The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean

by John Julius Norwich

  The Great War

  The First World War, as everyone knows, was fought principally in the trenches of northern France and Belgium. It was not in any sense a Mediterranean war. On three occasions, however, it spilled out into the Middle Sea to concentrate on its eastern enemy, the Ottoman Empire. The first was the ill-starred campaign of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli; the second, the Allied landings at Salonica; the third took place in Palestine.

  On 27 December 1914 Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, characteristically addressed to the Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, a long letter of advice. The war, he suggested, had reached an impasse. The two armies were so firmly dug in that an advance of a few hundred yards was likely to involve casualties of several thousand. What was needed was a breakout, to some completely new theatre of war. ‘Are there not other alternatives,’ he asked, ‘than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?’ It seemed to him that there were two. One idea was the invasion and seizure of Schleswig–Holstein, enabling Denmark to join the Allies and opening up the Baltic to Allied shipping; the Russians could then land an army within ninety miles of Berlin. This would certainly be his own preference.

  But he also put forward another idea, still more ambitious and imaginative: an invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula, control of which would allow the Royal Navy to force a passage through the Dardanelles and into the Sea of Marmara. Anchoring at the mouth of the Golden Horn, it could then threaten a bombardment of Constantinople–a terrible threat indeed in view of the narrow streets and tumbledown wooden houses of the old city. The destruction of the Galata Bridge would cut off Pera from Stamboul; the only two munitions factories in Turkey both stood on the water’s edge, where they would be an easy target for the British guns. All this would oblige the Sultan’s government to sue for peace, after which there would be no difficulty, Churchill believed, in persuading the still neutral Greece, Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria to throw in their lot with the Allies. It was a typically Churchillian plan which, had it succeeded, would have greatly shortened the war. But it did not succeed–and for the best part of a century military historians have been trying to analyse why a plan which at first appeared so promising led to the greatest disaster of the war.

  The chief problem seems to have been the lack of a concerted overall plan. Churchill had originally envisaged a combined military and naval operation; by mid-January 1915, however, he was advocating an attack by the Navy only, despite the furious opposition of the First Sea Lord, his friend–but occasionally also his bête noire–Admiral Sir John Fisher. Only a month later, less than a week before the naval bombardment of the Dardanelles began, was it decided to send troops in support. This was largely due to the fact that Churchill, who was providing all the energy and drive behind the plan, was only a cabinet minister, responsible exclusively for the navy. He had no power over the army; the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener–who did–was half-hearted, the Prime Minister still more so. Had Churchill possessed the authority that he was to enjoy twenty-five years later, the Gallipoli campaign might well have ended very differently.

  Over the navy, however, he was supreme; thanks to him, the fleet assembled by the British and French was the greatest concentration of naval strength ever seen in the Mediterranean. Apart from cruisers, destroyers and lesser craft, the British had contributed fourteen battleships, including the recently completed Queen Elizabeth, whose fifteen-inch guns–possessed by no other vessel–made her probably the most powerful ship afloat. Most of the others had twelve-inch guns, but these alone easily outclassed anything the Turks could boast in the eleven fortresses–on both sides of the straits–which constituted their principal defence. To this already considerable force the French added four more battleships and their auxiliaries.

  By 18 February 1915 the combined fleet was in position, and at 9.51 a.m. on the following morning the attack began. It continued throughout the day, the fleet gradually drawing nearer, bombarding the forts from ever closer range. Meanwhile, minesweepers were at work, clearing the approach to the straits. By nightfall there was as yet no conclusive result. The Allied commander, Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden, saw that nothing of importance could be achieved unless his ships could approach much closer still to their targets; unfortunately that night the weather broke, and rough seas made accurate bombardment impossible. Not until five days later did the storm blow itself out and allow the battle to continue. On the 25th Vice-Admiral John de Robeck advanced right up to the straits themselves and the defenders withdrew to the north. Over the next few days small parties of sailors and marines actually landed on both the European and Asiatic shores, destroying such Turkish equipment as they could find, but most of the territory seemed deserted. On 2 March Carden telegraphed to London that given fine weather he hoped to be at Constantinople in about a fortnight.

