Fisher still persisted; he suggested that a flotilla of destroyers should be brought back from the Dardanelles, a move which in Churchill’s opinion would have crippled the venture at the outset. Then there was the question of the Zeebrugge Canal. For some time past there had been under discussion a plan for the Navy to sail in and block the canal to German shipping. Fisher began to express his doubts about this operation as well. He was indeed, he now revealed, against aggressive action of any kind, until the German Fleet had been defeated.
Matters came to a head on January 25, when Fisher put down his views in writing and sent them to Churchill with this note: ‘First Lord: I have no desire to continue a useless resistance in the War Council to plans I cannot concur in, but I would ask that the enclosed may be printed and circulated to members before the next meeting. F.’
The document expressed complete opposition to the whole Dardanelles scheme. In it Fisher wrote, ‘We play into Germany’s hands if we risk fighting ships in any subsidiary operations such as coastal bombardments or the attack of fortified places without military co-operation, for we thereby increase the possibility that the Germans may be able to engage our Fleet with some approach to equality of strength. The sole justification of coastal bombardments and attacks by the Fleet on fortified places, such as the contemplated prolonged bombardment of the Dardanelles Forts by our Fleet, is to force a decision at sea, and so far and no further can they be justified.’
The fact that it was intended only to use semi-obsolete battleships to force the Dardanelles, he went on, was no reassurance; if they were sunk the crews would be lost and these were the very men who were needed to man the new vessels coming out of the dockyards.
So then, Fisher argued, Britain should revert to the blockade of Germany and be content with that. ‘Being already,’ he concluded, ‘in possession of all that a powerful fleet can give a country we should continue quietly to enjoy the advantage without dissipating our strength in operations that cannot improve the position.’
Here then was a fundamental difference on policy, a reversal, it seemed to Churchill, of the whole spirit in which they had planned the Dardanelles operation together.
One does not know how far Fisher had consulted the other members of the Admiralty Board before he committed himself to these views. Fisher himself denied that he had any such support. He said later, ‘Naval opinion was unanimous. Mr. Churchill had them all on his side. I was the only rebel.’ Churchill, however, felt that without Fisher’s support he was in an impossible position, and he persuaded the Admiral to come with him to the Prime Minister twenty minutes before the Council meeting began on the morning of January 28, so that they could have the matter out. The discussion went off very quietly at 10 Downing Street. Fisher stated his objections to both the Dardanelles and the Zeebrugge operations, and Churchill answered that he was prepared at any rate to give up Zeebrugge. Asquith, being left to decide, fell in with Churchill’s proposal: Zeebrugge should be stopped but the Dardanelles was to go forward. Fisher said no more and the three men went into the War Council together.
It appeared to Churchill that Fisher had accepted the decision, but here he was quite wrong, for the Admiral, in silence and rage, was preparing his protest. Directly Churchill had finished explaining to the Council the latest position of the Dardanelles plan, Fisher said that he had understood that this matter would not be raised that day: the Prime Minister knew his views.
To this Asquith replied that in view of the steps which had already been taken, the question could not very well be left in abeyance.
Fisher at once got up from the table, leaving the others to carry on the discussion, and Kitchener followed him over to the window to ask him what he was going to do. Fisher replied that he would not go back to the table: he intended to resign. Kitchener’s answer to this was to point out to Fisher that he was the only one in disagreement; the Prime Minister had taken the decision and it was his duty to abide by it. After some further discussion he eventually persuaded the Admiral to come back to the table again.
Churchill had noticed this incident, and as soon as the Council rose he invited Fisher to come to his room at the Admiralty in the afternoon. There is no record of the conversation that then took place, but it appears, in Churchill’s phrase, to have been ‘long and very friendly’, and at the end of it Fisher consented to undertake the operation.
‘When I finally decided to go in,’ Fisher said later, ‘I went the whole hog, totus porcus.’ Nothing, not even this extremity of his affairs, could quite upset that robust spirit; he even added two powerful battleships, the Lord Nelson and the Agamemnon, to the Dardanelles Fleet.
