The Dandarnelles Disaster (25 page)

The immediate cause of the defeat of the Royal Navy and its loyal French ally in their attempt to break into the Sea of Marmara was the defensive minefield system combined with the artillery and searchlights protecting it, and the impotence of the sweepers deployed against it. The idea of using powerfully engined destroyers with disciplined sailors and guns instead of unarmed wooden trawlers with civilian crews came too late. The mine as a weapon had been grievously underestimated despite its successes in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, which several Royal Navy officers present at the Dardanelles had witnessed as observers. Fear of the torpedo was much greater in the fleet, despite the fact that U-boats did not take a hand in the campaign until several weeks after the climactic naval bombardment. The well-protected minefield proved to be a much more intractable defence than the fixed guns in the forts or even the mobile batteries directed at the ships.

Admiral Wemyss at Mudros was not alone in regarding those running the war in London as a bunch of ill-informed amateurs. There was no proper staffwork at Admiralty or War Office, both run by strong-willed personalities. There had been no proper planning or discussion or co-ordination between navy and army. Hamilton ruefully acknowledged this pervasive spirit of shambolic amateurism in his
Gallipoli Diary
:

On the German system plans for a landing on Gallipoli would have been in my pocket, up to date and worked out to a ball cartridge and a pail of water. By the British system (?) I have been obliged to concoct my own plans in a brace of shakes almost under fire … in matters of supply, transport, organisation and administration our way is the way of Colney Hatch
.

The sardonic question mark in the above is Hamilton's own; Colney Hatch was a notorious lunatic asylum north of London, reclassified in 1918 as a mental hospital. We noted above the pathetic collection of ‘intelligence material' the general carried in his kit on the way from London to the Aegean.

As Tim Travers puts it in
Gallipoli 1915
, the war leadership ‘simply
indulged in a Darwinian struggle for control of operations'. Asquith was a weak and passive leader. Hankey, the Secretary of the War Council, was in many ways the most acute member of it but even he produced his own plans without consultation. Even so, the idea of the flank attack on Turkey via the Dardanelles, generally accepted as the best strategic idea of the war, originated with him rather than Churchill, who immediately saw its worth, took it up with enthusiasm and unfortunately chose the wrong way to implement it.

It is not mere hindsight that enables us to conclude that the whole idea of relying on the battleships to force the strait without full army support was a fundamental blunder: all the authorities, naval, military, strategic, believed from the lesson of Duckworth's expedition in 1807 onwards that the only way to do it was through a combined operation. There were also the more recent lessons provided by the Japanese siege of Port Arthur in 1904 and the attack on German Tsingtao ten years later. Even Churchill believed in a combined operation until Kitchener insisted there were no troops available, whereupon the First Lord lost patience and almost single-handedly forced through his navy-only strategy. Kitchener's U-turn after three weeks of dithering over the dispatch of the 29th infantry division also came too late: in the end the army was not ready until 24 April 1915. And when it was, the idea of a full-blown combined operation against the Dardanelles, if it had even been seriously considered after the naval failure, was abandoned as the navy fell back into a subsidiary role, providing escort, delivery and shore-bombardment services for the army. The failure from the outset to opt for a combined operation, or to wait until one became possible, and the consequent separation of the naval attack from the belated army invasion of the peninsula entitles us to see the Gallipoli military disaster as the first
consequence
of the failure of the fleet.

But before taking our narrative ashore on to the peninsula we need to consider the political consequences of the navy's failure to deliver Churchill's undertaking to break through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara with a fleet unsupported on land. They were profound: Turkish morale soared; by their own assessment and Churchill's, the Germans gained two years' extra capacity to endure in what turned out to be a four-year war; several states in southern Europe decided which side they were on; in London heads rolled and the government was reconstructed; and a normally deferential, unquestioningly patriotic British press began to complain of ‘bungling in high places'. These trends would only be
strengthened by the course of the Gallipoli land campaign which began on 25 April 1915 and had stalled by 9 May, though it would endure for many months yet as a smaller-scale but even more intense offshoot of the Western Front.