  How wrong he was. The Dardanelles, he soon discovered, were one vast minefield; the minesweepers were prevented from doing their job by the enemy guns, and the Navy could not silence the guns until the mines had been swept. A fortnight later, instead of dropping anchor in Constantinople, Carden was on his way back to London with a nervous breakdown. He was succeeded in the command by de Robeck, who led an attack on the straits on 18 March; alas, it was a failure, owing largely to an undetected line of mines that sank one French and two British battleships. De Robeck was not to know–though he might have suspected–that the Turkish emplacements were now running seriously short of ammunition and had little immediate prospect of obtaining any more. He was aware only of his heavy losses and of the fact that Constantinople seemed as far away as ever. As for the Turks, their 60,000 men, skilfully deployed and commanded by General Liman von Sanders, had won their first victory for many years–and over the Royal Navy, which they, and much of the rest of the world, had long believed to be invincible. Constantinople had been saved from British clutches. Once again, they could walk with their heads held high.

  It was by now clear to most of the British government that the navy could not achieve a breakthrough alone. ‘Somebody,’ wrote Admiral Fisher to David Lloyd George, ‘will have to land at Gallipoli some time or other.’ By mid-March Kitchener had reluctantly agreed to send out the 29th Division from England–totalling some 17,000 men–together with the Australian and New Zealand divisions (another 30,000) that were then awaiting orders in Egypt. In addition, there was one French division of 16,000 and the Royal Naval Division of 10,000. In overall command he appointed his old friend from Boer War days, General Sir Ian Hamilton. It was agreed that the armies would assemble on the island of Lemnos, where they would receive their stores and equipment and draw up their plans for the coming campaign.

  At Lemnos, however, another disappointment was in store. The transports from England had been loaded with no thought for the army that was to receive them. Horses and guns arrived on one ship, saddles, harness and ammunition on another. Landing craft had apparently been forgotten altogether. A number of heavy lorries had been loaded, despite the fact that the Gallipoli peninsula had no roads. Nor, it seemed, did the army possess any accurate maps or charts of the area over which it would be fighting. Finally, landing and other facilities on Lemnos were found to be inadequate or nonexistent, with the result that everything had to be re-embarked and carried on to Alexandria, where the whole army could be regrouped and somehow made ready for battle. There was now no chance that the combined force would be ready until mid-April at the earliest. That would give Hamilton some three weeks to prepare and plan the most ambitious amphibious operation in the history of warfare.

  The navy had been more fortunate with its supplies. A new fleet of destroyer-minesweepers had arrived, together with three dummy battleships, humble vessels which had been decked out with elaborate superstructures and wooden guns to serve as decoys and, with any luck, to persuade the German fleet to come out and fight.277 The Royal Flying Corps was represented by Air Commodore Charles Samson. When his thirty aircraft were uncrated, twenty-five were fou
nd to be unserviceable; for the remainder, however, there was a number of bombs designed to be lobbed overboard by the observer. Where the aircraft really came into their own was in the field of reconnaissance. The aerial photography of the enemy emplacements, with their vast fields of barbed wire, filled Hamilton with gloom.

  The long-delayed landings finally took place in the early hours of 25 April. The British disembarked at Cape Helles on the western tip of the peninsula, the Australians and New Zealanders in a small bay–henceforth to be known as Anzac Cove–some thirteen miles along the north coast. The French, meanwhile, were put ashore at Kum Kale on the southern coast. The defending Turks, though outnumbered and outgunned and subject to constant shelling from the ships, kept up a courageous resistance. The Allied troops fought equally bravely, but their task was made harder by the extraordinary preference of Hamilton and his two subordinate generals, Aylmer Hunter-Weston and Sir William Birdwood–commanding the British and the Anzacs respectively–to remain at sea throughout the vital first hours after the landings. Thus, when the signalling arrangements began to fail and there was an almost immediate breakdown of Allied communications, each individual unit was left to look after itself, with no knowledge of what was happening on the next beach to its own. By the end of the first day, after heavy casualties on both sides, the invading forces were still largely confined to the shore.

