The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (84 page)

The Empire was now obviously rocking on its heels. If Italy, after little more than forty years as a single nation, could inflict such damage upon it, then surely the way was open for all its other enemies to move in on their own behalf. By the end of the summer Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Montenegro had managed to set aside their differences and form a Balkan League, with the objective of driving the Turks once and for all from the European continent. Hostilities began in early October and a week later, its forces outnumbered by more than two to one, the Ottoman government made a panicky peace with Italy, by the terms of which it recognised Italian suzerainty over Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in return for the return of the Dodecanese–a condition to which the Italians agreed, but which they were never to fulfil. By the end of November the Bulgarians had overrun Thrace; the Serbs had occupied Kosovo, Monastir, Skopje and Ochrid; and–most significant of all–the key Mediterranean port of Thessalonica was in the hands of the Greeks.
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In December came a pause; Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro agreed to an armistice–though Greece pointedly did not–and five days before Christmas a peace conference opened in London. But there was too much unfinished business, and at the beginning of February 1913 war broke out again. Another armistice followed in mid-April and a peace treaty was signed in London on 30 May. Turkey had lost Crete (formally annexed by Greece on 13 December), Macedonia, Thrace, Albania and most of her islands in the Aegean. All that was left of ‘Turkey in Europe’ was the city of Constantinople and its hinterland–little more than half the area that it occupies today; the present frontier, just beyond Edirne, is the result of what was known as the Second Balkan War, which lasted only a week or two. It was caused by the Bulgarians who, resentful at the Greek and Serbian gains in Macedonia, in the early hours of 29 June (of that same year, 1913) launched a surprise attack on their former allies, who were joined soon afterwards by Romania. The Turks decided to intervene, and a certain Major Enver–later Enver Pasha–who had been one of the moving spirits of the Young Turks, led his cavalry at breakneck speed across eastern Thrace to Edirne, capturing the city virtually without firing a shot. It was a brave adventure, and a successful one, but it could not conceal the fact that in little more than a year the Ottoman Empire had lost four-fifths of its European territory and more than two-thirds of its European population.

For these losses it was generally agreed that its army was to blame. It clearly needed extensive reorganisation and reconstruction. The men had gone unpaid for months; all of them were ragged, many of them were hungry, and morale had sunk almost to the point of mutiny. The fleet, too, was hopelessly out of date and in appalling condition. The first German officers who arrived to set the armed forces on their feet again are said to have been horrified to discover that the Turkish language had no word for ‘maintenance’.

The Germans, it went without saying, were the people to do the job. For some years past, Kaiser Wilhelm II had been waging a goodwill offensive. Like several other powers, he had heard of the recent discovery of vast oil deposits in Mesopotamia, and was anxious to obtain the Sultan’s agreement to the extension of the existing Berlin–Constantinople railway eastward to Baghdad. He had first called at Constantinople on his yacht, the
Hohenzollern
, as early as 1889, the year after his accession; on his second visit in 1898, he and Abdul-Hamid together crossed the Bosphorus and formally opened the magnificent new Asiatic terminus at Haydarpa
a. He had then sailed on to Palestine, where on 29 October 1898 he had made a state entry into Jerusalem–the first by a German Emperor since that of Frederick II in 1229–on a coal-black charger, wearing white ceremonial uniform, his helmet surmounted by a golden eagle. The effect may have been faintly ridiculous–‘revolting,’ wrote the Empress Maria Fyodorovna to her son Tsar Nicholas II–but it certainly ensured that Wilhelm would not be easily forgotten. And now, on 30 June 1913–the very day of the Bulgarians’ surprise attack–the Kaiser appointed General Otto Liman von Sanders to lead a German military mission to Constantinople.

How much that mission would have achieved we shall never know. A year later almost to the day, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand fell victim to an assassin’s bullet in Sarajevo–and all Europe was at war.

CHAPTER XXXII

The Great War

The First World War, as everyone knows, was fought principally in the trenches of northern France and Belgium. It was not in any sense a Mediterranean war. On three occasions, however, it spilled out into the Middle Sea to concentrate on its eastern enemy, the Ottoman Empire. The first was the ill-starred campaign of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli; the second, the Allied landings at Salonica; the third took place in Palestine.

