The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (85 page)

After three days there was a lull, followed by what seemed a stalemate. The British and the Anzacs had somehow managed to advance a mile or two into the hills, and to dig themselves in; try as they might, the Turks could not dislodge them. For some time it looked as though the action in the trenches of the peninsula might become almost as static as in Flanders. Meanwhile, in London, all the stresses and strains within the government were mercilessly exposed. First, on 15 May, Admiral Fisher resigned–or, more accurately, walked out; for some hours he was missing, and was finally run to earth at the Charing Cross Hotel. Next, Prime Minister Asquith was obliged to form a coalition government, from which–in the most dramatic reverse of his political career to date–Winston Churchill was determinedly excluded.

For the men on the beaches of Gallipoli, and the others on the cliffs above, the summer was long indeed. As the weather grew steadily hotter, the flies became more and more insufferable: the food, the corpses in no man’s land, the countless suppurating wounds, the proximity of the latrines, all these things attracted them in their millions and made life an even greater misery than it would otherwise have been. In the wake of the flies came the dysentery. By July a thousand totally incapacitated men were being shipped off every week to Lemnos or one of the other islands. But there was good news too: in June it was agreed in London to send out five more divisions, giving Hamilton a total of some 120,000 men. De Robeck also–now that Fisher was safely out of the way–received substantial reinforcements to his fleet. In these dramatically changed conditions a new landing was clearly indicated, and the choice fell on Suvla Bay, a few miles to the north of Anzac Cove. From here it was hoped to advance quickly the four miles to the narrows, cutting off the bulk of the Turkish army on the tip of the peninsula.

Suvla Bay seemed at first full of promise. Unlike the shallow crescents of most of the other bays, it formed a perfect horseshoe; its waters thus provided an ideal anchorage for the fleet. It had no tall cliffs to dominate it and was, perhaps for that reason, only lightly defended–as it turned out, by some 1,800 men distributed around the bay, without barbed wire or machine-guns. It was, moreover, just around the headland from Anzac Cove; once its possession was assured it could accommodate many of the unhappy Dominion troops and so relieve the nightmare overcrowding which they had endured for so long. The landings began under cover of darkness on 4 August and continued until the night of the 6th, the Turks apparently suspecting nothing. It was only after all were disembarked that things began to go seriously wrong. The newly arrived troops were inexperienced and undisciplined, their commanders old and for the most part incompetent, seemingly unable to cope with the hellish conditions prevailing. The chain of command soon broke down, Hamilton remaining hopelessly out of touch: orders were countermanded at the last moment; generals and brigadiers were encouraged to act at their own discretion; seldom was it clearly explained to the soldiers what was required of them.

There were a few temporary successes. The heroic attack by the Australians at Lone Pine cost them 4,000 men, but it won them no less than seven Victoria Crosses and resulted in the capture of the Turkish front line. The New Zealanders smashed through another part of the line and found themselves to the rear of the Turkish positions. But for every success there were several failures, and on the evening of 8 April the Allies had been forced back into their own trenches, having sustained horrific casualties and with none of their main objectives achieved. At the end of August Hamilton confessed his failure to Kitchener. He could do no more, he said, without heavy reinforcements; he mentioned the figure of 95,000 men, but the Field Marshal only shrugged. The War Cabinet, it appeared, had decided to concentrate once again on the Western Front. Was Gallipoli to be written off?

In the last week of September there came a further blow. Bulgaria mobilised; it was virtually certain that within a week at the most she would enter the war on the side of Germany and Austria and would march with them against Serbia. This threatened to change the whole situation in the Balkans; the Allies therefore decided to transfer two divisions, first a French and then a British, from Gallipoli to Salonica, whence they could march north to help the Serbs. It seemed then that Hamilton must be prepared to abandon Suvla altogether. And there was another possibility, even more depressing: on 11 October Kitchener cabled Hamilton: ‘What is your estimate of the probable losses which would be entailed to your force if the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula was decided upon? No decision has been arrived at yet…but I feel I ought to have your views.’ Hamilton replied at once; 50 percent, he suggested, might be a realistic figure, adding, ‘On the other hand, with all these raw troops at Suvla and all those Senegalese at Cape Helles, we might have a veritable catastrophe.’ When this message was put before the Dardanelles Committee on 14 October, Hamilton’s fate was sealed. Two days later he received his dismissal.

Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Monro, Hamilton’s successor, had come straight from the Western Front, and from the day of his arrival made no secret of the fact that he considered the whole Gallipoli expedition misconceived. The war, he believed, would be won in France; any distraction or diversion from the main thrust was to be deplored. Since his orders were to advise on whether the peninsula should be evacuated or not, the nature of his advice seemed a foregone conclusion. Nor, on his arrival, did he see anything to make him change his mind. Although the weather was growing rapidly colder, no winter clothing had been received from London. Many units were now at half strength or less, the remaining soldiers reduced to skin and bone. The guns were rationed to two shells a day. Monro’s first sight of Suvla Bay confirmed his worst fears. ‘Like
Alice in Wonderland
,’ he was heard to murmur, ‘curiouser and curiouser.’ The following day he sent Kitchener his recommendation.

But all was not yet lost. Commodore Roger Keyes, Admiral de Robeck’s chief of staff, saw fit to disagree. His plan was quite simple: to gather the entire Mediterranean fleet, which had been lying all summer at various points in the Aegean, and–while keeping up a terrific bombardment of the Turkish shore batteries–to make a determined attempt on the straits. This would, he believed, take the Turks by surprise. Once in the Marmara, it would be a simple matter to block the isthmus of Bulair at the northern end of the peninsula, cutting off the twenty Turkish divisions stationed there. De Robeck was sceptical, but generously allowed Keyes to return to England to plead his case. He did–and made a considerable impact on all the principal admirals, on the First Lord of the Admiralty Arthur Balfour, and of course on Winston Churchill.

There remained Lord Kitchener, who had been appalled by the speed and tenor of Monro’s reply. It was he who had personally chosen Hamilton for the Gallipoli command, and he had not enjoyed seeing his friend humiliated. He immediately fell in with Keyes’s idea, asked him to try to get some sort of definite undertaking from the Admiralty, and then announced–to Birdwood rather than to Monro–his decision to leave personally for the Dardanelles the following day. The message ended: ‘I absolutely refuse to sign order for evacuation, which I think would be the greatest disaster and would condemn a large percentage of our men to death or imprisonment. Monro will be appointed to command the Salonica force.’ Then he set off, via Paris–where the French confirmed that they were firmly opposed to evacuation–to Marseille and thence in HMS
Dartmouth
to Gallipoli.

Had Keyes accompanied him–as Kitchener had asked him to, but the message was never delivered–he might have kept the Field Marshal steady, but the climate of opinion among the commanders on the spot had swung considerably since Keyes’s departure and Kitchener immediately found himself surrounded by Monro, de Robeck and Birdwood, all three now firmly in favour of evacuation. No one spoke up for Keyes and his plan. After two days of discussions the Field Marshal went off on a tour of inspection of the three principal bridgeheads, and was duly depressed by what he saw, though somewhat less so than Monro. On 22 November he cabled to London a recommendation that Suvla and Anzac Bay should be evacuated at once, Cape Helles being held ‘for the time being’. Two days later he sailed for England.

By this time no one remotely involved with the operation, from the highest to the most humble, felt anything but loathing for the Gallipoli peninsula; but they had not yet seen it at its worst. On 27 November it was hit by the fiercest blizzard for at least forty years. Twenty-four hours of deluge were followed by north winds of hurricane force, bringing with them heavy snowfalls and two nights of intense frost. Torrents came sweeping down from the hills, carrying the bodies of drowned Turks. At Anzac Cove, in particular, where many of the Australians and a small Indian contingent were probably seeing snow for the first time, there was virtually no protection from the piercing cold; winter clothing still had not been issued, and the soldiers could do nothing but huddle in their soaking wet blankets, which soon froze solid. For three days and three nights the torment continued. When it was over, 200 men had been drowned or died of cold, 5,000 were suffering from severe frostbite. Many of them had in the past opposed evacuation, determined to see the operation through to the end; now, however great the inherent dangers, they could not get away fast enough.

