Visions of Glory, 1874-1932
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Asquith felt desperate. “I am profoundly dissatisfied with the immediate prospect,” he wrote his beloved on December 30. He saw the war as “an enormous waste of life and money day after day with no appreciable progress.” Over the holidays Lloyd George drew up a memorandum predicting that a few more months of trench warfare “will inevitably destroy the morale of the best of troops” and “any attempt to force the carefully-prepared German lines in the west would end in failure and in appalling loss of life.” Under these conditions, Churchill believed, victory would be “bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat.” There was, however, a difference between his mood and that of the rest of the cabinet. They felt desperate; he felt challenged. The answer to immovable defense, he reasoned, was irresistible assault employing new tactics. He suggested what he described as “the attack by the spade”—some three hundred interconnected tunnels dug over a two-mile front toward the enemy’s lines and emerging within sixty yards of his trenches, where they would be inaccessible to his artillery. Then he proposed a collective metal shield, “pushed along either on a wheel or still better on a Caterpillar,” behind which several men could hide while crossing no-man’s-land.46
The War Office dismissed these as absurd, and in fact they were impractical. But he was groping toward something effective. His search had begun on September 23, before the Antwerp crisis, when he had been looking for a way to protect his airmen at Dunkirk. Buying up all available Rolls-Royces, he had ordered them clad in improvised armor. “It is most important,” he wrote, “that the… armed motor-cars should be provided to a certain extent with cars carrying the means of bridging small cuts in the road, and an arrangement of planks capable of bridging a ten-or twelve-feet span quickly and easily should be carried with every ten or twelve machines.” The bridging apparatus didn’t work; it couldn’t reach across a double line of trenches. But an army colonel attached to GHQ in France believed it could be made to work. He approached Sir Maurice Hankey, secretary to the cabinet. Hankey approached Churchill, and on January 5, 1915, Winston sent Asquith a memorandum. It would be simple, he wrote, to quickly “fit up a number of steam tractors with small armoured shelters, in which men and machine guns could be placed, which would be bullet-proof.” A “caterpillar system would enable trenches to be crossed quite easily, and the weight of the machine would destroy all wire entanglements.” A fleet of them could make “many points d’appui for the British supporting infantry to rush forward and rally on them. They can then move forward to attack the second line of trenches.” The cost would be slight. “If the experiment did not answer, what harm would be done? It should certainly be done now.”47
The idea was not new. H. G. Wells had conceived it in 1903. But it had been science fiction then. Now, with superior steel plating, improved internal-combustion engines, and caterpillar tracks, it was practical. Asquith forwarded Winston’s memo to Kitchener, who passed it along to his ordnance general, who pigeonholed it. In February, however, the matter came up again. Dining at the home of the Duke of Westminster, Churchill met Colonel Ernest Swinton, an officer fresh from the BEF who believed a large cross-country armored car could scale almost any obstacle. The following morning Winston summoned Captain Eustace Tennyson D’Eyncourt, an Admiralty designer, and asked him to devise a “land ship” using caterpillar treads. Secrecy was urgent; to mislead the Germans, everyone connected with the project would tell others in the Admiralty that they were making “water carriers for Russia”—vessels to carry large vats of drinking water into the czar’s front lines. Colonel Swinton predicted that the War Office would designate them “WCs for Russia.” He suggested they be called “tanks” and Churchill agreed.48
