Gallipoli (35 page)

T
HE
soldiers at Gallipoli were wrong in thinking that the campaign had been abandoned and forgotten in London. Directly the new government was in office
Churchill circulated a paper to cabinet Ministers in which he argued that while the Allies had neither the men nor the ammunition to bring about a decision in France, a comparatively small addition
to Hamilton’s forces would make all the difference at Gallipoli.
²⁴
‘It seems most urgent,’ he wrote, ‘to try to obtain a decision
here and wind up the enterprise in a satisfactory manner as soon as possible.’ If the Army advanced just three or four miles up the peninsula the Fleet could steam through to the Sea of
Marmara and all the old objects could still be realized: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the support of Russia, the allegiance of the Balkans. Where else in all the other theatres of war could
they look during the next three months for such a victory?

Kitchener himself had for some time been approaching this point of view, and in June he came the whole way. The recruiting and training of his new army in England was now well advanced, but it
was not yet ready for a resumption of the offensive in France. ‘Such an attack,’ he wrote, ‘before an adequate supply of guns and high-explosive shell can be provided, would only
result in heavy casualties and the capture of another turnip field.’

It was an indication of this new approach that as soon as the new cabinet was formed the War Council had been reconstructed under the name of the Dardanelles Committee. It met on June 7, and
Kitchener and Churchill between them had no difficulty in
getting the members to agree to the dispatch of another three divisions to Gallipoli. By the end of the month two
more divisions had been added, and three of the largest ocean liners, the
Olympic
, the
Mauretania
and the
Aquitania
, had been chartered to take them to the Mediterranean. By
the beginning of July Hamilton was informed that he was to have the ammunition for which he had been so persistently pleading, and a few weeks later the War Office was writing: ‘We should
like to hear from you after considering your plans whether there is anything further in the way of personnel, guns or ammunition we can send you, as we are most anxious to give you everything you
can possibly require and use.’

It was almost an embarrassment of favours. By now Hamilton had either in Gallipoli or in transit an army of thirteen divisions or approximately some 120,000 effective men. This was no longer a
distracting novel enterprise: it was the front on which the main British hopes were fixed, and men and shells were being withheld from France to supply it.

The Admiralty, too, was making a large contribution. The monitors arrived to replace the battleships, strange, flat-bottomed boats of 6,000 tons, mounting 14-inch guns of American manufacture.
Their most original feature was the blisters or bulges on their sides, designed to ward off the explosions of torpedoes (which the sailors soon discovered made excellent bathing platforms). Almost
as important were the Beetles, the landing barges which had been designed by Fisher and which were to be the precursors of the small craft used at Normandy and other landings in the second world
war. They were capable of carrying five hundred men or forty horses, and were fitted with armoured plates sufficiently strong to resist shrapnel and machine-gun fire. The name derived from the fact
that they were painted black, and the long landing ramps which projected from their bows had the appearance of antennae.

Two more balloon ships, the
Hector
and the
Canning
, were sent out to assist in the artillery spotting, and there were additions to the number of trawlers, auxiliary hospital ships,
and other craft.
It was a less imposing fleet than the one which had originally sailed to the Dardanelles in the spring, but it was larger and much better suited to an
amphibious operation in a narrow sea.

A similar change overtook the Air Force with the arrival of new seaplane carriers and pilots, the French setting themselves up on Tenedos and the British on Imbros. As many as fifteen aircraft
were now able to take off together for concentrated raids on the peninsula and the Narrows.

Towards the end of July, when a lull had again settled over the front, most of these new forces were concentrated in the Ægean islands, where they were to be kept in secret until the
moment came to commit them to the battle. A new landing on the enemy coast was obviously essential, and all the old arguments came up once again: Bulair was too strongly fortified, the Asiatic
coast too distant from their objectives, and at neither place could the Navy give its full support to the Army on the shore. So once again it had to be the peninsula itself. The plan that finally
emerged was very largely a repetition of April 25, but it had one vital difference: the emphasis was now removed from Cape Helles and Achi Baba and placed upon the Sari Bair ridge in the centre of
the peninsula. Birdwood had been urging this course for some weeks past, and in many ways it appeared to be a promising design. He proposed to break out of the north of the Anzac bridgehead by
night and assault Chunuk Bair and the crests of the hills, having first made a major feint at a place called Lone Pine to the south. Simultaneously there was to be a new landing at Suvla Bay,
immediately to the north of Anzac, and it was hoped that as soon as the hills there were taken the combined force would push through to the Narrows about four miles away. With the bulk of the
Turkish Army then bottled up in the tip of the peninsula, and under heavy pressure from the French and the British at Cape Helles, it was hoped that there would be a quick ending to the campaign,
at any rate as far as the Dardanelles was concerned.

