Castles of Steel (93 page)

Keyes, busy reorganizing the minesweeping force, was absent from this March 22 meeting. When he returned to
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and heard what had been decided, he was dismayed. “I lost no time in having it out with the admiral,” he said later. He pleaded with de Robeck not to wait; the new minesweepers would be ready on April 3 or 4; they would sweep the mines and then the fleet was bound to get through. To wait for the army to return meant giving the Turks time to rebuild their defenses and bring in fresh troops and ammunition. But de Robeck’s mind was made up: he would wait for Hamilton and the army; the navy would act in a supporting role. Nineteen years later, in 1934, Keyes, then an Admiral of the Fleet, wrote: “I wish to place on record that I had no doubt then, and have none now—and nothing will ever shake my opinion—that from the 4th of April onwards the fleet could have forced the Straits and, with losses trifling in comparison to those the army suffered, could have entered the Marmara. . . . This operation . . . would have led immediately to a victory decisive upon the whole course of the war.”

On March 23, the day after the
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conference, de Robeck broke the news to the Admiralty that he was abandoning the purely naval campaign. He proposed now to wait until April 14, when, Hamilton had told him, the army would be ready; then, together, they would conduct a combined assault against the Straits and the Gallipoli peninsula. “It appears better,” de Robeck wrote, “to prepare a decisive effort about the middle of April rather than risk a great deal for what may possibly be only a partial solution.” In a further signal on March 26, he added, “I do not hold the check on the 18th to be decisive, but having met General Hamilton . . . I consider a combined operation essential to obtain great results and object of campaign. . . . To attack the Narrows now with fleet would be a mistake, as it would jeopardize the execution of a better and bigger scheme.”

At the Admiralty, Churchill read this telegram with “consternation.” He had “regarded . . . [March 18] as only the first of several days’ fighting. It never occurred to me for a moment that we should not go on within the limits of what we had decided to risk, until we had reached a decision one way or another. . . . I feared the perils of the long delay. . . . The mere process of landing an army after giving the enemy at least three more weeks’ additional notice seemed to me a most terrible and formidable hazard.” Immediately, the First Lord drafted a message to de Robeck, overruling the decision of the conference on
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and commanding de Robeck “to renew the attack begun on March 18 at the first opportunity.” Then, summoning Fisher and the Admiralty War Group to his room, he showed them de Robeck’s telegram and his own reply and asked their approval. He met “insuperable resistance. . . . For the first time since the war began, high words were used around the octagonal table,” Churchill wrote later. In the opinion of Fisher, Wilson, and Jackson, de Robeck’s message had transformed the situation at the Dardanelles. They had been willing, they told the First Lord, to support an attack by the navy alone, “because it was supported and recommended by the commander on the spot.” But now de Robeck had decided on something different: a joint operation by the navy and the army. De Robeck was the officer responsible; he knew the situation; to insist that he set aside his own professional judgment must not be done. Indeed, Fisher was overjoyed that at last the operation was assuming the form that he had always preferred. “What more could we want?” he asked. “The army was going to do it. They ought to have done it all along.” All morning, Churchill “pressed to the very utmost the need to renew the attack. . . . I could make no headway. Nothing I could do could overcome the admirals now that they had dug their toes in.” As a last resort, Churchill took the draft of his telegram to Asquith. The prime minister declared that in principle he agreed with the First Lord, but that he would not overturn the professional advice of many admirals.

At a Cabinet meeting that afternoon, Churchill announced “with grief . . . the refusal of the admiral and the Admiralty to continue the naval attack.” At that point, Churchill well understood, the Cabinet’s reaction might be to withdraw from the entire Dardanelles enterprise. The attack had failed and, as Kitchener had said in an earlier deliberation, “We could always withdraw if things did not go well.” So far, “we had lost fewer men killed and wounded than were often incurred in a trench raid on the Western Front and no vessel of the slightest value had been sunk.” But Kitchener spoke up immediately. “Confident, commanding, magnanimous . . . he assumed the burden and declared he would carry the operations through by military force.” As usual, once the war lord had spoken, there was nothing more to be said. Churchill gave up and sent a message to de Robeck telling him that his new plans had been approved. Thus it was that the decision to call off the naval attack on the Dardanelles and to initiate a land campaign was made, not by a formal decision of the Cabinet or the War Council, not by the Admiralty or the War Office, but by de Robeck and Hamilton meeting one morning in the wardroom of a battleship 2,000 miles away. Thereafter, all major decisions in the campaign were made by Kitchener and Hamilton; de Robeck’s role became the providing of naval gunfire support and other services when requested. The War Council, having approved the decision and the arrangements made on the battleship, never altered them, because the War Council did not meet again until May 19, eight weeks later. By then, 70,000 Allied troops were ashore at Gallipoli and a new British government, a new First Sea Lord, and a new First Lord of the Admiralty were in office.

