A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (55 page)

The August 6 landing at Suvla Bay had delivered to Gallipoli the four divisions that Ian Hamilton, in response to inquiries from Kitchener, had said back in May that he would need to break the stalemate. In London there had been much disagreement over whether to send those divisions—disagreement heightened by the collapse of the Liberal government and its replacement with a coalition. But when Kitchener threatened to resign if they were not sent, the opposition relented. From that point forward, events both in Europe and at Gallipoli made victory seem more imperative than ever. Repeated attempts to break out at Cape Helles and Anzac Cove had ended in bloody failure, the Turks had begun mounting attacks of their own, and the beachheads had turned into stinking pits of disease.

Back in Europe, Italy had shown itself to be unprepared for war. Its army was ill-equipped, untrained, ineptly led, and incapable of the kind of impact the Entente had hoped for and the Central Powers had feared. The Italian commander in chief, Luigi Cadorna, had marched more than six hundred thousand troops north to the Isonzo River between Vienna and Trieste, where they greatly outnumbered the Austrian defenders. They had attacked in June, losing fifteen thousand men, and again in late July, when their casualties totaled forty-two thousand. These attacks had accomplished nothing. There would be two more before the end of the year, gaining no ground of significance and producing another one hundred and sixteen thousand casualties.

The Italian failures and Russian setbacks up and down the Eastern Front had been carefully watched in the Balkans. Bulgaria now seemed closer to joining the Central Powers; Romania and Greece were less inclined to throw in with the Entente. On August 4 the Russians were pulling out of Warsaw, and British and French fears that they were giving up rose almost to the level of panic. Joffre was well along with his planning of a new offensive, but it could not be ready until autumn and British cooperation was not assured. On all the many fronts of this increasingly immense war, there remained only one place where the Entente could act immediately to end the sequence of calamities. That place was Gallipoli.

The August 6 assault had been given the highest priority and all the support that any commander could have wished in terms of manpower, weaponry, and naval and air support. Its centerpiece, the nighttime landing at Suvla Bay, was well planned and took the defenders by surprise. Sanders, the German commander, knew in advance that another invasion was coming but had no idea where. Hamilton opened the operation with attacks by the thirty-five thousand men already ashore at Cape Helles and the fifty-seven thousand at Anzac Cove, tying up the Turks in both places. To avoid drawing attention to Suvla, he had ordered no naval bombardment there before the landing.

Everything went as well as anyone could have expected when putting masses of inexperienced troops ashore on a wild and unfamiliar coast on a moonless night. By the morning of August 7 more than twenty thousand men had been landed, meeting almost no resistance and suffering practically no losses. The troops moved two miles inland and stopped to secure a perimeter. A wealth of munitions and supplies was quickly piled up on the beach. Fewer than fifteen hundred Turkish troops, armed with little more than rifles, stood between Suvla and Tekke Tepe Ridge—the key to everything beyond, the whole point of the landing. When attacked, they fled, many of them throwing down their weapons. The nearest reinforcements were at least a day and a half away. The only thing remaining to be done was for some substantial part of the invading force to move the few miles uphill to Tekke Tepe and establish a defensible position there. Rugged as those few miles were, rocky and overgrown and broken by Gallipoli’s maze of ravines, they could have been traversed by noon on the first day.

British troops and supplies on the beach at Suvla Bay

Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Stopford in his prewar finery
Remained far from the action while the opportunity was lost.

All through that first day the troops ashore were marched back and forth in confusion, their officers having been given no clear instructions as to what they were supposed to do. Hamilton himself remained miles away at his headquarters on the island of Lemnos. The commander of the landing force—a sixty-one-year-old lieutenant general named Sir Frederick Stopford, who been given the assignment by Kitchener because Hamilton’s choices supposedly were needed on the Western Front—had never in his career commanded troops in combat. Satisfied that all was going well, believing that nothing more needed to be done until his artillery was put ashore, he remained aboard the ship that he had made his headquarters.

Late on the morning of August 8, half mad with frustration because of the absence of any indication that Stopford was trying to take the heights, Hamilton decided to go to Suvla himself. For a long time he was unable to find a ship to take him. It was late afternoon when he finally arrived, and when he did the senior officer ashore told him, absurdly, that no troops would be available to advance into the interior until morning. Hamilton’s air spotters had reported that, although Tekke Tepe remained empty, a Turkish force was marching toward it from the north. When he insisted that morning would be too late, the Thirty-second Brigade suddenly became available. But the climb to the ridge now had to be made in darkness. The brigade repeatedly lost its way in the confusing terrain and so took seven hours to finally reach the point from which, as the night ended, it began its final ascent and was met just short of its goal by the troops of Mustafa Kemal.

