The Dandarnelles Disaster (31 page)

The War Council had met on 13 January 1915 against a backdrop of stalemate on the Western Front. The Austrians had suffered defeats but the Russians and the Serbs were both in a bad way and the Balkan neutrals were immune to diplomatic persuasion as long as the Allies were unable to produce a victory. How could Britain deliver a blow against the Central Powers? An attack on the Dardanelles seemed, except to Fisher, to be the only practicable proposition at the time, and the potential results of success verged on the dazzling: Russia massively relieved in every sense, Bulgaria won over, the flank of the Central Powers turned, even the ‘Turkish Question' definitively answered after centuries of doubt … But the only germane question was whether or not a purely naval attempt was the right course. Churchill spelt out Carden's stage-by-stage plan to use modern naval guns against the allegedly antiquated enemy artillery and neglected fortifications; there were plenty of old battleships to spare, plus the
Queen Elizabeth
; in a matter of weeks the fleet could enter the Marmara and sink the
Goeben
; field guns and rifles ashore would be no more than an incon
venience
.
Hankey noted: ‘Lord Kitchener thought the plan was worth trying. We could leave off the bombardment if it did not prove effective.'

Fisher did not speak up. The political witnesses were agreed that had he objected, the project would almost certainly have been cancelled. But Asquith also thought that the old admiral's unspoken objection was based mainly on the fact that he wanted to use the fleet differently, in an operation in the Baltic, the other flank of the Central Powers, rather than on his belief that a solely naval attack was too risky. As the Commission was working in wartime, the Baltic option was not mentioned in its first report; but its conclusion that the real reason for Fisher's resignation was because the Dardanelles had blocked his pet project is a misleading over-simplification, not to say bizarre. Fisher told the Commission he believed from the outset that the solely naval attack was doomed to failure and was therefore opposed to it, but no witness said he had mentioned this misgiving at the time. Churchill's evidence makes it clear that as far as he was concerned Fisher's silence meant consent. The 13 January meeting ended with the decision to prepare for a naval expedition to ‘bombard and take the Gallipoli peninsula with Constantinople as its objective'. That this apparent, albeit misleading, clarity was rare is shown by the very next paragraph of the report, which says that nobody could review the mass of evidence given to the Commission ‘without being struck with the atmosphere of vagueness and want of precision which seems to have characterised the proceedings of the War Council'. Some, such as Churchill, read the conclusion of the 13 January meeting as tantamount to a go-ahead for a solely naval attack, while Asquith said it merely told the Admiralty to
prepare
for one: he understood the matter would be discussed again when it had done so. All witnesses agreed that the decision related to a naval attack without troops. The ‘demonstration' of 3 January had been superseded ten days later by ‘preparations for a purely naval attack' with the ultimate objective of Constantinople, which everybody knew could not be attained without a large army.

On being given his ‘mandate to prepare' an attack on the Dardanelles, Churchill lost no time in contacting the French government to ask for active support. M. Victor Augagneur, the Minister of Marine, came over to London to discuss the matter. His predecessor, Dr Gauthier, had resigned on health grounds (he suffered a breakdown when the Germans declared war) on the day Britain went to war (4 August 1914). Even so the ministry, as we saw, had failed to force Admiral Boué de Lapeyrère, commanding
the fleet, to obey the war orders he had himself played a major part in drawing up, a large contribution to the escape of the
Goeben.
Augagneur, who would himself leave office in the wake of the double failure at the Dardanelles in 1915, was no student of Clausewitz, having once delivered himself of the not very
bon mot
that ‘in war one does not improvise'. The French government agreed to leave the command in the Aegean to the British while retaining supremacy in the Adriatic and the rest of the Mediterranean, in accordance with the Anglo-French naval understanding that left the British in charge in the Channel and North Sea. Augagneur agreed to place a squadron at the disposal and under the flag of Admiral Carden, and also echoed Kitchener, Hankey and the rest by saying that the enterprise could always be abandoned if it did not make progress.

