A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (50 page)

“I don’t order you to attack. I order you to die.”

—M
USTAFA
K
EMAL

T
he Dardanelles have always been regarded as part of the line that separates Europe from what is broadly known as Asia. They are, in the most strictly literal sense, the stuff of legend. Before the dawn of history a maiden named Helle was said to have drowned there while fleeing with the Golden Fleece, and so until modern times the Dardanelles were known as the Hellespont. Leander swam the Hellespont nightly to visit his lover, the priestess Hero, and ultimately they too drowned. Jason and his Argonauts sailed through the Hellespont. Since the nineteenth century it has been accepted as fact that the city of Troy stood on the Asian side of the Hellespont, and a mound of earth there has since time immemorial been said to contain the bones of Achilles. The Persian ruler Xerxes took his great army across the strait when he set out to conquer the Greeks in 480
B.C.,
and Alexander the Great crossed in the other direction a century and a half later. The poet Byron swam the Hellespont for no better reason than that doing so was the most romantic act imaginable.

The importance of the Dardanelles derives from their position at the southern end of one of the most remarkable waterways on earth, one that connects the Aegean Sea and therefore the entire Mediterranean world with the Black Sea, with the Balkan states of Bulgaria and Romania, and with nations (Ukraine, Georgia) that at the time of the Great War were parts of the Russian Empire. Entering the Dardanelles at their southern or Aegean end (the end attacked in 1915), a ship must pass through a deepwater strait forty-five miles in length before reaching the great open expanse of the Sea of Marmara, 170 miles long and fifty wide. At the northeastern end of this sea is Istanbul—Byzantium to the ancient Greeks, Constantinople from the early Christian era. It was a great city from ancient times because of its position at the entrance to a second navigable channel, the Bosporus, which is twenty miles long and leads to the immensity of the Black Sea. Even today, standing on the heights overlooking the point where the Bosporus opens onto the Black Sea, one sees an unending stream of freighters moving between the heart of easternmost Europe and the world beyond, carrying oil and grain and other riches. Nothing could be more understandable than Russia’s centuries-old hunger to possess this passage, or the British belief that by wresting it from the Turks in 1915 they could win the war.

The Dardanelles owe their existence to an arid, ruggedly hilly peninsula that reaches some fifty miles southward from the Balkan mainland into the Aegean. The eastern coast of this Gallipoli Peninsula parallels the coast of Asian Turkey and is separated from it by only a few miles; it is within this gap that the Dardanelles channel lies, with steep ridges looming over it on both sides. From the peninsula’s highest peaks everything is visible: the Aegean to the west and south, the entire length of the Dardanelles to the east, and the hills of Asian Turkey beyond, all of it controllable, in the years before bomber aircraft, by anyone who could get artillery onto those peaks. Once it was decided that the British and French ships would not be able to break through the narrows and that troops must be landed, the next step became obvious: to seize the heights of Gallipoli and take control of everything below. Once that was accomplished, everything else—the fall of Constantinople, the opening of the sea-lane to Russia, the winning of Greece and Bulgaria and Romania to the Entente cause—could be expected to follow.

As of March 18, the day De Robeck’s battleships tried to force their way through the strait and ran into mines, the Turks had only a single ill-equipped, unprepared, and badly deployed division of infantry on the entire peninsula. Luckily for the Turks, however, the newly arrived British army commander in the Aegean, General Ian Hamilton, found his troops completely unprepared for anything as demanding as a landing on hostile shores. Everything was in disarray; the gun crews were not even on the same ships with their cannon or ammunition. Everything was going to have to be taken across the Mediterranean, unloaded, and reorganized. Accordingly, on March 22 Hamilton led his task force off to the Egyptian port of Alexandria. On that same day, in another stroke of good fortune for the Turks, Enver Pasha, who dominated the Constantinople government, had the good sense to put aside his faith in his own military brilliance. Instead of taking personal command (as he had done earlier, with disastrous results, in Turkey’s winter offensive in the Caucasus), Enver created a new army for the defense of the Dardanelles and appointed as its commander General Otto Liman von Sanders, head of the German military mission in Constantinople. Sanders understood that the British, not having renewed their naval assault, must be preparing an infantry invasion. “If the English will leave me alone for eight days!” he implored the heavens when he saw the sorry state of the Turkish defenses. In the event, the British left him alone for four weeks, and he made use of every hour, pouring in troops, building fortifications, even improving the peninsula’s primitive roads. The urgency of the work was increased by reports of the size of the force being assembled at Alexandria. Hamilton’s command was far too big, Egypt far too thick with spies, for there to be any possibility of secrecy.

Not until April 25 did the invasion force steam over the horizon from the south and approach Gallipoli. It was the most powerful force ever to have attempted an amphibious landing in the face of an armed enemy. Two hundred transport ships were accompanied by eighteen battleships, a dozen cruisers, twenty-nine destroyers, and eight submarines. On those transports were twenty-seven thousand British soldiers, including the crack Twenty-ninth Division that before leaving England had been such a bone of contention, thirty thousand “Anzac” troops from Australia and New Zealand, and sixteen thousand Frenchmen. They had all the guns of De Robeck’s great flotilla to support them and an abundance of their own artillery to take ashore. The Gallipoli expedition having been made a high priority in London and Paris, it was magnificently well equipped in virtually every way that mattered except two: hand grenades and trench mortars were in short supply. This deficiency would prove a serious handicap in the broken and hilly ground on which the troops would soon be grappling with the Turks.

Otto Limon von Sanders
“If the English will leave me alone for eight days!”

