This was a momentous proposal, and had it been put forward before the war it must have been decisive. But now an entirely new factor entered the scene: on September 5, 1914, the Battle of the Marne had been fought in France, and with every succeeding week it became more and more apparent that the first German onrush across France had been stopped. In the east as well the Russians were making headway against the Austrian forces. It was no longer so evident that this was to be a short war ending in a German victory; Germany was beginning to need allies. She now wanted Turkey in the war.
One of the earliest indications of this changed attitude was in the treatment of the British Naval Mission. This Mission, under the command of Admiral Limpus, had for some years past undertaken the training of the Turkish Navy. With the arrival of the Goeben its position had become at first embarrassing and then insupportable. Early in September it was clearly impossible for Admiral Limpus to go on. On the 9th the Mission was withdrawn, and the Germans now controlled the Turkish Navy as well as the Army. Then on September 26 something much more serious happened. A Turkish torpedo-boat was stopped at the mouth of the Dardanelles by the British squadron lurking there, and when it was found that there were German soldiers on board the vessel was ordered to go back to Turkey. On hearing this news a certain Weber Pasha, the German soldier commanding the fortifications, took it on himself to close the Dardanelles. New mines were laid across the channel, lighthouses were extinguished, and notices were put up on the cliffs warning all vessels that the passage was blocked. This was by some way the boldest thing that the Germans had attempted yet, for the free passage of the Dardanelles was governed by an international convention which affected both belligerents and neutrals alike, and any interference with international shipping there was an act of war.
The Turks themselves received no warning that this step was to be taken by the Germans, and there was an agitated meeting of the cabinet in Constantinople on September 27. But by now Enver and Talaat had delivered the country into German hands. The other members of the government might protest and threaten to resign, but there was nothing they could do to alter the situation. Russia’s lifeline was cut. For some weeks merchantmen from the Black Sea ports filled with Russian grain and other exports piled up in the Golden Horn until there were hundreds of them there, and a motor boat crossing the harbour could hardly find a way between them. When at last it was evident that the blockage was permanent the ships one by one sailed back to the Black Sea, never to return.
One can judge the importance of this day from the fact that the great maritime trade of the Dardanelles has never again been revived. When the straits were re-opened in 1918 the revolution had already taken place in Russia, and in the years since then the Soviet Empire has effectively cut itself off from the seaborne trade of the West. The consulates of all the great powers which used to line the foreshore at Chanak with their fluttering flags have been closed, and nothing now passes except the local caiques, a thin stream of ocean traffic on the Constantinople run, and, just occasionally, some solitary communist vessel that goes by with a silent and rather fated air, as though it were a visitor from some other planet.
The last few weeks of peace in Turkey ran out very quickly. More and more German technicians arrived, and all night long a constant clanging sounded from the naval yards where the old Turkish ships were being fitted out for war. Most of the German naval officers were quartered in the General, a depot ship tied up near the Galata Bridge in the Golden Horn, and it was common knowledge that in the nightly drinking parties there these officers boasted that if Turkey did not soon move then the German themselves would take a hand. Admiral Souchon was constantly sending the Goeben into the Black Sea on manœuvres. Once, being moved by a sense of humour which is a little difficult to gauge at this distance, he brought his ship to a standstill before the Russian Embassy on the Bosphorus. The sailors appeared on deck in their German uniforms and treated the enemy ambassador to a concert of German national songs. Then, putting on their fezzes, they sailed away again.
The end came in the last days of October. On the 29th the Goeben, the Breslau and a Turkish squadron which was manned in part by German sailors steamed through the Black Sea, and on this and the following day they opened fire without warning on Odessa harbour, on the Russian fortress at Sevastopol and on Novorossik, sinking all shipping they could reach and setting the oil tanks on fire. Djemal, the Turkish Minister for Marine, was playing cards at his club in Constantinople at the time, and when the news was brought to him he declared that he had not ordered the raid and that he knew nothing about it. Whether this be true or not, it seems hardly likely that Enver and Talaat were not informed. Moreover, at that same moment a Turkish column at Gaza, in the Palestinian desert, was about to set out on a major raid on the Suez Canal.
On October 30 the Russian, British and French ambassadors at Constantinople delivered a twelve-hour ultimatum to the Turkish government, and when it was unanswered, asked for their passports. Hostilities began on the following day.
Mustafa Kemal had no part in these events. He had, in the previous year, chosen to send a strong letter to Enver inveighing against Liman von Sanders and the German Mission. Turkey, Kemal argued, needed no help from foreigners of any kind; only the Turks themselves could find their own salvation.
Enver could afford to be lenient, for it was inconceivable that Kemal could ever become a rival. He posted him off as military attaché to the Turkish Embassy at Sofia.
There is a lurid legend of how Kemal employed his time in this semi-banishment. He is said to have made a gauche attempt to learn dancing, and to enter the social life of the Bulgarian capital; then, when he failed dismally in this enterprise, he is reputed to have reverted to debauchery. There may be some truth in the story. Yet he acted very promptly when he heard that his country had gone to war: he wired from Sofia for permission to return to active service. He had no answer for a time—an anti-German man was not wanted in the new Turkish Army—and was on the point of deserting his post and of making his way back to Turkey when orders came through for him from Constantinople. He was posted to Rodosto, at the head of the Gallipoli peninsula. It was an event which, passing quite unnoticed at the time, was to change the whole course of the campaign that lay ahead.