But as the Commission observed, amid patronising remarks about the oriental mind, if a serious attack was made and it failed, ‘the result would be to give a shattering blow to British prestige and influence throughout the East'. The inquiry report however goes on to note, with some complacency, that at time of writing (early 1917) the attack had indeed failed, and had even been followed by serious British setbacks in the Mesopotamian campaign against the Turks, ‘but, so far as can at present be judged, the political consequences … have been so slight as to be almost inappreciable'. But not even Kitchener with all his experience of ‘the Eastern mind' could have foreseen this. Those who thought on these lines had in mind a purely naval attack on the outer forts and a withdrawal if this did not produce a result that could be exploited: they were not thinking of the far more damaging idea of abandoning a serious military landing once made. The politicians, Kitchener and Admiral Wilson were all confident, until the solely naval approach was dropped, that British prestige could be preserved, yet the failure of the fleet in March 1915 was followed by the invasion of Gallipoli in great part to
salvage
British prestige, like a losing gambler trying a ‘double or quits' bet. The result of the second failure was a much bigger loss of prestige, which could be offset (but never quite eradicated) only by the eventual overall Allied defeat of the Turks on all their other fronts. The effect on the many participating Indian troops, for example, of witnessing at first hand the inability of their colonial masters to carry all before them (to put it no higher) would start the long process of undermining the authority of the British Empire.

The Commission next turned to the seductive argument about the efficacy of modern artillery, in particular the power and enormous range of naval
guns, seen by many on the War Council as vitiating Nelson's advice against ships attacking forts:
vide
Liège and Namur or Antwerp, said Churchill. But this was misleading because of the high, ‘lobbing' trajectory of the heavy German howitzers, their use of aircraft for spotting the fall of shot and their massive armies, on hand to exploit immediately the effect of the guns. Naval guns had almost flat trajectories except at extreme range, and needed to score direct hits on shore-based cannon to disable them, a well-nigh impossible feat at long distance. The best a naval gun could do was to achieve a downward trajectory of 21 degrees with a reduced propellant charge; a howitzer shell could be fired to fall at an angle much closer to 90 degrees, like a bomb from an aircraft. Naval guns in short were not appropriate for dealing with land fortifications, hidden and/or mobile batteries, or shore-based torpedo tubes which were believed (to an exaggerated extent) to exist in the strait. The fleet also faced the problem of minefields (effectively covered by searchlights and the elusive shore artillery) and eventually the threat of submarines; and seaplanes were not sufficiently powered at the time to rise above ground fire or even the prevalent strong winds – always assuming they could take off at all in the choppy waters. Outside the strait ships could observe the fall of each other's shot whereas inside they could not, for lack of sea-room; on 18 March they barely bothered to try. The fall of the Belgian forts, the inquiry in effect concluded, had been a false analogy: a snare and a delusion.

After the War Council meeting of 13 January the views of Churchill and Fisher on the Dardanelles diverged more and more, with the admiral wanting to drop it not just because it overrode his Baltic idea but because it was not a combined operation and would therefore fail. Asquith was just one War Council witness to this generally recognised difference of opinion: he received a dissenting memorandum from Fisher on 25 January. Churchill claimed he was unaware of the extent of Fisher's misgivings before this. Fisher had wanted to absent himself henceforward from War Council meetings but attended with his chief a private meeting in Asquith's office before the 28 January triple session. When Churchill briskly reported that the Russians and the French were pleased with the Dardanelles plan which would go ahead in the middle of February, Fisher protested that he understood the matter would not be raised in Council that day. He got up to leave but was headed off by Kitchener, who persuaded him not to resign and to resume his seat – the admiral was after all the only one present who disagreed with the Dardanelles operation, Kitchener told him. Yet Wilson
too was sceptical, if not as strongly as Fisher, but also kept silent. At the hearings, Wilson said Churchill had ‘passed over' dissent at the Admiralty: ‘He was very keen on his own views.' He repeatedly said he could do it without the army; ‘he only wanted the Army to come in and reap the fruits, I think was his expression.' Churchill had minimised the risk from mobile guns and talked as if armoured ships were immune from damage. Churchill's response was that in so far as Wilson was opposed, he too favoured a strategic alternative, like Fisher. Nobody had ever argued to him that the operation was something that could not work.