Returning with the Admiral to the afternoon meeting of the Council, Churchill was able to announce that all at the Admiralty were now in agreement, and that the plan would be set into motion. From this point onwards there could be no turning back. Turkey, the small gambler, was in the thick of the big game at last.
CHAPTER THREE
SOMEWHAT more than half way down the Gallipoli Peninsula the hills rise up into a series of jagged peaks which are known as Sari Bair. Only the steepest and roughest of tracks leads to this spot, and except for an occasional shepherd and the men who tend the cemeteries on the mountainside, hardly anybody ever goes there. Yet the view from these heights, and especially from the central crest which is called Chunuk Bair, is perhaps the grandest spectacle of the whole Mediterranean.
On first reaching the summit one is quite unprepared for the extreme closeness of the scene which seemed so distant on the map and so remote in history; an illusion which is partly created, no doubt, by the silence and the limpid air. To the south, in Asia, lie Mount Ida and the Trojan plain, reaching down to Tenedos. To the east, the islands of Imbros and Samothrace come up out of the sea with the appearance of mountain tops seen above the clouds on a sunny morning; and one even fancies that one can descry Mount Athos on the Greek mainland in Europe, a hundred miles away. The Dardanelles, which split this scene in two, dividing Asia from Europe, are no more than a river at your feet.
On a fine day, when there is no movement on the surface of the water, all this is presented to the eye with the clear finite outlines and the very bright colours of a relief map modelled in clay. Every inlet and bay, every island, is exactly defined, and the ships in the sea below float like toys in a pond. From this point too the Gallipoli Peninsula is laid out before you with the intimate detail of a reef uncovered by the tide, and you can see as far as the extreme tip at Cape Helles where the cliffs fell sharply downward, their contours still visible beneath the water, into the unbelievable blue of the Ægean. It is not the flat pattern one sees from an aeroplane: Chunuk Bair is only 850 feet high, and therefore you yourself are part of the scene, slightly above it and seeing all, but still attached.
This illusion of nearness, this compression not only of space but of time, is very much helped by the fact that, through the centuries, hardly anything has been done to change the landscape. There are no new towns or highroads, no advertisements or tourist haunts, and this rocky soil can support only a light crop of wheat and olives, a few flocks of sheep and goats. Very probably this same coarse scrub covered the broken ground when Xerxes crossed the Hellespont below Chunuk Bair, and although since the siege of Troy the Scamander may have changed its windings and its name (it is now called the Mendere), it still meanders down to its ancient mouth at Kum Kale on the Asiatic side.
From our perch on Chunuk Bair the Hellespont—the Dardanelles—does not appear to be a part of the sea at all: it looks more like a stream running through a valley, an estuary scarcely wider than the Thames at Gravesend. In the course of an afternoon one might take a motor boat from one end to the other, for the distance is just over forty miles. The mouth at Cape Helles in the Mediterranean is 4,000 yards wide, but then the banks on either side open out to a distance of four and a half miles until they gradually close in again at the Narrows, 14 miles upstream. Here the passage is only 1600 yards across. Abov
e the Narrows it again opens out to an average width of four miles until the Sea of Marmara is reached just above the town of Gallipoli.
There is no tide, but the Black Sea rivers and the melting snows create a four to five knot current, which at all times of the year sweeps down through the Dardanelles to the Mediterranean. In a severe winter this current can be blocked with great chunks of floating ice. The depth of the water is easily enough to accommodate any ship afloat.
