by Mark Baker
19
Fortune’s Wheel
A very small turn of Fortune’s wheel would have steered it through to success.
Cecil Aspinall-Oglander1
It would be more than two years after Sir Ian Hamilton departed Gallipoli—with the summary judgements of Keith Murdoch and Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett hanging over his distinguished career—before the official verdict on his conduct of the Dardanelles campaign was delivered.
An initial report by the Dardanelles Commission was published in March 1917. It criticised the failure of the navy to seek adequate advice about the viability of a purely naval attack on the Dardanelles forts in March 1915. It found delays in launching that attack had given the Turks too much warning and time to strengthen their defences. The report condemned the lack of support from London, where the War Council held no meetings between 19 March and 14 May 1915—almost three weeks after the Gallipoli landings. And there was criticism, albeit cautious, of Kitchener who ‘did not sufficiently avail himself of the services of his General Staff, with the result that more work was undertaken by him than was possible for one man to do, and confusion and want of efficiency resulted’.2
Commissioner Walter Roch MP, in a supplementary memorandum, sharpened the criticism of Kitchener, saying the Secretary of State for War had failed properly to embrace the Gallipoli expedition within the framework of Britain’s war planning in 1915. Roch also noted the fact that Hamilton had been ordered to leave at short notice for the Dardanelles ‘with no staff preparations and no preliminary scheme of operations of any kind’.3
Between January 1917 and the completion of hearings the following September, the commission focused on operational aspects of the campaign with 170 witnesses called over a total of 68 sitting days. The final report was completed on 4 December 1917. It was not made public until after the war but was circulated among senior officials. Hamilton’s hopes that he would be fully cleared of any misconduct or failures of leadership were dashed. But what criticisms there were of his actions were mild and heavily qualified with a recognition of what Hamilton had long argued: he was sent on an immensely complex mission at impossibly short notice and throughout the campaign was starved of the men and matériel necessary to ensure victory. Nowhere in the report was there support for the most damning accusations of Keith Murdoch: that Hamilton was a weak general who had lost the support of his officers and men, that he was reckless with the lives of his troops, that there were orders for stragglers to be shot, that men died of thirst because of his incompetent general staff. Etcetera. Etcetera.
The principal and most important conclusion of the commission was a collective rebuke for the government and the War Council: ‘When it was decided to undertake an important military expedition to the Gallipoli Peninsula, sufficient consideration was not given to the measures necessary to carry out such an expedition with success.’4 The report said the conditions for a military attack on the peninsula had not properly been studied and the difficulties of the operations, the strength of the Turkish defences, and the skills of the Turkish troops and the German officers leading them had all been underestimated. It was noted that all these facts had been reported to London by Hamilton and Admiral John de Robeck, the naval commander. The commissioners concluded that after the setbacks that followed the landings on 25 April 1915 proper consideration had not been given to the impact that a commitment to extended operations at Gallipoli would have on operations on the Western Front:
In fact those obligations made it impossible in May, June and July to supply the forces with the necessary drafts, gun ammunition, high explosives and other modern appliances of war. We are of the opinion that, with the resources then available, success in the Dardanelles, if possible, was only possible on condition that the Government concentrated their efforts upon the enterprise and limited their expenditure of men and material in the Western theatre of war. This condition was never fulfilled.
The report acknowledged that after the failure of the attacks that followed the first landing, Hamilton had called for just such a strategic review in a cable sent to London on 17 May. The cable was not considered by the War Council until 7 June. This meant a six-week delay in the sending of badly needed reinforcements. The commission was critical of the handling of the August offensive, and particularly the bungled operations at Suvla Bay. But it did not endorse Hamilton’s full criticisms of General Stopford, who had lobbied hard after his sacking to clear his name and to blacken Hamilton’s. The report said Stopford had been hampered by the fact that most of his troops, newly arrived at Gallipoli, had never been under fire and by ‘a want of determination and competence’ among his senior officers.
On Hamilton himself, the commissioners said it was inevitable that the capabilities of a commander in war were judged by the results achieved—even when he may be only partly responsible for failures. But there was no faulting Hamilton’s determination against very difficult odds:
We recognise Sir Ian Hamilton’s personal gallantry and energy, his sanguine disposition, and his determination to win at all costs. We also recognise that the task entrusted to him was one of extreme difficulty, the more so as the authorities at home at first misconceived the nature and duration of the operations, and afterwards were slow to realise that to drive the Turks out of their entrenchments and occupy the heights commanding the Straits was a formidable and hazardous enterprise which demanded a concentration of force and effort. It must be further borne in mind that Lord Kitchener, whom Sir Ian Hamilton appears to have regarded as a Commander-in-Chief rather than as a Secretary of State, pressed upon him the paramount importance, if it were by any means possible, of carrying out the task assigned to him. Though from time to time Sir Ian Hamilton represented the need for drafts, reinforcements, guns and munitions, which the Government found it impossible to supply, he was nevertheless always ready to renew the struggle with the resources at his disposal, and to the last was confident of success. For this it would be hard to blame him; but viewing the expedition in the light of events it would, in our opinion, have been well had he examined the situation as disclosed by the first landings in a more critical spirit, impartially weighed the probabilities of success and failure, having regard to the resources in men and material which could be placed at his disposal, and submitted to the Secretary of State for War a comprehensive statement of the arguments for and against a continuance of operations.