There were to be pretended landings at Bulair and from the island of Mytilene on to the Asiatic coast so as to keep Liman in doubt until after the main battle had been joined. Once again
surprise
was the chief element of the plan; once again the Fleet was to hold its hand until the Army had broken through.

Suvla Bay was an admirable place for the new landing. It offered a safe anchorage for the Fleet, it was backed by low undulating country, and it was known to be very lightly defended. Once
ashore the soldiers would quickly join up with the Anzac bridgehead and relieve the congestion in that narrow space. There was a salt lake about a mile and a half wide directly behind the Suvla Bay
beaches, but this dried up in summer, and Hamilton in any case planned to avoid it by landing in the first instance on an easy strip of coastline just south of the Bay itself. Everything depended
upon the speed with which the soldiers pushed inland to the hills so that they could bring assistance to Birdwood fighting the main battle on Sari Bair. This time there was to be no repetition of
the
River Clyde
and the Sedd-el-Bahr disaster for the troops were to come ashore by night without preliminary bombardment.

In addition to the Beetles (which were to be commanded by Commander Unwin, V.C., in the first assault), a great deal of modern equipment had been shipped out to the Ægean. An antisubmarine
net, over a mile in length, was to be laid across the mouth of Suvla Bay immediately after the landing. A pontoon pier 300 feet long had been assembled at Imbros, and was to be towed across to the
beach. Four 50-ton water lighters were also to be taken over by the water steamer
Krini
, which had another 200 tons on board in addition to pumps and hoses. As a further precaution the
Egyptian bazaars were once again ransacked for camel tanks, milk cans, skins—anything that would hold water.

For a time Hamilton debated whether or not he should bring the battered but experienced 29th Division round from Cape Helles to make the first landing at Suvla, but in the end he decided that
the operation should be entrusted to the new troops coming out from England. Extreme secrecy was the key to all these arrangements, and there was a special difficulty in reinforcing Birdwood for
the battle. The Anzac bridgehead was not much bigger than Regent’s Park in London, or Central Park in New
York (if one can imagine a park of bare cliffs and peaks), and
just as much overlooked. The Navy, however, believed that over a series of nights they could smuggle another 25,000 men ashore without the Turks knowing anything about it.

The Army was finally disposed as follows: the six divisions already in Cape Helles, about 35,000 men, to remain where they were and make a northern thrust against the village of Krithia;
Birdwood with his Australians, New Zealanders and a division and a half of new British troops, about 37,000 men in all, to make the main attack at Anzac, and the remainder of the reinforcements
from the United Kingdom, numbering some 25,000, to go ashore at Suvla.

August 6 was fixed as the day of the offensive, since the waning moon, then in its last quarter, would not rise until about 10.30 that night, and the boats on the Suvla landing would thus be
able to approach the coast in the darkness. The actual timing of the various attacks was arranged so as to create the maximum confusion in the enemy command. It was a chain reaction, a succession
of explosions from south to north, beginning with the first bombardment on the Helles front at 2.30 in the afternoon. There would then follow the Australian feint at Lone Pine at 5.30, the main
assault on Chunuk Bair at 9.30 at night, and the landing at Suvla about an hour later. Thus by midnight the whole front would be ablaze.

