In the last week of September there came a further blow. Bulgaria mobilised; it was virtually certain that within a week at the most she would enter the war on the side of Germany and Austria and would march with them against Serbia. This threatened to change the whole situation in the Balkans; the Allies therefore decided to transfer two divisions, first a French and then a British, from Gallipoli to Salonica, whence they could march north to help the Serbs. It seemed then that Hamilton must be prepared to abandon Suvla altogether. And there was another possibility, even more depressing: on 11 October Kitchener cabled Hamilton: ‘What is your estimate of the probable losses which would be entailed to your force if the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula was decided upon? No decision has been arrived at yet…but I feel I ought to have your views.’ Hamilton replied at once; 50 percent, he suggested, might be a realistic figure, adding, ‘On the other hand, with all these raw troops at Suvla and all those Senegalese at Cape Helles, we might have a veritable catastrophe.’ When this message was put before the Dardanelles Committee on 14 October, Hamilton’s fate was sealed. Two days later he received his dismissal.
Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Monro, Hamilton’s successor, had come straight from the Western Front, and from the day of his arrival made no secret of the fact that he considered the whole Gallipoli expedition misconceived. The war, he believed, would be won in France; any distraction or diversion from the main thrust was to be deplored. Since his orders were to advise on whether the peninsula should be evacuated or not, the nature of his advice seemed a foregone conclusion. Nor, on his arrival, did he see anything to make him change his mind. Although the weather was growing rapidly colder, no winter clothing had been received from London. Many units were now at half strength or less, the remaining soldiers reduced to skin and bone. The guns were rationed to two shells a day. Monro’s first sight of Suvla Bay confirmed his worst fears. ‘Like Alice in Wonderland,’ he was heard to murmur, ‘curiouser and curiouser.’ The following day he sent Kitchener his recommendation.
But all was not yet lost. Commodore Roger Keyes, Admiral de Robeck’s chief of staff, saw fit to disagree. His plan was quite simple: to gather the entire Mediterranean fleet, which had been lying all summer at various points in the Aegean, and–while keeping up a terrific bombardment of the Turkish shore batteries–to make a determined attempt on the straits. This would, he believed, take the Turks by surprise. Once in the Marmara, it would be a simple matter to block the isthmus of Bulair at the northern end of the peninsula, cutting off the twenty Turkish divisions stationed there. De Robeck was sceptical, but generously allowed Keyes to return to England to plead his case. He did–and made a considerable impact on all the principal admirals, on the First Lord of the Admiralty Arthur Balfour, and of course on Winston Churchill.
There remained Lord Kitchener, who had been appalled by the speed and tenor of Monro’s reply. It was he who had personally chosen Hamilton for the Gallipoli command, and he had not enjoyed seeing his friend humiliated. He immediately fell in with Keyes’s idea, asked him to try to get some sort of definite undertaking from the Admiralty, and then announced–to Birdwood rather than to Monro–his decision to leave personally for the Dardanelles the following day. The message ended: ‘I absolutely refuse to sign order for evacuation, which I think would be the greatest disaster and would condemn a large percentage of our men to death or imprisonment. Monro will be appointed to command the Salonica force.’ Then he set off, via Paris–where the French confirmed that they were firmly opposed to evacuation–to Marseille and thence in HMS Dartmouth to Gallipoli.
Had Keyes accompanied him–as Kitchener had asked him to, but the message was never delivered–he might have kept the Field Marshal steady, but the climate of opinion among the commanders on the spot had swung considerably since Keyes’s departure and Kitchener immediately found himself surrounded by Monro, de Robeck and Birdwood, all three now firmly in favour of evacuation. No one spoke up for Keyes and his plan. After two days of discussions the Field Marshal went off on a tour of inspection of the three principal bridgeheads, and was duly depressed by what he saw, though somewhat less so than Monro. On 22 November he cabled to London a recommendation that Suvla and Anzac Bay should be evacuated at once, Cape Helles being held ‘for the time being’. Two days later he sailed for England.
