Phillip Schuler

Home > Other > Phillip Schuler > Page 11
Phillip Schuler Page 11

by Mark Baker


  In preparation for the August offensive, Kitchener had sent Hamilton three divisions of his citizen New Army formed as the IX Corps—the 10th (Irish) Division, the 11th (Northern) Division and the 13th (Western) Division. The generals given command of the three divisions all had serious problems with their CVs. Frederick Shaw of the 13th was nudging 20 stone, Frederick Hammersley of the 11th was recovering from a nervous breakdown two years earlier, and Sir Bryan Mahon of the 10th was a lieutenant general—one ‘star’ too many to be commanding a mere division and a couple of stars short of top leadership material in the view of Hamilton who damned him with faint praise as ‘good up to a point’. But the biggest problem was the question of who would lead the corps into the vital battle at Suvla, north of Anzac Cove. Hamilton got nowhere with Kitchener when he requested either Julian Byng or Henry Rawlinson, two experienced senior generals with command experience on the Western Front. That narrowed his options to two. It was an impossible choice. Sir John Ewart was a military bureaucrat who was also seriously overweight. Hamilton noted that he had ‘never approached troops’ for fifteen years and ‘would not last out here for one fortnight’.17 Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Stopford was something else.

  Freddy Stopford was 61 and in poor health. He had been in retirement for six years and had never commanded troops in war. Churchill dismissed him as a ‘placid, prudent, elderly English gentleman’. Stopford was better known as a teacher of military history than a maker of it. Even the king thought he was too old for Gallipoli. But he was senior on the Army List and, in late 1915, this still counted for more than competence. Historian Les Carlyon would write: ‘Frederick Stopford sailed for Gallipoli as a corps commander, not because he was a brilliant soldier, or because he was pushy, or because he knew the right people, or even because he wanted to go; he went because he was the only candidate left.’18 Hamilton’s misgivings about his new corps commander were soon vindicated—with devastating consequences.

  Opening the Suvla front was a key part of the August offensive. The shoreline of Suvla Bay is a broad, 3 kilometre-long crescent with rocky promontories at either end. Behind the beach, at the southern end, is a large salt lake, mostly dry in summer, that opens the way to a vast plain running to the foothills of the Sari Bair range and, further north, the Anafarta Hills. The troops were to advance inland between 3 and 7 kilometres to capture several small unoccupied hills and secure the northern approaches to Sari Bair and the highest peaks on the peninsula—and thereby stretch the Turkish forces to breaking point. It should have been relatively easy. A tiny force of just 1500 men, including Ottoman military police, led by a Bavarian cavalry officer, Major Wilhelm Willmer, was caught completely by surprise. Greatly outnumbered they should have been immediately overrun. Instead the invaders, once ashore at Suvla, lost the plot.

  The first casualty at Suvla Bay was the commander. Stopford sprained his knee on the morning of 6 August, the eve of the attack. A staff officer from Hamilton’s headquarters found him lying on a valise on the floor of his tent later that day. Stopford promised to do his best and hoped to be successful but then started rehearsing excuses for failure: he could not be expected to dislodge the enemy from their trenches until large numbers of howitzers were landed. When told that GHQ was sure there were no continuous trenches in the Suvla sector, Stopford continued to mutter about needing more guns. What he really needed was more water for the men who would be exposed to baking conditions with inadequate supplies all the next day and the next.

  When the first of his 20,000 troops got ashore after midnight, Stopford was sitting just off the coast aboard the sloop Jonquil without proper communication with his senior officers at the landing or with GHQ on Imbros, where Hamilton was pacing between his hut and the signals tent desperate for news. Sporadic gunfire suggested to those aboard the Jonquil that the first waves of men had got ashore with little resistance, but without communications with the shore that was just a guess. It was a hot night, Stopford’s knee was hurting and he’d had a long day. The crew brought mattresses up onto the deck and the general went to sleep.