CHAPTER TWO
‘The whole hog. Totus Porcus.’—ADMIRAL FISHER
BY their daring—perhaps even because they had to dare in order to keep in office—the Young Turks had got their country into a war which was much too big for them. They were small gamblers in a game of very high stakes, and, as it usually happens in such cases, their presence was hardly noticed by the other players for a while. They watched, they waited, they made their anxious little bids, they tried desperately to understand which way the luck was going, and they put on an air of being quite at ease which was very far from being the case.
October, November and December went by and their small army had still not been risked, nor had they cared to expose their borrowed warships in any way. Two expeditions had set out: one to the east headed by Enver himself, and the other to the south commanded by Djemal, the Minister of Marine; and their objectives were nothing less than the conquest of the Caucasus from the Russians and the ejection of the British from Egypt. But as yet nothing had been heard of either of these two enterprises, and a certain cynicism was beginning to develop in the other Balkan states which had not dared to risk their fortunes in the war. Nothing would have given greater pleasure in Greece, Bulgaria and Rumania than the humiliation of the Turks in some major battle, and they waited hopefully for the Allies to move.
There were one or two skirmishes at sea. A squadron of British and French warships was patrolling the Ægean in the hope that the Goeben would emerge, and in November the ships opened up their guns on the forts of Sedd-el-Bahr and Kum Kale on either side of the entrance to the Dardanelles. It was all over in twenty minutes, and there was no reply from the Turks. Then on Sunday, December 13, Lieutenant Norman Holbrook penetrated th
rough to the Narrows in the submarine B 11. Entering the straits as soon as the Turkish searchlights were extinguished at dawn, he found his way through the minefields and after four hours hoisted his periscope. He saw a large two-funnelled vessel, the Turkish battleship Messudieh, at anchor in Sari Sigla Bay, and fired his torpedoes at her from 600 yards away. Waiting just long enough to see that his target was destroyed, Holbrook dived steeply and bumped along the bottom until he reached deep water and the open sea. He was awarded the Victoria Cross.
But these actions were nothing more than local raids, and no attempt was made to follow them up. In London, it is true, there was a general feeling that something ought to be done about Turkey, and the question was revived from time to time. Even before hostilities began Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, and Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, had discussed whether they might not persuade the Greeks to land an army on the Gallipoli peninsula. Once the Turkish garrison there had been defeated the fleet would sail through the straits, sink the Goeben, and then turn its guns on Constantinople. It was an intriguing project, and the Greeks on being sounded out were at first quite eager; they were to be given the island of Cyprus as a reward. Later, however, they changed their minds, and the British too soon cooled.
The vast killing match in France overwhelmed them all. By the end of November, barely three months after the fighting began, the Allies had suffered nearly a million casualties, a fantastic figure never to be eclipsed in so short a period throughout the entire war. It was so terrible that it seemed that it must soon produce some result; somehow, if only sufficient men were got to the front, if they charged just once more against the machine-gun bullets and the barbed wire, they were bound to get through.
To kill Germans—that was the thing; to go on killing them until there were no more left, and then to advance into Germany itself.
At the end of December Lieut.-Colonel Hankey, the Secretary of the War Council, produced a paper in which he pointed out that the Allies were not in fact advancing, nor were they killing Germans at a greater rate than they were being killed themselves. The trenches were now dug for 350 miles from the North Sea to the Swiss Alps, and Hankey suggested that it was time to consider whether this impasse might not be broken by making some broad flanking movement around the line—perhaps through Turkey and the Balkans.
These ideas had been canvassed already in a general way by Churchill, Lloyd George and others, and Lord Fisher, the First Sea Lord, had a scheme for breaking into the Baltic and landing a Russian army on Germany’s northern coast. But there was determined opposition from the French and British generals in France—the killing-Germans school of thought; in their view not a man could be spared from the vital theatre in the west. They argued that to divide the Allied forces, to set off on some experimental expedition in the east, would endanger the safety of their whole position in France and expose England to the risk of invasion.
Kitchener at first supported these views, but then in the last days of the year a message arrived from Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador in Petrograd, saying that the Russians were in difficulties. The Grand Duke Nicholas, the commander-in-chief of the Russian armies, had asked, Sir George said, ‘if it would be possible for Lord Kitchener to arrange for a demonstration of some kind against the Turks elsewhere, either naval or military, and to so spread reports as to cause Turks, who he says are very liable to go off at a tangent, to withdraw some of the forces now acting against the Russians in the Caucasus, and thus ease the position of the Russians.’
This was a matter that could not be ignored. After the tremendous blows of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes the Russian armies were beginning to falter everywhere along the line. They were reported to have suffered over a million casualties, and their supplies of rifles and ammunition were giving out. A new German offensive in the spring might prove disastrous.
