The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (92 page)

C
hurchill now set aside all thoughts of a Baltic campaign and concentrated on the Dardanelles. He believed the battle was as good as won, always a dangerous assumption in war. By coincidence January 13 was the Russian New Year, and he had sent an extravagant holiday message to Saint Petersburg: “Our resources are within reach and inexhaustible; our minds are made up. We have only to bend forward together laying aside every hindrance, keeping nothing back, and the downfall of German ambition is sure.” For the next week he and an ad hoc Admiralty war group examined every particular detail of the coming attack, sending and receiving telegrams from Carden almost hourly. Each instruction, each technical problem, was read, endorsed, and initialed by the first sea lord with the famous scrawled green
F.
Yet the old admiral was seething. Like a tumor, an irrational terror was growing in him—the fear that the Aegean expedition would weaken the Home Fleet, encouraging Tirpitz to steam into Scapa Flow with a superior force, sink every British warship left there, and win the war. In that case Jellicoe would become the defeated admiral. But he did not share the first sea lord’s doubts. He kept sending him reassurances. Fisher was unconsoled. On January 19, six days after the decision, he wrote Jellicoe that the ships sailing to the eastern Mediterranean were “
all urgently required at the decisive theatre at home!
There is only one way out, and that is to resign! But you say ‘
no
,’ which simply means I am a consenting party to what I absolutely disapprove.
I don’t agree with one single step taken,
so it is fearfully against the grain that I remain on in deference to your wishes.” The next day he wept on Hankey’s shoulder. Hankey told Asquith, who wrote Venetia that the old man was “in a very unhappy frame of mind,” that he “likes Winston personally” but was frequently overruled (“he out-argues me”) on purely “technical naval matters.”
⁶⁹

The Dardanelles assault had been approved, not by Churchill, but by the entire War Council. Fisher had participated in every step taken since then. Winston had no inkling of his anxiety until, eight days after the arrival of Carden’s plan of attack, the first sea lord urged the recall of a destroyer flotilla and an Australian submarine which had been sent to the Aegean from Scapa Flow. He himself had suggested the dispatch of the
Queen Elizabeth,
but on January 21, in another letter to Jellicoe, he wrote that its transfer was “a serious interference with our imperative needs in Home waters, and I’ve fought against it ‘tooth and nail.’… I just abominate the Dardanelles operation, unless a great change is made and it is settled to be a military operation, with 200,000 men in conjunction with the Fleet. I believe that Kitchener is coming now to this view of the matter.” But Kitchener wasn’t, at least not yet. Thus far the War Office had not been drawn in. Churchill would have been elated had K of K offered 200,000 men, or even a fraction of that. Lacking troops, Winston was moving forward on the strength of Carden’s professional opinion. All of them had endorsed it, including Fisher. Yet the old salt continued to have second thoughts. His blaming Churchill was a consequence of senility. Matters had to come to a head; even he recognized that, and so, on January 25, he submitted a rebellious memorandum to the first lord, with a request that it be printed and circulated among members of the War Council before their next meeting, scheduled three days hence. His paper was a flat renunciation of the entire Dardanelles plan. “We play into Germany’s hands,” he wrote, “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… is to force a decision at sea, and so far and no further can they be justified.” Therefore, the Admiralty should be satisfied with blockading the enemy: “Being already 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.”
⁷⁰

Churchill was stunned. He immediately drew up a table comparing the naval strengths of Britain and Germany, pointing out that England’s domination of the North Sea would be unweakened by the Dardanelles task force. Jellicoe concurred. Fisher wouldn’t budge. Asquith refused to circulate either his memorandum or Winston’s table. On the morning of the next War Council meeting Churchill found Fisher’s resignation on his desk. “I entreat you to believe,” he said in part, “that if as I think really desirable for a complete
‘unity of purpose’
in the War that I should gracefully disappear and revert to roses at Richmond (
‘The heart untravelled fondly turns to home’
) that there will not be in my heart the least lingering thought of anything but regard and affection and
indeed much admiration
towards yourself.”
⁷¹