Although there is no point in the whole forty miles where a hostile vessel cannot be reached by direct or even point-blank fire from either shore, the key to the whole military position is, of course, the Narrows. It was just upstream from this point that Xerxes built the bridge of boats on which his army crossed into Europe, and here too Leander is supposed to have swum by night from Abydos to meet Hero in Sestos, on the European shore.3
Two ancient fortresses, one a square crenellated building in the town of Chanak on the Asiatic side, and the other an odd heart-shaped structure tilted towards the sea at Kilid Bahr on the opposite bank, stand guard over the Narrows, and it was here that the Turks established their main defences at the outbreak of war. These consisted of eleven forts with 72 guns, some of them new, a series of torpedo tubes designed to fire on vessels coming upstream, a minefield and, later on, a net of wire mesh to block submarines. They had in addition other heavier guns in forts at Kum Kale and Sedd-el-Bahr at the mouth of the straits, and various intermediate defences further upstream. After the first Allied bombardment of November 1914, the Germans made certain additions to this armament—notably eight 6-inch howitzer batteries which could change position fairly rapidly, and the number of searchlights was increased to eight. Nine lines of mines were laid in the vicinity of the Narrows. Along the whole length of the straits there were in all something like 100 guns.
These defences, however, were less formidable than they sound, since barely a score of the guns were of modern design, and ammunition was in short supply. Two divisions of infantry—one in the Gallipoli Peninsula and the other on the Asiatic side—were responsible for holding all the ground from the Gulf of Saros to the Asiatic coast opposite Tenedos in the event of the Allies making a landing.
The fleet which the Allies assembled to attack these obstacles was the greatest concentration of naval strength which had ever been seen in the Mediterranean. Apart from the cruisers, destroyers, minesweepers and lesser craft, the British had contributed fourteen battleships, two semi-dreadnoughts, the Lord Nelson and the Agamemnon, the battle-cruiser Inflexible and the newly completed Queen Elizabeth. The French squadron, under Admiral Guépratte, consisted of four battleships and their auxiliaries.
Although most of these battleships had become semi-obsolete their 12-inch guns were, of course, immensely superior to anything the Turks had on shore, and the Queen Elizabeth with her 15-inch guns was a more formidable opponent still. It was quite possible for the Fleet to fire on the forts at the mouth of the Dardanelles without ever coming into the range of the Turkish batteries. The only question was just how accurate this long range fire was going to be: how many forts would be knocked out before the Allied vessels closed in, as it were, for the kill?
Admiral Carden, flying his flag in the Queen Elizabeth, deployed his force in three divisions:
Inflexible
Vengeance
Suffren
Agamemnon
Albion
Bouvet
Queen Elizabeth
Cornwallis
Charlemagne
Irresistible
Gaulois
Triumph
The attack itself was planned in three parts: a deliberate long-range bombardment followed by a medium-range bombardment, and finally an overwhelming fire at very close range. Under the cover of this attack minesweepers were to clear the channel up to the entrance of the straits. For the moment, the rest of the Fleet which was not engaged on diversionary missions was held in reserve.
At 9.51 a.m. on February 19 (which happened to be the 108th anniversary of Duckworth’s exploit), the assault began. A slow bombardment continued all morning, and at 2 p.m. Carden decided to close to six thousand yards. Up to this time, none of the Turkish guns had replied, but at 4.45 p.m. the Vengeance, the Cornwallis and the Suffren went closer still and drew the fire of two of the smaller forts. The other batteries were enveloped in dust and smoke and appeared to be deserted. By now, however, the light was failing, and Carden sounded the general recall. Vice-Admiral de Robeck in the Vengeance asked for permission to continue the attack, but this was refused as the ships were now silhouetted against the setting sun.
The results of this short winter day were not entirely satisfactory. It was observed that the firing was not very accurate so long as the ships were moving, and only 139 12-inch shells had been used. To be really effective it was evident that the Fleet would have to go in much closer and engage the individual Turkish guns one by one with direct fire.
There was, however, no immediate opportunity of putting these tactics to the test, because the weather broke that night, and rough seas continued for the next five days. Bitterly cold sleet and snow flew in the wind. Aware of the impatience at the Admiralty in London, and a little troubled by it, Carden sent off a message which Roger Keyes, his chief-of-staff, had drafted for him: ‘I do not intend to commence in bad weather leaving result undecided as from experience on first day I am convinced given favourable weather conditions that the reduction of the forts at the entrance can be completed in one day.’