No one can know whether, if the Allied fleet had tried again, the ships would have broken through to the Sea of Marmara. If so, what might have happened? After the war, Henry Morgenthau declared that the appearance of an Allied fleet off Constantinople in March 1915 would have toppled the Turkish government and driven that nation out of the war. “The whole Ottoman state, on that eighteenth day of March when the Allied fleet abandoned the attack, was on the brink of dissolution,” Morgenthau wrote. At Constantinople, “the populace, far from opposing the arrival of the Allied fleet, would have welcomed it with joy . . . for this would emancipate them from the hated Germans, bring about peace and end their miseries. . . . Talaat [the grand vizier] had loaded two automobiles with extra tires, gasoline, and all other essentials of a protracted journey. . . . [He] stationed these automobiles on the Asiatic side of the city with chauffeurs constantly at hand. . . . But the great Allied armada never returned.”

The first chapters of the new epic were completed. The days went by and silence settled over the Dardanelles. The weather constantly changed; mornings of warm, mirror-surface calm gave way to high winds, driving rain, storm-tossed waves, and sometimes flurries of snow. Not until the end of April, when scarlet poppies covered the fields of Gallipoli, did the tale resume its grim unfolding a few miles distant from the site of ancient Troy.

CHAPTER 26
Gallipoli: The Landings

From the beginning, the possibility of a land campaign had lurked beneath the surface of the naval attack on the Dardanelles. A plan to employ significant land forces had not emerged in the early discussions because Kitchener had declared categorically that no troops were available; this had prompted Churchill to say that the navy could force the Straits on its own. Originally, Fisher had been in the middle, believing that a Dardanelles campaign was a good idea, but only as a combined operation involving both the army and the navy. On February 23, 1915, he made this point to Lloyd George: “The Dardanelles: futile without soldiers. Somebody will have to land at Gallipoli some time or other.” Thereafter, as it became clear that the navy was indeed going to try to force the Straits alone, Fisher lapsed into resentment and opposition.

By early February, however, it began to appear that Fisher was right. At the Admiralty, at the War Office, and in the War Council, realization was growing that at least some soldiers would be necessary to occupy the forts after the guns were silenced. Even Kitchener conceded this and modified his first emphatic position. “If the navy required assistance of land forces at a later stage, that assistance would be forthcoming,” he informed the War Council on February 9. The fact was that, despite his statement that no troops were available, Kitchener, all along, had been hoarding in England a division of veteran soldiers, the 18,000 men of the regular army’s 29th Division. On February 16, Kitchener decided to release these men and told Asquith, Churchill, and Fisher that he had assigned the division to the Aegean where it would be available “either to seize the Gallipoli peninsula after it has been evacuated [by the Turks] or to occupy Constantinople.” He had also, he said, authorized the use at Gallipoli of 30,000 Australian and New Zealand troops training in Egypt.

[The widely used abbreviation for “Australian and New Zealand Army Corps” was “Anzac.” Soldiers, individually and collectively, were known as “Anzacs.”]

Word of the assignment of the 29th Division to the Mediterranean predictably infuriated Sir John French, the British Commander-in-Chief in France, who bombarded Kitchener with protests. Kitchener waffled and on February 20, four days after they were issued, the division’s Mediterranean sailing orders were canceled. Kitchener’s explanation to the War Council was that recent severe defeats inflicted on the Russian army might permit the Germans to transfer numerous divisions from the Eastern to the Western Front; therefore, prudence required withholding the 29th Division to shore up the Allied armies in France. Churchill, perturbed, pointed out that one division would not make the slightest difference between success and failure in France, but might have an impact in the East. He asked Asquith to overrule Kitchener and order the troops to the Aegean, but the First Lord’s argument was undermined by the fact that, only a few weeks before, he himself had enthusiastically promised that the navy could force the Dardanelles alone.

