The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (94 page)

During this euphoric interlude, Kitchener’s Twenty-ninth Division shrank in significance. Churchill told the War Council that in exploiting Constantinople’s capitulation they could count on 140,000 men: the British troops in Egypt, the Royal Naval Division now at sea, 2,000 Royal Marines already on Lemnos, a French division, the three Greek divisions Venizelos had promised, and a Russian corps preparing to embark at Batum, the Black Sea port near the Russo-Turkish border. He hadn’t even counted the Rumanians, Bulgarians, and Italians waiting in the wings. Greece’s 60,000 troops alone could seize and fortify Gallipoli. But speed, as Fisher had noted, was essential. On March 4 Winston wrote Grey: “Mr Venizelos shd be told
now
that the Admiralty believe it in their power to force the Dardanelles without military assistance, destroying all the forts as they go. If so, Gallipoli Peninsula cannot be held by Turks, who wd be cut off & reduced at leisure. By the 20th inst 40,000 British Infantry will be available to go to C’nople, if the Straits have been forced, either by crossing the Bulair Isthmus, or going up the Dardanelles. A French Divn will be on the spot at the same time. M. Venizelos shd consider Greek military movements in relation to these facts.”
⁸⁷

It was at this point that what he later called “the terrible Ifs” began to accumulate. If Greece had entered the war then, everything would not have hinged on Carden’s conquest of the Narrows. The forts there could have been taken from the rear, by land. Churchill warned Grey two days later: “If you don’t back up
this
Greece—the Greece of Venizelos—you will have another wh will cleave to Germany.”
⁸⁸
Precisely that happened. It wasn’t Grey’s fault. The blame lay in Saint Petersburg. Both London and Paris agreed that King Constantine should receive Constantinople’s surrender. The czar, who more than anyone else needed a victory on this front—whose very life depended upon it—refused even to discuss the idea. The Bosporus was
his,
he told the incredulous British ambassador on March 3; once Constantine entered it in triumph he would never leave. When word of this reached Athens three days later, the Venizelos government fell and was replaced by German sympathizers led by M. Zaimis, who held that Greece must remain neutral because it was threatened by an invasion of Bulgarians. The first domino had failed to topple. The others awaited events in the Dardanelles.

That same day Carden began to encounter difficulties—nothing serious, but enough to exasperate him and temper the enthusiasm at home. Turkish riflemen reappeared at Cape Helles and Kum Kale and drove off the British landing parties. Gales and another storm developed on March 8, and when the sky cleared the admiral’s battleship captains, ordered to silence the land batteries between Kephez Point and Chanak, reported that they couldn’t get within range of them. Minefields barred the way. It was then that the admiral discovered his Achilles’ heel. By tradition, British trawlers used for minesweepers were manned by civilians, fishermen recruited in England’s commercial ports. The Turkish guns couldn’t reach the warships, but they were raking the trawlers, which backed away. One trawler officer told Commodore Roger Keyes, Carden’s chief of staff, that his men “recognize sweeping risks and don’t mind getting blown up, but they hate the gunfire, and point out that they aren’t supposed to sweep under fire, they didn’t join for that.”
⁸⁹

Keyes, the ablest officer in the operation, called for volunteers from his Royal Navy tars. Meanwhile, he offered the fishermen bonuses. That night the trawlers tried again. The enemy surprised them with huge searchlights from Germany, uncrated that very afternoon. Blinded by their glare, the sweeper crews turned tail. Keyes pointed out that the enemy fire, though deafening, was wild. He persuaded them to try again the following night. Again they fled. As he wrote afterward: “I was furious and told the officers in charge that they had had their opportunity…. It did not matter if we lost all seven sweepers, there were twenty-eight more, and the mines had got to be swept up. How could they talk of being stopped by heavy fire if they were not hit? The Admiralty were prepared for losses, but we had chucked our hand in and started squealing before we had any.”
⁹⁰