Sanders by now had six Turkish divisions on the peninsula, eighty-four thousand men. But he had more than a hundred miles of shoreline to defend, much of it nearly inaccessible, and he could only guess where his enemies intended to come ashore. As it happened, his guesses were so wrong that their consequences should have been fatal. Hamilton had decided to divide his force and send it to three places. The French would be landed—only temporarily and solely as a diversion—at a place called Kum Kale, on the Asian shore south of the tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula. Correctly anticipating this deployment, Sanders had placed two divisions not far from Kum Kale, which was vulnerable because within easy reach of naval gunfire. What he couldn’t know was that Hamilton had no intention of accomplishing anything substantial at Kum Kale; Kitchener had ordered him to avoid trying to establish a permanent position on the eastern side of the strait.

The British were to be put ashore on five separate beaches at Cape Helles, the toe of the peninsula. This Sanders did not expect at all. With good reason, he thought it improbable that the invaders would land at the point of maximum distance from what was presumably their destination, the Sea of Marmara. He decided that Hamilton was most likely to send most of his troops by ship to the area around the town of Bulair, at the narrow northern neck of the peninsula. There, if successful, the invaders would be almost at the Sea of Marmara and positioned to cut communications between the Turkish forces on Gallipoli and their home base to the north. He placed two divisions at Bulair and made it his headquarters.

The Anzacs, the biggest part of the Allied force, were to be taken up Gallipoli’s Aegean coast but less than halfway to Bulair. Their destination was a promisingly easy-looking beach leading to flat terrain at a point called Gaba Tepe. Air reconnaissance had found few Turkish troops in the area, and no reserves were nearby. Sanders therefore had a third of his troops on the wrong side of the strait and another third much too far north. Of the remaining third, half—a single undersize division—was sent to Cape Helles, where it would find itself trying to hold off the entire British landing force. The remaining one-sixth of Sanders’s force, his last division, was sent to the middle of the peninsula, to a position from which it could move wherever needed. The only substantial Turkish force within a day’s march of the Anzac landing, it was under the command of a strange, eccentric young lieutenant colonel who was so disliked and distrusted by the cabal that governed the Ottoman Empire that before the outbreak of war he had been consigned to inactive status. This was Mustafa Kemal, the future Atatürk.

The invasion should have been a triumph. The British, when they came ashore at Cape Helles, outnumbered the Turks there by six to one and met resistance at only two of their five landing beaches. Those beaches were, however, defended ferociously. At one of them, 700 of the first thousand troops to land were mowed down by machine-gun fire; at the end of the day only four hundred British were both on dry land and alive. At the other beach the Twenty-ninth Division, in action at last, fought its way through barbed wire and heavy fire, took control of the immediate area, and hunkered down to await instructions. None came, and so they did nothing. With a terrible absurdity, the same thing happened at the three undefended beaches. The British could have moved inland effortlessly and taken the crucial high ground that lay before them. They also, after advancing, could have swung around and taken from behind the Turks at the defended beaches. But no one had told their commanders what to do after getting ashore, and they stayed, uselessly, where they were.

At one of the undefended beaches, after standing by idly all day, the British spent a long hard night fighting off an enemy force that had at last come forward to meet them. In the morning, thinking their position hopeless, they returned to their landing craft and were taken away. At exactly the same time their Turkish adversaries, also having had enough, were themselves withdrawing. By then half the Turks at Cape Helles had become casualties, with barely a thousand still alive and unwounded. If the British had attacked, the sheer weight of their numbers would have been enough to sweep all resistance aside. But no orders came, and so again there was no move inland. Instead the British braced for a counterattack that the Turks were utterly incapable of attempting. Hamilton, on the battleship
Queen Elizabeth
well out to sea, had almost no idea of what was happening ashore and was able to issue no orders. By the end of the second day the French had disembarked from Kum Kale and were on their way to Cape Helles. It was too late. Sanders, having seen that there would be no landing in the north, was hurrying the Bulair divisions southward.

The landing of the Anzac force was also a disaster but of a markedly different kind. The Australians and New Zealanders, when they went ashore, encountered relatively light resistance but found themselves in a landscape far different from what they had been told to expect. Instead of the flat and easy ground that supposedly lay beyond Gaba Tepe, they found themselves having to clamber up into steep craggy hills and rock-lined ravines in the face of gunfire from Turkish riflemen concealed in the nearby hills. “A galling fire rained on us from the left where there were high cliffs,” an Australian corporal would recall. “One man dropped down alongside me laughing. I broke the news to him gently: ‘You’ve got yourself into the hottest corner you’ll ever strike.’ I had shown him where the enemy were, he fired a few shots. And again I heard the sickening thud of a bullet. I looked at him in horror. The bullet had fearfully mashed his face and gone down his throat, rendering him dumb. But his eyes were dreadful to behold. How he squirmed in agony. There was nothing I could do for him, but pray that he might die swiftly. It took him about twenty minutes to accomplish this and by that time he had tangled his legs in pain and stiffened. I saw the waxy color creep over his cheek and breathed easier.”

Eventually it would become clear that the Anzacs had been landed not at Gaba Tepe but, probably because of a misreading of the tidal currents, a full mile north of their destination. They were on a piece of coast so harsh and inaccessible that not even the Turks knew their way through it. Twelve thousand Anzacs got ashore in less than twelve hours, however, and almost immediately their advance units began pushing on into the hills. Soon they stood unchallenged on the ultimate prize: peaks from which they could look back to the Aegean and eastward to the Dardanelles. From here, once artillery was in place, they would command everything that mattered on land and sea.