Kitchener came across to the Admiralty to discuss the message with Churchill, and the following day, January 2, 1915, in a letter to Churchill, he said: ‘The only place that a demonstration might have some effect in stopping reinforcements going east would be the Dardanelles. Particularly if, as the Grand Duke says, reports could be spread at the same time that Constantinople was being threatened.’ And the following telegram was sent off to Petrograd:
‘Please assure the Grand Duke that steps will be taken to make a demonstration against the Turks. It is, however, feared that any action we can devise and carry out will be unlikely to seriously affect numbers of enemy in the Caucasus, or cause their withdrawal.’
Gloomy as this message was, it committed the British to action, and at the Admiralty both Churchill and Fisher got down to the question of just what action it should be. Fisher was all for taking up Hankey’s plan at once. ‘I CONSIDER THE ATTACK ON TURKEY HOLDS THE FIELD!’ he wrote (in capital letters), ‘BUT ONLY IF IT’S IMMEDIATE!’ and he went on to define exactly what should be done. All the Indians and 75,000 of the British troops in France were to be embarked at Marseilles and landed, together with the Egyptian garrison, on the Asiatic side of the Dardanelles; the Greeks were to attack the Gallipoli peninsula, and the Bulgarians to march to Constantinople. At the same time a squadron of old British battleships of the Majestic and Canopus class were to force the Dardanelles.
This was all very well in its way, but Kitchener had said emphatically in the course of the discussions that he could not spare a man for any new expedition, and there was certainly no question of taking troops from France; if there was to be any demonstration at all it would have to be a naval affair. Churchill was particularly struck by Fisher’s reference to the forcing of the straits with old battleships. It was an exploit which had captivated British naval strategists for at least a century, and in fact it had once been done, and in very similar circumstances to those that now prevailed. In 1807 when Napoleon was advancing to the east, the Russians had asked for assistance against Turkey, and the British sent a naval squadron to the Dardanelles. Sir John Moore, who was second-in-command of the British garrison in Sicily, urged that troops should accompany the expedition, but was told that there were none to spare (which was not, in fact, true). ‘It would have been well,’ Sir John wrote after the ships had sailed, ‘to have sent 7,000 or 8,000 men with the fleet to Constantinople, which would have secured their passage through the Dardanelles and enabled the admiral to have destroyed the Turkish fleet and arsenal, which, from the want of such a force, he may not be able to effect.’ The expedition, however, opened very well. Admiral Duckworth with seven ships of the line ran the gauntlet of the Turkish batteries along the straits, destroyed a Turkish squadron and was within eight miles of Constantinople when the wind failed. He waited for a week, unable to bring his guns to bear on the city, and then decided to retire. The return journey proved more difficult. He lost no ship but the Turkish guns at the Narrows inflicted 150 casualties among his sailors.
Since then the problem had been studied anew on several occasions and in the light of steam navigation. Fisher himself had twice considered making the attempt in the first years of the twentieth century, but had decided that it was ‘mightily hazardous’. There were now, however, good arguments for taking up the matter again. The battleships of the Majestic and Canopus class were all due for scrap within the next fifteen months. Already they were so out of date they could not be used in the first line of battle against the German fleet, but they were perfectly adequate to deal with the Turkish batteries at the Dardanelles. The Germans in their recent advance across Belgium had given a striking demonstration of what modern guns could do against old forts—and the Turkish forts were very old indeed. The British had had their naval mission in Turkey for years, and they knew all about them, gun by gun. It was also known that there was barely a division of Turkish soldiers on the Gallipoli peninsula. These were widely scattered and very badly equipped; and presumably they were still subject to the inertia and the confusion of command which had lost Turkey all her battles in the pas
t five years.
As for Fisher’s other proposal—the bringing in of Greek and Bulgarian soldiers to attack Turkey—there was a good deal to be said for it. Once the fleet was in the Sea of Marmara it was quite likely that Greece and Bulgaria would abandon their neutrality in the hope of gaining still more territory from the Turks. Italy and Rumania too would be greatly influenced, and thus you might end with a grand alliance of the Balkan Christian states against Turkey. But it was the aid that would be brought to Russia that was the really vital thing. Directly the Dardanelles was forced and Constantinople taken, arms and ammunition could be sent to her across the Black Sea, and the 350,000 tons of shipping which had been bottled up would be released. Russia’s grain would once more become available to feed the Allies in the west.
With these ideas in mind Churchill sent off the following message to Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden, who was commanding the squadron outside the Dardanelles:
‘Do you consider the forcing of the Dardanelles by ships alone a practical operation?
‘It is assumed older battleships fitted with mine-bumpers would be used, preceded by colliers or other merchant craft as mine-bumpers and sweepers.
‘Importance of results would justify severe loss.
‘Let me know your views.’
Both Fisher and Sir Henry Jackson (who was attached to the Admiralty staff as an adviser on the Turkish theatre), saw this telegram before it went, and approved it. On January 5 Carden’s answer arrived: ‘With reference to your telegram of 3rd instant, I do not consider Dardanelles can be rushed. They might be forced by extended operations with large number of ships.’
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