  Anyone who has ever visited the Gallipoli peninsula will have been struck by the intense hostility of the terrain. Of scenic beauty there is plenty, with the plain of Troy extending beyond the Dardanelles to the south and, rising from the sea in the west, the islands of Imbros and Samothrace. But the beaches themselves, set in what is essentially a succession of small coves, are small and narrow, and they are overhung by cliffs, rising almost perpendicular only yards from the shore, slashed by precipitous ravines and so densely covered with scrub and bracken as to be in many places utterly impassable. Thus the Turks on the heights above, hidden in the thick vegetation, had a perfect field of fire on the forces trapped on the beaches below.

  How, one wonders, can those who planned the operation have believed that it had the faintest chance of success? Hamilton and a few of his senior officers had done a rough reconnaissance by sailing a little way up the coast in a destroyer, and there were a few aerial photographs. But no one had a proper map, and there were some areas–notably Anzac Cove–which had never been mapped at all. Nonetheless, when the Australians and New Zealanders splashed ashore in the early hours of that Sunday morning, they fought like tigers. Some of them managed to cut a path with their bayonets through the scrub, and by 8 a.m. it seemed that in several places the Turks were on the run. At that moment, however, there arrived on the scene one of the half-dozen most remarkable men of the twentieth century.

  Mustafa Kemal–he made a brief appearance in the preceding chapter–was by now, at the age of thirty-four, a divisional commander. Called out with one small battalion to engage the invaders, he first single-handedly stopped a group of his retreating countrymen and by the sheer force of his personality persuaded them to turn and fight; then, realising that the battle was far more serious and on an infinitely larger scale than he had been led to understand, he summoned–on his own responsibility–a crack Turkish regiment and one of the Arab units as well. In doing this he was blatantly exceeding his authority, but it was not until the early afternoon that he even informed his headquarters of what he had done. By this time the progress of the battle had proved him right; he returned to his unit with effective authority over the whole of the Anzac front.

  All day he kept up the pressure, and the Dominion troops who had managed to advance a short distance into the hinterland began to fall back towards the sea. By now Birdwood had discovered to his horror that he had landed his men on the wrong beach. He had expected to find a strip of coast at least a mile long; he found instead a cove little more than half that length, with only some thirty yards between the water and the cliff. Here everything had to be brought: guns, ammunition, stores of all kinds, pack animals–and, all too soon, an endless stream of stretchers bearing the dead or wounded. That night he sent a message to the Commander-in-Chief seeking permission to abandon his whole position and to re-embark his men.

  But Hamilton refused. Any such re-embarkation, he pointed out, would take at least two days; meanwhile it had just been reported to him that an Australian submarine had passed through the narrows and entered the Sea of Marmara, where it had already torpedoed a Turkish gunboat. There was nothing the poor general could do but tell his men to dig themselves in.

  Birdwood, busy with the Anzacs, would have been even more discouraged had he known how the European troops had fared. The French, to be sure, had done well: they had landed near the reputed tomb of Achilles, had seized and occupied the ruined fortress of Kum Kale and were now ready to join their British allies at Cape Helles. Here, however, the landings had been catastrophic. The Turks had held their fire until most of the transports had been drawn up to the beach and the men disembarked, and had then suddenly loosed a murderous hail of bullets. For the British troops there was no protection, and soon, as Air Commodore Samson reported after observing the scene from the air, ‘the calm blue sea was absolutely red with blood for fifty yards from the shore, a horrible sight to see.’ In the shallows, all the little ripples were dyed scarlet. Within three hours, nearly a thousand corpses were strewn across the beach. At the other four nearby landing places the situation had been rather better; it was known, too, that the Turks had also suffered appalling casualties. Nevertheless, Hamilton’s continued optimism remained astonishing. ‘Thanks to God who calmed the seas,’ he wrote on April 26, ‘and to the Royal Navy who rowed our fellows ashore as coolly as if at a regatta; thanks also to the dauntless spirit shown by all ranks of both Services, we have landed 29,000 upon six beaches in the face of desperate resistance.’ But as other reports filtered back to London there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the cost of the Gallipoli operation in human life alone had already been far greater than foreseen, and that its long-term prospects were in serious doubt.