Winston hurried across the Horse Guards Parade to No. 10. Asquith, furious, summoned Fisher to his upstairs study, heard his version and Churchill’s, and told them his decision. As a sop to Fisher, the Zeebrugge operation was shelved. The Dardanelles plan would stand unchanged. The three men then descended to the Cabinet Room to join the council. Fisher remained taciturn as usual until Churchill mentioned French and Russian reactions to Carden’s coming campaign in Turkey. At that he spoke up, saying he had “understood that this question would not be raised today, and the Prime Minister is well aware of my views in regard to it.” With that, he rose, left the table, and stood at a window with his back to the others. Kitchener went to him. Fisher, tight-lipped, said he was leaving the Admiralty. Kitchener pointed out that everyone else believed in the plan, that the prime minister had issued the directive, and that it was the first sea lord’s duty to follow orders. Reluctantly the old admiral returned to his seat. As he himself said later, “Naval opinion was unanimous. Mr. Churchill had them all on his side. I was the only rebel.” Asquith told the meeting that Churchill was anxious to have everyone’s views on the importance of the coming campaign. Kitchener considered the naval attack to be “vitally important. If successful, its effect would be the equivalent of a successful campaign fought with the new armies.” Grey said it would settle the situation in the Balkans, particularly in Bulgaria. Balfour was rhapsodic. He thought it would cut Turkey in half, turn Constantinople into an Allied base, provide them with Russian wheat, and open a passage to the Danube. “It is difficult,” he said, to “imagine a more helpful operation.”
⁷²

During these cheerful forecasts, Asquith scribbled a note to Venetia: “A personal matter which rather worries me is the growing friction between Winston and Fisher.” As the council broke for lunch, the prime minister called the old salt to his study, and, after a turbulent hour, persuaded him to support it. Fisher, indeed, seemed to have been transformed into an enthusiast. He even suggested—and the offer was accepted—that Carden be reinforced by two 1908 battleships from Scapa Flow, the
Lord Nelson
and the
Agamemnon
. “When I finally decided to come in,” he later testified, “I went the whole hog, totus porcus.” Churchill sprang a surprise during that afternoon’s session. He announced that he didn’t want troops even if Kitchener offered them. “A landing in force under fire on the Gallipoli peninsula” once the Turks were “fully awakened,” he argued, would involve “a greater stake.” A successful naval action could produce “revolutionary effects at Constantinople and throughout the Balkans.” The prospects for success were so bright that he believed it worthwhile “to try the naval plan” even though, if it failed, “a subsequent military operation” would be rendered “more difficult.” If a brigade of Tommies was available, he suggested, it should be sent to Salonika, where, he believed, the appearance of no more than 10,000 British soldiers would bring Greece’s 180,000 troops into the war. As the dinner hour approached, he conferred with Fisher and Vice Admiral Henry Oliver, chief of the Admiralty War Staff, then told the council, with Fisher’s approval, that the Admiralty was united in its determination to “make a naval attack on the Dardanelles.” Oliver said: “The first shot will be fired in about a fortnight.”
⁷³

Actually, it would not be fired for over three weeks. Meanwhile, misunderstandings and disagreements, inherent in war by committee, multiplied. “No single man,” Robert Rhodes James has observed, “can, or should, bear responsibility for the series of decisions, half-decisions, and evasions of decisions that marked the initiation of the Gallipoli campaign. The manner in which the Asquith Government drifted into this vast commitment of men and resources… condemns not any individual but rather the system of war government practiced by the Administration.” Churchill, however, had become the operation’s most visible advocate and its most eloquent spokesman. As he saw the situation in early 1915, France had become an abattoir, the Russians were bogged down, the German fleet refused to come out and fight, and the world’s finest military instrument, the Royal Navy, was idle. Therefore, as Asquith noted, “Winston is for the moment as keen as mustard about his Dardanelles adventure.” It had become
his
Dardanelles adventure. Even the prime minister now thought of it that way. As such, it would become a cross he bore for years. Later it was seen as a monument to his genius. In
Through the Fog of War,
Liddell Hart wrote: “Everyone realizes that, in the words of the German official account, ‘Churchill’s bold idea was not a finespun fantasy of the brain.’ We too now know, as the Germans did in the War, how feasible was the Dardanelles project, and how vital its effect would have been.” Another writer, Edward Grigg, declared that had Churchill’s advice been followed—had he had the power of the prime minister—“not only the entire development of the First World War but also the fate of Britain, and Europe, too, would have been different.”
⁷⁴

