Gandhi & Churchill (38 page)

A Foreign Office civil servant, Mark Sykes, built an even more elaborate geopolitical castle in the air. On April Fool’s Day 1915 he penned a memo predicting that the Dardanelles operation would mean the end of the Ottoman Empire. “Turkey must cease to be,” he wrote. “Smyrna shall be Greek…North Syria French, Filistin [Palestine] British, Mesopotamia British and everything else Russian—including Constantinople.” It was a wild, outrageous vision that, except for the prediction about the Russians, all came true after the war was over.
^*53
In fact, the entire shape of the modern Near East suddenly appeared on the horizon, thanks to Churchill’s Dardanelles gambit.
³¹

For in the end it was Churchill’s gambit. He recognized as much in his own account, published after the war in
The World Crisis
. And the War Council had signed on because they believed Churchill when he said his admirals, as the professional experts, had signed on. What they did not know was that those admirals had far more doubts than they dared to tell Churchill. His keen enthusiasm for the Gallipoli invasion, his swift and fluent reply to any objections or hesitations, had made them reluctant to say what they really thought.
³²
That was why Churchill would be surprised and angered when Fisher told him later that he had opposed the plan from the beginning, and why the firestorm of criticism that fell on his head seemed such a betrayal.

This scene would be repeated again and again in Churchill’s life, notably in the Second World War and on India. It revealed his crucial weakness as a leader. Churchill always interpreted a lack of objections, whether by admirals or by cabinet members or by the British public, as the equivalent of wholehearted support. He read dissenters’ inability to state a contrary conviction as a lack of conviction itself. As he grew older and more self-assured, and as his decisions carried even more weight, Churchill’s passion and eloquence in fact became handicaps. They made him deaf and blind to those who were never quite as sure, never quite as optimistic or as staunchly committed on anything, as he was on virtually everything.

The truth was the admirals, including Carden, did not believe the plan would work. They feared what finally did happen: that the Turks and their canny German advisers would grasp the British plan and use all their resources to turn the narrow strait into a death trap. And in retrospect, it did seem a madcap scheme.

Except for the fact that it almost worked.

On March 18, 1915, Admiral John de Robeck
^*54
sailed into the entrance of the Dardanelles with sixteen battleships—twelve British and four French—and a swarm of destroyers, minesweepers, and cruisers, including the new battlecruiser
Inflexible
. It was the biggest naval force ever seen in the eastern Mediterranean. For a time it seemed they might actually force the Dardanelles alone, as Churchill’s original plan had suggested. But then the French battleship
Bouvet
and the British
Ocean
and
Irresistible
struck mines that the Turks had laid in the passage, and sank. Furious gunfire from the forts on shore badly damaged the
Suffren
and
Inflexible
. Before long a third of de Robeck’s battle fleet was out of action. Under cover of darkness, he withdrew to regroup and refit.

Still, as documents would later show, the weight and power of de Robeck’s naval advance had convinced the Turks that they had lost the battle. Orders had gone out to fire off all remaining ammunition (which the Allies mistook for a show of strength) and to abandon all positions the next day. Parties of Marines could have landed freely on beaches that in little more than five weeks would become death traps for entire divisions. If de Robeck had managed to stay in the strait another twenty-four hours, in the judgment of at least one historian, “the fleet could have sailed into Constantinople without opposition.”
³³
And instead of being Britain’s greatest scapegoat in the Great War, Churchill would have been its greatest hero.

But de Robeck did not stay. Instead, he was joined by the army’s commander, Sir Ian Hamilton, who ordered the entire expedition back to Alexandria to repack its supply ships and transports. Hamilton, a veteran of the Boer War, had seen the costs of ill-preparation with nonessential supplies stowed on the top and essential ones at the bottom, and he would not allow it to happen on his watch, especially with five infantry divisions under his responsibility.

Unfortunately, what was prudent in 1900 turned out to be foolhardy in 1915. Hamilton wasted an entire month repacking every ship and making sure everything was safely stowed and secured. All the while the Turks and their German allies poured concrete, strung barbed wire, laid mines, and rebuilt the forts overlooking the narrows and Cape Helles, where they knew the attack would come.