By this time no one remotely involved with the operation, from the highest to the most humble, felt anything but loathing for the Gallipoli peninsula; but they had not yet seen it at its worst. On 27 November it was hit by the fiercest blizzard for at least forty years. Twenty-four hours of deluge were followed by north winds of hurricane force, bringing with them heavy snowfalls and two nights of intense frost. Torrents came sweeping down from the hills, carrying the bodies of drowned Turks. At Anzac Cove, in particular, where many of the Australians and a small Indian contingent were probably seeing snow for the first time, there was virtually no protection from the piercing cold; winter clothing still had not been issued, and the soldiers could do nothing but huddle in their soaking wet blankets, which soon froze solid. For three days and three nights the torment continued. When it was over, 200 men had been drowned or died of cold, 5,000 were suffering from severe frostbite. Many of them had in the past opposed evacuation, determined to see the operation through to the end; now, however great the inherent dangers, they could not get away fast enough.
The evacuation was clearly going to be a long and difficult job.278 In the Suvla–Anzac bridgehead alone there were 83,000 men, to say nothing of the 5,000 horses and donkeys, 2,000 motor vehicles, nearly 2,000 guns and several tons of supplies. The only hope was to withdraw silently and secretly over perhaps two or three weeks. Even then there were formidable dangers: a sustained Turkish bombardment could easily make embarkations impossible; bad weather and a rough sea could ruin the best-laid plans–and the winter solstice was fast approaching. But there was no alternative; from the second week of December nightly flotillas of barges and small boats crept into the bays, leaving before dawn weighed down to the gunwales with men, animals and arms. The sick and wounded were embarked first; fifty-six temporary hospital ships had been prepared for them, and 12,000 hospital beds were waiting in Egypt. During the day, to allay Turkish suspicions, life continued precisely as usual: the endless mule teams continued to toil up from the beaches to the front, down from the front to the beaches. The only difference was that the crates and boxes that they carried were empty. As the evacuation progressed the deception became more difficult: the same men and animals were obliged to march round and round again like a stage army. No tents were struck; thousands of extra cooking fires were lit every night.
After a week the pace quickened; by 18 December half the force–some 40,000–had been taken off. The enemy could no longer be fooled; it was agreed that the remainder of the army would leave over the next two nights. In some sectors of the front, the Allied and Turkish trenches were less than ten yards from each other (many of them can still be seen) and it must have seemed impossible to leave them without alerting the enemy; yet somehow it was done. Just before daybreak on the 21st the last boats pulled away from the beach. At Anzac Cove two men were wounded by stray shots just as they were boarding; at Suvla Bay every single man and animal was safely taken off. The last thing they did before they left was to light the fuses that had been carefully laid all over the beaches. Ten minutes later they heard with deep satisfaction the series of deafening explosions as the ammunition dumps went up.
What about the British? For their four divisions–some 35,000 men–in the Helles bridgehead, the situation looked grave indeed. The Turks had allowed the Anzacs to disappear from right under their noses; surely they would not make the same mistake again. Instead, no longer tied down at Anzac and Suvla, they would throw the whole weight of their army against them. There could no longer be any question of hanging on, and Monro, Birdwood and de Robeck–who had been briefly invalided home but who returned just before Christmas–were now all agreed. Evacuati
on, however problematic, must be attempted.
It began on Saturday, 1 January 1916. The French left first, and after a week the number of British troops remaining was down to 19,000. Up to this point there had been surprisingly little enemy opposition. Then, in the early afternoon of the 7th, the Turks launched their attack–in a bombardment that lasted for four and a half hours. After the guns had fallen silent there came the inevitable charge. The British in their trenches faced it with guns and rifles blazing, and were astonished to see the Turkish infantry–well-known for its discipline and courage–stopping dead in its tracks, flatly refusing to advance further. When night fell not a single Turkish soldier had penetrated the British line. For the next twenty-four hours there was no more trouble, and the evacuation continued.
Meanwhile, however, the weather was worsening. By the evening of 8 January the glass was falling fast, and soon the wind was gusting at 35 miles an hour. Two lighters broke adrift and smashed one of the makeshift piers; everything stopped while it was repaired–no easy job in the dark, with a stormy sea. The wind and the rain also slowed down the few remaining troops as they marched the three or four miles from their trenches to the beach, but at 3.45 a.m. the last man was on board, the last boat heading out to sea. Ten minutes later, as at Anzac and Suvla, the ammunition dumps exploded in a dramatic finale. The ill-starred adventure was over at last.
