Gallipoli (8 page)

Matters came to a head on January 25, when Fisher put down his views in writing and sent them to Churchill with this note: ‘First Lord: I have no desire to continue a useless resistance in
the War Council to plans I cannot concur in, but I would ask that the enclosed may be printed and circulated to members before the next meeting. F.’

The document expressed complete opposition to the whole Dardanelles scheme. In it Fisher wrote, ‘We play into Germany’s hands if we risk fighting ships in any subsidiary operations
such as coastal bombardments or the attack of fortified places without military co-operation, for we thereby increase the possibility that the Germans may be able to engage our Fleet with some
approach to equality of strength. The sole justification of coastal bombardments and attacks by the Fleet on fortified places, such as the contemplated prolonged bombardment of the Dardanelles
Forts by our Fleet, is to force a decision at sea, and so far and no further can they be justified.’

The fact that it was intended only to use semi-obsolete battleships to force the Dardanelles, he went on, was no reassurance; if they were sunk the crews would be lost and these were the very
men who were needed to man the new vessels coming out of the dockyards.

So then, Fisher argued, Britain should revert to the blockade of Germany and be content with that. ‘Being already,’ he concluded, ‘in possession of all that a powerful fleet
can give a country we should continue quietly to enjoy the advantage without dissipating our strength in operations that cannot improve the position.’

Here then was a fundamental difference on policy, a reversal, it seemed to Churchill, of the whole spirit in which they had planned the Dardanelles operation together.

One does not know how far Fisher had consulted the other members of the Admiralty Board before he committed himself to these views. Fisher himself denied that he had any such support.
He said later, ‘Naval opinion was unanimous. Mr. Churchill had them all on his side. I was the only rebel.’ Churchill, however, felt that without Fisher’s support he
was in an impossible position, and he persuaded the Admiral to come with him to the Prime Minister twenty minutes before the Council meeting began on the morning of January 28, so that they could
have the matter out. The discussion went off very quietly at 10 Downing Street. Fisher stated his objections to both the Dardanelles and the Zeebrugge operations, and Churchill answered that he was
prepared at any rate to give up Zeebrugge. Asquith, being left to decide, fell in with Churchill’s proposal: Zeebrugge should be stopped but the Dardanelles was to go forward. Fisher said no
more and the three men went into the War Council together.

It appeared to Churchill that Fisher had accepted the decision, but here he was quite wrong, for the Admiral, in silence and rage, was preparing his protest. Directly Churchill had finished
explaining to the Council the latest position of the Dardanelles plan, Fisher said that he had understood that this matter would not be raised that day: the Prime Minister knew his views.

To this Asquith replied that in view of the steps which had already been taken, the question could not very well be left in abeyance.

Fisher at once got up from the table, leaving the others to carry on the discussion, and Kitchener followed him over to the window to ask him what he was going to do. Fisher replied that he
would not go back to the table: he intended to resign. Kitchener’s answer to this was to point out to Fisher that he was the only one in disagreement; the Prime Minister had taken the
decision and it was his duty to abide by it. After some further discussion he eventually persuaded the Admiral to come back to the table again.

Churchill had noticed this incident, and as soon as the Council rose he invited Fisher to come to his room at the Admiralty in the afternoon. There is no record of the conversation that then
took place, but it appears, in Churchill’s phrase, to have been ‘long and very friendly’, and at the end of it Fisher consented to undertake the operation.

‘When I finally decided to go in,’ Fisher said later, ‘I went the whole hog,
totus porcus
.’ Nothing, not even this extremity of his
affairs, could quite upset that robust spirit; he even added two powerful battleships, the
Lord Nelson
and the
Agamemnon
, to the Dardanelles Fleet.

Returning with the Admiral to the afternoon meeting of the Council, Churchill was able to announce that all at the Admiralty were now in agreement, and that the plan would be set into motion.
From this point onwards there could be no turning back. Turkey, the small gambler, was in the thick of the big game at last.

S
OMEWHAT
more than half way down the Gallipoli Peninsula the hills rise up into a series of jagged peaks which are known as Sari Bair. Only the steepest
and roughest of tracks leads to this spot, and except for an occasional shepherd and the men who tend the cemeteries on the mountainside, hardly anybody ever goes there. Yet the view from these
heights, and especially from the central crest which is called Chunuk Bair, is perhaps the grandest spectacle of the whole Mediterranean.

On first reaching the summit one is quite unprepared for the extreme closeness of the scene which seemed so distant on the map and so remote in history; an illusion which is partly created, no
doubt, by the silence and the limpid air. To the south, in Asia, lie Mount Ida and the Trojan plain, reaching down to Tenedos. To the east, the islands of Imbros and Samothrace come up out of the
sea with the appearance of mountain tops seen above the clouds on a sunny morning; and one even fancies that one can descry Mount Athos on the Greek mainland in Europe, a hundred miles away. The
Dardanelles, which split this scene in two, dividing Asia from Europe, are no more than a river at your feet.

On a fine day, when there is no movement on the surface of the water, all this is presented to the eye with the clear finite outlines and the very bright colours of a relief map modelled in
clay. Every inlet and bay, every island, is exactly defined, and the ships in the sea below float like toys in a pond. From this point too the Gallipoli Peninsula is laid out before you with the
intimate detail of a reef uncovered by the tide, and you can see as far as the extreme tip at Cape Helles where the cliffs fell sharply downward, their contours still visible beneath the water,
into the unbelievable blue of the Ægean. It is not the flat pattern one sees from an aeroplane: Chunuk Bair is only 850 feet high, and therefore you yourself
are part of
the scene, slightly above it and seeing all, but still attached.