Finally, at dawn on April 25, 1915, soldiers from the Third Australian Brigade of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) looked out from their transports through the fading mist and saw the narrow yellow strips of beach on either side of Cape Helles and the headlands towering above. These men were volunteers, sons of the Empire coming to the aid of their mother country, much like Gandhi’s Indian volunteers. “To be a New Zealander in 1914 was to be taught that ‘The Empire looks to you to be ready in time of need,’” one of them said later. “To be left behind was unthinkable.”
³⁴
Their job was to land on the beach at Kaba Tepe and get as far up the bluffs as possible before digging in, despite what promised to be devastating Turkish shelling.

Their British counterparts in the Twenty-ninth Division faced the same daunting challenge. They were battalions from the Lancashire Fusiliers, the Hampshires, and the Munsters, as well as the Dublin Fusiliers—by sheer coincidence, the very same regiment that had been with Churchill on the armored train at Estcourt in the Boer War. These men were to land on the beaches at the tip of Cape Helles, almost directly under the Turkish forts.

Watching it all from the deck of de Robeck’s flagship, H.M.S.
Queen Elizabeth,
was Winston’s brother Jack, who was attached as a major to Ian Hamilton’s staff. Jack had already seen action in France at Ypres. He knew what machine guns and artillery could do to exposed human flesh and how they gave an almost insuperable advantage to defenders in fortified positions like the ones the Turks occupied. But even he would be amazed and then appalled at what was about to unfold that April morning.

The ANZAC landing went badly almost from the start, and soon the Australians and New Zealanders were stuck on the hillside under murderous fire. The Lancashires suffered worse. Their boats became entangled in masses of barbed wire as they landed, while Turkish soldiers opened up from trenches strung out along the beach. “The sea behind was absolutely crimson,” one officer, Major Frederick Shaw, remembered, “and you could hear the groans through the rattle of musketry.” Shaw tried to order his men to move forward: “I then perceived they were all hit.”
³⁵

More troops landed but could make no headway. The Turks, on the other hand, were not strong enough to drive them back into the sea. For British soldiers, the beach had become a “death trap.” Jack Churchill described to his brother how “the Turks dug a series of great caves and from there could shoot anyone on the beach, while guns could not touch them. Forty hundred and fifty four men have already been buried there!”
³⁶

By May 4, nine days later, more than 10,000 ANZAC troops and 14,000 Turkish troops had been killed or wounded with little or no result. The British assaults had made slightly more gains at a slightly lower cost. The shape of things to come was clear: there would be no breakthrough. The next day Jack Churchill gave his candid assessment of the situation. After four days of almost continuous fighting, he wrote the British troops were holding on, but “we are not very happy about the larger side of the question. Here we are, a comparatively small force clinging on to the end of the Gallipoli peninsula, and having the prospect of fighting the entire Turkish Empire!” Jack did his own tour of the battlefield and was shocked at the filth and carnage. From the side of one hastily dug trench he saw the withered hand of a dead soldier sticking out in a grisly gesture.
³⁷

Before the month was out Hamilton had lost more than 45,000 men. Instead of providing the Allies a way of escaping the quagmire in the West, Gallipoli had become one itself. By then everyone in the British government realized the Dardanelles campaign had gone hopelessly wrong, and everyone wanted a scapegoat. Every finger would point in the same direction: at the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill.

In one sense, blaming Churchill for the fiasco was unfair. It was Kitchener, not Churchill, who had first broached the plan. The entire War Council, including the prime minister, had endorsed the final version and had saddled it with conditions and delays that almost certainly doomed any chance of success.

Yet as Churchill would learn, the power to make great decisions came with equally great responsibility and accountability. He had set out to take the credit if the Gallipoli plan succeeded. Now that it had failed, he could only expect to take the blame.