It was almost true. When the storm quietened on February 25 Vice-Admiral de Robeck in the Vengeance led the attack right up to the mouth of the straits, and the Turkish and German gunners, unable to keep up the unequal struggle any longer, withdrew to the north. During the next few days, through intermittent gales, parties of marines and bluejackets were put on shore, and they roamed at will across the Trojan plain and the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula, blowing up the abandoned guns, smashing the searchlights and wrecking the enemy emplacements. There were one or two skirmishes with the Turkish rearguard, but for the most part the countryside around Cape Helles and Kum Kale was deserted. The minesweepers were having some difficulty in making headway against the current, but they penetrated for a distance of six miles into the straits without finding any mines, and although the warships were repeatedly hit by the mobile guns on shore no vessel was lost or even seriously damaged. The casualties were trifling. On March 2 Admiral Carden sent a message to London saying that, given fine weather, he hoped to get through to Constantinople in about fourteen days.
This news was received with elation at the Admiralty, and in the War Council. All earlier hesitations vanished; now everyone wanted to be associated with the adventure, and Lord Fisher even spoke of going out to the Dardanelles himself to take command of the next stage of the operations: the assault on the main enemy forts at the Narrows. In Chicago the price of grain fell sharply in expectation that, on the arrival of the Allied fleet in Constantinople, Russia would soon resume the export of her wheat.
But now difficulties appeared. The Turkish soldiers on shore were beginning to recover their confidence, for they returned to Kum Kale and Cape Helles and drove off the British landing parties with heavy rifle fire. At the same time the Turks had much more success against the Fleet with their howitzers and small mobile guns; they lay low until each bombardment from the Fleet was over and then, emerging from their emplacements, moved to other hidden positions in the scrub; and so it often happened that the batteries which the British thought they had silenced in the morning had to be dealt with all over again in the afternoon. This hardly affected the battleships, but it was a serious matter for the unarmed minesweepers, especially at night in the narrow waters below Chanak where they were instantly picked up by searchlights and exposed to a harassing fire.
None of these things amounted to a definite reverse, but by March 8, when the weather worsened again, it was evident that the first impetus of the attack had spent itse
lf. It was an exasperating position for the Admirals: they were being held up, not by the strength of the enemy, but by his elusiveness. The minesweepers could not go forward until the guns were silenced, and the battleships could not get near enough to silence the guns until the mines were out of the way. The Fleet’s seaplanes with their new wireless equipment might have solved the problem for the naval gunners by acting as spotters, but each day the sea proved either too rough or too smooth for the machines to take off. In this dilemma Carden began to hesitate and delay.
Roger Keyes, who was constantly up at the front of the attack, was convinced that it was all the fault of the civilian crews of the minesweepers who had been recruited from the North Sea fishing ports of England. Their officers told him that the men ‘recognized sweeping risks and did not mind being blown up, but they hated the gunfire, and pointed out that they were not supposed to sweep under fire, they had not joined for that’.
Well then, Keyes suggested, let us call for volunteers from the regular Navy, and in the meantime offer the civilian crews a bonus if they will go in again tonight. This was on March 10, and as soon as he had got the Admiral’s rather reluctant consent, Keyes himself went in with the flotilla under the cover of darkness. Five brilliant searchlights burst out at them directly they entered the straits, and the battleship Canopus, following behind, opened fire.
‘We were fired at from all directions,’ Keyes says. ‘One saw stabs of light in the hills and in the direction of the 6-inch battery covering the minefields on both sides of the straits, followed by the whine of little shells, the bursting of shrapnel, and the scream of heavy projectiles which threw up fountains of water. It was a pretty sight. The fire was very wild, and the Canopus was not hit, but for all the good we did towards dowsing the searchlights we might just as well have been firing at the moon.’
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