This illusion of nearness, this compression not only of space but of time, is very much helped by the fact that, through the centuries, hardly anything has been done to change the landscape.
There are no new towns or highroads, no advertisements or tourist haunts, and this rocky soil can support only a light crop of wheat and olives, a few flocks of sheep and goats. Very probably this
same coarse scrub covered the broken ground when Xerxes crossed the Hellespont below Chunuk Bair, and although since the siege of Troy the Scamander may have changed its windings and its name (it
is now called the Mendere), it still meanders down to its ancient mouth at Kum Kale on the Asiatic side.

From our perch on Chunuk Bair the Hellespont—the Dardanelles—does not appear to be a part of the sea at all: it looks more like a stream running through a valley, an estuary scarcely
wider than the Thames at Gravesend. In the course of an afternoon one might take a motor boat from one end to the other, for the distance is just over forty miles. The mouth at Cape Helles in the
Mediterranean is 4,000 yards wide, but then the banks on either side open out to a distance of four and a half miles until they gradually close in again at the Narrows, 14 miles upstream. Here the
passage is only 1600 yards across. Above the Narrows it again opens out to an average width of four miles until the Sea of Marmara is reached just above the town of Gallipoli.

There is no tide, but the Black Sea rivers and the melting snows create a four to five knot current, which at all times of the year sweeps down through the Dardanelles to the Mediterranean. In a
severe winter this current can be blocked with great chunks of floating ice. The depth of the water is easily enough to accommodate any ship afloat.

Although there is no point in the whole forty miles where a hostile vessel cannot be reached by direct or even point-blank fire from either shore, the key to the whole military position is, of
course, the Narrows. It was just upstream from this point that Xerxes built the bridge of boats on which his army crossed into
Europe, and here too Leander is supposed to have
swum by night from Abydos to meet Hero in Sestos, on the European shore.
³

Two ancient fortresses, one a square crenellated building in the town of Chanak on the Asiatic side, and the other an odd heart-shaped structure tilted towards the sea at Kilid Bahr on the
opposite bank, stand guard over the Narrows, and it was here that the Turks established their main defences at the outbreak of war. These consisted of eleven forts with 72 guns, some of them new, a
series of torpedo tubes designed to fire on vessels coming upstream, a minefield and, later on, a net of wire mesh to block submarines. They had in addition other heavier guns in forts at
Kum Kale and Sedd-el-Bahr at the mouth of the straits, and various intermediate defences further upstream. After the first Allied bombardment of November 1914, the Germans made certain
additions to this armament—notably eight 6-inch howitzer batteries which could change position fairly rapidly, and the number of searchlights was increased to eight. Nine lines of mines were
laid in the vicinity of the Narrows. Along the whole length of the straits there were in all something like 100 guns.

These defences, however, were less formidable than they sound, since barely a score of the guns were of modern design, and ammunition was in short supply. Two divisions of infantry—one in
the Gallipoli Peninsula and the other on the Asiatic side—were responsible for holding all the ground from the Gulf of Saros to the Asiatic coast opposite Tenedos in the event of the Allies
making a landing.

The fleet which the Allies assembled to attack these obstacles was the greatest concentration of naval strength which had ever been seen in the Mediterranean. Apart from the cruisers,
destroyers, minesweepers and lesser craft, the British had contributed fourteen battleships, two semi-dreadnoughts, the
Lord Nelson
and the
Agamemnon
, the battle-cruiser
Inflexible
and the newly completed
Queen Elizabeth.
The French squadron, under Admiral Guépratte, consisted of four battleships and their auxiliaries.

Although most of these battleships had become semi-obsolete their 12-inch guns were, of course, immensely superior to anything the Turks had on shore, and the
Queen Elizabeth
with her
15-inch guns was a more formidable opponent still. It was quite possible for the Fleet to fire on the forts at the mouth of the Dardanelles without ever coming into the range of the Turkish
batteries. The only question was just how accurate this long range fire was going to be: how many forts would be knocked out before the Allied vessels closed in, as it were, for the kill?

Admiral Carden, flying his flag in the
Queen Elizabeth
, deployed his force in three divisions:

The attack itself was planned in three parts: a deliberate long-range bombardment followed by a medium-range bombardment, and finally an overwhelming fire at very close range. Under the cover of
this attack minesweepers were to clear the channel up to the entrance of the straits. For the moment, the rest of the Fleet which was not engaged on diversionary missions was held in reserve.

At 9.51 a.m. on February 19 (which happened to be the 108th anniversary of Duckworth’s exploit), the assault began. A slow bombardment continued all morning, and at 2 p.m. Carden decided
to close to six thousand yards. Up to this time, none of the Turkish guns had replied, but at 4.45 p.m. the
Vengeance
, the
Cornwallis
and the
Suffren
went closer still
and drew the fire of two of the smaller forts. The other batteries were enveloped in dust and smoke and appeared to be deserted. By now, however, the light was failing, and Carden sounded the
general recall. Vice-Admiral de Robeck in the
Vengeance
asked for permission to continue the attack, but this was refused as the ships were now silhouetted against the setting sun.

The results of this short winter day were not entirely satisfactory. It was observed that the firing was not very accurate so long as the ships were moving, and only 139 12-inch shells had been
used. To be really effective it was evident that the Fleet would have to go in much closer and engage the individual Turkish guns one by one with direct fire.

There was, however, no immediate opportunity of putting these tactics to the test, because the weather broke that night, and rough seas continued for the next five days. Bitterly cold sleet and
snow flew in the wind. Aware of the impatience at the Admiralty in London, and a little troubled by it, Carden sent off a message
which Roger Keyes, his chief-of-staff, had
drafted for him: ‘I do not intend to commence in bad weather leaving result undecided as from experience on first day I am convinced given favourable weather conditions that the reduction of
the forts at the entrance can be completed in one day.’