Castles of Steel (86 page)

Churchill sought the opinion of Admiral Carden. Fisher had agreed that Carden should be consulted, but the First Sea Lord was not shown the message. In the telegram, there was no mention of British troops from France, of Greek troops, or of Bulgarian troops. Instead the First Lord asked simply: “Do you consider the forcing of the Dardanelles by ships alone a practicable operation? It is assumed older battleships fitted with mine-bumpers would be used, preceded by colliers or other merchant craft as mine-bumpers and sweepers. Importance of results would justify severe loss. Let me know your views.”

Carden’s answer, when it arrived on January 5, was cautious. The admiral did not like what appeared to be the Churchillian concept of “forcing” the Dardanelles using merchant ships out in front as mine bumpers: “I do not consider Dardanelles can be rushed,” he said. “They might be forced by extended operations with large number of ships.” This answer, although guarded, was sufficient to encourage Churchill, who read it to the War Council and then took it back to the Admiralty for discussion. Fisher saw Carden’s telegram and expressed no opinion, but, Churchill wrote later, “he seemed at this time not merely to favor the enterprise, but to treat it as a matter practically decided.” Accordingly, on January 6, Churchill sent another message to Carden: “Your view is agreed with by high authorities here. Please telegraph in detail what you think could be done by extended operations, what force would be needed, and how you consider it should be used.”

The War Council met again on January 8. Kitchener warned that the Germans were about to begin a new offensive in France. Lloyd George appealed for a British countermove elsewhere; his preference was the Balkans, in order to bring aid to Serbia. Kitchener replied that Sir John French still believed that the German lines in France could be broken and insisted that no effort should be made in another theater “until the impossibility of breaking through . . . [in France] was proved.” The war secretary then seemed to take a momentary step back from the Western Front philosophy; he added that if an offensive were to be launched in a secondary theater, “the Dardanelles appeared to be the most suitable objective. A hundred and fifty thousand men,” Kitchener thought, “might be sufficient to assist the fleet in forcing the Straits and capturing Constantinople.” Having offered this observation, Kitchener then reverted to his unvarying mantra: “Unfortunately, I have no troops available.” No one on the War Council challenged the inconsistency of Kitchener’s comments; at that time, whatever the Supreme War Lord said was accepted without question. If Kitchener believed that an attack on the Straits might succeed, then so it might. And if Kitchener said that no British troops were available for such an enterprise, none were.

On the morning of January 12, Carden’s detailed operational plan arrived in London. The admiral suggested a slow progress with the application of overwhelming force, shelling and silencing the forts one by one. First, he would attack the entrance forts at long range from outside the Straits. Once the entrance forts were destroyed, he would slowly and methodically progress up the Straits. The numerous secondary batteries of the fleet would silence the concealed guns and deal with the mobile batteries. Minesweepers would sweep a channel through which he would approach the heavy guns and forts at Chanak (Çanakkale) on the Narrows. He would demolish these and then advance into the Sea of Marmara. He would not hurry or risk taking heavy losses. “Time required for operations depends greatly on morale of enemy under bombardment; garrison largely stiffened by the Germans,” he noted. “Also on weather conditions. Gales now frequent. Might do it all in a month about. Expenditure of ammunition would be large.” The force required, he said, should be twelve battleships, three battle cruisers—two to deal with the
Goeben
in the Sea of Marmara—three light cruisers, sixteen destroyers, six submarines, and twelve minesweepers.

