Exotic, vaguely sinister with its skyline of onion-domed mosques and slender minarets, its ornate Topkapi Palace housing the sultan’s seraglio, its noisome Haydarpasar stews, the luxury hotels overlooking the Bosporus, the Golden Horn separating the city from its wealthy suburbs, Constantinople had seen Saracens and Crusaders eviscerate one another, had watched red-bearded Sultan “Abdul the Damned” butcher his subjects in the streets, and seemed stained by its memories. Abdul’s successors, the Young Turks, were a small improvement on him. Their leader, Enver Pasha, was a vain, shallow, cruel megalomaniac who strutted around in a dandy’s uniform, fingering his sword hilt. He and his fellow pashas didn’t even treasure their own past; if the British approached, they planned to demolish Constantinople out of spite. Saint Sophia, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and other priceless buildings were primed with dynamite. Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador, begged them to save Saint Sophia at least, but a Young Turk told him: “There are not six men in the Committee of Union and Progress who care for anything that is old. We all like new things.”58 They thought of themselves as modern politicians, but they were politically inept. The people mistrusted them deeply; every neutral diplomat believed that at the first sight of a British warship off the Golden Horn, the masses would rise. The Young Turks were proud of their militarism. Yet the country’s defenses were in wretched shape—obsolete, undermanned, badly led. Actually, the army’s officers included a military genius: thirty-three-year-old Mustapha Kemal. But Kemal despised the Germans. Therefore he was banished from Constantinople. As a sign of his low station he was ordered to defend remote Gallipoli.
“I loathe the Turk,” Margot Asquith wrote in her diary on November 9, “and really hope that he will be wiped out of Europe.” Young men of her class saw it rather differently. They held no brief for the country’s present rulers, but Asia Minor fascinated them. Classically educated in England’s public schools, they had an almost mystical regard for the heroes who had dominated it in its days of greatness. The city of Troy had stood not four miles from the southern entrance to the Dardanelles. Around it lay the once embattled Troad, now called the Troas Plain. And high above loomed Mount Ida, from whose 5,800-foot peak the gods were said to have witnessed the Trojan War. Upon learning that he was bound for the Bosporus, Rupert Brooke wrote: “It’s too wonderful for belief. I had not imagined Fate could be so benign…. Will Hero’s Tower crumble under the 15-inch guns? Will the sea be polyphloisbic and wine-dark and unvintageable? Shall I loot mosaics from St. Sophia, and Turkish Delight and carpets? Shall we be a Turning Point in History? Oh God! I’ve never been quite so happy in my life I think. Never quite so pervasively happy; like a stream flowing entirely to one end. I suddenly realize that the ambition of my life has been—since I was two—to go on a military expedition against Constantinople.” It was Brooke, the symbol of the idealistic generation now being fed to the guns, who had just written:59
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.
Even Churchill, who had despised his Greek classes at Harrow, confronted the Turkish challenge with a quickening pulse; at the climax of his novel, Savrola, an admiral had led his ships past a gauntlet of blazing forts. That, however, had been fiction. To the Admiralty, Kitchener’s insistence upon a naval attack, unsupported by infantry on Gallipoli, seemed futile. Nevertheless, Churchill summoned his senior admirals and asked their opinion. As he expected, they were pessimistic. Yet he was reluctant to leave the issue there. It was crucial, and not only because of the need for Grand Duke Nicholas to keep Germany’s eastern armies tied down. Russia’s grain was wanted to feed the Allies; 350,000 tons of it were piled up in the Black Sea ports. Any action in Asia Minor would have to be confined to old battleships not needed by Jellicoe in the North Sea. England’s security could not be compromised. As it happened, old battleships were available; in his last naval estimates Winston had provided funds to keep such vessels in commission. There was another factor. “Like most people,” he testified before a commission investigating the campaign in 1916, “I had held the opinion that the days of forcing the Dardanelles were over…. But this war had brought many surprises. We had seen fortresses reputed throughout Europe to be impregnable collapsing after a few days’ attack by field armies without a regular siege.” Before he broke the bad news to Kitchener, he decided, he would send a query to Vice Admiral Sackville Carden, commanding the blockading squadron off Cape Helles. He wired him: “Do you consider the forcing of the Dardanelles by ships alone a practicable operation. It is assumed that older battleships fitted with mine-bumpers would be used preceded by colliers or other merchant craft as bumpers and sweepers. Importance of results would justify severe loss. Let me know your views.”60