Fisher, who had never been wholly convinced by Churchill's advocacy of a navy-only attack but supported his chief out of loyalty and gratitude for his reappointment in 1914, reverted to his main concern, the Germans in the North Sea, after the failure of 18 March. Britain had declared a total maritime blockade of Germany on 1 March in response to the increased U-boat threat, even though goods for Germany could still be delivered to neutral Scandinavian and Dutch ports: neither side wanted to provoke the non-belligerent United States. For the old admiral, when it came to the British margin of superiority over the Imperial High Seas Fleet there was no such thing as enough, and he felt increasingly uneasy about the fleet of 16 battleships, 4 light cruisers and 24 destroyers, the latter of greatest value, still sitting in the Aegean with an array of auxiliary vessels. The battleships were mostly elderly but were the bulk of Britain's naval reserve of last resort against the Germans; Fisher tried to ensure that de Robeck's most modern ships, the
Queen Elizabeth
,
Lord Nelson
and
Agamemnon
, were kept out of operations inside the strait. Nervousness at the Admiralty about the North Sea was exacerbated by signs at the end of March that the German fleet was about to come out, a plan abandoned when a sharp increase in British naval wireless traffic indicated to the Germans that the Grand Fleet was itself preparing a foray. British diplomats and spies in The Hague learned at about this time that Germany was exerting enormous pressure on her Dutch neighbour to enter the war on the side of the Central Powers. The War Office considered landing troops at the Hook of Holland and the Admiralty looked at establishing a destroyer and submarine base on the Dutch Frisian island of Terschelling; the Dutch scare however faded by mid-April.

But by the end of March the Germans had set up their U-boat flotilla at Zeebrugge with their first small coastal and new mine-laying types of submarines, shipped in sections to the Belgian coast by rail and assembled at Antwerp. Elsewhere U-boats sank 29 merchant ships totalling 90,000 tons around Britain in March, more in a single month than in the whole of the war so far – an uncomfortable portent.

The navy's failure to break through the Dardanelles and its military consequences cost its political and operational chiefs their jobs. But whereas the
former had to be pushed, the latter defenestrated himself, and rather messily at that, bringing a sad end to a unique career.

It is difficult to keep track of the number of occasions on which the excitable and emotional John Arbuthnot Fisher threatened to resign after the First World War broke out, but there were at least seven before the great setback of 18 March: we saw how Kitchener had to persuade him not to walk out of the War Council. He had risen from the lowest to the highest in his beloved Royal Navy, a fighting admiral with extraordinary courage, administrative ability and energy – a rare combination indeed. He was 40 when appointed captain of the most powerful battleship of the day, HMS
Inflexible
(not to be confused with the Dardanelles casualty), in 1881. He distinguished himself in action in China and Egypt. A rear-admiral in 1892, he joined the Board of Admiralty as Third Sea Lord and
ex officio
Controller of the Navy, responsible for the design and construction of ships. In his five years in the post Fisher introduced the water-tube boiler and the destroyer (originally known as the ‘torpedo-boat destroyer') to the fleet, and initiated a large ship-construction programme. A rare career failure was his appointment as naval delegate to the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899, where he most undiplomatically spoke his mind: ‘moderation in war is imbecility' was just one of his blunt ‘sound-bites'. This did not prevent him from becoming commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, the navy's plum command, later the same year for three years, during which he introduced far-reaching, modernising reforms that were spread across the entire navy when he became First Sea Lord in 1904, aged 63.

The leitmotiv of his six hectic years in this supreme office was preparation for what he correctly foresaw (remarkable foresight was another of his many gifts) as the inevitable war with Germany, which was expanding its navy at an alarming rate. Among his innovations were the ‘all-big-gun ship' (HMS
Dreadnought
, built in a year and armed with ten 12-inch guns), making all other battleships in the world, including Britain's, obsolete at a stroke in 1906; its faster but less well-armoured sister, the battlecruiser (HMS
Invincible
with eight 12-inch guns was the prototype), to scout for the battlefleet and lead it into action; a ruthlessly pruned reserve fleet with core crews of 40 per cent strength to be filled out in time of war; concentration of Britain's naval power against Germany; a rapid switch to oil propulsion from coal; better gunnery training; submarines; the Royal Naval Air Service. Fees were abolished at officer-cadet schools; conditions were markedly improved for the lower deck; merit began to displace privilege as ground for promotion.