On February 20 Winston had the flu, so the first meeting of the “Land Ship Committee” was held in his Admiralty House bedroom. Four days later he initialed its recommendations “as proposed & with all despatch.” An order for a prototype was placed with Messrs. Fosters of Lincoln, which suggested using a tractor as a model. By the end of the month Churchill had persuaded Asquith to earmark £70,000 for the committee. On March 9 Winston was shown the first designs. He minuted: “Press on.” Eleven days later D’Eyncourt asked him to approve manufacture of eighteen tanks. Churchill wrote him: “Most urgent. Special report to me in case of delay.” His one fear was that the invention would be disclosed prematurely, before enough of them were ready, thereby destroying the element of surprise and alerting the enemy to the new weapon. But when the first one clanked weirdly across the Horse Guards Parade under his eager eyes, observers from the War Office said tanks weren’t wanted at all; they would be unable to cope with mud. Even in the Admiralty the project was called “Winston’s Folly.”49
“Winston’s Folly”
Meanwhile, the insensate killing in France continued. By the end of November, 1914, Britain and France had suffered almost a million casualties. Their leaders were trapped by geography and the sheer mass of the men mobilized. What was needed, The Times suggested, was strategy with a “touch of imagination.”50 Vision, perhaps, would have been a better word. Certainly the cabinet, preferring another battleground, almost any other battleground, was straining to look in all directions. Visible and close at hand was the North Sea island of Borkum, which, if seized, could be used in a variant of Fisher’s suggestion—as a staging area for an amphibious invasion of the German coast, twelve miles away. Violations of Dutch and Danish neutrality, regarded as unconscionable earlier, were now debated. The only other possibilities lay in the eastern Mediterranean, on the vulnerable edges of the tottering Turkish empire: Salonika in northeastern Greece, Syria, Gallipoli, and the Dardanelles, the strait separating Europe from Asia. Here in southeastern Europe, England might find new allies. Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Montenegro shared a common hatred of the oppressive Turks. Farsighted British imperialists had long dreamed of a Balkan league, a union of Christian states federated with the Empire. Now it seemed to be within reach. In the second week of the war Eleutherios Venizelos, the anglophilic Liberal Greek premier, had proposed an Anglo-Greek alliance and volunteered to send sixty thousand men to occupy Gallipoli. The War Office was enthusiastic; in peacetime, Britain’s general staff, like Greece’s, had studied the peninsula and concluded that it was ripe for plucking. But Grey, wary of extending England’s commitments, and believing he could change his mind later, rejected Venizelos’s overture.
If one conceives of the waters in that part of the world as a listing stack of irregular glass globes—the kind of weird, bubbling apparatus Dr. Frankenstein used in infusing life into his monster—the vessel on top would be the Black Sea. The Black Sea empties through a bottleneck, the nineteen-mile-long Bosporus, into the Sea of Marmara. Constantinople stands on both banks of the Bosporus strait. The Sea of Marmara, continuing downward, drains through a second channel, the thirty-eight-mile-long Dardanelles, into the Aegean Sea, an arm of the Mediterranean. Until the end of 1914, over 90 percent of Russia’s grain and half its exports had passed through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, also known as the Hellespont. For ships approaching from the south, the Dardanelles is the key to Constantinople. It is astonishingly slim. Viewed from a height, it looks more like a river, and is in fact no wider than the Hudson at Ossining. At its mouth, by Cape Helles on the Aegean, on the tip of Gallipoli peninsula, it is four thousand yards wide. The banks open up as you proceed upward but then close again at the Narrows, where the channel is less than a mile across. Byron swam it easily in March 1810. Gallipoli forms the western shore of the strait. A military force holding the peninsula would dominate the Dardanelles. In the autumn of 1914 it was defended by a skeletal garrison of Turks.
