Castles of Steel (98 page)

Hamilton did what he could with what he had. In mid-July, he asked Kitchener for two experienced generals to take over two of his commands. He was told that they were in France and “unavailable”; instead, elderly former officers, plucked from retirement, were sent out. He asked for a guaranteed supply of 400,000 shells a month for his artillery; the War Office replied, “It will be quite impossible to send you ammunition at this rate without stopping all operations in France. This, of course, is out of the question.” Nevertheless, on August 6, Hamilton launched his final offensive. Two fresh divisions of Kitchener’s New Army, just arrived from England with no experience in war, were put ashore on Suvla Beach, three miles north of Anzac Beach. To distract the Turks while the British landed, the veteran Australians and New Zealanders stormed up Lone Pine Ridge and Sari Bair from Anzac Beach. The casualties were shocking: one Australian brigade lost more than 1,700 men out of 2,900 involved; another battalion suffered 74 percent casualties; within two days, the Anzacs won six Victoria Crosses; but they failed to take the summit. Meanwhile, another column of Anzacs, British, and Gurkhas was assaulting the dominating ridge of Chunuk Bair. At dawn, the 6th Gurkha Battalion reached the top. “We bit, fisted and used rifles and pistols as clubs, blood was flying about like spray . . . and then the Turks turned and fled,” said the British major commanding the Gurkhas. “I felt a very proud man: the key of the whole peninsula was ours. . . . Below I saw the Straits . . . [and] the roads leading to Achi Baba. We dashed down [pursuing the Turks] towards Maidos [on the Straits] but had only got about a hundred feet down when suddenly our own navy put six 12-inch shells into us . . . confusion . . . disaster . . . the place was a mass of blood and limbs and screams. . . . We lost about a hundred and fifty men and the regiment was withdrawn.”

All of this bravery went for nought. Sir “Freddy” Stopford, commanding the troops landed at Suvla, was an amiable, doddering lieutenant general who had retired seven years earlier to battle chronic ill health. His presence at Gallipoli—indeed, in the army at all—was due to the fact that his country, beginning the war with only a small professional army, had no deep cadre of men qualified to command an army corps or even a division. Stopford, called back into service, had been given this key assignment by Kitchener even though Hamilton had named at least three other generals he thought better qualified. In any case, Stopford’s landing had taken the Turks by surprise, but because his men seemed tired and thirsty, he did not push them to occupy the surrounding ridges. When Hamilton arrived a few hours later, he found 20,000 men “spread around the beaches . . . smoking and cooking, others bathing by hundreds in the bright blue bay.” He discovered Stopford placidly presiding over this scene from an offshore yacht, enormously pleased that he had met so little resistance. Hamilton insisted that Stopford’s men hurry to occupy the heights before the enemy arrived. “We might have the hills at the cost of walking up them today,” he said. “The Lord only knows what the price of them will be tomorrow.” Stopford did not disagree, but cordially excused himself from going ashore because “he had not been very fit, his knee was sore from a fall and he wanted to give it a chance to recover.” The British troops remained in place and by the next morning, thousands of Turks were massed on the heights. Eventually, Stopford was relieved of command, but the opportunity, now missed, never returned. By August 21, the Suvla offensive was stalemated and Hamilton had suffered another 40,000 casualties. He told Kitchener that to attack again he would need a further reinforcement of 95,000 men.

Briefly, it seemed that he might get them. On September 2, the French made a surprise proposal to land four new divisions on the Asian side of the Dardanelles. “From bankrupt to millionaire in 24 hours! We are saved! Constantinople is doomed!” was Hamilton’s gleeful reaction. But this French operation was canceled when, on October 14, Bulgaria, having observed the defeat at Suvla Bay and concluding that the Allies would never take the Dardanelles, joined the Austrian-German assault on her old foe, Serbia. A Serb defeat cleared the way for an enemy advance on Salonika, which Britain and France did not wish to lose. Accordingly, instead of gaining four new divisions, Hamilton lost two: one British and one French, taken from him and sent to defend Salonika. “We can’t feed Russia with munitions through Salonika, nor can we bring back Russian wheat through Salonika,” Hamilton noted bitterly.