Fisher's reforms mostly kept pace with the speed and scope of advances in naval technology and weapons but aroused a powerful conservative opposition within the upper reaches of the navy, led by Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, commander-in-chief of the Channel Fleet from 1907, no match for Fisher in professional attainment but a charmer with a taste for office politics writ large. This is not the place to go into the details of a complicated dispute which split the service and in which Fisher's own conduct was arrogant, ruthless and devious: suffice it to say that as a result of the constant feuding he resigned as First Sea Lord in January 1910, aged 69 and with a barony. He had been the driving force behind the strengthened fleet that eventually overcame the unprecedented maritime threat from Germany, a priceless legacy overriding his many faults and failures. Churchill thought that Fisher had been right in nine-tenths of what he fought for and brought him back in 1914 in the hope of more of the same from an admiral of the fleet who, however, was now 74.

Churchill was 33 years younger but had already built up an impressive record. Grandson of a duke and son of a Cabinet minister, he served in Africa as a cavalry subaltern and was a press correspondent in the South African War at the end of the century, when he escaped from Boer captivity with a price on his head, before entering parliament as a Conservative in 1900. He ‘crossed the floor' to join the ruling Liberals in 1906 and was rewarded with a junior ministry before advancing to President of the Board of Trade and the Cabinet in 1908, then to Home Secretary aged 36 in 1910. In late October of the following year he became First Lord of the Admiralty – a post he had declined in 1908. He had got to know Fisher in 1907 and began as a result to take a real interest in naval affairs, sharing the admiral's certainty about war with Germany but falling out with him early in 1911 over the mounting cost of the dreadnought programme, which was drawing funds away from the social reforms the Liberal Cabinet wanted to introduce. At the Admiralty however he strove for a further strengthening of the navy against the German challenge, introduced a rudimentary naval staff and proved as keen as Fisher had been on technical innovation, especially aviation, and improvements in conditions of service.

His single greatest contribution to the welfare of the nation by the time war broke out lay in working with First Sea Lord Battenberg to ensure the navy was ready for war, by sending the Grand Fleet to Scapa Flow just before it began and keeping the reserve fleet fully manned after the providential naval review at the end of July 1914. Though ridiculed for his intervention in the abortive attempt to save Antwerp, Churchill's efforts
helped to delay the Germans long enough to enable the Allied line in Flanders to stabilise itself. His stamina, energy, self-confidence and persuasive powers led him to intervene in the tiniest matters of operational detail at the Admiralty. Unable to delegate and unabashed by his own technical ignorance, he poured out an endless stream of ideas and initiatives in memoranda and telegrams which in the end drove Fisher and many others to distraction. He was intolerant of fools, whose number clearly included most of his ministerial colleagues, and appeared to believe that he should be in charge of the entire conduct of the war. He seized upon Maurice Hankey's suggestion of a flanking strategy, using Britain's maritime strength, which he controlled, against the weak point in the position of the Central Powers that Turkey represented. The mediocrity of its execution and consequent failure was a disaster for Churchill as well as the Allied cause, and would have destroyed the career of anyone else.

The two men at the top of the Admiralty formed a mutual admiration society but could hardly have been more different. Fisher's formidable energy was waning through age and had to be husbanded by an early-to-bed, early-to-rise regime; he did his best work in the morning. The much younger Churchill already had the self-indulgent habits that became famous during the Second World War, rising late, snoozing after lunch, eating a convivial, daunting dinner washed down with copious quantities of alcohol and working until the early hours. The flow of ideas often peaked just when most people had gone to bed after a tiring day, which meant that Fisher found challenging notes from his chief on his desk when he got to his office, often before dawn. It is mildly surprising that they managed to meet so often as their working days barely overlapped. Fisher was particularly annoyed by Churchill's pre-emptive habits. The First Lord clearly regarded ‘consultation' as a process that took place between a decision and its implementation, as so many modern politicians do. Fisher, who was constitutionally entitled to initiate operational proposals and put them to the First Lord for approval, found himself faced with a
fait accompli
almost on a daily basis, with which he felt he had to concur out of loyalty. This went against nature for a natural autocrat with far better and deeper technical knowledge of naval matters than his political chief, who did not shrink from firing off long and detailed orders to admirals like the passive Carden. Fisher was frequently driven to thoughts, and not infrequently threats, of resignation. In the end Churchill's impetuosity precipitated both men out of office.