Churchill was keenly aware of the position’s military significance. On August 17, when Turkey was neutral, Asquith had written his wife: “The Turk threatens to give trouble in Egypt and elsewhere, and the Germans are doing all they can to get hold of him. Winston is quite prepared to send a swarm of flotillas into the Dardanelles to torpedo the ‘Goeben’
if necessary.” Two weeks later, before the battle of the Marne had even begun and with Turkey still a nonbelligerent, Churchill had persuaded Kitchener to send him two generals, who, with two admirals, would “examine and work out a plan for the seizure by means of a Greek army of adequate strength of the Gallipoli peninsula, with a view to admitting a British Fleet into the Sea of Marmara.” The following day, with Turkey still neutral, the cabinet had agreed to help Serbia and Rumania and, in Asquith’s words, “to sink Turkish ships if they issue from the Dardanelles.” The prime minister wanted to frighten the Turks out of the war. His first lord expected them to come in. At that same meeting, according to the diary of Joseph Pease, a fellow minister, Churchill proposed that once the first shots had been fired the Admiralty should concentrate on “landing Greek force on isthmus on west side of Dardanelles [Gallipoli] & controlling Sea of Marmara.” Grey, troubled, wrote him four days later: “I dont like the prospect in the Mediterranean at all, unless there is some turn of the tide in France.” Churchill replied: “There is no need for British or Russian anxiety abt a war with Turkey…. The price to be paid in taking Gallipoli wd no doubt be heavy, but there wd be no more war with Turkey. A good army of 50,000 & sea-power—that is the end of the Turkish menace.”51
In the last week of September 1914 a British squadron lying off Cape Helles had stopped a Turkish torpedo boat and, finding German soldiers aboard, turned it back. Learning of this, the German officer who had assumed command of the strait had mined the Dardanelles, ordered that all lighthouses be darkened, and erected signs on precipices declaring that the channel was closed. This had been a flagrant violation of an international convention guaranteeing free passage of the strait. Its sequel, the attack on the czar’s Black Sea ports by German cruisers flying the Turkish colors, had brought Turkey in as a formal belligerent. Worried about the security of Egypt, Churchill asked Fisher to investigate “the possibility & advisability of a bombardment of the sea face forts of the Dardanelles.”52 Fisher found the prospects excellent, and during a ten-minute shelling by British warships, a lucky shot hit the magazine of the enemy position at Sedd-el-Bahr, destroying the fort and most of its guns. The wisdom of this strike is doubtful, however. The Turks, warned, withdrew their big guns to the two ancient, crenellated fortresses guarding the channel’s Narrows at Chanak. Later in this campaign the same sin would be repeated again and again. The British would strike a heavy blow. It would be effective but indecisive. They would return to find the enemy alerted and strengthened.
In London the War Council met for the first time on November 25.* Churchill, according to Hankey’s notes, urged “an attack on Gallipoli peninsula. This, if successful, would give us control of the Dardanelles, and we could dictate terms at Constantinople.” Fisher spoke up, asking “whether Greece might not perhaps undertake an attack on Gallipoli on behalf of the Allies.” Grey then delivered a rueful report. King Constantine, nagged by his German wife, unwilling to fight his cousin the kaiser, and worried about Bulgarian intentions, had vetoed Premier Venizelos’s troop offer. Winston, undiscouraged, pointed out that Constantine’s throne was wobbly. Surely he could be subverted. They must not give up. Before them lay a chance to execute the greatest flanking movement in history. He felt military greatness stirring within him. “I have it in me,” he had confided to a friend, “to be a successful soldier. I can visualize great movements and combinations.” In private he repeated his arguments to Asquith, pressing him to open a new front in the Balkans. On December 5 Asquith wrote Venetia, “His volatile mind is at present set on Turkey & Bulgaria, & he wants to organise a heroic adventure against Gallipoli and the Dardanelles: to wh I am altogether opposed.”53