By mid-October, the sands of the Gallipoli adventure were running out. Bulgaria’s entry into the war meant the opening of a direct rail link between Germany and Constantinople with the likelihood that Turkish artillery on Gallipoli soon would have large supplies of ammunition. Already, on October 11, Kitchener had asked Hamilton for an assessment of the losses that might be incurred if Allied troops evacuated Gallipoli. Unwilling to concede defeat, Hamilton gloomily had estimated that he might lose half of his men. The reaction from London was swift: on October 16, Hamilton was relieved of command.

[There was another factor in Hamilton’s dismissal. On September 2, an Australian journalist, Keith Arthur Murdoch, arrived at British headquarters and gave Hamilton “an elaborate explanation of why his duty to Australia could be better done with a pen than a rifle.” Murdoch was permitted to visit Suvla and Anzac Beaches for a few hours; then, in breach of a signed agreement pertaining to the behavior of all war correspondents, Murdoch wrote directly to Andrew Fisher, prime minister of Australia, who passed the letter along to Asquith. In his letter, Murdoch praised the physical health, spirit, and bravery of the Australian forces and then spoke with contempt of the British troops: “You would refuse to believe that these men were really British soldiers. . . . The British physique is very much below that of the Turks. . . . They are merely a lot of child-like youths, without strength to endure or brains to improve their conditions.” This was opinion, but Murdoch’s worst accusation was flagrantly untrue: “The fact is that after the first day at Suvla an order had to be issued to [British] officers to shoot without mercy any [British] soldier who lagged behind or loitered in advance.” Hamilton later described Murdoch’s allegation as “an irresponsible statement by an ignorant man,” but Asquith, inexplicably, had it reprinted on official British government stationery and circulated it to the War Council and the Committee on Imperial Defence. Neither Hamilton nor Kitchener was ever given an opportunity to respond.

Some Australians have never forgiven Britain and the British army for the loss of young Anzac lives at Gallipoli. The 1981 film
Gallipoli
also celebrated the manly beauty and heroism of the Australian soldiery, especially that of the 10th Light Horse Regiment from Western Australia. The film depicts this regiment ordered to attack again and again, repeatedly charging into Turkish rifles and machine guns and suffering 75 percent casualties at the relentless insistence of an Australian senior officer under orders to distract the Turks while the British landed at Suvla Beach. The film was mostly truthful. “The 10th went forward to meet death instantly,” wrote C.E.W. Bean, in the official Australian history of the Great War, “the men running as swiftly and as straight as they could at the Turkish rifles. With that regiment went the flower of the youth of Western Australia, sons of the old pioneering families—in some cases two and three from the same home—who had flocked to Perth to enlist with their own horses and saddles.”

Interestingly, Keith Murdoch’s son, Rupert, was one of the film’s principal financial backers.]

His replacement was a general straight from the Western Front, Sir Charles Monro, described by Hankey as “a cheery old fellow with an odd trick of slapping you on the arm and ejaculating ‘Ja!’ ” Monro had always believed that the Dardanelles was a foolish, hopeless “side-show” thatdiverted troops from France, the only theater of war where an ultimate decision could be achieved. On a single day, October 31, Monro visited the beaches at Helles, Suvla, and Anzac and then—as everyone in London knew he would—recommended immediate evacuation of the entire peninsula. He estimated that the withdrawal would cost 40,000 British casualties. Churchill’s comment was bitter: “General Monro was an officer of swift decision. He came, he saw, he capitulated.” On November 3, however, Kitchener rejected Monro’s advice, refused to order an evacuation, and announced that he himself would go out to Gallipoli. Kitchener reached Mudros on November 9 and spent the next three days inspecting troops and positions on the peninsula. After talking with Birdwell and plodding up and down the hillsides, walking in trenches within twenty yards of the Turks, he concluded that Monro had been right: further effort was useless. He telegraphed the War Council his recommendation that Suvla and Anzac should be immediately evacuated and Helles temporarily retained. Back in London on Novem-ber 30, he went straight to Downing Street and offered his resignation to the prime minister. Asquith refused to accept it.

