The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (90 page)

Churchill was keenly aware of the position’s military significance. On August 17, when Turkey was neutral, Asquith had written his wife: “The Turk threatens to give trouble in Egypt and elsewhere, and the Germans are doing all they can to get hold of him. Winston is quite prepared to send a swarm of flotillas into the Dardanelles to torpedo the ‘Goeben’ if necessary.” Two weeks later, before the battle of the Marne had even begun and with Turkey still a nonbelligerent, Churchill had persuaded Kitchener to send him two generals, who, with two admirals, would “examine and work out a plan for the seizure by means of a Greek army of adequate strength of the Gallipoli peninsula, with a view to admitting a British Fleet into the Sea of Marmara.” The following day, with Turkey still neutral, the cabinet had agreed to help Serbia and Rumania and, in Asquith’s words, “to sink Turkish ships if they issue from the Dardanelles.” The prime minister wanted to frighten the Turks out of the war. His first lord expected them to come in. At that same meeting, according to the diary of Joseph Pease, a fellow minister, Churchill proposed that once the first shots had been fired the Admiralty should concentrate on “landing Greek force on isthmus on west side of Dardanelles [Gallipoli] & controlling Sea of Marmara.” Grey, troubled, wrote him four days later: “I dont like the prospect in the Mediterranean at all, unless there is some turn of the tide in France.” Churchill replied: “There is no need for British or Russian anxiety abt a war with Turkey…. The price to be paid in taking Gallipoli wd no doubt be heavy, but there wd be no more war with Turkey. A good army of 50,000 & sea-power—that is the end of the Turkish menace.”
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In the last week of September 1914 a British squadron lying off Cape Helles had stopped a Turkish torpedo boat and, finding German soldiers aboard, turned it back. Learning of this, the German officer who had assumed command of the strait had mined the Dardanelles, ordered that all lighthouses be darkened, and erected signs on precipices declaring that the channel was closed. This had been a flagrant violation of an international convention guaranteeing free passage of the strait. Its sequel, the attack on the czar’s Black Sea ports by German cruisers flying the Turkish colors, had brought Turkey in as a formal belligerent. Worried about the security of Egypt, Churchill asked Fisher to investigate “the possibility & advisability of a bombardment of the sea face forts of the Dardanelles.”
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Fisher found the prospects excellent, and during a ten-minute shelling by British warships, a lucky shot hit the magazine of the enemy position at Sedd-el-Bahr, destroying the fort and most of its guns. The wisdom of this strike is doubtful, however. The Turks, warned, withdrew their big guns to the two ancient, crenellated fortresses guarding the channel’s Narrows at Chanak. Later in this campaign the same sin would be repeated again and again. The British would strike a heavy blow. It would be effective but indecisive. They would return to find the enemy alerted and strengthened.

In London the War Council met for the first time on November 25.
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Churchill, according to Hankey’s notes, urged “an attack on Gallipoli peninsula. This, if successful, would give us control of the Dardanelles, and we could dictate terms at Constantinople.” Fisher spoke up, asking “whether Greece might not perhaps undertake an attack on Gallipoli on behalf of the Allies.” Grey then delivered a rueful report. King Constantine, nagged by his German wife, unwilling to fight his cousin the kaiser, and worried about Bulgarian intentions, had vetoed Premier Venizelos’s troop offer. Winston, undiscouraged, pointed out that Constantine’s throne was wobbly. Surely he could be subverted. They must not give up. Before them lay a chance to execute the greatest flanking movement in history. He felt military greatness stirring within him. “I have it in me,” he had confided to a friend, “to be a successful soldier. I can visualize great movements and combinations.” In private he repeated his arguments to Asquith, pressing him to open a new front in the Balkans. On December 5 Asquith wrote Venetia, “His volatile mind is at present set on Turkey & Bulgaria, & he wants to organise a heroic adventure against Gallipoli and the Dardanelles: to wh I am altogether opposed.”