  The morning revealed a scene of spreading chaos with no concerted mobilisation across the plain towards the hills. The three divisional commanders were issuing confusing and contradictory orders. As the sun rose, thousands of men stopped to rest. Others, increasingly desperate for water in the 32-degree heat, crowded the shoreline waiting for relief supplies from the ships. No one was taking charge, least of all Stopford who was still ensconced aboard his sloop. Later in the day several British units pushed inland, taking some of the high points. But they lost 1600 men and 100 officers—more than the Turkish force that faced them—before falling back.

  Colonel Hans Kannengiesser, commander of the Turkish 9th Division, could not believe what he was seeing as he surveyed the scene from the heights late in the afternoon: ‘Suvla Bay was full of ships. We counted ten transports, six warships, and seven hospital ships. On land we saw a confused mass of troops like a disturbed ant heap. Nowhere was there fighting in progress.’19 Major Willmer’s men had fought magnificently but the two main divisions being sent down to reinforce them from Bulair at the neck of the peninsula were still many hours march away.

  The second day was a replica of the inertia of the first before an exasperated General Hamilton finally reached Suvla, having been delayed for hours on Imbros by transport problems. Dispensing with Stopford, who had been absurdly trumpeting the success of his men in simply making it ashore, Hamilton went straight to General Hammersley and directed him to order as many men as possible to advance immediately. He said they must reach the crestline below the vital objective of Tekke Tepe ridge and dig themselves in that night. It was 6.30 p.m. on 8 August, more than 40 hours since the first brigades had landed at Suvla. The attacks on the Nek, Pope’s Hill and Quinn’s Post had all failed. Now Suvla, which should have been a simpler task, was unravelling and with it the entire August offensive. Winston Churchill would later write that ‘the long and varied annals of the British Army contain no more heart-breaking episode than Suvla Bay’.20

  As Stopford and his divisional commanders prevaricated, a young Turkish colonel was about to seize the moment—and his place in history. Mustafa Kemal, whose division faced the northern Anzac front, had accurately predicted that the Allies would mount a fresh attack from the direction of Suvla. But his warning, just days before the attack, had been dismissed by his immediate superior. Now Kemal was to play a crucial part in dealing with a mistake he believed had exposed his country to ‘very great danger’. Von Sanders had been assured that the two divisions from Bulair would reach Suvla late on 7 August. When they arrived the next day their commanding officer, Ahmed Fevzi Bey, said they were too tired and hungry from the march to attack before sunset and their officers needed time to familiarise themselves with the terrain. Von Sanders did what Hamilton should have done with his dilatory generals at Suvla: Fevzi was sacked on the spot and Kemal was promoted to command the entire sector facing Suvla and the northern flank of Anzac with six divisions under his control.

  Early the next morning, 9 August, as the British troops finally mobilised by Hamilton moved toward the crest of Tekke Tepe, Kemal’s forces swept down on them with a barrage of artillery and machine-gun fire so intense that the scrub caught fire, incinerating many of the British troops as they turned in panic and fled back down to the middle of the plain. Many more were taken prisoner and a large number of machine guns were captured by the Turks. The British would regroup by mid-morning but their chance to storm the heights had been lost and with it any real prospect of a breakout at Suvla.

  Kemal, who had not slept for three nights and was suffering from malaria, rode on horseback through the heat of the day and, after visiting von Sanders at his headquarters on the way, reached Chunuk Bair at sunset. After several waves of intense fighting, notably involving New Zealanders and Gurkhas, Allied troops had captured the summit of Chunuk Bair, one of the three highest points in the range. Kemal ordered prepara
tions for a counterattack at 4.30 the next morning to clear the heights—ignoring protests that the men were exhausted after fighting for three days with little sleep, food or water. Kemal scented victory: ‘For four months, I had lived three hundred metres away from the firing line, breathing the fetid smell of corpses. Having left in dungeon-like darkness, at 11 o’clock that night, I was able to breathe the clean air for the first time.’21

  Two regiments were inserted into the forward Turkish trenches during the night. A few minutes before the attack was launched, according to Turkish folklore, Kemal crawled out into no-man’s land. ‘Don’t hurry, let me go first,’ he whispered to his men. ‘Wait until you see me raise my whip and then all rush forward together.’ And they did, sweeping the Allies from the trenches and driving them back down the slopes. Thousands of Turkish soldiers were cut down by rifle fire and naval artillery shells during the battle, but the Sari Bair range was back under Turkish control and would remain so for the rest of the Gallipoli campaign.