On 27 December 1914 Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, characteristically addressed to the Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, a long letter of advice. The war, he suggested, had reached an impasse. The two armies were so firmly dug in that an advance of a few hundred yards was likely to involve casualties of several thousand. What was needed was a breakout, to some completely new theatre of war. ‘Are there not other alternatives,’ he asked, ‘than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?’ It seemed to him that there were two. One idea was the invasion and seizure of Schleswig–Holstein, enabling Denmark to join the Allies and opening up the Baltic to Allied shipping; the Russians could then land an army within ninety miles of Berlin. This would certainly be his own preference.

But he also put forward another idea, still more ambitious and imaginative: an invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula, control of which would allow the Royal Navy to force a passage through the Dardanelles and into the Sea of Marmara. Anchoring at the mouth of the Golden Horn, it could then threaten a bombardment of Constantinople–a terrible threat indeed in view of the narrow streets and tumbledown wooden houses of the old city. The destruction of the Galata Bridge would cut off Pera from Stamboul; the only two munitions factories in Turkey both stood on the water’s edge, where they would be an easy target for the British guns. All this would oblige the Sultan’s government to sue for peace, after which there would be no difficulty, Churchill believed, in persuading the still neutral Greece, Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria to throw in their lot with the Allies. It was a typically Churchillian plan which, had it succeeded, would have greatly shortened the war. But it did not succeed–and for the best part of a century military historians have been trying to analyse why a plan which at first appeared so promising led to the greatest disaster of the war.

The chief problem seems to have been the lack of a concerted overall plan. Churchill had originally envisaged a combined military and naval operation; by mid-January 1915, however, he was advocating an attack by the Navy only, despite the furious opposition of the First Sea Lord, his friend–but occasionally also his
bête noire
–Admiral Sir John Fisher. Only a month later, less than a week before the naval bombardment of the Dardanelles began, was it decided to send troops in support. This was largely due to the fact that Churchill, who was providing all the energy and drive behind the plan, was only a cabinet minister, responsible exclusively for the navy. He had no power over the army; the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener–who did–was half-hearted, the Prime Minister still more so. Had Churchill possessed the authority that he was to enjoy twenty-five years later, the Gallipoli campaign might well have ended very differently.

Over the navy, however, he was supreme; thanks to him, the fleet assembled by the British and French was the greatest concentration of naval strength ever seen in the Mediterranean. Apart from cruisers, destroyers and lesser craft, the British had contributed fourteen battleships, including the recently completed
Queen Elizabeth
, whose fifteen-inch guns–possessed by no other vessel–made her probably the most powerful ship afloat. Most of the others had twelve-inch guns, but these alone easily outclassed anything the Turks could boast in the eleven fortresses–on both sides of the straits–which constituted their principal defence. To this already considerable force the French added four more battleships and their auxiliaries.

By 18 February 1915 the combined fleet was in position, and at 9.51 a.m. on the following morning the attack began. It continued throughout the day, the fleet gradually drawing nearer, bombarding the forts from ever closer range. Meanwhile, minesweepers were at work, clearing the approach to the straits. By nightfall there was as yet no conclusive result. The Allied commander, Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden, saw that nothing of importance could be achieved unless his ships could approach much closer still to their targets; unfortunately that night the weather broke, and rough seas made accurate bombardment impossible. Not until five days later did the storm blow itself out and allow the battle to continue. On the 25th Vice-Admiral John de Robeck advanced right up to the straits themselves and the defenders withdrew to the north. Over the next few days small parties of sailors and marines actually landed on both the European and Asiatic shores, destroying such Turkish equipment as they could find, but most of the territory seemed deserted. On 2 March Carden telegraphed to London that given fine weather he hoped to be at Constantinople in about a fortnight.

