by Mark Baker
During his time on the peninsula, Hankey was reunited with his cousin, Major Carew Reynell, of the Australian 9th Light Horse, who would prove a valuable guide through the Anzac front lines. The eldest son of a famous wine-making family in South Australia, Reynell was a tough and popular officer with a reputation for leading his men from the front. He had a fine fighting pedigree. His great-uncle, Lieutenant General Thomas Reynell, had commanded the 71st Regiment at Waterloo. After Carew Reynell’s commanding officer was killed during the Battle of the Nek, on 7 August, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and took charge of the regiment. Three weeks later he too was killed, on the edge of a Turkish trench after leading a charge across no-man’s land at Hill 60.
Hankey arrived back in London the following day with an abiding respect for the quality and tenacity of the Australian troops, the ground they had gained in early August and their ability to at least hold their positions through the winter. He also brought home a renewed respect for what Sir Ian Hamilton had achieved, against the odds—and a scathing assessment of General Stopford’s leadership at Suvla Bay, where Hankey had gone ashore to see soldiers resting by the shore rather than advancing to the hills as ordered:
Anzac has done splendidly. It has trebled its area, and is hanging on only just below the ridge, which I think it will get as soon as we have some howitzers in suitable positions . . . Was I wrong when I said the Australian troops were the finest in the world? The only weak point is this wretched inert corps at Suvla.10
In his report, Hankey defended Hamilton against the rising chorus of accusations that his weak leadership was a key factor in the failure at Suvla. He told Asquith that the criticism of Hamilton for remaining at his headquarters during the early stages of the offensive—which had three broad fronts—was unwarranted. ‘Sir Ian was in charge of a great concerted operation extending over Helles, Anzac and Suvla,’ Hankey argued. ‘He could not tell beforehand where the crisis would arise, or where his reserves would be wanted.’ At Suvla he would have had to remain on a ship where communications with the army could not be guaranteed; Helles and Anzac were ‘equally impossible for GHQ’. Imbros was ‘the least inconvenient place’ to direct operations.
Hankey might have saved his breath. No one seemed to be listening. On September 28 Herbert Asquith bowed to the relentless political pressure and ordered that the Murdoch letter be printed as a secret briefing paper and circulated to the cabinet. While his intention was to defuse the situation by precipitating a full debate, the move also gave formal standing to Murdoch’s claims. The writing, for Sir Ian Hamilton, now was not such on the wall as on the duck-egg blue stationery of the Committee for Imperial Defence.
But at his headquarters in the eastern Mediterranean, Hamilton remained unaware of how rapidly the political tide was turning against him. He had still not been briefed about the contents of the Murdoch letter by the men to whom he owed allegiance and who, in turn, owed him at least a heads-up. That same day Hamilton received a cable from Kitchener saying he supported holding on at Suvla. ‘He agrees in fact that to draw in our horns would merely free six Turkish divisions to attack us elsewhere,’ Hamilton noted in his diary.
It was not until 4 October that Kitchener finally briefed Hamilton that trouble was brewing and even then he failed to mention the Murdoch letter and its direct attacks on Hamilton’s leadership. The cable from the Secretary of State for War spoke of ‘unofficial reports’ criticising the work of the headquarters staff and accusing them of being out of touch with the troops—and noted that the War Office ‘also doubt whether their present methods are quite satisfactory’. Kitchener then proposed a sacrificial lamb—Hamilton’s unpopular chief of staff, Major General Sir Walter Braithwaite. Hamilton—as loyal to those below him as to those above—would have none of it. Still attributing the noblest motives to Kitchener and unaware that his great mentor in fact was already turning against the Dardanelles campaign, Hamilton naively thought that ‘Old K.’ was shrewdly trying to buy time to mount a final, successful thrust against the Turks with the help of fresh French divisions. But the sacking of Braithwaite could not be part of that strategy, as he wrote in his diary:
The Turks are in the depths. [General Maurice] Sarrail with his six divisions behind him could open the narrows in no time. I see the plan. K. must have a splendid sacrifice but by the Lord they shan’t have the man who stood by me like a rock during those first ghastly ten days.