Nothing became it like its end. It is one of the many ironies of Gallipoli that, after the chaos and confusion that had blighted the whole operation from the beginning, the final evacuations were models of superb organisation and planning. There were scarcely any casualties; not a man was left behind. But there is, perhaps, a greater irony still: that the great expedition, failure as it may have been, was nevertheless a brilliant concept, which should–and could–have succeeded. Some years after the war, an official report on the campaign by the Turkish General Staff confessed that the naval battle of 19 March had left it virtually without ammunition; had de Robeck returned immediately to the attack he would very probably have been able to advance unhindered through the straits to Constantinople, in which case ‘the eight divisions retained there would have been unable to defend it’. With Constantinople occupied, it is doubtful whether the Russians would ever have signed a separate peace–and the Russian Revolution might never have occurred. Even after the landings victory might have been possible; the Turkish report also admitted that twice during the campaign–during the first Anzac landing in April and at Suvla Bay in August–the Allies would almost certainly have broken through had it not been for the astonishing personal magnetism of Mustafa Kemal.279 Had they managed to do so, had the campaign succeeded–as it so very nearly did–the Great War would probably have ended three years earlier, and a million lives would have been saved.
The Greek attitude towards the landing of troops in Salonica was ambiguous and uncertain. The Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, secretly welcomed the plan, though for form’s sake he registered a formal protest. King Constantine, on the other hand–who had succeeded his father George two years before and was married to the Kaiser’s sister–was violently opposed, on the grounds that until the Bulgarian army actually crossed the frontier, the presence of foreign troops on Greek soil would be a violation of Greek neutrality. As for the Greeks themselves, they were overwhelmingly on the side of the King. They had no desire for an Allied presence, feeling that they were being forced against their will into the war. The result was what came to be known as the National Schism, and Venizelos was forced to resign.
It is always a mistake for constitutional monarchs to meddle in foreign policy; this time it was calamitous. The King now opened secret talks with the Germans, and on 23 May 1916, on his orders, the Greek army surrendered the frontier castle of Roupel, allowing German and Bulgarian troops to overrun eastern Macedonia. Kavalla too was ordered to surrender, its Greek garrison being carted off to Germany as prisoners of war. ‘Where,’ shouted Venizelos in parliament, ‘where at least are your thirty pieces of silver?’ It was not perhaps the most diplomatic preface to a last appeal to the King to join the Allies before it was too late. Predictably, Constantine turned a deaf ear.
For the expeditionary force, the situation was becoming more and more impossible. From the day of its arrival it had found itself extremely unwelcome, being obliged to camp several miles outside the city while the consuls of the enemy remained at liberty within. That winter the Serbs had been driven back to the Adriatic and Serbia had been occupied. What, the Allies asked themselves, were they meant to be doing? It was then that the French commander in Salonica, General Maurice Serrail, had taken the law into his own hands, putting all the enemy consuls and agents under arrest and imprisoning them in the castle while simultaneously taking possession of another fortress guarding the entrance to the bay. Now the gloves were off: the Allied powers officially demanded the demobilisation of the Greek army, the dissolution of parliament and the dismissal of the government. In September 1916 Venizelos slipped away to his native Crete, where he raised a revolt against the King. He then returned to Greece and established a provisional government in Thessalonica, which the Allies recognised a month later.
In December the British and French, their demands still unfulfilled, landed troops at Piraeus in an attempt to force the King to surrender his armaments and munitions. This, however, proved a mistake: the Greeks fought back and the royal palace was bombarded by the French fleet. Venizelos, understandably but quite unjustifiably, was blamed, and on 26 December was solemnly excommunicated by the Archbishop of Athens. The Allies then put southern Greece under a blockade and in June 1917 demanded the abdication of the King–the French reinforcing the demand by landing troops at Corinth. Constantine refused to abdicate, but left with his eldest son for Switzerland.
Now, overnight, the whole situation changed. Constantine was succeeded in Athens–now starving owing to the continuing blockade and virtually under French occupation–by his second son, Alexander. A few days later Venizelos returned from Salonica with his government, received a warm welcome and became the new King’s Prime Minister–celebrating his reappointment with a nine-hour speech to parliament. Now it was the royalists who suffered; indeed they were purged–government, civil service, army, even the Church. Greek society was torn in two, and was to remain so for at least a generation. At last, and not a moment too soon, Greece entered the war on the Allied side. Her army, conscripted and largely untrained, fought magnificently in Macedonia. With the British they invaded and defeated Bulgaria; with the French and Serbs, they drove the Germans out of Serbia. As a final triumph, Greek troops entered Constantinople for the first time since 1453. For Eleftherios Venizelos, it was his finest hour.