The fight for Tekke Tepe Ridge had followed two days of terrible combat at Anzac Cove (where Kemal had yet again saved the day for the Turks and been vaulted by Sanders to command of all the troops in the area) and at Cape Helles. A day afterward, still without sleep, able to stay on his feet only with the aid of stimulants administered by a doctor who followed him everwhere, Kemal was shot through the wrist while driving the Anzacs from the high point of Chunuk Bair. This was the final crisis; if the Anzacs had been able to hold Chunuk Bair, it might have compensated for the failure at Tekke Tepe. When they were driven off, the second invasion of Gallipoli was essentially finished. The hapless Stopford launched additional attacks on August 12, 15, and 21, the last being the biggest battle of the Gallipoli campaign. It all but wrecked the Twenty-ninth Division that had arrived on the peninsula amid such high hopes in April. These anticlimactic offensives managed to connect the beachheads at Suvla and Anzac Cove but not to take any of the high ground on which the Turks were now positioned in strength. Both sides settled down to more stalemate. Hamilton sent a telegram to London reporting that Suvla Bay was a failure and stating that to regain the initiative he was going to need another ninety-five thousand troops. His August casualties totaled forty-five thousand, eight thousand of them at Suvla.

When Hamilton’s grim news reached its destination, Kitchener was in France attending the last of a series of meetings called for the purpose of deciding what should be done next on the Western Front. The first of these conferences, at Calais on July 6, had been attended not only by the army leadership but by Prime Minister Asquith and French War Minister Millerand. It had exposed continued disagreement as to priorities and had made plain that the lines of division extended in many directions. Joffre had outlined his plan for a fall offensive. Kitchener had reacted with something close to scorn, as had Arthur Balfour, a former prime minister who had recently replaced Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty. The next day, Kitchener and the civilians having departed, Joffre and French met at Chantilly and quietly agreed that the preparations for their offensive should proceed regardless of what the politicians thought. At a larger meeting of French and British generals on July 17, it was Haig who raised objections. He had examined the area where Joffre, Foch, and French wanted his army to attack. He declared it to be unsuitable and himself to be unwilling. The ground was too open, he said; his troops would be too exposed. And he did not have nearly enough artillery. Joffre was unmoved.

Kitchener was back in France in mid-August not only because details of the offensive needed to be settled but because of mounting trouble in the east. The fall of Warsaw—and so of all Poland—had been followed by continued German advances and increasing evidence that the Russian armies were on the verge of disintegration. The Russian retreat was turning into not just an alarming mess but a wave of crimes against humanity.

For generations most of Russia’s Jews had been forcibly confined to eastern Poland, where they were required to live in ghettos and shtetls and almost entirely barred both from farming and from the learned professions. In late 1914, claiming to be addressing security concerns, the Russians had driven more than half a million of these people out of their homes and left them to the tender mercies of the long central European winter. In the first months of 1915 another eight hundred thousand of them were put out onto the roads of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland by the tsar’s Cossacks, who often did not even permit them to take whatever possessions they might have been able to carry or cart away.

The Russians’ final withdrawal from Poland was directed by General Nikolai Yanushkevich, a protégé of one of the tsar’s favorites, the corrupt War Minister Vladimir Sukhomlinov. Yanushkevich, whom the tsar had forced a reluctant Grand Duke Nicholas to accept as his chief of staff early in the war, adopted a scorched-earth policy in which all the region’s inhabitants, Jews and Gentiles alike, were put to flight. Stores of grain and other foodstuffs were destroyed; machinery was loaded onto wagons and railcars and moved east. Four million head of cattle were gratuitously slaughtered, ushering in a meat shortage that would persist in Russia beyond the end of the war. The refugees were ravaged by starvation, cholera, typhus, and typhoid. The number of lives lost will never be known.

The scale of the war in the east was breathtaking. Not long after taking Warsaw, the Germans captured the fortress city of Novo Georgievsk, taking ninety thousand soldiers, thirty generals, and seven hundred guns with it. Days later they took the equally important city of Kovno and another thirteen hundred guns. By now the Germans had taken more than seven hundred thousand Russian prisoners, the Austrians nearly that many, and their armies were still marching eastward. The Russian general staff was so alarmed by the rate at which its men were surrendering that it issued draconian decrees. Families of soldiers taken prisoner would receive no government assistance. Soldiers who surrendered would be sent to Siberia after the war.

As reports of what was happening arrived in the west, General Sir Henry Wilson, the British officer closest to the French high command and a masterful if sometimes too obvious manipulator, found ways to use them to the advantage of his friends. He began warning London that failure to give full support to France’s next offensive could lead to the fall of Joffre and Millerand—and to
France
making a separate peace. Not surprisingly, Kitchener informed Hamilton that he should expect no more troops at Gallipoli and gave the BEF unambiguous new orders for the autumn. Britain must support Joffre’s offensive to the utmost, he said, “even though, by doing so, we suffer very heavy losses indeed.” What is striking is that Kitchener at no point, privately or otherwise, expressed the smallest hope that the coming offensive might be a success. Its purpose, for him, was not to achieve victory but to hold the Entente together. His fears were eased though not ended when, in the closing days of August, Tsar Nicholas removed Grand Duke Nicholas as head of the Russian armies and, to the entirely appropriate horror of his ministers, appointed himself to the position. Nicholas was the soul of gentleness in dismissing his cousin, explaining in a letter that he believed it to be his “duty to the country which God has committed to my keeping” to “share the burdens and toils of war with my army and help it protect Russian soil against the onslaught of the foe.” The grand duke, when he got the news, was more succinct. “God be praised,” he said. “The Emperor releases me from a task which was wearing me out.”