The Dandarnelles Disaster (16 page)

General Otto Liman von Sanders in Turkish service, defender of Gallipoli Turkish service, defender of Gallipoli 1914-15.

The Allied fleet sailing for the Dardanelles

SS
River Clyde
grounded at ‘V' beach after playing ‘Trojan horse' for the Cape Helles landing.

French soldiers from the Colonial Regiment inspect a smashed searchlight.

The Kaiser and Enver Pasha converse on the deck of the
Goeben.

The commanders and chiefs of staff on HMS
Triad
: (L to R) Commodore Roger Keyes; Vice-Admiral John de Robeck; General Sir Ian Hamilton; Major-General W.P. Braithwaite.

The man who answered the Turkish Question, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

The undoing of the Allied fleet. The Turkish minelayer
Nusret
— the modern copy at Çannakale.

Atatürk's verdict on the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns.

So on 3 January Churchill sent a telegram to Admiral Carden, asking whether forcing the Dardanelles by naval gunfire was practicable: ‘The importance of the results would justify severe loss.' Two days later Carden replied that it could be done, though slowly and with a suitable number of ships. On the 6th Churchill asked the admiral how he would do it and what he needed. Five days later Carden telegraphed his considered reply:

… Possibility of operations.

(a)  Total reduction of defences at the entrance.

(b)  Clear defences inside of straits up to and including Kephez Point battery no. 8.

(c)  Reduction of defences at the Narrows, Chanak.

(d)  Clear passage through minefield, advancing through Narrows, and final advance to Marmora.

…

Whilst (a) and (b) are being carried out a battleship force would be employed in demonstration and bombardment of Bulair lines and coast [at the north-eastern neck of the Gallipoli peninsula] and reduction of battery at [near the south-western end].

Force required 12 [pre-dreadnought] battleships … three battlecruisers … three light cruisers, one flotilla leader [light cruiser], 16 destroyers … six submarines, four seaplanes … 12 minesweepers …

And a dozen support ships, including a hospital ship and supply vessels. And piles of shells. Carden's long telegram went on to describe in detail the programme of action, step by step, starting with silencing the entrance forts and sending the battleships, preceded by minesweepers, up the straits, bombardments over the peninsula from the Aegean followed by shorter-range direct shelling, with the seaplanes observing the fall of shot: ‘Might do it all in a month about. Expenditure of ammunition would be large.' Carden made no mention of a combined operation or of troops to support the fleet.

On 4 January, just five days after the Grand Duke's plea for help, the Russians turned the tables on the Turks in Armenia, defeating them in several actions. Nicholas neglected to tell his British allies of this favourable turn of events, and they went on believing that their Dardanelles interven
tion, whatever form it took, was for the immediate relief of Russia, as well as for her and the Entente's long-term benefit. There were 129 merchant steamships, Allied and neutral, totalling 350,000 gross register tons, locked up in the Black Sea. Freeing Russia's main trade route would salvage her economy, solve her munitions shortage, guarantee Anglo-French grain supplies, impress the wavering Balkan states and the Arabs under Turkish rule, and quite possibly Italy too. All this was an understandably dazzling prospect.

Churchill took Carden's exhaustive shopping list to the meeting of the War Council on 13 January 1915. A low-key discussion was almost electrified, and certainly enlivened, when he produced it. Sir John French was still arguing for the Zeebrugge attack, on which a final decision was postponed until mid-February, when two new Territorial Army divisions would be ready for the Western Front. Meanwhile General Joffre, the French commander-in-chief, had pulled 100,000 troops out of the line immediately to the right of the BEF to form part of his mobile reserve, which meant that the temporarily exposed British Army could not risk an advance on the Belgian ports.

The First Lord explained that a dozen slow old battleships, of little use against the High Seas Fleet but usually carrying four 12-inch guns, could be used as floating batteries to destroy most of the Dardanelles fortifications. Fisher not only agreed at this stage that old battleships could be spared but threw in the latest pre-dreadnoughts, the
Agamemnon
and
Lord Nelson
– and on the eve of the Council meeting he suggested to Churchill that the new
Queen Elizabeth
, with eight 15-inch guns, the world's most powerful battleship of the day, could go too. The First Sea Lord's enthusiasm for a massive bombardment obviously knew no bounds: he was going to go ‘the whole hog –
totus porcus
', as he said later, when the final decision on the nature of the attack was taken, against his advice, at the end of the month; but he soon developed misgivings when it became clear to him that Churchill was pursuing a
totus porcus
of his own: a naval breakthrough followed by an attack on Constantinople,
after
Kitchener had repeated that no troops were available. This would entail considerable, possibly serious, losses; while some old ships could be spared, their trained crews, needed as reserves for the Grand Fleet, could not; and in the event of a defeat of the Grand Fleet the Channel Fleet's pre-dreadnoughts would be the only reserves left against a German invasion. Total domination of the North Sea and Channel was Fisher's absolute strategic priority. A bombardment from a great distance was one thing; a short-range duel with Krupp cannon amid the mines in the Narrows was something else altogether.

Carden wanted three battlecruisers to tackle the most modern of the defences (and the
Goeben
if the chance offered), the First Lord said. There were already two battlecruisers in the Mediterranean; and the
Queen Elizabeth
could join them to complete her gunnery trials against real targets. Churchill did what would now be called a hard sell on the stupendous gun-power of the new maritime colossus, displacing 28,000 tonnes. Even the normally impassive Kitchener was impressed. He thought a massive naval demonstration worth trying (he had no troops to offer, after all) and added, naïvely or disingenuously: ‘We could leave off the bombardment if it did not prove effective.' On this basis, the War Council imprecisely decided on a navy-only attack on the Dardanelles: ‘that the Admiralty should … prepare for a naval expedition in February to bombard and take the Gallipoli peninsula with Constantinople as its objective'. Fisher did not speak at the meeting. Churchill told the French government and Grand Duke Nicholas of the plan on 19 January, inviting their active co-operation at the Dardanelles and the Bosporus respectively: the Russians pleaded maritime weakness in the Black Sea (where Souchon was giving them a lot of trouble) but the French promised naval reinforcements. On the same day Churchill wrote to Fisher with a detailed analysis of the comparative strengths of the Grand and High Seas fleets to underpin his argument that the Royal Navy could well spare some of its older ships for the Mediterranean.