff advisers. Although he had allowed German officers in his War Ministry to move into key posts in the Departments of Operations, Intelligence, Railroads, Supply, Munitions, Coal, and Fortresses, he had jealously questioned the judgments and circumscribed the authority of his German colleagues; and in many areas he continued to do so. Yet under the guns of the Allied armada he finally stepped aside on the battlefield that most mattered.

Liman had little time, and wasted none. He assembled such forces and supplies as were to be found amidst the wreckage of the empire’s resources. He made his own command appointments, notably giving a responsible position to Mustapha Kemal, a Turkish officer who admired European ways and whose scorn of Ottoman backwardness and bitter consciousness that he was superior to those advanced over his head had, until then, kept him in obscure and unrewarding assignments. Kemal was to prove the battlefield genius of the coming combat: the commander with the eye for the key tactical position, who would seize the high ground and dominate the field.

Liman was kept well informed of British progress in organizing an invasion force. News of the British expedition’s assembly and embarkation in Egypt was published by newspapers in Cairo and reported to the Turks by merchants in Alexandria. Later, Ottoman agents in neutral Greece could hardly have missed noticing the vast fleet as it moved through the islands of the Aegean, its lights and signal lamps shining brightly through the night, its military bands blaring above the sound of winds and waves by day.

Well-officered for once, the Ottoman defending forces under Liman’s workmanlike direction were waiting for the British invasion when it came. It was the type of engagement in which the steadfastness of the Ottoman soldiery could be employed to best advantage. Sir Mark Sykes had pointed this out in late February in a letter to Churchill. He wrote that though they could be routed by a surprise attack, “Turks always grow formidable if given time to think.”
¹

II

For Sir Ian Hamilton, the British Commander, the campaign began the morning of 12 March when Lord Kitchener unexpectedly—and without explanation—summoned him to the War Office to offer him the command. He told the War Minister that he knew nothing about Turkey, and therefore that he needed at least some word of explanation and guidance.

As Hamilton later recalled, at their meeting the War Minister, while giving him command of the division that initially was being sent out to the Dardanelles in support of the navy, warned that the troops were “only to be a loan and are to be returned the moment they can be spared.” He explained that “all things earmarked for the East are looked on by powerful interests both at home and in France as having been stolen from the West.”
²

The Director of Military Operations at the War Office then briefed Hamilton by showing him a map and a plan of attack borrowed from the Greek General Staff. The War Office had not taken the time or trouble to work out one of their own.

General Hamilton was sent out with an inaccurate and out-of-date map, and little else to guide him. On seeing the Gallipoli peninsula for the first time, he remarked immediately that “the Peninsula looks a tougher nut to crack than it did on Lord K.’s small and featureless map.”
³
It was a rugged landscape of ravines, and hills that divided the shoreline into tiny beaches cut off from one another.

Having traveled on a fast naval cruiser from Marseilles, Hamilton reached the coast of Gallipoli on 18 March, in time to influence de Robeck to call off the naval campaign. By late April he was steaming back toward the straits to command the army’s attack. He carefully followed the instructions that the War Minister had given him for the campaign. He was to attack only the European side of the straits: the Gallipoli peninsula. He was not to attack until he had his whole force, which is why (despite his own misgivings) he had ordered the navy to take him back from Turkey to Egypt to assemble his forces. It took him about three weeks to organize his expeditionary force; then the navy took him back to Turkey to launch his invasion of Gallipoli, the western (or European) shore of the Dardanelles.

It was a risky venture: indeed prewar British military studies that were revealed to the Cabinet by Asquith at the end of February had concluded that an attack on Gallipoli by the British army was too risky to be undertaken.
⁴
Kitchener had ordered that it should be done nonetheless, saying that he believed the Ottoman generals had left the European side of the straits more or less undefended.

At a War Council meeting, its only Tory member—the former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour—asked “whether the Turks were likely, if cut off, to surrender or to fight with their back to the wall.” Lloyd George said he “thought it more probable that they would make a stand” but Kitchener replied that they would probably surrender.
⁵

A year later, a verdict on the matter was returned by Allied armies serving in the field. Compton Mackenzie, the young novelist-turned-war correspondent, reported from the Dardanelles that “French officers who have fought in the West say that as a fighting unit one Turk is worth two Germans; in fact, with his back to the wall the Turk is magnificent.”
⁶

III

At dawn on 25 April 1915, the British, Dominion, and Allied armies waded ashore onto six narrow, unconnected beaches on the Gallipoli peninsula. The Turks, who had known when but not where the Allies would attack, were taken by surprise and probably could have been overwhelmed that day.

The northernmost invasion site, Ari Burnu, also proved a surprise to the Australian and New Zealand troops who landed there—the navy had taken them to the wrong beach. Ascending the steep slopes to the ridge above, they encountered Turkish soldiers who fled until rallied by their commander, Mustapha Kemal. The battle raged all day. There were moments when it could have gone either way; but in the end the Turks drove the invaders back down the slope.

At the tip of Gallipoli, the five other Allied landings were at beachheads code-named S, V, W, X, and Y. At Y there were no Turks, and the invaders climbed unopposed to the top of the cliff that dominated the beach; but instead of marching on, they stopped because of confusion as to who was in command. At X, meeting little opposition, the attackers also mounted the cliff—and also stopped there. At S, the landing party met little opposition, but made camp on the beach without attempting to ascend to the top of the slope that overlooked it.

The Allies held an overwhelming numerical superiority that day—most of Liman’s forces were held in reserve at a distance from the battlefield—and at beaches Y, X, and S the invasion forces could have exploited their surprise attack by advancing and destroying the small Turkish garrison in the vicinity.

By 26 April the situation had changed. Turkish reinforcements started to pour in, and in a sense it was all over: a cheap victory at Gallipoli was no longer in sight for the Allies. General Birdwood, commander of the ANZAC forces, on the advice of his officers, recommended re-embarking and abandoning the positions his forces occupied. But Sir Ian Hamilton, Birdwood’s commanding officer, decided instead to dig in.

Unknowingly, Hamilton thereby conceded that the expedition he led—and which was intended to break the military stalemate in the war—was doomed to fail. As had been shown in France and Flanders, digging in was more likely to produce a stalemate than break one; and indeed, in futile, bloody assaults on fixed positions, Gallipoli was to become a drawn-out replay of the trench warfare on the western front.

Hamilton had positioned his troops at best to fight the Turks to a draw, but at worst to suffer disaster. While the Turks dug in on the dominating heights, the British commanders ordered their troops to entrench on the beaches; and there at the water’s edge the Allied fight eventually became one for survival. Soon most members of the British government in London came to view evacuation as the only solution, but Churchill and Kitchener fought against it: Churchill because he was never willing to accept defeat, and Kitchener because he believed it would be a disaster for a British army to be seen to be defeated by a Middle Eastern one.