Two days later the Murdoch letter was debated at a meeting of the Dardanelles Committee. Chairman Sir Edward Carson began the meeting by accusing Kitchener of failing to fully brief them about the Suvla debacle. Kitchener’s response was to offer his own sacrifical lamb—Hamilton. He told the committee that he had ordered a number of generals to brief him on the conduct of the operations at Suvla and they had come back to him with ‘considerable criticism of Hamilton’s leadership’.11 In fact, the only general openly attacking Hamilton’s leadership was Sir Frederick Stopford, the man who was deservedly sacked by Hamilton for his incompetence at Suvla and who was now back in London and bent on settling the score. Stopford was a totally discredited witness for the prosecution, as Kitchener well knew. Lloyd George was quick to reinforce the Kitchener line, telling the committee he also had heard criticisms of Hamilton’s leadership. When the meeting turned to the first agenda item—the Murdoch letter—Asquith criticised it as ‘rather a bitter document’ and pointed out that it was ‘conspicuous for the omission of any praise for anyone and anything at the Dardanelles’. The prime minister also reinforced Colonel Hankey’s assessment that the letter was full of errors and accusations that Murdoch was unable to substantiate. But the anti-Dardanelles faction was unwavering. Both Lloyd George and Andrew Bonar Law, the colonial secretary, argued strongly that stripped of its journalese and any inaccuracies, the letter was a credible account of how the Dardanelles campaign had failed. The committee did not take a formal decision on the future of the operation and the commander-in-chief, but the momentum was heading inexorably in that direction.
It was not until 12 October that Hamilton finally received a copy of Murdoch’s letter—a document that, by then, had been seen by dozens of his supposed friends, as well as those out for his scalp, and had been debated at the highest levels of the government. It was sent by the War Office’s director of military operations and intelligence, Major General Sir Charles Callwell. A covering note from Callwell claimed improbably that Kitchener ‘has not had time to read it yet’ but thought Hamilton should have a chance of defending himself against the allegations. The offer, like Kitchener’s supposed friendship, was hollow; the time for explanations and self-defence had long passed. Four days later Hamilton was awoken late at night in his tent to receive a cable marked ‘Secret and Personal’ from Kitchener, telling him that he must personally decipher the next message that arrived. When a staff member brought him the second cable and the code book the next morning, Hamilton had already ‘got K’s message pat in my dreams’. His command was over.
The War Council held last night decided that though the Government fully appreciate your work and the gallant manner in which you personally have struggled to make the enterprise a success in the face of the terrible difficulties you have had to contend against, they, all the same, wish to make a change in command which will give them an opportunity of seeing you.12
Within 24 hours, Hamilton was on his way back to London. After a round of melancholy farewells with the senior army and naval commanders, and his staff, the general boarded HMS Chatham, the light cruiser assigned to take him home. Down in his cabin, Hamilton heard the anchor raised and ‘wondered whether I could stand the strain of seeing Imbros, Kephalos, the camp, fade into the region of dreams’ when a message came from the captain that Admiral de Robeck requested his company on the quarter deck. Hamilton arrived to see the Chatham steering a corkscrew course threading in and out among the warships at anchor in the harbour: ‘Each as we passed manned ship and sent us on our way with the cheers of brav
e men ringing in our ears.’ It was a moving farewell to a commander for whom, Keith Murdoch had confidently told his prime minister, the officers and men at Gallipoli had ‘nothing but contempt’.
12
The Retreat
As to the failure, it can be attributed to the lack of men, the lack of reinforcement, the lack of munitions.1
Phillip Schuler
Phillip Schuler was back in Egypt when the news of Ian Hamilton’s sacking reached him. He had met Keith Murdoch during his brief visit to the Dardanelles, but he would not discover until months later the full extent of the intrigues by his former Age colleague and Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. When he did, Schuler was appalled. Like Hamilton, he firmly believed, despite the failure of the August offensive, that victory had been within the grasp of the Allied troops and that it could still be achieved provided the forces were given what they had been denied from the outset: enough men and enough munitions. And he remained unwavering in his belief that Hamilton was the best man for the job and that the attacks on the general’s leadership were unwarranted and exaggerated. He was furious that Murdoch, despite spending so little time at Gallipoli, had been willing to mount such a malicious and damaging assault on the reputation of the man Schuler admired as a gallant and generous commander.