Admiral Carden’s reply reached the Admiralty on the morning of January 5, 1915, and it was electrifying. “With reference to your telegram of 3rd instant,” it began, “I do not consider that the Dardanelles can be rushed. They might be forced by extended operations with large number of ships.” He outlined four phases of action: leveling defenses at the entrance, clearing the channel up to the Narrows, reducing the Narrows forts, and the “final advance to Marmara.” As Churchill later testified, this was “the most important telegram. Here was the Admiral, who had been for weeks sitting off the Dardanelles, who presumably had been turning this thing over in his mind again and again, wondering on the possibilities of action there, who produced a plan, and a detailed plan and a novel plan.” He showed it to the sea lords, who were as startled as he was; Fisher enthusiastically volunteered to send Carden his newest superdreadnought, the Queen Elizabeth, whose fifteen-inch guns had not even been fired yet. Churchill testified: “We all felt ourselves in the presence of a ‘new fact.’ Moreover, the Queen Elizabeth came into the argument with a cumulative effect.” He replied to Carden: “Your view is agreed with by high authorities here. Please telegraph in detail what you think could be done by extended operations, what force would be needed, and how you would consider it should be used.” In his answer, which arrived in London on January 11, the admiral asked for twelve battleships, three heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, sixteen destroyers, six submarines, four seaplanes, twelve minesweepers, and a score of miscellaneous vessels. He planned to open with a long-range bombardment of the forts; then, with minesweepers leading the way, to sail close and destroy them seriatim. At the same time, the Turks would be misled by diversionary shelling on both coasts of Gallipoli. He wanted a great deal of ammunition, and once he had broken through to the Sea of Marmara, he intended to keep the Dardanelles clear by constant patrolling. “Time required for operations,” he concluded, “depends greatly on morale of enemy under bombardment; garrison largely stiffened by the Germans; also on weather conditions. Gales now frequent. Might do it all in a month about.” He proposed to start the operation on February 1 with hull-down fire from the Queen Elizabeth.61
Churchill laid all this before Asquith and Kitchener early in the afternoon on January 12. He had been particularly pleased with Fisher’s response, writing him how glad he was that, as a result of the first sea lord’s initiative, the mighty new ship would be “firing all her ammunition at the Dardanelles forts instead of uselessly into the sea.” At noon the next day he put the War Council in the picture. Sir John French was there. After discussing the progress of plans for an amphibious attack on the German U-boat pens in Zeebrugge, Belgium, which he favored, Winston stepped up to a map and described Carden’s proposal, arguing, as Lloyd George put it, “with all the inexorable force and pertinacity, together with the mastery of detail he always commands when he is really interested in a subject.” He said the Admiralty could spare the twelve old battleships Carden wanted and add three modern dreadnoughts “without reducing our strength in the main theatre of war.” Then he said: “Once the forts are reduced, the minefields will be cleared and the Fleet will proceed up to Constantinople and destroy the Goebe
n.” According to Hankey’s memories, The Supreme Command, “The idea caught on at once…. The War Council turned eagerly from the dreary vista of a ‘slogging match’ on the Western Front to brighter prospects, as they seemed, in the Mediterranean.” Asquith liked it now. Lloyd George agreed, and so did Kitchener. Arthur Balfour, present as a senior statesman, thought it would be hard to imagine a more useful operation. K of K said that if the bombardment proved ineffective, they could cancel the rest of the operation. The decision was unanimous: “That the Admiralty should prepare for a naval expedition and take Gallipoli with Constantinople as its objective.”62
Fisher said nothing. The sea lords made a point of never speaking up at these meetings. As he once explained: “When sailors get round a Council Board they are almost invariably mute. The politicians who are round the Board are never mute; they would never have got there if they had been mute.” Yet even when he was silent his presence was felt, and an understanding of him and the minister for war, the two professionals on the War Council, is essential to a grasp of what was happening and, more important, to what lay ahead. Both were immensely popular with the British public, so much so that the cabinet members, their nominal superiors, would go to almost any lengths to avoid antagonizing them. Erratic and peppery, the old admiral seemed the very personification of English sea traditions, a dauntless figure who ranked with Drake and Nelson. Churchill compared him to “a great castle, which has long contended with time; the mighty central mass of the donjon towered up intact and seemingly everlasting.” But the mightiest castle crumbles in time, and probably no septuagenarian could have borne the strain of serving as first sea lord in 1915. Moreover, Fisher’s temperament was ill-suited to working in harness with Churchill through an endless series of crises. Violet Asquith wrote of the admiral: “He lived by instincts, hunches, flashes, which he was unable to justify or sustain in argument. Though words poured from his lips and from his pen he was no match for Winston as a dialectician. In trying to defend his own position he trumped up reasons and pretexts of no substance which Winston easily demolished…. His personal intimacy with Winston and affection for him increased his sense of helplessness in standing up to him.”63