In London, Churchill agreed. That same day—March 11—he wired Carden: “Your original instructions laid stress on caution and deliberate methods, and we approve highly the skill and patience with which you have advanced hitherto without loss. The results to be gained are, however, great enough to justify loss of ships and men…. We do not wish to hurry you or urge you beyond your judgment, but we recognise clearly that at a certain period in your operations you will have to press hard for a decision, and we desire to know whether you consider that point has now been reached.” There was no reply—Winston terrified Carden—but in forty-eight hours the bluejacket volunteers were ready, and despite the arrival of new German searchlights and more accurate fire, the sweepers persevered. In the morning shoals of mines, cut adrift by the trawlers’ kites, floated southward with the current. In four or five days, Carden’s staff believed, they would be ready to assault the Narrows. But Churchill was impatient. And his query was still unanswered. He telegraphed again: “I do not understand why minesweeping should be interfered with by firing which causes no casualties. Two or three hundred casualties would be a moderate price to pay for sweeping up as far as the Narrows…. This work has to be done whatever the loss of life and small craft and the sooner it is done the better. Secondly, we have information that the Turkish forts are short of ammunition, that German officers have made desponding reports and have appealed to Germany for more. Every conceivable effort is being made to supply ammunition. It is being seriously considered to send a German or Austrian submarine, but apparently they have not started yet. Above is absolutely secret. All this makes it clear that the operations should now be pressed forward methodically and resolutely by night and day. The unavoidable losses must be accepted. The enemy is harassed and anxious now. The time is precious as the interference of submarines would be a very serious complication.”
⁹¹

The first lord’s information about the enemy’s ammunition shortage was accurate. German messages had been intercepted and decoded. As he testified the following year, it was this intelligence coup “that led Lord Fisher and me, with the assent of those whom we were consulting over it, to change the methodical advance and the step-by-step bombardment… into a more decided and vehement attempt to quell and smash up the fortresses at the Narrows and force them to use their ammunition.” At the time, however, security precautions prevented him from revealing his source to Carden. The strain and suspense were too much for the admiral. He replied that he expected to lunge at the Narrows on March 17, but he was exhausted. On the morning of March 15, after two sleepless nights, he told Keyes that he could not survive more pressure from Churchill. He had decided to resign his commission. His staff tried to argue him out of it, but a Harley Street neurologist serving with the fleet examined him and said the admiral was near collapse; his nerves were shot; he must be sent home immediately. Thus, less than two days before the critical attempt on the Narrows, the command devolved on de Robeck. The Admiralty telegraphed him: “Personal and Secret from First Lord. In entrusting to you with great confidence the command of the Mediterranean Detached Fleet I presume… that you consider, after separate and independent judgment, that the immediate operations proposed are wise and practicable. If not, do not hesitate to say so. If so, execute them without delay and without further reference at the first favourable opportunity…. All good fortune attend you.”
⁹²

The date was Wednesday, March 17, 1915. De Robeck replied that he would attack in the morning.

I
t was a day out of season: pleasant, warm, with bright sunshine and a flawless overarching sky. De Robeck’s attacking fleet, the mightiest ever seen in the Mediterranean, was spearheaded by four dreadnoughts, flanked by two battleships. A mile behind them came the four French men-of-war, also flanked by British battleships. Six more battleships, surrounded by destroyers and trawlers, were held in reserve; they were to clear away the last obstacles, sail through the Narrows, and enter the Sea of Marmara the following morning. Twelve hours later the Union Jack and the French tricolor would fly over Constantinople.

A morning fog rose at 10:30, revealing the enemy forts, and the first six warships, taking the bone in their teeth, sailed toward them. After twenty-five minutes of maneuvering, each captain picked his target, half of them facing the Chanak, or Asian, side of the Narrows, and the other half facing the Kilid Bahr, or European, side. Once more the warships were beyond the range of the frustrated Turkish and German gunners. Howitzers on the cliffs downstream could hit the ships, but their shells bounced harmlessly off the thick steel armor. Meanwhile, the forts were being systematically demolished. Ten minutes before noon a British gunner hit the magazine of a key Chanak blockhouse; it erupted in a single sheet of flame. It was the turn of the French. At eight bells, noon, de Robeck signaled Admiral Emile-Paul-Aimable Guépratte to come forward. The
Suffren, Bouvet, Charlemagne,
and
Gaulois
fanned out and continued the terrific bombardment for another forty-five minutes. Both banks now resembled a tortured Dantean vision: billowing clouds of dense, roiling smoke, stabbing spurts of flame from the howitzers; roars of bursting shells; debris that heaved and shifted with each hit, dismembered corpses flying upward and into the channel, where ineffectual little fountains of water marked the failure of the fortress guns still in action to reach the towering warships. Occasionally a howitzer shell struck a French or British superstructure, but fewer than a dozen seamen had been wounded. The enemy was approaching extremity. Fort 13 on the European shore had also blown up. The forts’ fire-control communications had been destroyed. Batteries were covered with rubble and the dead. Breechblocks were jammed. De Robeck was now ready to sweep up the last mines and pass his fleet through to the Sea of Marmara. At 1:30 he ordered the French to move aside and signaled the last six battleships and their escorts to move forward past the defeated enemy, and it was then, at 1:45 in the afternoon, a hairbreadth from victory, that the trouble began.
Bouvet,
pivoting in
Suffren
’s wake close to the strait’s Asian bank, was rocked by a tremendous explosion. In less than two minutes she heeled over and sank, taking with her the captain and 639 seamen.