Schuler had left Imbros for the last time in the first days of September. Charles Bean had said farewell to him and Charles Smith of The Argus from his dugout at Anzac Cove on 20 August. Smith was reassigned by The Argus to cover the fighting in the Balkans before he returned to Melbourne in 1916 to become the paper’s literary editor. It is believed that the permits for both men to report from Gallipoli were revoked under pressure from the Australian government, despite Hamilton’s willingness for them to stay on. In November, William Hughes’s government formally requested the British authorities to prohibit any further access to the fighting by unofficial correspondents as they ‘result in value of Government press service being discounted’.2 Ian Hamilton might have been a friend of journalism, but Billy Hughes certainly wasn’t.
Schuler spent time with the navy, including reporting on submarine operations, before returning to Cairo to be reunited with Nelly Rabinovitch and her girls at the end of September. With winter approaching, the fighting at Gallipoli had settled into a pattern of intermittent skirmishing. In one of his final despatches, datelined ‘Eastern Mediterranean, 26th September’, Schuler gave Age readers the first suggestion that the days of the Gallipoli campaign might be numbered for the Australian troops—not because of the abject failure of the August offensive, but because the unfolding crisis in the Balkans might trigger a full-scale redeployment from the Dardanelles. Like Hamilton, Schuler remained optimistic that another ‘great shove’ would see a breakthrough at Gallipoli:
As far as one can judge, the Australian army stands committed to a winter campaign. Yet so delicate is the whole Balkan situation that I hesitate to definitely assert that Christmas will find the Australians at Anzac. There seems excellent ground for the belief that another great shove forward will be undertaken before winter finally sets in. One hopes that two, instead of one, Australian divisions will take part. The landing of another 10,000 men on the peninsula would just about clinch matters. No doubt the Turks are getting thoroughly sick of the campaign, and are experiencing great shortages of big gun ammunition, to say nothing of the difficult transport from Constantinople, which is daily becoming more difficult.3
The dispatch did not appear in The Age until 26 October 1915. By then Ian Hamilton was already back in London and his successor was busy preparing not for a big shove but to shove off. With his ability to report the campaign first-hand once more severely curtailed, Schuler resolved to head home to Melbourne. He had been away for a year and the work had been both exhilarating and exhausting. He needed a break but he also had work to do: a book to be written that would be the first and one of the best about the Gallipoli campaign, and an archive of more than 2000 photographs—some of them the most dramatic to be recorded at Anzac Cove—to be delivered. Promising Nelly that he would be back, Schuler set sail for Melbourne and a Christmas reunion with his family. By then, the great military adventure at Gallipoli was all but over.
Six days before he was relieved of his command on 11 October, Hamilton had met with Admiral John de Robeck who had received a message from the admiralty asking how many extra troops would be needed to bring up to strength the units deployed at Gallipoli. Hamilton’s briefing would reveal the parlous state of his army. ‘My force as a whole is near as may be to half strength. Half of that half are sick men,’ the general, himself suffering greatly from dysentery, wrote in his diary. Of the 100,000 soldiers left on Gallipoli, 50,000 were unfit to fight. The problem was compounded by severe shortages of ammunition that had reduced the British guns to a ration of just two shells per day. As the weather worsened the problems of sickness were exacerbated by the fact that no winter clothing had arrived. Yet Hamilton’s spirits were revived by the possibility that the powers in London might be contemplating sending the reinforcements he had pleaded for: ‘If the units were up to strength there would be 200,000 men on the Peninsula as well as excitement and movement which would greatly reduce the disease.’ But by the end of that day, the War Cabinet’s true intentions were laid bare. A brief cable from Kitchener asked Hamilton to estimate the probable losses to his remaining forces ‘if the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula was decided on and carried out’.4
Hamilton was indignant and defiant, at least privately. He believed Kitchener shared his conviction that a retreat from Gallipoli would be a ‘smashing blow’ to Britain’s military prestige—not least across its Indian empire—and would imperil the nation’s hold on Egypt. Kitchener said as much when he advised Hamilton that, when responding to his cable, the general did not need to consider ‘the possible future danger to the Empire’ that an evacuation might cause. Hamilton vented his spleen in his diary entry that night:
If they do this they make the Dardanelles into the bloodiest tragedy of the world! Even if we were to escape without a scratch, they would stamp our enterprise as the bloodiest of all tragedies! K. [Kitchener] has always sworn by all his Gods he would have no hand in it. I won’t touch it, and I think he knew that and calculated on that when he cabled. Anyway, let K., cat or Cabinet leap where they will, I must sleep on my answer, but that answer will be NO!5
In the morning, Hamilton’s formal response was dutifully measured, but still the answer was no. He was sure an evacuation would be bloody. His initial thinking was that between 35 and 45 per cent of his force would be lost as the Turks swept down from the hills in pursuit of the retreating army. His senior staff officers were even more pessimistic. They predicted 50 per cent losses, and that was the figure Hamilton took back to Kitchener, also highlighting the potential loss of guns, stores, railway plant and horses. ‘We might have a veritable catastrophe,’ he concluded. Hamilton’s advice would inevitably have been pitched to discourage a decision to evacuate, as he remained convinced that the Turks could be beaten. But that advice was not heeded. Soon it would be proved spectacularly wrong.