  The battles that were the unmaking of Ian Hamilton would be the making of Mustafa Kemal—and the modern Turkish state. In 1923 Ataturk—‘The Father of the Turks’, as the hero of Gallipoli was now venerated—would become the founder and first president of the Turkish republic and begin to create from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire a modern secular state.

  9

  Scoop

  Phillip Schuler might have arrived at the Dardanelles to a warm and generous welcome from Sir Ian Hamilton, but trouble was brewing in the correspondents’ camp. There was a black sheep among the small flock of British and Anzac correspondents and he would become a significant player in the series of events that ultimately would destroy the general’s military career.

  Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett was a figure straight from the pages of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, the peerless satire on the antics of Fleet Street in the early twentieth century. He was an inveterate gambler, a voracious womaniser, a high society gadfly and a serial bankrupt. Charles Bean described him as ‘fast and flashy’. But Ashmead-Bartlett also had a fine and sometimes ferocious pen and the rat cunning of the best of his craft down the ages, not least with the creative use of his publishers’ expense accounts.

  Once the decision to invade Turkey was taken, Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, gave initial permission ‘for the selection of three gentleman, representing the whole of the press’1 to cover the campaign—one each for the London and British provincial newspapers, and another for the dominions: the job that fell to Charles Bean for Australia. When Harry Lawson of the Daily Telegraph proposed Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett as London’s man, his fellow proprietors readily agreed. At 35, Ashmead-Bartlett was already a veteran war correspondent. He had covered a string of conflicts across North Africa and the Balkans over the previous decade, building a formidable reputation as a news breaker and a stylish writer.

  The eldest son of a well-connected Conservative MP, Sir Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett—who won notoriety for his affair with Blanche Hozier, Winston Churchill’s later mother-in-law—the younger Ashmead-Bartlett had a precocious intelligence that gave rein to a swaggering self-assurance. Fellow correspondent Henry Nevinson would observe: ‘Association from boyhood with the rich and great had given him a proud self-confidence and a self-centred aspect of the world, but his scornful and often antagonising wit made him a difficult, though attractive, companion in a camp.’2 Most of all, Ashmead-Bartlett carried an unshakeable conviction that he knew more about the conduct of war—and particularly the unfolding Dardanelles campaign—than anyone in uniform and certainly anyone in the War Office and the Cabinet.

  Sir Ian Hamilton had been with Phillip Schuler in Egypt when the first news of Ashmead-Bartlett’s appointment arrived. ‘It so happened he was walking with me when I received and read aloud a cable telling me that a certain Mr Ashmead-Bartlett had been appointed to represent the whole of the London Press with the Expeditionary Force,’ Hamilton wrote later, noting that he had uttered ‘a bad word’ in response. ‘Phillip Schuler was greatly amused at the way I took this piece of news, and afterwards, when events had justified my ill-humour, he often reminded me of my expression of annoyance at the time of the first announcement.’3

  The antipathy between the general and the pressman may have begun during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. Four decades before Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had employed the same opening gambit with a surprise attack on the Russian Fleet at Port Arthur. It was the first war between an Asian and a European power and Sir Ian Hamilton had been sent as an official British observer with the Japanese forces. Ashmead-Bartlett rushed to join the fray with a journalistic fervour bordering on blood lust: ‘I scented the battle from afar, longed to take part in all the stirring events, and visions of great fights, cavalry charges, blood and slaughter arose within me.’4

  Hamilton the elegant writer bowed to Ashmead-Bartlett’s talent with words. ‘He handles his pen like an artist,’ Hamilton conceded in a letter later in the year complaining about the correspondent to Harry Lawson, proprietor of the Daily Telegraph. ‘He was writing first-class stuff, and one is always prepared to make allowances for the artistic temperament.’5 But the general would make no allowances for the journalist’s swagger and his presumed expertise on all matters of military strategy and tactics.