Officers on other ships assumed that a lucky howitzer gunner had hit
Bouvet
’s magazine. The six newly arrived battleships bombarded the banks; by four o’clock enemy fortress fire had ceased altogether and the British minesweepers advanced. They were working skillfully, cutting mine cables with their kites, when a howitzer shell landed among them; then they panicked and turned about. Another line of trawlers advanced; the same thing happened. This was irritating, but hardly worrisome. Graver by far was the misadventure of
Inflexible,
which was mysteriously hit at 4:41
P.M.
not far from the place where
Bouvet
had gone down. Listing heavily to starboard,
Inflexible
left the battle line. De Robeck suspected a mine. Less than five minutes later a third battleship,
Irresistible,
was struck near the same spot. She, too, was out of action. Now senior officers were both alarmed and mystified. The trawlers had swept these waters. De Robeck believed there was only one explanation: the enemy was floating mines down with the current. He broke off action and ordered a general retirement. During the withdrawal a fourth man-of-war,
Ocean,
was lost the same way and in the same waters as
Bouvet, Inflexible,
and
Irresistible.

Keyes, who stayed behind to direct the rescue of the stricken vessels, moving back and forth in a cutter by the light of a few surviving Turkish searchlights, was far from discouraged. Both banks of the Dardanelles were quiet. He had, he wrote afterward, “a most indelible impression that we were in the presence of a beaten foe. I thought he was beaten at 2
P.M.
I knew he was beaten at 4
P.M.
—and at midnight I knew with still greater certainty that he was absolutely beaten; and it only remained for us to organize a proper sweeping force and devise some means of dealing with the drifting mines to reap the fruits of our efforts. I felt that the guns of the forts and batteries and the concealed howitzers and mobile field guns were no longer a menace. Mines moored and drifting about could, and must, be overcome.”
⁹³
Returning to the
Queen Elizabeth,
he was, therefore, astounded to find de Robeck distraught. His career was ruined, the admiral moaned; his losses would never be forgiven; as soon as the Admiralty saw his action report, he would be relieved and dismissed from the service. Keyes replied that Churchill would never act like that. The day had been anything but a disaster. Except for the crew of
Bouvet,
fewer than seventy sailors had been hit. The disabled ships could be repaired; all were destined for the scrap heap anyway. Obviously the next step was to convert British destroyers into sweepers—the tackle, wire mesh, and kites were available on Malta—and continue the attack. They were bound to break through.

The enemy agreed. De Robeck’s misfortune, they knew, was a freak. His four unlucky ships had been hit because they had sailed too close to shore. Ten days earlier a Turkish colonel had supervised the laying of a string of twenty mines parallel to the Asian bank of the Dardanelles, just inside the slack water. The British sweepers had missed them, but they weren’t much of an obstacle; in skirting them the Allied warships would still have an eight-thousand-yard-wide channel in which to maneuver. Surely, the Turks reasoned, the English admiral would not repeat his error. British fleets had ruled the world’s waves for two hundred years. They could hardly be stopped by the shattered defenses left at the Narrows. The Turkish guns still in service were almost out of ammunition—some were
completely
out—and no more shells were available. Once the Allies were past Chanak they would face nothing but a few ancient smooth-bore bronze cannon aimed in the wrong direction. Mines would not trouble them. The Turks had none left. Those which had been laid in the Dardanelles had been collected from mines which the Russians had been floating down the Black Sea in hopes of blowing up the
Goeben
and
Breslau.