By the end of June all these plans were well advanced, and Keyes and the Army staff were again involved with their elaborate timetables for the ferrying of the troops and their supplies from the
islands to the beaches. Meanwhile a crucial issue had arisen over the question of who was to have command of the new landing at Suvla. Hamilton had two men in mind, Sir Julian Byng and Sir Henry
Rawlinson, but when he put their names up to Kitchener he was refused on the grounds that neither could be spared from France. The appointment, Kitchener decided, must go to the most suitable and
senior Lieutenant-General who was not already in a field command. This practically narrowed the choice down to the Hon. Sir Frederick Stopford, and he duly arrived at Mudros with
his chief staff officer Brigadier-General Reed, on July 11. Hamilton had misgivings about both of them. Stopford was 61, and although he had been in Egypt and the Sudan in the
’eighties, and had served as military secretary to General Buller in the Boer War, he had seen very little actual fighting and had never commanded troops in war. He had a reputation as a
teacher of military history, but he had been living in retirement since 1909, and was often in ill-health. Reed, a gunner, had also been in South Africa, and had won a memorable V.C. there, but his
recent experiences in France had left him with an obsession for tremendous artillery bombardments, and he could talk of very little else.

The officers commanding the five new divisions were of similar cast: professional soldiers who had made their way upward mostly on the strength of their years of service. Many of them, generals
and colonels alike, were men who were well over fifty and who had been in retirement when the war broke out. Major-General Hammersley, the officer who was to lead the 11th Division on the actual
assault at Suvla, had suffered a breakdown a year or two before. It was a curious position; while the generals were old Regular Army soldiers, their troops were civilians and very young; and all of
them, generals as well as soldiers, were wholly unused to the rough and individual kind of campaigning upon which they were now to be engaged.

Soon after he arrived at Mudros Stopford was sent over to Cape Helles for a few days to accustom himself to conditions at the front, and it was there that he was shown the plan on July 22. He
was well satisfied. ‘This is the plan which I have always hoped he (Hamilton) would adopt,’ he said. ‘It is a good plan. I am sure it will succeed and I congratulate whoever has
been responsible for framing it.’ But the General soon changed his mind.

On the following day he had a talk with Reed, the exponent of artillery bombardments, and on July 25 he went over to Anzac on an afternoon visit so that he could survey the Suvla plain from the
slopes of Sari Bair. These experiences unsettled Stopford profoundly. On July 26 he called with Reed at G.H.Q. at Imbros and together they tore the plan to pieces. He must have more artillery,
Stopford said, more howitzers to fire into the enemy trenches. It was pointed out to him that at Suvla there were no enemy trenches to speak of; Hamilton himself had been
close to the shore in a destroyer and had seen no sign of life there. Samson had flown over within the last day or so and his photographs revealed nothing more than 150 yards of entrenchments
between the salt lake and the sea. But Stopford remained only half convinced and Reed was quite tireless in his criticisms. Next they argued that the force should be put ashore within the bay
itself. The Navy was all against this, since the water there was shallow and uncharted and no one could say what reefs or shoals might wreck the boats in the darkness. In the end, however, they
agreed to land one of the three assaulting brigades inside the bay.

Still another difficulty arose over corps headquarters. Hamilton, remembering his isolation aboard the
Queen Elizabeth
on April 25, wanted Stopford to remain at Imbros during the early
hours of the landing since he would be in touch with the troops by wireless as soon as they were ashore, and soon afterwards a telephone cable was to be laid from Imbros to the Suvla beaches.
Stopford insisted that he must remain close to his troops aboard his headquarters ship, the sloop
Jonquil
, and in the end he had his way.

His other objections to the plan were of a vague and more subtle kind. In the original drafting it had been stated quite definitely that, since speed was. essential, the assaulting troops were
to reach a series of low hills, known as Ismail Oglu Tepe, by daylight. There were good reasons for this. The interrogations of prisoners had gone to show that no more than three enemy battalions
were holding the Suvla area, and the whole point of the landing was to overwhelm them and seize the high ground before the Turkish reinforcements could arrive. Since all Liman’s forces in the
south of the peninsula would already be engaged at Anzac and Helles, it was believed that these reinforcements would have to be brought down from Bulair, some thirty miles away. Yet it was unwise
to count on more than fifteen or twenty hours’ respite; from the moment the first Allied soldier put his foot ashore the Turks would be on the march. Everything in their bitter three
months’ experience in Gallipoli had made it plain to Hamilton’s headquarters that once the period of surprise was gone there was very little chance of breaking
the enemy line. Every hour, even every minute, counted.