Kitchener was underrated by the rest of the cabinet. Like Fisher, he had predicted the year of the war’s outbreak, and he had been among the first to see the possibilities of the Dardanelles. It was his tragedy, and England’s, that no one dared say no to him. As Churchill testified a year later, “His prestige and authority were immense. He was the sole mouthpiece of War Office opinion in the War Council…. He was never, to my belief, overruled by the War Council or the Cabinet, in any military matter, great or small…. Respect for the man, sympathy for his immense labours, confidence in his professional judgment, and the belief that he had plans deeper and wider than any we could see, silenced misgivings and disputes, whether in the Council or at the War Office. All-powerful, imperturbable, reserved, he dominated absolutely our counsels at this time.” Sir Osbert Sitwell thought he knew why. Six months earlier, at the time of Sarajevo, Sitwell had written that Kitchener “plainly belonged to some different order of creation from those around him… he could claim kinship to the old race of gigantic German generals, spawned by Wotan in the Prussian plains, and born with spiked helments ready on their heads… he sat there with the same suggestion of immense strength and even of latent fury.”64
Kitchener was caught in a bloody debate between the “Westerners,” as they were called—those who believed the war could be won only in France—and the “Easterners,” who were convinced that the solution lay in Asia Minor, the Balkans, Italy, or the Baltic. Almost without exception, the Westerners were crusty, stubborn, conservative regular army officers who had been posted to France because that was where the fighting had begun, and whose professional reputations could be made only there. If France became a dead end, their sacrifice of all the lives there would have been made in vain. Haig said the key to victory was “attrition,” which, his general staff explained, meant “wearing down the Boches.” But this assumed that more Germans were dying than Englishmen. And it wasn’t true. In the struggle for Flanders, three British soldiers fell for every two Germans. In the battle of the Somme, the figures were two British to one German. Incessant shelling back and forth across no-man’s-land meant that even in the quietest sector more than a thousand Britons died every week. Sir John French admitted to the War Council that “complete success against the Germans in the Western theatre of war, though possible is not probable.” When his subordinates heard of this they turned mutinous and began to plot against him. Henry Wilson was alarmed by news of the Dardanelles preparations. He wrote Bonar Law that “the way to end this war is to kill Germans, not Turks. The place where we can kill most Germans is here, and therefore every man and every round of ammunition we have got in the world ought to come here. All history shows that operations in a secondary and ineffectual theatre have no bearing on major operations—except to weaken the force there engaged. History, no doubt, will repeat her lesson once more for our benefit.”65
This was poppycock. The way to end a war is to win it—defeating the enemy by superior strategy, not by counting his dead, especially when, as in this case, his count is lower than yours. And history refutes Wilson. Day by day, in World War I English losses in France were triple those in World War II, when, with Churchill as prime minister, British armies were fighting all over the world. Between 1914 and 1918 Britain’s generals slaughtered the most idealistic generation of young leaders in the history of England, and all to no purpose. Never in the field of human conflict have so many suffered so much to gratify the pride of so few. And this was clear to some men at the time. Those not blinded by chauvinism were shocked and incredulous. Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated hero of the trenches, threw his medal away and wrote: “Pray God that you may never know / The hell where youth and laughter go.” “How long,” D. H. Lawrence wrote Asquith’s daughter-in-law Cynthia, “will the nations continue to empty the future?”66
