But it was not quite as straightforward as it might sound, given that the northern bank of the Dardanelles (up to seven miles wide in places) was formed by the Gallipoli Peninsula, and Asia Minor protected the southern bank. Furthermore, the Straits ended in a narrow passage between high cliffs that were easily defended. Here at the narrows the Turks had constructed heavily armed fortresses backed up with portable howitzer gun stations. And any fleet forcing the Straits would have to run the dual gauntlet of heavy bombardment from the shores, as well as mines.
In order not to call on the Fleet, which was protecting home waters, Winston proposed to use old ‘spare’ warships to capture the Straits, with help from the French Navy and a Russian warship. His second-in-command, Lord Fisher, who had replaced the retired Prince Louis of Battenberg as First Sea Lord and had himself been First Lord of the Admiralty until 1910, agreed to this plan, if reluctantly. Though Fisher would later claim that he had never supported Churchill’s plan there is no record of his having opposed it at the time. And Churchill, believing he had the full approval of the government and of Fisher, went ahead. Lloyd George said he liked the plan. Kitchener, who had control of land forces, certainly approved the idea, moving the single surplus British infantry division into readiness to attack on land at the Gallipoli Peninsula following the naval attack, and in addition he diverted seventy-five thousand Australian and New Zealand troops stationed in Egypt, bound for the Western Front, to the Dardanelles instead. Jack Churchill was there serving on the HQ staff of the ANZAC forces.* The French added a further corps (which, however, arrived too late to assist in the grim first battle).
The first naval attack on the Dardanelles took place on 19 February 1915, with an Anglo-French fleet comprising a battleship, 3 battlecruisers, 16 old dreadnoughts, 4 cruisers, 18 destroyers, 6 submarines, 21 trawlers and the Ark Royal carrying seaplanes. The massive bombardment from this fleet took out the closest forts, but many seemed out of range (although much later it would transpire that greater damage had been inflicted on the Turkish defence system than was recognised at the time). The fleet advanced six miles into the Straits before finding it impossible to proceed further because the channel had been mined. Minesweepers were sent in, but were forced to withdraw under fierce bombardment. The weather then closed in, so a second attack had to wait six days, until 25 February. This was equally unsuccessful, so the fleet again withdrew.
With hindsight it is evident that such an attack could only work given an element of surprise – the shock-and-awe technique – and Churchill began frantically agitating for an immediate third attack. Had it gone ahead as he demanded, there is, again with hindsight, a possibility that it might have succeeded.† But the War Cabinet had been badly frightened, and it was decided instead that a combined land and sea attack was needed to achieve success. Almost a month was allowed to elapse while the necessary preparations were made for Allied landings at Cape Helles and Anzac Cove. Those valuable weeks allowed the Turks to repair the severe damage inflicted in the earlier assaults, to lay more mines and significantly to improve their defences, under the command of a German officer who brought in eighty thousand troops to boost the Turkish Army. The Allied fleet attacked again on 18 March, when eighteen battleships entered the Straits. Three British ships hit mines and were sunk or disabled, and the fleet retreated for a third time, with the loss of seven hundred men. Grave as this was, it was an insignificant number compared with the daily losses on the battlefields of the Western Front.
After much argument and changing of mind in the War Council, the failure of the naval attack gave birth to a new proposal: to send in land forces behind the forts that protected the Straits in order to capture Constantinople. This idea gained great support in the Cabinet, and on 25 April the Gallipoli Campaign began, with significant naval support. Kitchener had been warned by the Greeks that 150,000 men would be needed to take Gallipoli by land, but he believed only half that number would be needed.
The subsequent land battle at Gallipoli was to be a disaster for the Allied forces, with some 60,000 British and Commonwealth troops killed and over 200,000 other casualties before the Allies finally retreated. But long before that retreat occurred, in December 1915, Churchill found himself pilloried by public opinion, by the War Cabinet and by the Tories for the failure of the naval attack. Fisher resigned, after making two public speeches claiming he had been opposed to the plan all along. Churchill alone was held to blame for the fiasco.