Oddly, Kitchener himself kept coming back to the question of troops for the Dardanelles. After Carden’s bombardment of the outer forts, the war lord grandly declared in the War Council on February 24 that “if the fleet cannot get through the Straits unaided, the army ought to see the business through. The effect of a defeat in the Orient would be very serious. There can be no going back.” Nevertheless, he continued to withhold the 29th Division. Meanwhile, pressure for the involvement of ground forces continued to rise. A possibile solution was the offer on March 1 by the pro-Allied government of Eleuthérios Venizélos—impressed by Carden’s destruction of the outer Dardanelles forts—to land three Greek divisions on the Gallipoli peninsula and then to advance on Constantinople. Immediately, Russia objected. The liberation of Constantinople, the restoration of the cross to the dome of the former cathedral of Santa Sophia, control of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles astride Russia’s lifeline to the world’s oceans—these had been objectives of Russian foreign policy for centuries. Much as the tsar’s government wished to expel the hated Turk, it would not permit this expulsion to be performed by Greeks. The Russian veto snatched away the possibility of a Greek army on Gallipoli.

Still, Kitchener could not leave the problem of ground troops alone. On March 1, he had sent Lieutenant General William Birdwood, the British officer commanding the Australian and New Zealand troops in Egypt, to confer with Carden about possible use of the army. While Birdwood was at Mudros, Kitchener—still vacillating—signaled him again, cautioning that there was no intention of using troops on the Gallipoli peninsula “unless the navy are convinced that they cannot silence the guns in the Straits without military cooperation on a large scale. . . . The concentration of troops at the entrance to the Dardanelles is for operations subsequently to be undertaken in the neighborhood of Constantinople.” Birdwood, responding on March 6, attempted to focus his chief on reality by saying that, on the basis of what he had seen and heard, he considered Carden’s estimate as to the rapid passage of the Straits “too sanguine . . . I doubt his ability to force the passage unaided.” Birdwood also passed along to Kitchener his confidential opinion that Carden was “very second rate—no ‘go’ in him, or ideas, or initiative.”

Kitchener had heard enough: on March 10, he reversed himself again. The 29th Division, he told the War Council, would go to the Aegean, although it would not sail until March 16 and could not arrive before the first week of April. In addition, he had arranged for a division of the French North African army to join the force and, with the Anzacs thrown in, there now would be 75,000 Allied soldiers available for the Dardanelles. To command this polyglot force, Kitchener turned to an old friend and protégé, General Sir Ian Hamilton, his Chief of Staff during the Boer War. On the morning of March 12, Hamilton was summoned to Kitchener’s office. “Opening the door,” Hamilton said, “I bade him [Kitchener] good morning and walked up to his desk where he went on writing like a graven image. After a moment, he looked up and said in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘We are sending a military force to support the fleet now at the Dardanelles and you are to have command.’ ” Kitchener said nothing else, but resumed writing while Hamilton remained standing silently in front of his desk. Eventually, Kitchener looked up and said, “Well?” Hamilton then learned that Kitchener hoped that the fleet would get through without military help and that he contemplated Hamilton landing his troops on the shores of the Bosporus to occupy Constantinople. Once the fleet got through the Dardanelles, Kitchener declared, “Constantinople could not hold out. . . . The fleet . . . with their guns would dominate the place and if necessary, burn the place to ashes. . . . There would be a revolution at the mere sight of the smoke from the funnels of our warships.” When Hamilton asked how many enemy troops were defending the Dardanelles and the names and backgrounds of the principal Turkish and German commanders, Kitchener replied that he had no idea. When Hamilton asked how many troops he himself would command, Kitchener said that the Greeks had proposed to put 150,000 men on the Gallipoli peninsula, but that in Hamilton’s case “half that number will do you handsomely; the Turks are busy elsewhere; I hope you will not have to land at all; if you
do
have to land, why then the powerful fleet at your back will be the prime factor in your choice of time and place.” Hamilton’s troops, Kitchener decreed, were not to fight on the Asian side of the Dardanelles, because “once we began marching about continents, situations calling for heavy reinforcements would probably be created.” If putting troops ashore on Gallipoli turned out to be necessary, Hamilton was not to attack until the full weight of his expeditionary force—including the 29th Division—could be thrown in. But the general was not to worry: “The peninsula is open to landing on very easy terms,” he was assured. “The cross fire from the fleet . . . must sweep that stretch of flat and open country so as to render it untenable by the enemy.” Hamilton was allowed one night to say good-bye to his wife and to pack his clothes. In the morning, he was back at the War Office. “I said good-bye to old K. as casually as if we were to meet again for dinner,” he wrote. “He did not even wish me luck . . . but he did say, rather unexpectedly just as I was taking up my cap from the table, ‘If the fleet gets through, Constantinople will fall of itself and you will have won, not a battle, but the war.’ ”