The evacuation was clearly going to be a long and difficult job.
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In the Suvla–Anzac bridgehead alone there were 83,000 men, to say nothing of the 5,000 horses and donkeys, 2,000 motor vehicles, nearly 2,000 guns and several tons of supplies. The only hope was to withdraw silently and secretly over perhaps two or three weeks. Even then there were formidable dangers: a sustained Turkish bombardment could easily make embarkations impossible; bad weather and a rough sea could ruin the best-laid plans–and the winter solstice was fast approaching. But there was no alternative; from the second week of December nightly flotillas of barges and small boats crept into the bays, leaving before dawn weighed down to the gunwales with men, animals and arms. The sick and wounded were embarked first; fifty-six temporary hospital ships had been prepared for them, and 12,000 hospital beds were waiting in Egypt. During the day, to allay Turkish suspicions, life continued precisely as usual: the endless mule teams continued to toil up from the beaches to the front, down from the front to the beaches. The only difference was that the crates and boxes that they carried were empty. As the evacuation progressed the deception became more difficult: the same men and animals were obliged to march round and round again like a stage army. No tents were struck; thousands of extra cooking fires were lit every night.

After a week the pace quickened; by 18 December half the force–some 40,000–had been taken off. The enemy could no longer be fooled; it was agreed that the remainder of the army would leave over the next two nights. In some sectors of the front, the Allied and Turkish trenches were less than ten yards from each other (many of them can still be seen) and it must have seemed impossible to leave them without alerting the enemy; yet somehow it was done. Just before daybreak on the 21st the last boats pulled away from the beach. At Anzac Cove two men were wounded by stray shots just as they were boarding; at Suvla Bay every single man and animal was safely taken off. The last thing they did before they left was to light the fuses that had been carefully laid all over the beaches. Ten minutes later they heard with deep satisfaction the series of deafening explosions as the ammunition dumps went up.

What about the British? For their four divisions–some 35,000 men–in the Helles bridgehead, the situation looked grave indeed. The Turks had allowed the Anzacs to disappear from right under their noses; surely they would not make the same mistake again. Instead, no longer tied down at Anzac and Suvla, they would throw the whole weight of their army against them. There could no longer be any question of hanging on, and Monro, Birdwood and de Robeck–who had been briefly invalided home but who returned just before Christmas–were now all agreed. Evacuation, however problematic, must be attempted.

It began on Saturday, 1 January 1916. The French left first, and after a week the number of British troops remaining was down to 19,000. Up to this point there had been surprisingly little enemy opposition. Then, in the early afternoon of the 7th, the Turks launched their attack–in a bombardment that lasted for four and a half hours. After the guns had fallen silent there came the inevitable charge. The British in their trenches faced it with guns and rifles blazing, and were astonished to see the Turkish infantry–well-known for its discipline and courage–stopping dead in its tracks, flatly refusing to advance further. When night fell not a single Turkish soldier had penetrated the British line. For the next twenty-four hours there was no more trouble, and the evacuation continued.

Meanwhile, however, the weather was worsening. By the evening of 8 January the glass was falling fast, and soon the wind was gusting at 35 miles an hour. Two lighters broke adrift and smashed one of the makeshift piers; everything stopped while it was repaired–no easy job in the dark, with a stormy sea. The wind and the rain also slowed down the few remaining troops as they marched the three or four miles from their trenches to the beach, but at 3.45 a.m. the last man was on board, the last boat heading out to sea. Ten minutes later, as at Anzac and Suvla, the ammunition dumps exploded in a dramatic finale. The ill-starred adventure was over at last.

Nothing became it like its end. It is one of the many ironies of Gallipoli that, after the chaos and confusion that had blighted the whole operation from the beginning, the final evacuations were models of superb organisation and planning. There were scarcely any casualties; not a man was left behind. But there is, perhaps, a greater irony still: that the great expedition, failure as it may have been, was nevertheless a brilliant concept, which should–and could–have succeeded. Some years after the war, an official report on the campaign by the Turkish General Staff confessed that the naval battle of 19 March had left it virtually without ammunition; had de Robeck returned immediately to the attack he would very probably have been able to advance unhindered through the straits to Constantinople, in which case ‘the eight divisions retained there would have been unable to defend it’. With Constantinople occupied, it is doubtful whether the Russians would ever have signed a separate peace–and the Russian Revolution might never have occurred. Even after the landings victory might have been possible; the Turkish report also admitted that twice during the campaign–during the first Anzac landing in April and at Suvla Bay in August–the Allies would almost certainly have broken through had it not been for the astonishing personal magnetism of Mustafa Kemal.
²⁷⁹
Had they managed to do so, had the campaign succeeded–as it so very nearly did–the Great War would probably have ended three years earlier, and a million lives would have been saved.