Churchill invited Fisher to see him in the First Lord's office after the first session of the day, and the admiral ‘definitely consented' to undertake the operation. At the second session in the evening Churchill announced to the War Council that the Admiralty, with the agreement of Lord Fisher, had ‘decided to undertake the task with which the War Council had charged us so urgently' (it will be recalled that the 13 January meeting called for
preparations
, and that no urgency had been attached). Churchill told the Commission, presumably with a rhetorical flourish:

This I take as the point of final decision. After it, I never looked back. We had left the region of discussion and consultation, of balancings and misgivings. The matter had passed into the domain of action.

The purely naval ‘demonstration' which 15 days earlier had passed into ‘preparation' had now reached its third degree: ‘action' by the fleet. The fleet would attack the Dardanelles unaided, with Constantinople as its objective.

The Commission chided Fisher and Wilson for keeping silent and concealing their misgivings. ‘They must have … been aware that none of the ministerial members of the Council had any expert naval knowledge' – not excluding Churchill. The latter was also very much at fault for concealing the two admirals' doubts instead of inviting them to speak to the Council, which could have enabled its members to reach a conclusion in full possession of all the facts and arguments. Instead he pressed his case very strongly: ‘he was carried away by his sanguine temperament and his firm belief in the success of the undertaking which he advocated.' He had deluded himself about the degree of support he had won from his naval advisers and suppressed their misgivings, about which, in the psychological jargon of today, he was obviously ‘in denial'. The other politicians on the Council should also have sought the express advice of the silent ex
perts; a short adjournment to seek the opinion of more experts from outside could then have been called, the Commission said. But the Council, dazzled by the potential rewards of success, gave insufficient attention to the disadvantages that would accrue ‘in the not improbable case of failure'. There is no mention of Churchill's widely attested rhetorical persuasiveness, but it must now be clear that it played the leading part in bringing about a commitment by Britain's war leadership to the solely naval attack on the Dardanelles.

Neither the Admiralty nor Carden, nor of course the politicians, gave much thought to what else would need to be done if the fleet forced its way into the Sea of Marmara. Turkish resistance was arrogantly discounted: they would withdraw once the fleet got in; there would be a revolution in Constantinople. But doubt did begin to creep into some minds, particularly in the military. The question of Britain's prestige in the event of a setback was by no means dead, giving rise to growing unease, but the Commission could not put its collective finger on a single moment or event that marked the palpable shift of opinion towards a military intervention. Major-General Charles Callwell, Director of Military Operations at the War Office at the material time, said simply: ‘We drifted into the big military attack.'

Kitchener had promised as early as 9 February 1915 that if the navy needed help from the army at a later stage, it would be forthcoming. Jackson advised Carden on 15 February to keep in mind the likely need for a large military intervention as the fleet progressed, and to collect transports to deliver it: a naval bombardment was not to be recommended ‘unless a strong military force is ready to assist'. On 16 February ministers met informally (no Hankey present to take a note) and initiated the movement of the 29th Division to the Aegean, of more troops from Egypt, of Royal Marines and of horse boats and landing craft, while the Admiralty was to organise the construction of transports and lighters sufficient for 50,000 men. All this was endorsed by the War Council proper, and Hankey said that the 16 February meeting was the ‘all-important decision from which sprang the joint naval and military enterprise against the Gallipoli peninsula'. Callwell's concept of drift seems entirely appropriate: Kitchener's reluctance to release troops had prevented, before spring 1915, the combined operation which the received wisdom had unanimously recommended – but so had Churchill's impatience. As a result, the naval and military attacks were not combined at all, allowing the enemy to fend them off one after the other. Had the army gone in first, closely followed by the
fleet, the outcome could and should have been entirely different – provided of course that the military side of operations had been executed rather more efficiently than was the case.