Meanwhile, the prime minister again was trying to save his government. By early October, the Cabinet was deeply divided on the issue of Gallipoli: Bonar Law passionately favored evacuation; Churchill, fervently, and, to a lesser degree, Balfour advocated seeing the campaign through. Once Bulgaria declared war on October 18, thus establishing a direct rail link between Germany and Turkey, Bonar Law predicted that German artillery and munitions would pour into Constantinople and Gallipoli, putting Allied troops on the peninsula in extreme danger. Asquith sat on the fence. His tactic was to call for reports followed by discussions of the reports; invariably, this resulted in the passage of time and the postponement of decisions. Thus, when Hamilton was recalled and Monro sent out, everyone knew that the general would recommend evacuation. Bonar Law protested, accurately describing the mission as a waste of time. When Monro’s recommendation arrived, however, so formidable was the opposition to evacuation from Churchill and others that the prime minister needed a further postponement of decision. Accordingly, Lord Kitchener was dispatched to do over again what General Monro had just done. Bonar Law, enraged, threatened to resign unless the Cabinet rescinded its decision to postpone the final decision until Kitchener made his report. On November 7, Bonar Law met Asquith and made clear to the prime minister that this conversation must be a final one between them—either evacuation or his own resignation must follow immediately. Asquith used every persuasion; Bonar Law remained firm, and, at the conclusion, the prime minister surrendered and promised that the troops would be withdrawn. Thereafter, although Kitchener did not know it, his mission became only a façade behind which the timing and sequence of the evacuation would be arranged. Luckily for Asquith, Lord Kitchener decided independently that Gallipoli should be given up and on November 23, the War Committee duly voted for evacuation, “on the strength of Lord Kitchener’s views.” One man who saw what was coming did not wait for the final vote. On November 18, Winston Churchill resigned from the Cabinet and the Duchy of Lancaster and departed England to command a battalion on the Western Front. He spent his first night sleeping in a pit of Flanders mud four feet deep, containing a foot of water.

New horrors afflicted the men on Gallipoli. On November 26, a torrential rain followed by a two-day blizzard of sleet and snow flooded and froze the trenches. Men drowned when icy water roared down the hillsides and through the trenches; subsequently, 200 men froze to death. Eventually, over 16,000 men on the Allied side were disabled by frostbite, and 10,000 had to be evacuated. Evidence of Turkish suffering came from a stream of Turkish bodies washing down from the heights into Allied trenches.

Despite the lost battleships, Hamilton’s removal, the gloomy visits of Monro and Kitchener, and the secret decision in London for evacuation, a counter-current had been running through the fleet offshore. De Robeck remained opposed to a new naval attempt to force the Narrows, but Roger Keyes, his Chief of Staff, had never abandoned hope. Before Kitchener arrived, Keyes had made a new proposal: the army need only hold on to its three beachheads while the navy rushed a squadron through the Straits into the Sea of Marmara. De Robeck was a forbearing superior: “Well, Commodore,” he said to Keyes, who was ten years younger, “you and I will never agree, but there is no reason we should not remain friends.” Keyes had a strong ally in Rear Admiral Rosslyn Wester Wemyss, the commander at Mudros; possibly because of this, de Robeck gave his Chief of Staff permission to go to London and personally present his plan to the Admiralty. Keyes arrived in London on October 28 and called on Arthur Balfour. The new First Lord, lying back in his armchair with his knees as high as his head, listened for two hours while Keyes poured out his appeal. Then Balfour stood up, rang for tea, and said, “It is not often that when one examines a hazardous enterprise—and you will admit it has its hazards—the more one considers it the better one likes it.” To the argument that de Robeck, the admiral in command, opposed the plan, Keyes replied that Wemyss, who was senior to de Robeck on the permanent Navy List and who knew the theater equally well, supported the plan and therefore should be placed in command. Balfour nodded and suggested that Keyes make a call on Kitchener who was about to depart on his visit to Gallipoli. The field marshal listened and urged Keyes to go back to the Admiralty and get a firm commitment to the naval attack. That evening, November 3, Kitchener sent a message to Birdwood, who was temporarily in command at Gallipoli:

Most secret. Decipher yourself. . . . You know Monro’s report. I leave here tomorrow night to come out to you. Have seen Commodore Keyes, and the Admiralty will, I believe, agree naval attempt to force the Straits. We must do what we can to help them, and I think as soon as ships are in the Marmara, we should seize and hold the Bulair isthmus. . . . The admiral will probably be changed and Wemyss given command to carry through the naval part of the work. . . . We must do it right this time. I absolutely refuse to sign orders for evacuation, which I think would condemn a large percentage of our men to death or imprisonment.