But he was
not
prime minister. In attempting to reshape the entire direction of the war from the Admiralty, he was headed for rocks and shoals. It was Antwerp again—in spades. As he recalled in 1949: “I was ruined for the time being over the Dardanelles, and a supreme enterprise cast away, through my trying to carry out a major and combined enterprise of war from a subordinate position.” Ian Hamilton described him as “one who has it in him to revive the part of Pitt, had he but Pitt’s place.” Lacking it, he was unable to force, not the Dardanelles, but Britain’s naval and military commanders. Moreover, being wholly competent himself, he assumed that they were, too. They weren’t. Hindenburg called the British soldiers of that war “lions led by donkeys.”
⁷⁵
Some were stupid; others were devious. Haig told the War Office that the Germans being taken prisoner were in wretched condition, proof that the enemy was scraping the bottom of the barrel; when the prime minister crossed the Channel to see for himself, Haig packed a POW camp with sick, scrawny captives. Able politicians should see through such scams. They are, or ought to be, shrewd judges of men, and Churchill’s continuing misjudgment of Fisher, his failure to realize that his first sea lord was a Judas, spelled trouble ahead. So did his puzzling claim that he didn’t need troops on Gallipoli.

At first it passed unnoticed. At the next meeting of the War Council, on February 9, Churchill informed them of a dazzling
coup de maître.
Venizelos had been persuaded to defy his king and turn the Greek island of Lemnos over to the British as a base for operations against Turkey. It was a masterstroke, accomplished with tact and restraint—Winston had overruled Fisher’s preposterous proposal that they annex Lemnos and Lesbos—and the ministers were too elated to question this intrusion into Grey’s domain. It was four days later, when the warships detailed to shell the Dardanelles had assembled off Cape Helles, and Carden was awaiting the last minesweepers before attacking, that Hankey became the first to challenge Winston’s position on troops. He approached Asquith, who wrote Venetia that Hankey “thinks very strongly that the naval operations of which you know should be supported by landing a fairly strong military force. I have been for some time coming to the same opinion, and I think we ought to be able without denuding [Sir John] French to scrape together from Egypt, Malta & elsewhere a sufficiently large contingent.” Others were reaching the same conclusion independently. The next day Richmond sent Hankey a memorandum arguing that “the bombardment of the Dardanelles, even if all the forts are destroyed, can be nothing but a local success, which without an army to carry it on can have no further effect.” Hankey replied, “Your Memo. is absolutely A.
I
… I am sending it to Jacky.” Fisher wrote Richmond: “
YOUR PAPER IS EXCELLENT
.” That same day Admiral Sir Henry Jackson submitted a minute to the first lord: “The naval bombardment is not recommended as a sound military operation unless a strong military force is ready to assist in the operation, or, at least, follow it up immediately the forts are silenced.”
⁷⁶

All this gave Churchill pause. In first broaching the subject of the Dardanelles, he had specified the need for infantry; his switch had been based on Carden’s assurance that warships could do the job alone. Now, a month later, he belatedly roused himself and cast about for sources of troops. As it happened, the very day he received Jackson’s opinion, the Greeks rejected Grey’s offer of a Salonika expedition. That meant a first-class division, the Twenty-ninth, was available for assignment elsewhere. Asquith called an emergency meeting of the War Council. Kitchener agreed that the Twenty-ninth should sail to Lemnos “at the earliest possible date.” There they would be joined by a marine brigade and the Australian and New Zealand troops now in Egypt, all of which would be available “in case of necessity to support the naval attack on the Dardanelles.” The first lord was directed to assemble sufficient transports to carry “a force of 50,000 men at any point where they might be required.” The attempt on the strait was now imminent. K of K passed Winston a note: “You get through! I will find the men.”
⁷⁷