  As Henry Nevinson wrote of his Fleet Street colleague: ‘He might have made a good officer if he had been always in command, but being clever beyond question, he had a way of loudly criticising campaigns with an assurance that sometimes secured excessive respect from all but the commander-in-chief.’6

  Ashmead-Bartlett’s presumption later to speak in the corridors of power in London on behalf of the voiceless officer class at Gallipoli is challenged by an episode which novelist and correspondent Compton Mackenzie recounts with relish in his memoirs. One day, while Mackenzie was heading towards the headquarters of the 8th Army Corps at Cape Helles to have some dispatches cleared by the censor, he was startled by a burst of enemy shellfire:

  I was not in a mood to be frightened by it; it was only when I reached General Hunter-Weston’s camp that I began to feel some qualms. There was not a living creature in sight. Evidently a bombardment by the infernal Asiatic gun was expected. I waited, embarrassed by the silence and emptiness and wondering with a perceptibly increasing woolliness about the knees which way to turn for cover. Just as I was preparing to dive into the first hole I could find and escape from those big shells, the head of Carter, Hunter-Bunter’s ADC, rose slowly and cautiously from the ground almost at my feet. Save that his countenance was as always cheerful and ruddy he might have been a figure from Dante’s Inferno. ‘Oh, it’s you Mackenzie,’ he exclaimed. ‘We thought it was Ashmead-Bartlett and we didn’t want to ask him to lunch.’ He shouted jovially, and from other dugouts emerged the relieved faces of the Army Corps Staff.7

  Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett had anticipated the landings at Gallipoli with the enthusiasm—and sophistication—of an excited schoolboy. Aboard HMS London on 23 April, he watched the convoy of ships steam out of Mudros Bay carrying the troops of the British 29th Division who were to land at Cape Helles, on the southern tip of the peninsula. The coming struggle, he wrote, would be ‘the last and greatest of the Crusades which could decide whether the Turk could be driven out of Europe forever, or else leave the Crescent more triumphant than it had been since the capture of Constantinople by Mohammed the Second in 1482’.8 Although indeed there was an air of great optimism for the coming battle, no one in authority shared such an absurd ambition as the repudiation of the Turkish nation or saw the contest in terms of religious or racial supremacy. The central objective simply was to knock the Ottomans out of the war, taking pressure off the Russians fighting on Germany’s eastern front and opening the way to attack Austria from below.

  Ashmead-Bartlett’s penchant for hyperbole and exaggeration was in full flight in the despatch that would make him famous in Australia—and set the tone for generations of eulogising about the courage and t
enacity of the first ‘Diggers’. His report of the 25 April landings—splashed across the front pages of Australian newspapers on the morning of 8 May—was the first full account of the attack and the first of many more to describe it in terms of exemplary heroism and dash. It was also too good to be true. The Australians had unquestionably fought hard and with great courage, but the overwrought depiction of their deeds in Ashmead-Bartlett’s journalistic beat-up would ultimately diminish that achievement by opening it to questioning. He described ‘a race of athletes’ storming ashore and rushing the enemy’s trenches with empty magazines and just the ‘cold steel’ of their bayonets to instant triumph: ‘It was over in a minute. The Turks in the first trench either were bayoneted or ran away, and the Maxim was captured.’9 He wrote absurdly of wounded men later cheering as they were towed away from the shores:

  Though many were shot almost to bits, without hope of recovery, their cheers resounded. Throughout the night you could see in the midst of the mass of suffering humanity, arms waving in greetings to the crews of the warships. They were happy because they knew they had been tried for the first time and had been found not wanting . . . These raw colonial troops in these desperate hours proved worthy to fight side by side with the heroes of Mons, the Aisne, Ypres, and Neuve Chapelle.10

  His account of the first 24 hours fighting at Anzac Cove would conclude with its most serious misrepresentation of the grim reality on the battlefield—and its greatest deception of Australian newspaper readers who, after days of fearing the worst about the fate of their soldiers, were now rejoicing in a victorious account beyond their wildest hopes. He described a Turkish counterattack in the early hours of the morning of 26 April that was met by a ferocious two-hour barrage from the warships arrayed along the coast:

 

‹ Prev