Lord Salisbury had warned the generation of parliamentarians who would succeed him: “No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe.” They hadn’t forgotten, but they were bullied by the military experts’ doctrine of attrition. Thus cowed, they writhed and protested. Lloyd George wept over the millions of youths who did “their intrepid best to obey the fatuous orders,” advancing “against the most terrible machine-gun fire directed against troops.” Churchill pointed out: “A policy of pure attrition between armies so evenly balanced cannot lead to a decision…. Unless this problem can be solved satisfactorily, we shall simply be wearing each other out on a gigantic scale and with fearful sacrifices without ever reaping the reward.”67
These civilian ministers knew the military hierarchy didn’t have the answers. But neither did they. Like animals trapped in a maze they scurried this way and that, so confused that they wouldn’t have recognized a way out if they had stumbled upon it. In that same War Council meeting which adopted the Dardanelles plan, orders were issued to draw up plans for operations in Salonika, the Netherlands, Rumania, and the Gulf of Kotor on the Adriatic. Lloyd George wanted rolling stock built for the Salonika railroad “and perhaps barges built for the Danube.” Churchill agreed. “At the worst,” he said, “they would be a good feint.” Then he himself, who had just delivered a brilliant presentation of the flanking movement through Turkey, said: “We ought not to go South until we can do nothing in the North. Is there, for example, no possibility of action in Holland?”68 Grey replied that there was none. Nothing could be done there until the War Office could provide at least 300,000 soldiers for an expedition. Winston said no more. Calls for troops stopped every ministerial discussion. Troops had to come from Kitchener. Kitchener would have to get them from the BEF, and there would be hell to pay in France. He would
have paid if he were sure an operation would succeed. But in this new war, with its machines and gas and mines and land ships that sailed underwater, nothing could guarantee success. Inertia bound him; he sided with his brother officers across the Channel while Fisher, similarly torn, fell back on the peacetime axiom that a good naval commander doesn’t risk the vessels entrusted to him.
Actually, Fisher was more confused than Kitchener. Later his conduct would raise questions about his sanity, but his bewilderment on January 13 is understandable. The council had decided that the Dardanelles task force should “take Gallipoli with Constantinople as its objective.” How could a fleet “take” a peninsula? How could it occupy a great city? As we know now, the occupation of Constantinople would have been unnecessary; the dissident Turkish mobs would have done the job for them. At the time, however, no one in London could have guessed that. Nevertheless, the plan pleased everyone. Grey saw neutral states lining up to join the Allies. Arthur Balfour, who had been invited to join the council, not as a member of the Opposition, but as an elder statesman, thought everything about the Dardanelles sounded splendid. The French, similarly enchanted, offered four battleships. The Russians hinted that they might send troops, which was impractical. Kitchener, who did not know that, was delighted.
Churchill now set aside all thoughts of a Baltic campaign and concentrated on the Dardanelles. He believed the battle was as good as won, always a dangerous assumption in war. By coincidence January 13 was the Russian New Year, and he had sent an extravagant holiday message to Saint Petersburg: “Our resources are within reach and inexhaustible; our minds are made up. We have only to bend forward together laying aside every hindrance, keeping nothing back, and the downfall of German ambition is sure.” For the next week he and an ad hoc Admiralty war group examined every particular detail of the coming attack, sending and receiving telegrams from Carden almost hourly. Each instruction, each technical problem, was read, endorsed, and initialed by the first sea lord with the famous scrawled green F. Yet the old admiral was seething. Like a tumor, an irrational terror was growing in him—the fear that the Aegean expedition would weaken the Home Fleet, encouraging Tirpitz to steam into Scapa Flow with a superior force, sink every British warship left there, and win the war. In that case Jellicoe would become the defeated admiral. But he did not share the first sea lord’s doubts. He kept sending him reassurances. Fisher was unconsoled. On January 19, six days after the decision, he wrote Jellicoe that the ships sailing to the eastern Mediterranean were “all urgently required at the decisive theatre at home! There is only one way out, and that is to resign! But you say ‘no,’ which simply means I am a consenting party to what I absolutely disapprove. I don’t agree with one single step taken, so it is fearfully against the grain that I remain on in deference to your wishes.” The next day he wept on Hankey’s shoulder. Hankey told Asquith, who wrote Venetia that the old man was “in a very unhappy frame of mind,” that he “likes Winston personally” but was frequently overruled (“he out-argues me”) on purely “technical naval matters.”69
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