  After three days there was a lull, followed by what seemed a stalemate. The British and the Anzacs had somehow managed to advance a mile or two into the hills, and to dig themselves in; try as they might, the Turks could not dislodge them. For some time it looked as though the action in the trenches of the peninsula might become almost as static as in Flanders. Meanwhile, in London, all the stresses and strains within the government were mercilessly exposed. First, on 15 May, Admiral Fisher resigned–or, more accurately, walked out; for some hours he was missing, and was finally run to earth at the Charing Cross Hotel. Next, Prime Minister Asquith was obliged to form a coalition government, from which–in the most dramatic reverse of his political career to date–Winston Churchill was determinedly excluded.

  For the men on the beaches of Gallipoli, and the others on the cliffs above, the summer was long indeed. As the weather grew steadily hotter, the flies became more and more insufferable: the food, the corpses in no man’s land, the countless suppurating wounds, the proximity of the latrines, all these things attracted them in their millions and made life an even greater misery than it would otherwise have been. In the wake of the flies came the dysentery. By July a thousand totally incapacitated men were being shipped off every week to Lemnos or one of the other islands. But there was good news too: in June it was agreed in London to send out five more divisions, giving Hamilton a total of some 120,000 men. De Robeck also–now that Fisher was safely out of the way–received substantial reinforcements to his fleet. In these dramatically changed conditions a new landing was clearly indicated, and the choice fell on Suvla Bay, a few miles to the north of Anzac Cove. From here it was hoped to advance quickly the four miles to the narrows, cutting off the bulk of the Turkish army on the tip of the peninsula.

  Suvla Bay seemed at first full of promise. Unlike the shallow crescents of most of the other bays, it formed a perfect horseshoe; its wate
rs thus provided an ideal anchorage for the fleet. It had no tall cliffs to dominate it and was, perhaps for that reason, only lightly defended–as it turned out, by some 1,800 men distributed around the bay, without barbed wire or machine-guns. It was, moreover, just around the headland from Anzac Cove; once its possession was assured it could accommodate many of the unhappy Dominion troops and so relieve the nightmare overcrowding which they had endured for so long. The landings began under cover of darkness on 4 August and continued until the night of the 6th, the Turks apparently suspecting nothing. It was only after all were disembarked that things began to go seriously wrong. The newly arrived troops were inexperienced and undisciplined, their commanders old and for the most part incompetent, seemingly unable to cope with the hellish conditions prevailing. The chain of command soon broke down, Hamilton remaining hopelessly out of touch: orders were countermanded at the last moment; generals and brigadiers were encouraged to act at their own discretion; seldom was it clearly explained to the soldiers what was required of them.

  There were a few temporary successes. The heroic attack by the Australians at Lone Pine cost them 4,000 men, but it won them no less than seven Victoria Crosses and resulted in the capture of the Turkish front line. The New Zealanders smashed through another part of the line and found themselves to the rear of the Turkish positions. But for every success there were several failures, and on the evening of 8 April the Allies had been forced back into their own trenches, having sustained horrific casualties and with none of their main objectives achieved. At the end of August Hamilton confessed his failure to Kitchener. He could do no more, he said, without heavy reinforcements; he mentioned the figure of 95,000 men, but the Field Marshal only shrugged. The War Cabinet, it appeared, had decided to concentrate once again on the Western Front. Was Gallipoli to be written off?