By Christmas Winston had reluctantly changed his mind. The troops were unavailable, and he assumed the strait couldn’t be taken until they held the peninsula. To be sure, the Dardanelles had been forced by ships alone in 1807, when Napoleon was advancing eastward. Seven British men-of-war under Admiral John T. Duckworth had run the gauntlet, reached the Sea of Marmara, and returned through the channel a week later without losing a single vessel. But twentieth-century fortifications were more imposing. In his early years as first sea lord, Fisher had pondered the Dardanelles problem twice and concluded that it would be “mightily hazardous.” On March 15, 1911, Winston himself had written the cabinet: “It is no longer possible to force the Dardanelles… nobody would expose a modern fleet to such perils.” Now, on December 22, 1914, he wrote Fisher: “The Baltic is the only theatre in wh naval action can appreciably shorten the war.” The old admiral continued to look eastward. “I CONSIDER THE ATTACK ON TURKEY HOLDS THE FIELD!” he replied, “but ONLY if it’s IMMEDIATE.” However, his plan called for 75,000 British soldiers now in French trenches, plus the Indian and Egyptian garrisons, none of which were available. Similarly, when Lloyd George wanted to land 100,000 men in Syria or Salonika, the men were not to be had. On December 30 Asquith noted that he had received “two very interesting memoranda” from Hankey and Churchill. Both wanted to end the senseless slaughter in the trenches. Hankey pointed out that the BEF was not advancing in France and the British were losing more men than the Germans. He proposed a broad flanking movement through the Balkans. Churchill’s minute opened with a ringing cry that the new armies Kitchener was forming ought not to be sent to “chew barbed wire.” He then renewed his proposal to storm Schleswig-Holstein via Borkum. In his diary Captain Richmond wrote: “It is quite mad…. It remains with the army, who I hope will refuse to throw away 12000 troops in this manner for the self-glorification of an ignorant and impulsive man.” Refuse they did, and the ministers’ frantic search for a better battlefield continued. On New Year’s Day the prime minister found two more propositions on his desk, from Lloyd George and, again, from Winston. He noted: “They are both keen on a new objective & theatre as soon as our troops are ready. W., of course, for Borkum and the Baltic: LG for Salonica to join in with the Serbians, and for Syria!”54
The Russians forced their hand. They, too, had lost a million men, and had suffered crushing defeats at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. Their rifles and ammunition were in short supply. Now the Turks were threatening the Caucasus. Grand Duke Nicholas summoned the chief British observer accompanying his army and told him that if the Turkish drive continued, he would have to wheel southward to meet it, reducing his commitment to the German front. This was grave. If the Russians fell back, German troops now fighting in the east could be moved into France. The threat brought Kitchener, until now obsessed with the trenches, into the debate over grand strategy. He came to the Admiralty to suggest a naval “demonstration at the Dardanelles.” Winston replied that if any such move were to be effective, an infantry commitment would be necessary. When Kitchener returned to the War Office, his staff told him that every English soldier who could be mustered was required on the western front—another standoff. On January 4 Churchill expressed reservations about any attack on Turkey; he still favored the Baltic. The War Council met repeatedly, pondering plans to relieve the pressure on their harried Russian ally. Kitchener opened the January 8 session with a depressing report: a new German drive in France was imminent. Lloyd George interrupted to say heatedly that trench fighting would never lead to victory. Was there, he asked, no alternative theater “in which we might employ our surplus armies to produce a decisive effect?”55
Kitchener could think of only one, and he asked the others to support him in backing it. “The Dardanelles,” he said, “appear to be the most suitable objective, as an attack here could be made in co-operation with the Fleet. If successful, it would re-establish communications with Russia; settle the Near Eastern question; draw in Greece and, perhaps, Bulgaria and Rumania; and release wheat and shipping now locked up in the Black Sea.” Hankey added that a Dardanelles victory “would give us the Danube as a line of communication for an army penetrating into the heart of Austria and bring our sea power to bear in the middle of Europe.” The first lord was skeptical. When he asked about troops,
the minister for war was evasive. The attack, it seemed, would have to be by ships alone. Churchill therefore rejected it. As late as January 11 he was still pressing for action in the North Sea. The following day, however, events took a sudden, unexpected turn.56
Napoleon had written: “Essentially the great question remains: Who will hold Constantinople?” It does not seem essential today, but before the advent of air power the lovely, decaying, sprawling, 2,600-year-old capital of Byzantium was as vital to control of the world’s trade routes as it had been in 85 B.C., when the Roman general Sulla signed a famous treaty with Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, in the ancient city of Dardanus, thereby giving the nearby strait its name. As recently as 1886, Lord Salisbury, when he was successfully negotiating free passage to Constantinople for British ships of the line, had written Winston’s father: “You are naturally sarcastic about my Dardanelles, and I hope the matter will not come up in our time…. I consider the loss of Constantinople would be the ruin of our party and a heavy blow to the country.”57