The initial excitement and subsequent despair over Gallipoli completely overshadowed yet another theatre of war: that of the Middle East. This too formed part of the Ottoman Empire, and saw the Turkish army under constant pressure from the Allies, both in Mesopotamia and in Palestine.
The Palestinian campaign was, once again, an attempt to boost the morale of an increasingly war-weary Britain: to give its people something to think about other than the continuing holocaust in the trenches of Flanders, while at the same time landing a telling blow on the enemy at his weakest point. Its principal instigator, however, was not Winston Churchill–still out of the government thanks to the Gallipoli debacle–but the Prime Minister, Asquith’s successor David Lloyd George. His objective could be summarised in just three words, ‘Jerusalem before Christmas’, and the man he chose to achieve it was General Sir Edmund Allenby. Allenby was not universally popular in the army, where his immense height, commanding presence, furious temper and frequently hectoring manner had earned him the nickname of the Bull;280 in fact, his aggression concealed a genuine passion for nature and a deep love of music, literature and philosophy.281 A soldier through and through, he had been desolated when ordered to leave the trenches for Palestine; he little knew that the unwelcome transfer was to make his name and fame
, securing him a field marshal’s baton, a viscountcy and the gift from a grateful nation of £50,000.
The Egyptian Expeditionary Force (as it was called) was manned largely by Australians. It existed primarily to protect the Suez Canal–but it was also expected to fight the Turks. The Canal was safe enough; against the Turks, however, though superior both in numbers and equipment to the ramshackle army facing it beyond the Sinai Peninsula, the EEF had achieved remarkably little. ‘In Palestine and Mesopotamia,’ Lloyd George had written, ‘nothing and nobody could have saved the Turk from complete collapse in 1915 and 1916 except our General Staff.’ The spring of 1917 showed no sign of improvement. There had been two half-hearted attempts to take Gaza; both had ended in defeat. Allenby’s first task, therefore, when he arrived in Cairo on 28 June, was to breathe new life into this sadly demoralised army–and within a few weeks he had done so. His predecessor, General Archibald Murray, had preferred to maintain his headquarters at the Savoy Hotel in Cairo; Allenby moved it forward to a sweltering, fly-blown camp of tents and huts just behind the front line at Gaza and immediately embarked on a round of all the advanced units, establishing direct personal contact with his officers and men. It was the height of summer, the noonday temperature often hit 120 degrees, sandstorms were frequent and asphyxiating–but nothing seemed to stop the enormous general in full uniform, sitting bolt upright in an old Ford truck beside a diminutive Australian driver in vest and shorts, bouncing over the desert, investigating defence works and water supplies, barking out orders and quick to express his dissatisfaction in no uncertain terms. Wherever he went, morale soared.
Allenby’s first task had been to gain a clear idea of the forces at his command; his next was to draw up a plan of campaign. This required substantial reinforcements: two further divisions to supplement the seven already in Palestine. To plead his case with the War Office he sent to London a young liaison officer, Lieutenant-Colonel A. P. Wavell (the future field marshal of the Second World War and subsequently Viceroy of India). It was largely thanks to Wavell’s persuasive powers and already growing reputation that he got what he wanted, together with extra artillery and further units of the Royal Flying Corps; soon afterwards, it was Wavell who explained Allenby’s plan to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff and the War Cabinet. Briefly, this consisted of a main thrust to the plentiful wells at Beersheba, some thirty miles inland from Gaza, to be protected by a feint attack on Gaza itself. As always, Allenby’s preparations were thorough: 30,000 camels were assembled to carry water to the advance troops; new roads were built and new maps prepared, far more accurate–thanks to recent aerial reconnaissance–than their predecessors, which had been prepared by ‘H. H. Kitchener, Lt.’ in the 1870s. Meanwhile, he read everything on the area that he could get his hands on, from Herodotus and Strabo to histories of the Crusades and the latest papers of the Royal Geographical Society.
The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean Page 76