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By Christmas Winston had reluctantly changed his mind. The troops were unavailable, and he assumed the strait couldn’t be taken until they held the peninsula. To be sure, the Dardanelles had been forced by ships alone in 1807, when Napoleon was advancing eastward. Seven British men-of-war under Admiral John T. Duckworth had run the gauntlet, reached the Sea of Marmara, and returned through the channel a week later without losing a single vessel. But twentieth-century fortifications were more imposing. In his early years as first sea lord, Fisher had pondered the Dardanelles problem twice and concluded that it would be “mightily hazardous.” On March 15, 1911, Winston himself had written the cabinet: “It is no longer possible to force the Dardanelles… nobody would expose a modern fleet to such perils.” Now, on December 22, 1914, he wrote Fisher: “The Baltic is the only theatre in wh naval action can appreciably shorten the war.” The old admiral continued to look eastward. “
I CONSIDER THE ATTACK ON TURKEY HOLDS THE FIELD
!” he replied, “but
ONLY
if it’s
IMMEDIATE
.” However, his plan called for 75,000 British soldiers now in French trenches, plus the Indian and Egyptian garrisons, none of which were available. Similarly, when Lloyd George wanted to land 100,000 men in Syria or Salonika, the men were not to be had. On December 30 Asquith noted that he had received “two very interesting memoranda” from Hankey and Churchill. Both wanted to end the senseless slaughter in the trenches. Hankey pointed out that the BEF was not advancing in France and the British were losing more men than the Germans. He proposed a broad flanking movement through the Balkans. Churchill’s minute opened with a ringing cry that the new armies Kitchener was forming ought not to be sent to “chew barbed wire.” He then renewed his proposal to storm Schleswig-Holstein via Borkum. In his diary Captain Richmond wrote: “It is
quite mad
…. It remains with the army, who I hope will refuse to throw away 12000 troops in this manner for the self-glorification of an ignorant and impulsive man.” Refuse they did, and the ministers’ frantic search for a better battlefield continued. On New Year’s Day the prime minister found two more propositions on his desk, from Lloyd George and, again, from Winston. He noted: “They are both keen on a new objective & theatre as soon as our troops are ready. W., of course, for Borkum and the Baltic: LG for Salonica to join in with the Serbians, and for Syria!”
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The Russians forced their hand. They, too, had lost a million men, and had suffered crushing defeats at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. Their rifles and ammunition were in short supply. Now the Turks were threatening the Caucasus. Grand Duke Nicholas summoned the chief British observer accompanying his army and told him that if the Turkish drive continued, he would have to wheel southward to meet it, reducing his commitment to the German front. This was grave. If the Russians fell back, German troops now fighting in the east could be moved into France. The threat brought Kitchener, until now obsessed with the trenches, into the debate over grand strategy. He came to the Admiralty to suggest a naval “demonstration at the Dardanelles.” Winston replied that if any such move were to be effective, an infantry commitment would be necessary. When Kitchener returned to the War Office, his staff told him that every English soldier who could be mustered was required on the western front—another standoff. On January 4 Churchill expressed reservations about any attack on Turkey; he still favored the Baltic. The War Council met repeatedly, pondering plans to relieve the pressure on their harried Russian ally. Kitchener opened the January 8 session with a depressing report: a new German drive in France was imminent. Lloyd George interrupted to say heatedly that trench fighting would never lead to victory. Was there, he asked, no alternative theater “in which we might employ our surplus armies to produce a decisive effect?”
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Kitchener could think of only one, and he asked the others to support him in backing it. “The Dardanelles,” he said, “appear to be the most suitable objective, as an attack here could be made in co-operation with the Fleet. If successful, it would re-establish communications with Russia; settle the Near Eastern question; draw in Greece and, perhaps, Bulgaria and Rumania; and release wheat and shipping now locked up in the Black Sea.” Hankey added that a Dardanelles victory “would give us the Danube as a line of communication for an army penetrating into the heart of Austria and bring our sea power to bear in the middle of Europe.” The first lord was skeptical. When he asked about troops, the minister for war was evasive. The attack, it seemed, would have to be by ships alone. Churchill therefore rejected it. As late as January 11 he was still pressing for action in the North Sea. The following day, however, events took a sudden, unexpected turn.
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N
apoleon had written: “Essentially the great question remains: Who will hold Constantinople?” It does not seem essential today, but before the advent of air power the lovely, decaying, sprawling, 2,600-year-old capital of Byzantium was as vital to control of the world’s trade routes as it had been in 85
B.C.
, when the Roman general Sulla signed a famous treaty with Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, in the ancient city of Dardanus, thereby giving the nearby strait its name. As recently as 1886, Lord Salisbury, when he was successfully negotiating free passage to Constantinople for British ships of the line, had written Winston’s father: “You are naturally sarcastic about my Dardanelles, and I hope the matter will not come up in our time…. I consider the loss of Constantinople would be the ruin of our party and a heavy blow to the country.”