The failure of the Dardanelles attack was the single greatest error, and certainly the greatest setback, of Winston’s life. With his usual enthusiasm for the task in hand, he had reached out too far and had lost. Asquith would have retained Winston in a Liberal administration but he was now heading a coalition government, and he had no option but to remove the Admiralty from Winston to satisfy outraged public opinion and to quell the anger of the House of Commons, but mainly to save his own neck in the face of the Tory hatred of Winston. To retain Winston’s valuable expertise in the War Cabinet he offered a face-saving minor office, the chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster – ‘a bone,’ Sunny Marlborough commented succinctly, ‘on which there is very little meat’. Prime Minister Asquith, who knew very well how the campaign had come about as well as the support that had been given to Winston’s plan, could easily have saved Winston’s career by revealing the facts, and Winston initially assumed he would do so. But what he did not know was that Asquith had recently suffered a major tragedy in his personal life and was not operating with his usual perspicacity.
For years Asquith had been in love with his daughter Violet’s friend Venetia Stanley (who, curiously enough, was Clementine’s best friend). Venetia was his sounding-board, adored and unattainable, a trusted confidante with whom he shared the pressures of his high office. She encouraged him through bouts of depression and self-doubt, advised and cautioned him, and – ironic though it is, given that women were not even allowed to vote – the Prime Minister had come to rely utterly on her counsel. It was during the Dardanelles attacks that Venetia had informed Asquith that their friendship must end, as she was to marry Edwin Montagu, Under-Secretary of State for India. It was a blow from which Asquith would never recover. Racked with jealousy, desperately trying to persuade Venetia to maintain contact with him, he was unable to focus on the political crisis in hand; and though he held on to office he had lost the will to fight without Venetia, whom he called the ‘soul of my life’. ‘You alone of all the world,’ he wrote to her, ‘to whom I have always gone in every moment of trial & trouble, & from whom I have always come back solaced and healed & inspired – were the one person who could do nothing wrong…To my dying day [this] will be the most bitter memory of my life.’19
Winston was bewildered by his fall from such great power. Now his role was little more than that of an onlooker. Having controlled great fleets, he now found himself appointing county magistrates. He fell into a deep depression, regarding Asquith as his enemy because the Prime Minister refused to make known the whole truth behind the ill-fated expedition. Winston had made mistakes in strategy, and he accepted that.* But he refused to accept that in rushing to grasp the glittering prize of Constantinople – the romantic-sounding goal that had fired his imagination and that would have given him a glorious victory to rival that of the Battle of Blenheim – he had omitted to ensure that adequate preparations were in place for failure. Had the initial naval action been carried out some weeks later with the support of the Army, had he obtained better intelligence about the mined areas of the Straits, the operation would have stood a better chance of succeeding. Had the Navy returned immediately after the first attack and cleared the mines, the later attacks would also have stood a better chance of success. Certainly, the lapse of almost a month between the second and third attacks had been a fatal error.
But the fact remains that Churchill was made a scapegoat, for while he and Kitchener had joint responsibility for the campaign, all the blame for the failure in the Dardanelles and at
Gallipoli was laid at Churchill’s feet. Such was his misery in the aftermath of this fiasco that his friends were concerned that he might commit suicide, and Clementine told a friend later that she thought he might die of grief. For the remainder of his life hostile hecklers at his talks, probably with no knowledge of the facts, would shout out: ‘What about the Dardanelles?’