How wrong he was. The Dardanelles, he soon discovered, were one vast minefield; the minesweepers were prevented from doing their job by the enemy guns, and the Navy could not silence the guns until the mines had been swept. A fortnight later, instead of dropping anchor in Constantinople, Carden was on his way back to London with a nervous breakdown. He was succeeded in the command by de Robeck, who led an attack on the straits on 18 March; alas, it was a failure, owing largely to an undetected line of mines that sank one French and two British battleships. De Robeck was not to know–though he might have suspected–that the Turkish emplacements were now running seriously short of ammunition and had little immediate prospect of obtaining any more. He was aware only of his heavy losses and of the fact that Constantinople seemed as far away as ever. As for the Turks, their 60,000 men, skilfully deployed and commanded by General Liman von Sanders, had won their first victory for many years–and over the Royal Navy, which they, and much of the rest of the world, had long believed to be invincible. Constantinople had been saved from British clutches. Once again, they could walk with their heads held high.

It was by now clear to most of the British government that the navy could not achieve a breakthrough alone. ‘Somebody,’ wrote Admiral Fisher to David Lloyd George, ‘will have to land at Gallipoli some time or other.’ By mid-March Kitchener had reluctantly agreed to send out the 29th Division from England–totalling some 17,000 men–together with the Australian and New Zealand divisions (another 30,000) that were then awaiting orders in Egypt. In addition, there was one French division of 16,000 and the Royal Naval Division of 10,000. In overall command he appointed his old friend from Boer War days, General Sir Ian Hamilton. It was agreed that the armies would assemble on the island of Lemnos, where they would receive their stores and equipment and draw up their plans for the coming campaign.

At Lemnos, however, another disappointment was in store. The transports from England had been loaded with no thought for the army that was to receive them. Horses and guns arrived on one ship, saddles, harness and ammunition on another. Landing craft had apparently been forgotten altogether. A number of heavy lorries had been loaded, despite the fact that the Gallipoli peninsula had no roads. Nor, it seemed, did the army possess any accurate maps or charts of the area over which it would be fighting. Finally, landing and other facilities on Lemnos were found to be inadequate or nonexistent, with the result that everything had to be re-embarked and carried on to Alexandria, where the whole army could be regrouped and somehow made ready for battle. There was now no chance that the combined force would be ready until mid-April at the earliest. That would give Hamilton some three weeks to prepare and plan the most ambitious amphibious operation in the history of warfare.

The navy had been more fortunate with its supplies. A new fleet of destroyer-minesweepers had arrived, together with three dummy battleships, humble vessels which had been decked out with elaborate superstructures and wooden guns to serve as decoys and, with any luck, to persuade the German fleet to come out and fight.
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The Royal Flying Corps was represented by Air Commodore Charles Samson. When his thirty aircraft were uncrated, twenty-five were found to be unserviceable; for the remainder, however, there was a number of bombs designed to be lobbed overboard by the observer. Where the aircraft really came into their own was in the field of reconnaissance. The aerial photography of the enemy emplacements, with their vast fields of barbed wire, filled Hamilton with gloom.

The long-delayed landings finally took place in the early hours of 25 April. The British disembarked at Cape Helles on the western tip of the peninsula, the Australians and New Zealanders in a small bay–henceforth to be known as Anzac Cove–some thirteen miles along the north coast. The French, meanwhile, were put ashore at Kum Kale on the southern coast. The defending Turks, though outnumbered and outgunned and subject to constant shelling from the ships, kept up a courageous resistance. The Allied troops fought equally bravely, but their task was made harder by the extraordinary preference of Hamilton and his two subordinate generals, Aylmer Hunter-Weston and Sir William Birdwood–commanding the British and the Anzacs respectively–to remain at sea throughout the vital first hours after the landings. Thus, when the signalling arrangements began to fail and there was an almost immediate breakdown of Allied communications, each individual unit was left to look after itself, with no knowledge of what was happening on the next beach to its own. By the end of the first day, after heavy casualties on both sides, the invading forces were still largely confined to the shore.