As Hamilton left the Dardanelles, the political campaign in favour of evacuation gathered momentum. His replacement, General Sir Charles Munro, would help make it unstoppable. A tough commander who had led the British 2nd Division into Flanders in August 1914 and distinguished himself in the First Battle of Ypres, Munro was described by Maurice Hankey as ‘rather a sound old bird . . . but not very quick’. At Gallipoli, he swooped like a hawk. After arriving at Imbros, Munro toured Anzac, Helles and Suvla in a single day and immediately recommended evacuation to Kitchener. ‘He came, he saw, he capitulated,’ Winston Churchill would declare, after having warned Munro before he left London that a withdrawal from Gallipoli would be as great a disaster as Corunna, the bloody and humiliating British retreat during the Peninsular War.6 Munro had always believed the war effort should be concentrated on the Western Front. He shared Hamilton’s prediction of a huge
loss of men during the evacuation, but was convinced the position at Gallipoli was hopeless and that thousands of men would perish anyway in what became the most severe winter at the Dardanelles in 40 years.
Despite their new commander’s unequivocal recommendation, the cabinet continued to prevaricate. In early November, the great Kitchener was dispatched to Gallipoli as hastily as he had sent Ian Hamilton eight months earlier. At last, as he strode through the forward trenches and surveyed the Turkish positions, Kitchener saw for himself the magnitude of the task he had assigned his protégé. In a cable to Asquith, he conceded that the country was far more difficult than he had imagined and that the Turkish front lines were ‘natural fortresses which, if not taken by surprise at first could be held against very serious attack by larger forces than had been engaged’.7 In short, Hamilton’s initial orders had been impossibly difficult and the manpower and matériel supplied to the task had been woefully inadequate. What had been achieved against the odds, the field marshal declared, was ‘a most remarkable feat of arms’. A week later, after flirting briefly with the idea of a fresh landing at Ayas Bay in southern Turkey, Kitchener recommended the evacuation of Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay while temporarily holding on to the main British beach head at Cape Helles. The game was over.
Before the end, one man who had shared from the outset Ian Hamilton’s conviction that victory could be achieved with the right will—at the Dardanelles and in London—launched a final effort to turn the defeatist tide. Roger Keyes began his naval career as a junior officer aboard a corvette running slavery suppression operations out of Zanzibar and ended it as Admiral of Fleet and a baronet. In 1915 he was a headstrong commodore who punched well above his weight in the gold-braided ranks of generals and admirals. And he had a singular confidence in the leadership of Ian Hamilton whom, he would later say, ‘had probably seen more of modern warfare and desperate fighting than any living soldier, prior to the Great War’.8 When Keyes’s friend and commanding officer, Admiral John de Robeck, had abandoned the attempt to force The Narrows after the first ill-fated battle in April, the commodore had fought hard but in vain to persuade him to try again. As the political momentum built towards a full evacuation, Keyes rushed to London in late October to try to persuade the admiralty that it was still possible for the navy to save the day.