Already the exodus from Constantinople had begun. Gold, art treasures, and official archives had been moved to Eskişehir, in western Turkey. Two special trains, their fires banked, stood ready in the station at Uskudar, just across the Bosporus, to carry the sultan, his harem, his suite, foreign ambassadors, and wealthy pashas and beys into the interior. There was an air of panic in the streets. The city’s two arsenals, visible from the water, could be easily destroyed by naval gunfire. After the war the Turkish general staff declared that “a naval attack executed with rapidity and vigor” would have found the capital’s garrison “impotent to defend it,” and Enver Pasha, Turkey’s wartime military dictator, added: “If the English had only had the courage to rush more ships through the Dardanelles they could have got to Constantinople.” The
Goeben
and
Breslau
had weighed anchor and were preparing to steam away across the Black Sea. Otto Liman von Sanders, the senior German general on this front, said afterward that if de Robeck had ordered a renewal of his attack on March 19, he would have found the city undefended. “The course of the World War,” he said, “would have been given such a turn in the spring of 1915 that Germany and Austria would have had to continue the struggle without Turkey.” Keyes steamed through the strait in 1925. His eyes filled. He said: “My God, it would have been even easier than I thought. We simply
couldn’t
have failed… and because we didn’t try, another million lives were thrown away and the war went on for another three years.”
⁹⁴

H
e had sensed this at the time. So had Churchill. Far from recalling de Robeck, when Winston read his report of the March 18 action he immediately dispatched four more battleships to his command. The French similarly replaced the
Bouvet
with the
Henry IV.
The French admiral, unlike the British, was eager to return to the Narrows. Jacky Fisher was not. He had waxed hot and cold on the operation, and Winston never knew, from one day to the next, what stand his first sea lord was going to take. Before the struggle in the Narrows he had grumbled, “The more I consider the Dardanelles, the less I like it.” Yet after the battle it was Fisher, not Churchill, who first proposed to make good the British losses with new battleships. “De Robeck is really better than Carden,” he said, “so Providence is with us.” On the afternoon of March 19, when the Admiralty’s director of naval intelligence brought them newly intercepted German messages, providing details of the shell shortage in the Narrows forts, Fisher read the report aloud, waved it over his head, and shouted: “By God, I’ll go through tomorrow!” Winston scanned it and said: “That means they’ve come to the end of their ammunition.” Fisher danced a jig and cried again: “Tomorrow! We shall probably lose six ships, but I’m going through!” Yet a few hours later, at a somber meeting of the War Council, he declared that it was impossible to “explain away” the losses of such great vessels, that he had always feared that the price of forcing the Dardanelles would be twelve sunken battleships, and that he would prefer to lose them elsewhere.
⁹⁵

What troubled him? It was Gallipoli. He cried to Lloyd George: “The Dardanelles! Futile without soldiers!” And he said: “Somebody will have to land on Gallipoli sooner or later.” Before the attack he had sent Churchill a memorandum: “
Are we going to Constantinople or are we not?
If
NOT
—then don’t send half a dozen battleships to the bottom which would be better applied at Cuxhaven or Borkum. If
YES
—then push the military co-operation with all speed & make the demonstration with all possible despatch at
both
extremities of the
Gallipoli
Peninsula.” Admiral Jackson concurred and set forth his reasons: “To advance further with a rush over unswept minefields and in waters commanded at short range by heavy guns, howitzers, and torpedo-tubes, must involve serious losses in ships and men, and will not achieve the object of making the Straits a safe waterway for the transports. The Gallipoli peninsula must be cleared of the enemy’s artillery before this is achieved…. The time has now arrived to make use of military forces to occupy the Gallipoli peninsula, and clear away the enemy on that side. With the peninsula in our possession, the concealed batteries on the Asiatic side, which are less formidable, could be dealt with more easily… and the troops should be of great assistance in the demolition of the fortress’s guns.”
⁹⁶