Anyone who has ever visited the Gallipoli peninsula will have been struck by the intense hostility of the terrain. Of scenic beauty there is plenty, with the plain of Troy extending beyond the Dardanelles to the south and, rising from the sea in the west, the islands of Imbros and Samothrace. But the beaches themselves, set in what is essentially a succession of small coves, are small and narrow, and they are overhung by cliffs, rising almost perpendicular only yards from the shore, slashed by precipitous ravines and so densely covered with scrub and bracken as to be in many places utterly impassable. Thus the Turks on the heights above, hidden in the thick vegetation, had a perfect field of fire on the forces trapped on the beaches below.

How, one wonders, can those who planned the operation have believed that it had the faintest chance of success? Hamilton and a few of his senior officers had done a rough reconnaissance by sailing a little way up the coast in a destroyer, and there were a few aerial photographs. But no one had a proper map, and there were some areas–notably Anzac Cove–which had never been mapped at all. Nonetheless, when the Australians and New Zealanders splashed ashore in the early hours of that Sunday morning, they fought like tigers. Some of them managed to cut a path with their bayonets through the scrub, and by 8 a.m. it seemed that in several places the Turks were on the run. At that moment, however, there arrived on the scene one of the half-dozen most remarkable men of the twentieth century.

Mustafa Kemal–he made a brief appearance in the preceding chapter–was by now, at the age of thirty-four, a divisional commander. Called out with one small battalion to engage the invaders, he first single-handedly stopped a group of his retreating countrymen and by the sheer force of his personality persuaded them to turn and fight; then, realising that the battle was far more serious and on an infinitely larger scale than he had been led to understand, he summoned–on his own responsibility–a crack Turkish regiment and one of the Arab units as well. In doing this he was blatantly exceeding his authority, but it was not until the early afternoon that he even informed his headquarters of what he had done. By this time the progress of the battle had proved him right; he returned to his unit with effective authority over the whole of the Anzac front.

All day he kept up the pressure, and the Dominion troops who had managed to advance a short distance into the hinterland began to fall back towards the sea. By now Birdwood had discovered to his horror that he had landed his men on the wrong beach. He had expected to find a strip of coast at least a mile long; he found instead a cove little more than half that length, with only some thirty yards between the water and the cliff. Here everything had to be brought: guns, ammunition, stores of all kinds, pack animals–and, all too soon, an endless stream of stretchers bearing the dead or wounded. That night he sent a message to the Commander-in-Chief seeking permission to abandon his whole position and to re-embark his men.

But Hamilton refused. Any such re-embarkation, he pointed out, would take at least two days; meanwhile it had just been reported to him that an Australian submarine had passed through the narrows and entered the Sea of Marmara, where it had already torpedoed a Turkish gunboat. There was nothing the poor general could do but tell his men to dig themselves in.

Birdwood, busy with the Anzacs, would have been even more discouraged had he known how the European troops had fared. The French, to be sure, had done well: they had landed near the reputed tomb of Achilles, had seized and occupied the ruined fortress of Kum Kale and were now ready to join their British allies at Cape Helles. Here, however, the landings had been catastrophic. The Turks had held their fire until most of the transports had been drawn up to the beach and the men disembarked, and had then suddenly loosed a murderous hail of bullets. For the British troops there was no protection, and soon, as Air Commodore Samson reported after observing the scene from the air, ‘the calm blue sea was absolutely red with blood for fifty yards from the shore, a horrible sight to see.’ In the shallows, all the little ripples were dyed scarlet. Within three hours, nearly a thousand corpses were strewn across the beach. At the other four nearby landing places the situation had been rather better; it was known, too, that the Turks had also suffered appalling casualties. Nevertheless, Hamilton’s continued optimism remained astonishing. ‘Thanks to God who calmed the seas,’ he wrote on April 26, ‘and to the Royal Navy who rowed our fellows ashore as coolly as if at a regatta; thanks also to the dauntless spirit shown by all ranks of both Services, we have landed 29,000 upon six beaches in the face of desperate resistance.’ But as other reports filtered back to London there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the cost of the Gallipoli operation in human life alone had already been far greater than foreseen, and that its long-term prospects were in serious doubt.