Nor was it only his career that was affected. His domestic circumstances altered greatly and immediately, too. With the loss of high office his salary fell from £4500 to £2000 a year. The Churchills had rented out Eccleston Square in 1913, and had lived at Admiralty House ever since. Now Asquith wrote kindly to say he would allow them to stay on there, but Clementine would not hear of it. Her pride would not allow them to be pensioners of Asquith. After a short stay at Ivor Guest’s house in Arlington Street, they moved in with Goonie and her children at 41 Cromwell Road opposite the National History Museum. ‘Instantly,’ Goonie’s son Johnny would later recall, ‘our cozy home became Uncle’s war head-quarters. The most important statesmen of the day, Lloyd George among them, knocked for admission at all hours; I recollect that dispatch boxes cluttered the hall and stairs, and we used to open doors to find the most unlikely rooms crammed with secretaries banging at typewriters. Telephones were installed at strategic points.’20
Fortunately for Goonie and Clementine, soon afterwards a Cabinet decision to pool all Cabinet salaries, then divide the total equally, resulted in Winston’s income being raised again, to £4360, and he decided to lease a small farmhouse, Hoe Farm near Godalming in Surrey, for a year. From there he could commute to London, and the rural location gave him a measure of rest from the stress he now lived with day and night. He also considered it a safer place for his family to be. And even during the worst times, Winston could always be diverted by beauty. Now he wrote of Hoe Farm to Jack:
How I wish you could be there. It really is a delightful valley and the garden gleams with summer jewellery. We live vy simply – but with all the essentials of life well understood & well provided for – hot baths, cold champagne, new peas & old brandy. The war is terrible and carnage grows apace, & the certainty that no result will be reached this year fills my mind with melancholy thoughts. The youth of Europe – almost a whole generation – will be shorn away. I find it vy painful to be deprived of direct means of action, but I bear the pangs because I see and feel the value of my influence on general policy. I do not think the present arrangement will last forever, and I hope to regain a fuller measure of control before the end of the year.21
It was just at this point, when he needed some relaxation from a situation out of his control, that he discovered painting. He had become interested while watching Goonie sketching, and in an attempt to give him some solace of mind Clementine had rushed out and bought him the necessary materials. Equipped with oils, easel, brushes and palette, he set out to paint a small pond in front of the farmhouse, but found the virgin canvas intimidating. He had just cautiously applied a tiny patch of blue for the sky when he was disturbed by the slamming of a car door. He wrote:
From this chariot there stepped swiftly and lightly the gifted wife of Sir John Lavery.* “Painting! But what are you hesitating about? Let me have a brush – the big one.” Splash into the turpentine, wallop into the blue and the white, frantic flourish on the palette – clean no longer – and then several large, fierce strokes and slashes of blue on the absolutely cowering canvas. Anyone could see that it could not hit back. No evil fate avenged the jaunty violence. The canvas grinned in helplessness before me. The spell was broken. The sickly inhibitions rolled away. I seized the largest brush and fell upon my victim with berserk fury. I have never felt any awe of a canvas since.22
Over the years his artistic output would be prodigious;23 he used art, Jennie once wrote, ‘as an opiate’.24
As the months rolled on and Britain made no headway, Jack suggested to Winston that he visit Gallipoli as an observer, and this fired Winston’s imagination. He applied for permission, but to his fury he was refused. And when Asquith wound up the Dardanelles Committee, making himself, Kitchener and Balfour solely responsible for that theatre, Winston no longer had a role in the War Cabinet. There was only one avenue remaining that would allow him to participate in the war, and that was to join the fight in the trenches. This meant giving up his Cabinet salary and a sinecure post. But he felt there was no honourable alternative and so he drafted a resignation letter to Asquith:
I agree with the principle of a War Executive composed of the Prime Minister & the heads of the two military departments. But the change necessarily deprives me of rendering useful service. After leaving the Admiralty five months ago I have only remained in the Government at your request in order to take part in the War Council. It would not be right for me at this time to remain in a sinecure…Nor could I conscientiously accept responsibility without power.
The long delays in coming to decisions have not been the only cause of our misfortunes. The faulty & lethargic executions and lack of scheme and combination over all military affairs & of any concert with our Allies are evils wh[ich] will not be cured merely by the changes indicated in yr memorandum…I therefore take leave of you not without many regrets on personal grounds but without any doubts. There is one point however on which it would perhaps be well for us to have a talk. It is now necessary for the truth to be made public about the initiation of the Dardanelles expedition.25
He made his farewell speech to the House of Commons on 15 November, and used the traditional courtesy shown to members on such an occasion by delivering a long speech about the Dardanelles, which he referred to as ‘a legitimate gamble’, knowing that he would not be interrupted. But because of the great loss of life that had been incurred his opinions shocked some of his listeners and gained him few supporters.