This was, of course, a gross distortion of the situation. No one had suggested rushing over unswept minefields, the battleships were invulnerable to the shore batteries in the Narrows, and the artillery at the mouth of the strait, which had been cast in the days of sailing ships, was useless even against trawlers, whose helmsmen could steer beyond their range. Nevertheless, Fisher had a point. Eventually someone
would
have to occupy Gallipoli. That was why Churchill, supported by a majority of the cabinet, had wanted to send out the Twenty-ninth Division and the Australians and New Zealanders (Anzacs) in February. After Kitchener had vetoed that, the operation became what Winston called “a legitimate war gamble.” It was a good gamble. Liddell Hart has described it as a “sound and far-sighted conception, marred by a chain of errors in execution almost unrivalled even in British history.” Once Constantinople fell, the Turks would have been unable to fortify the peninsula. Russians—and, almost certainly, new Balkan armies—would have been lunging across their frontiers. Had the czar not been a dolt, the conquest of Gallipoli would by now have been complete. Peter Wright, a member of the War Council, later wrote: “Our navy was in command of the sea; the Greeks were eager to join us and attack in the peninsula with their whole army. The Gallipoli campaign should have succeeded without the loss of a single English soldier.”
⁹⁷

Before the year was out it would cost over a quarter-million Allied casualties, counting 47,000 Frenchmen sacrificed in support operations. All were lost in vain; every inch of the peninsula would remain in enemy hands. The lion’s share of the blame must be laid at the door of Lord Kitchener. Unlike French, Haig, and Wilson, mesmerized by the butchery in France, K of K grasped the possibilities in the east. He had told the War Council that if the fleet could not “get through the straits unaided, the Army ought to see the business through.”
⁹⁸
Yet he had been evasive when Churchill argued passionately for a combined military and naval operation, and, at a time when a relatively small British expedition could have done the job, he had mulishly refused to release the idle Twenty-ninth Division. Gallipoli was no natural fortress. Except for a series of jutting heights known as Sari Bair, it was relatively flat and largely barren, covered with stony soil, coarse scrub, a few olive trees, and scattered flocks of sheep and goats. Thinly held, as it was before the tumult in the Narrows alerted the Turks, Gallipoli could have been seized in a few days, almost without bloodshed.

Now that England was committed in the Mediterranean, with Grey telling the council that failure there “would be morally equivalent to a great defeat,” Kitchener, speaking as secretary for war, told the startled cabinet that “the military situation is now sufficiently secure to justify the despatch of the XXIX Division.” The trench fighting at Neuve Chapelle was at its height; barring unexpected developments there, nineteen thousand Tommies could embark five days hence. The war minister, a firm believer in locking the barn door after the horse has escaped, had also decided to commit the Anzacs to Gallipoli. Altogether, counting the Egyptian garrison and the Royal Marines, the “Mediterranean Expeditionary Force,” as he called it, would number over seventy thousand. The council was excited; as Churchill wrote afterward, “Everybody’s blood was up.” The commanding general would be Kitchener’s protégé and Winston’s old friend, Ian Hamilton. K of K told Hamilton: “If the Fleet gets through, Constantinople will fall of itself and you will have won, not a battle, but the war.”
⁹⁹

Asquith thought Hamilton “a sanguine enthusiastic person, with a good deal of
superficial
charm… but there is too much feather in his brain.” His performance in small wars had been superb. He had fought well at Majuba, on India’s North-West Frontier, and in South Africa, and had been a keen military observer in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. None of this was evident in his appearance. He was scrawny, bowlegged, and birdlike in his movements, and his manner was almost effeminate. He also wrote poetry and kept a voluminous, gossipy diary, which diminished him in the eyes of bluff officer types. Clementine disliked him, but Winston regarded him as dashing and chivalrous; he wrote Kitchener of the appointment: “No choice could be more agreeable to the Admiralty, and to the Navy.”
¹⁰⁰
Churchill wanted him in the eastern Mediterranean, and he wanted him there fast; on the first lord’s orders, a special train would take the general to Dover, he would cross the Channel on H.M.S.
Foresight,
another special train would rush him from Calais to Marseilles, and there H.M.S.
Phaeton
, a fast cruiser, would pick him up and carry him to his command. Churchill saw him off at Charing Cross Station, whence Chinese Gordon had left on his own fateful journey to Egypt over thirty years earlier. Because of Kitchener’s touchiness, Hamilton explained, there would be no communication between him and the Admiralty. Winston said nothing, but it was a deplorable decision. The train pulled away amid gay shouts, and the dainty general settled down to study a prewar report on the Dardanelles, an out-of-date Turkish army handbook, and a highly inaccurate map of Gallipoli.