The plan was discussed the same day by the Admiralty War Group, which included Fisher, Wilson, Jackson, and Oliver. No one protested. Instead, “the plan produced a great impression upon everyone who saw it,” said Churchill later. “Both the First Sea Lord and the Chief of Staff [Oliver] seemed favourable to it. No one at any time threw the slightest doubt upon its technical soundness. . . . On the contrary, they all treated it as an extremely interesting and hopeful proposal.” Indeed, Fisher made a proposal of great significance. He suggested sending to Carden the new battleship
Queen Elizabeth,
the first of a class of five new dreadnoughts armed with eight 15-inch guns. The vessel, at that moment the most powerful warship afloat, had been commissioned at Portsmouth on December 22, and was scheduled to depart in February for gun calibration exercises in the calm, submarine-free waters of the Mediterranean off Gibraltar. Fisher now proposed that the dreadnought should test her huge guns against the Turkish forts at the Dardanelles rather than “firing all her ammunition uselessly into the sea at Gibraltar.”
Queen Elizabeth
’s guns had a range of 22,000 yards; thus she could easily stand off and fire out of range of Turkish guns. (The Admiralty placed restrictions on her use: to preserve her gun barrels from becoming worn, the dreadnought was never to fire salvos; rather she must fire slowly and deliberately, one gun, one shell at a time.) Later, Fisher went further, adding to Carden’s force the two latest of the predreadnoughts,
Lord Nelson
and
Agamemnon,
both commissioned after
Dreadnought
herself.

Thus, by mid-January, Churchill and the Admiralty were close to committing the fleet to steaming forty miles up a narrow waterway defended by forts equipped with heavy guns and also by numerous batteries of mobile howitzers. Traditionally, a bombardment of forts by ships was abhorred in the Royal Navy. The idea that naval guns should be used against land-based artillery had been condemned by Nelson, who had declared that “any sailor who attacked a fort was a fool.” Mahan had elaborated: “A ship can no more stand up against a fort . . . than the fort could run a race with a ship.” The primary mission of warships, these authorities declared, was to control the sea by sinking enemy warships, not to attack forts, which, no matter how many times they are hit, always refuse to sink. Ships are more vulnerable than forts: a battleship 500 feet long is a large target; any part of it can be hit, sometimes with drastic consequences for the entire vessel. A fort, on the other hand, cannot be greatly harmed except by hitting the guns themselves; usually only a direct hit will put a piece of coastal artillery out of action. On this point—the inefficacy of naval bombardment—Fisher had direct experience. The First Sea Lord had participated in the British navy’s most famous previous effort to subdue land forts. In July 1883, Fisher, as captain of
Inflexible,
the most powerful battleship in the world at that time, had participated in an all-day bombardment by the British Mediterranean Fleet of the Egyptian forts at Alexandria. During the day,
Inflexible,
anchored outside the breakwater, spasmodically belched eighty-eight 16-inch shells at the forts. By late afternoon, the fleet had fired 3,000 shells but only ten of forty-four Egyptian heavy guns had been silenced.

Churchill believed that the lessons of this experience, now thirty years in the past, had been modified if not invalidated by the new technology of modern warfare. He had been profoundly impressed by the success of German heavy artillery on the Western Front. The fortresses of Liège, Namur, and Antwerp had ranked among the world’s strongest, yet they had been reduced within a few days, sometimes within a few hours, by German siege howitzers. Once the bombardment began, the forts had collapsed, leaving a few dazed and blackened Belgians to crawl from the ruins and surrender. If the Belgian forts were helpless against these heavy land guns, how could the old Turkish forts on the Dardanelles withstand the enormous 12-inch and 15-inch guns of battleships? Thereupon, there formed in Churchill’s mind a glorious picture of
Queen Elizabeth
relentlessly blasting the Turkish defenses with tremendous shells from her monster guns.

Unfortunately, the First Lord ignored or misunderstood the differences between controlling German land artillery at close range from forward positions, and firing naval guns at targets seven or eight miles away with no means of accurately spotting the fall of shot. The German siege howitzer was a fat, short-barreled cannon that lobbed its shell high into the air so that the missile plunged down on its target. An observer close to the target observed the location of the shell’s impact and then signaled the battery to correct the range until the shell fell precisely on the desired spot. Large naval guns had an entirely different design and purpose. Shells fired from a long barrel in a low trajectory over thousands of yards were designed to strike and sink enemy warships at the greatest possible range. Spotting the fall of shot at sea was made easier for ships by the eruption of a great column of water where the shell hit. By tracking these water towers through binoculars and correcting their aim, the ship’s gunners hoped eventually to hit their enemy. When a ship is firing at a fort, on the other hand, the impact of a shell produces, not an easily discernible column of water, but a cloud of debris and dust that further obscures the target, giving the observer, thousands of yards away, little help in correcting his aim. In addition, warship shells fired in a flat trajectory would not plunge onto or near the target; more likely, they would pass overhead and hit many yards—even hundreds of yards—behind.