The next day a group of his closest friends gathered in Jack and Goonie’s house in the Cromwell Road to say goodbye to Winston. Among them were Margot and Violet Asquith, Clementine’s younger sister Nellie Hozier who was staying with Clementine, and Edward Marsh, Winston’s Private Secretary. Max Aitken (later Lord Beaverbrook), who called later, found ‘the whole household was upside down while the soldier statesman was buckling on his sword’. Marsh was in tears and Jennie, remembering how long her nephew Norman Leslie had lasted after he was shipped out to France, was ‘in a state of despair at the thought of her brilliant son being relegated to the trenches. Clementine seemed to be the only person who remained calm and efficient.’26 She was behaving as she knew Winston would want her to behave; only her subsequent letters to her husband reveal that she was as frightened as the others.
Three days after his resignation speech Winston was on his way to France, commissioned, like Jack, as a major in the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars. Soon after his arrival he was attached to the 2nd Battalion of the Grenadier Guards which was about to go into the line. This gratified his sense of history, for the 1st Duke of Marlborough had once commanded the same unit. Lord Cavan the commanding officer told him, ‘If you come and lunch with me…at one o’clock, you will be in plenty of time.’27
‘I am sure I am going to be entirely happy out here, and at peace,’ he wrote to Clementine. ‘I must try to win my way as a good & sincere soldier. But do not suppose I shall run any foolish risks or do anything wh[ich is] not obviously required.’28 A few days later he sounded almost jaunty when addressing Clementine as ‘My dearest Soul’ and remarking, ‘This is what the great Duke of Marlborough used to write from the Low Countries to his cat.’ Then: ‘I cannot tell the rota in wh we shall go into the trenches. But I do hope you will realise what a vy harmless thing this is. To my surprise I learn they only have about 15 killed & wounded each day out of 8000 men exposed! It will make me vy sulky if I think you are allowing yourself to be made anxious by any risk like that.’29
In fact his immediate anxieties were not connected with the risks of battle. Having been dropped at the Grenadiers HQ near Laventie some twelve miles west of Lille an
d close to the Belgian border, he had been greeted coolly by the officers in his unit, who were clearly suspicious of him. ‘I think I ought to tell you,’ his CO told him coldly, ‘we were not at all consulted in the matter of your coming to join us.’ Winston recognised that only time and example could deal with this matter. And it was not too long before he realised that he had not brought the right equipment with him. He wrote to Clementine asking for another pair of trench boots – one pair was not enough (and henceforward he would always advise soldiers in the trenches to have two). Also, he asked for a sheepskin sleeping bag – this was late November in the Low Countries, after all – and other personal items such as a bath towel. Clementine did what she could, but found that the London shops had sold out of waterproof trench wading boots. She sent him all she could find – a pair of wellingtons – until she could locate some trench boots. He was able from time to time to speak to Jack, who, to Goonie’s massive relief, had been transferred to Staff HQ.
Winston served with honour, often in the thick of the fighting, until May 1916. At one point in February that year he was placed in charge of his brigade, commanding five battalions and 4000 yards of trenches in the front line. He hoped this meant he would get a brigade of his own and in fact the French Commander-in-Chief wanted this, but it was merely a temporary appointment while the brigadier was away. Drawing on his experience in the trenches and his knowledge of what was required, Winston designed what he called a ‘caterpillar’, the first-ever rudimentary ‘tank’, which was shown to the Prime Minister and Army chiefs (‘foolish slugs and dawdlers’, Winston called them); it ‘performed miracles’. He was critical of the technical support given to the men in the front line. ‘Take the telephone system for example,’ he wrote:
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