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Exotic, vaguely sinister with its skyline of onion-domed mosques and slender minarets, its ornate Topkapi Palace housing the sultan’s seraglio, its noisome Haydarpasar stews, the luxury hotels overlooking the Bosporus, the Golden Horn separating the city from its wealthy suburbs, Constantinople had seen Saracens and Crusaders eviscerate one another, had watched red-bearded Sultan “Abdul the Damned” butcher his subjects in the streets, and seemed stained by its memories. Abdul’s successors, the Young Turks, were a small improvement on him. Their leader, Enver Pasha, was a vain, shallow, cruel megalomaniac who strutted around in a dandy’s uniform, fingering his sword hilt. He and his fellow pashas didn’t even treasure their own past; if the British approached, they planned to demolish Constantinople out of spite. Saint Sophia, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and other priceless buildings were primed with dynamite. Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador, begged them to save Saint Sophia at least, but a Young Turk told him: “There are not six men in the Committee of Union and Progress who care for anything that is old. We all like new things.”
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They thought of themselves as modern politicians, but they were politically inept. The people mistrusted them deeply; every neutral diplomat believed that at the first sight of a British warship off the Golden Horn, the masses would rise. The Young Turks were proud of their militarism. Yet the country’s defenses were in wretched shape—obsolete, undermanned, badly led. Actually, the army’s officers included a military genius: thirty-three-year-old Mustapha Kemal. But Kemal despised the Germans. Therefore he was banished from Constantinople. As a sign of his low station he was ordered to defend remote Gallipoli.

“I
loathe
the Turk,” Margot Asquith wrote in her diary on November 9, “and really hope that he will be wiped out of Europe.” Young men of her class saw it rather differently. They held no brief for the country’s present rulers, but Asia Minor fascinated them. Classically educated in England’s public schools, they had an almost mystical regard for the heroes who had dominated it in its days of greatness. The city of Troy had stood not four miles from the southern entrance to the Dardanelles. Around it lay the once embattled Troad, now called the Troas Plain. And high above loomed Mount Ida, from whose 5,800-foot peak the gods were said to have witnessed the Trojan War. Upon learning that he was bound for the Bosporus, Rupert Brooke wrote: “It’s too wonderful for belief. I had not imagined Fate could be so benign…. Will Hero’s Tower crumble under the 15-inch guns? Will the sea be polyphloisbic and wine-dark and unvintageable? Shall I loot mosaics from St. Sophia, and Turkish Delight and carpets? Shall we be a Turning Point in History? Oh God! I’ve never been quite so happy in my life I think. Never quite so pervasively happy; like a stream flowing entirely to one end. I suddenly realize that the ambition of my life has been—since I was two—to go on a military expedition against Constantinople.” It was Brooke, the symbol of the idealistic generation now being fed to the guns, who had just written:
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Even Churchill, who had despised his Greek classes at Harrow, confronted the Turkish challenge with a quickening pulse; at the climax of his novel,
Savrola,
an admiral had led his ships past a gauntlet of blazing forts. That, however, had been fiction. To the Admiralty, Kitchener’s insistence upon a naval attack, unsupported by infantry on Gallipoli, seemed futile. Nevertheless, Churchill summoned his senior admirals and asked their opinion. As he expected, they were pessimistic. Yet he was reluctant to leave the issue there. It was crucial, and not only because of the need for Grand Duke Nicholas to keep Germany’s eastern armies tied down. Russia’s grain was wanted to feed the Allies; 350,000 tons of it were piled up in the Black Sea ports. Any action in Asia Minor would have to be confined to old battleships not needed by Jellicoe in the North Sea. England’s security could not be compromised. As it happened, old battleships were available; in his last naval estimates Winston had provided funds to keep such vessels in commission. There was another factor. “Like most people,” he testified before a commission investigating the campaign in 1916, “I had held the opinion that the days of forcing the Dardanelles were over…. But this war had brought many surprises. We had seen fortresses reputed throughout Europe to be impregnable collapsing after a few days’ attack by field armies without a regular siege.” Before he broke the bad news to Kitchener, he decided, he would send a query to Vice Admiral Sackville Carden, commanding the blockading squadron off Cape Helles. He wired him: “Do you consider the forcing of the Dardanelles by ships alone a practicable operation. It is assumed that older battleships fitted with mine-bumpers would be used preceded by colliers or other merchant craft as bumpers and sweepers. Importance of results would justify severe loss. Let me know your views.”
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