First Sea Lord Fisher had been his mentor and confidant in naval matters for four years. Now Fisher was the first to turn on him, churning out a bitter memorandum stating that he had thought the Dardanelles diversion was doomed from the start. Fisher resigned as First Sea Lord, hoping this action would prompt Prime Minister Asquith to dismiss Churchill as well. Asquith, however, hesitated, and Churchill might still have kept his office except for another, unrelated event.

In May Asquith agreed to form a coalition National Government with the Tories. They had drawn their sights on Churchill for nearly a decade. The bitterness aroused by his earlier attacks and criticism, not to mention his change of party, had not abated. The failure of the Gallipoli operation gave them an opportunity for revenge that was too delicious to pass up. So it was the Conservatives who finally forced Asquith’s hand and made Winston resign from the Admiralty.

He was heartbroken. On May 20 a friend, George Riddell, visited him at his office and found him in a black mood. “I am victim of a political intrigue. I am finished!” Riddell tried to reassure him that he would bounce back. But Winston shook his head. “Yes, finished in respect of all I care for” was his bitter response. “The waging of war; the defeat of the Germans…. This is what I live for.”

It was his first experience of true, abject failure in the eyes of his public and himself. Clementine said later she worried he might die of grief. His old friend Violet Asquith, the prime minister’s daughter, met him in the House of Commons, “silent, despairing—as I have never seen him.” She wept as he brokenly described how he had thought her father might have stuck by him but his head was part of the price of the coalition. “He did not even abuse Fisher,” she would write years later, “but simply said, ‘I’m finished.’ I poured out contradictions, protestations—but he waved them aside. ‘No, I’m done.’”
³⁸

In fact, his career was hardly done. He still had a seat on the War Council, as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the sinecure office that Asquith offered him as consolation for losing the Admiralty. And he still believed the Dardanelles campaign could succeed. On June 18 he wrote another hopeful memo. “There can be no doubt that we now possess the means and the power to take Constantinople before the end of the summer,” it read. One final great push would do the job; it would save the situation in Russia and Italy “and resound throughout Asia.”
³⁹
The government did approve one more landing at Gallipoli, north of Kaba Tepe at Suvla Bay, on August 4. But the new Turkish commander, Mustapha Kemal,
^*55
succeeded in blunting the attack, and soon Suvla Bay became another precarious salient, along with Cape Helles and Anzac Cove, where hundreds of men died daily from Turkish snipers and fever.

Not for another five more months would the Allies decide to cut their losses and evacuate from Gallipoli. By then the coalition government had reorganized the War Council and pointedly left Winston out. On November 11, 1915, Winston formally resigned. He was going to France to serve with the Grenadier Guards. “I have a clear conscience,” he wrote to Asquith, “which enables me to bear my responsibility for past events with composure.”
⁴⁰

That was probably true. But when he reached France in his Guards uniform everyone from his commanding officer (the last survivor from the officers of the original battalion in 1914), to the lowest private gave him the cold shoulder. The reinforcements they needed had been sent to Gallipoli instead, and they knew who was to blame. He arrived at the front in a freezing drizzle on the night of November 20. On his first night the only sleeping quarters he was offered were either an eight-foot square signal office shared with four other men, or a nearby dugout, which he described as “a sort of pit four feet deep containing about one foot of water.” It was ten days from his forty-first birthday. A few days later a letter from Clementine informed him that the army was evacuating Gallipoli.
⁴¹

By the second week of January 1916 the beaches at Suvla, Anzac Cove, and Cape Helles were deserted. The sands had been soaked with the blood of more than 265,000 Australians, New Zealanders, Irishmen, Indians, Englishmen, and Frenchmen. (Turkish losses had been higher, close to 300,000.)
⁴²
The battle would leave an indelible impression on the Australian collective memory. The first day of landing, April 25, would forever be a national day of remembrance, and Churchill’s name a national curse. For the rest of his life Winston would relentlessly try to justify his decision to attack. He refused point-blank to accept the conclusion by Parliament’s own investigative commission that it had been a horrible mistake. “Not to persevere,” he would respond, “that was the crime.”
⁴³