But all of this was still to be learned.

The meeting of the War Council on January 13, 1915, was a prolonged and exhausting session lasting all day. Not until after sunset did the council turn to the Dardanelles. Churchill explained Admiral Carden’s plan, which had arrived at the Admiralty the day before. As Hankey described the scene:

The War Council had been sitting all day. The blinds had been drawn to shut out the winter evening. The air was heavy and the table presented that rather disheveled appearance that results from a long session. . . . At this point events took a dramatic turn for Churchill suddenly revealed his well-kept secret of a naval attack on the Dardanelles! The idea caught on at once. The whole atmosphere changed. Fatigue was forgotten. The War Council turned eagerly from the dreary prospect of a “slogging match” on the Western Front to brighter prospects, as they seemed, in the Mediterranean. The navy, in whom everyone had implicit confidence and whose opportunities so far had been limited, was to come into the front line. . . . Churchill unfolded his plans with the skill that might be expected of him, lucidly, but quietly and without exaggerated optimism.

Pointing to a map, the First Lord declared that the Admiralty “believed that a plan could be made for systematically reducing all the forts within a few weeks. Once the forts were reduced, the minefields could be cleared and the fleet would proceed up to Constantinople and destroy
Goeben.
” Churchill declared that ships for the enterprise, including
Queen Elizabeth,
were available.

Churchill’s argument, Lloyd George said later, was delivered “with all the inexorable force and pertinacity, together with the mastery of detail he always commands when he is really interested in a subject.” So deep was the sense of frustration, so strong the apparent need that something be done, and so infectiously enthusiastic was Churchill’s presentation, that most of those who heard it were captured by its novelty and simplicity. There was no opposition. Churchill’s principal naval advisers, Admirals of the Fleet Fisher and Wilson, were present, but were not called upon for their opinions, nor did they offer any remarks. Their silence permitted Churchill and the other ministers to take their acquiescence for granted. Kitchener said the plan was worth trying and that “we could leave off the bombardment if it did not prove effective.” During the discussion, Asquith was seen to be writing. At length the prime minister read out the conclusion he had written: “That the Admiralty should prepare for a naval expedition in February to bombard and take the Gallipoli peninsula with Constantinople as its objective.” The War Council approved unanimously. Later, many of the ministers at the meeting differed as to whether any final decision had been made. Asquith himself understood that the council was pledged to nothing more than preparations. Eventually the Dardanelles Commission was to ask, How could a fleet “take” a peninsula? How could it occupy Constantinople? But these and other questions were not asked until two years later.

Up to mid-January, operational planning at the Admiralty seemed to be proceeding smoothly. The French government promised to place a squadron of four battleships under Carden’s command. Nevertheless, even as plans for the naval attack were taking form around him, Fisher’s enthusiasm was fading. As early as January 19, the First Sea Lord was complaining to Jellicoe, who he knew would provide a sympathetic ear: “The Cabinet have decided on taking the Dardanelles solely with the navy using fifteen battleships and 32 other vessels, and keeping out there three battle cruisers and a flotilla of destroyers
all urgently required at the decisive theater 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. . . . The way the war is conducted both ashore and afloat is chaotic! We have a new plan every week.
” Two days later, Fisher wrote again to Jellicoe, “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 Kitchener is coming now to this sane view of the matter.”

Fisher was not opposed to all amphibious operations; indeed, he had always believed that the British army “is a projectile to be fired by the navy.” It was the navy’s job to carry soldiers from here to there, but not to fight a land campaign. He was quite prepared for a combined navy-army operation but he would have liked it somewhere other than at the Dardanelles. His own strong preference was for a large-scale Russian landing on the German Baltic coast, followed by a march to Berlin. With this in mind, his great building program, initiated within a week of his return to the Admiralty in November, had called for a large number of armor-plated landing barges capable of carrying 500 men each and equipped with ramps for rapid disembarkation. The first of these craft were now approaching completion. But now, apparently, they were to go, not to the Baltic, but to the Dardanelles.