In essence, the report’s central criticism of Hamilton was that he didn’t stand up to Kitchener. This was as tall an order as the one given to Hamilton on the day he was peremptorily dispatched to the Dardanelles with brusque instructions from the field marshal to take Constantinople, break the deadlock on the Western Front and end the war early. In early 1915 nobody talked back to the god with the pointed finger who glowered from thousands of recruitment posters across the country with the declaration: ‘Your country needs You’. As Alan Moorehead would write, the entire British nation was in awe of the war hero—and no one in the ruling elite, from the prime minister down, dared challenge Kitchener’s authority on military matters:
It is even doubtful if Churchill in the 1940s enjoyed quite the same prestige, the air of almost infallible right and might which Kitchener possessed . . . Asquith, the most urbane of men, came under the influence, and Churchill, an extremely youthful First Lord of forty, was in no position to challenge the colossus, even if he had wanted to. Certainly at this stage Lloyd George had not begun to murmur that Kitchener’s handling of affairs was less than perfect . . . He knew the mysteries of war and they did not. Inside the War Office his power was absolute.5
Hamilton had little to fear from the publication of the report, biographer John Lee would observe, if the worst criticism that could be made of him were ‘that, burdened as he was by Kitchener’s admonition to see the thing through once it had begun, he did not foresee the future and advise an immediate abandonment of the whole enterprise’. But it might have been a lot worse. Hamilton had been right, at the
outset, to fear the malevolent hand of his long-time adversary Field Marshal William Nicholson, who repeatedly showed a bias against Hamilton during the hearings. After the commissioners had agreed on the text of their final report, ‘Old Nick’ had, according to Lee, volunteered to ‘give it a final polish’ before it went to the printers:
He inserted a damning censure of Hamilton for not having gone ashore immediately at Suvla to get things moving there. This point had never been discussed before at the Commission and, mercifully, Grimwood Mears [the commission secretary] checked the final draft and discovered the unauthorised passage. He showed it to all the commissioners and every member demanded that the offending piece be struck out.6
Hamilton’s critics would repeatedly ridicule him for his unflagging optimism; for always claiming to be close to victory—even after the disastrous setback of the failed August offensive. But evidence would emerge in the aftermath of the evacuation and after the war to vindicate his confidence. As early as August 1917, a German journalist, Harry Stuermer, who had been living in Turkey and fled to Switzerland after being shocked by the treatment of Armenians by the Turks, confirmed that the Allies had twice come tantalisingly close to victory at Gallipoli. In his book Two War Years in Constantinople, Stuermer said the Turkish defences at The Narrows were at breaking point after the British and French naval bombardment on 18 March 1915 and would not have been able to resist a renewed attack the following day—had the Allied naval commanders not lost their nerve after losing several warships. He also said the Turkish leadership had been convinced that the Allies would break through during the August offensive. There had been panic in Constantinople and the state archives and bullion reserves had been moved to Asia Minor in the expectation that the capital was about to fall to the British.
In his 1918 memoirs, American Ambassador to Constantinople Henry Morgenthau verified how close the Turks had been to defeat after the 18 March naval attack:
The fortifications were very short of ammunition. They had almost reached the limit of their resisting power when the British fleet passed out on the afternoon of the 18th. I had secured permission for Mr. George A. Schreiner, the well-known American correspondent of the Associated Press, to visit the Dardanelles on this occasion. On the night of the 18th, this correspondent discussed the situation with General Mertens, who was the chief technical officer at the straits. General Mertens admitted that the outlook was very discouraging for the defence. ‘We expect that the British will come back early tomorrow morning,’ he said, ‘and if they do, we may be able to hold out for a few hours.’ General Mertens did not declare in so many words that the ammunition was practically exhausted, but Mr. Schreiner discovered that such was the case. The fact was that Fort Hamidie, the most powerful defence on the Asiatic side, had just seventeen armour-piercing shells left, while at Kilidul-Bahr, which was the main defence on the European side, there were precisely ten. ‘I should advise you to get up at six o’clock to-morrow morning,’ said General Mertens, ‘and take to the Anatolian hills. That’s what we are going to do.’7
Morgenthau’s account eventually was authenticated by Ismail Enver Pasha, the Ottoman Minister of War. ‘If the English had only had the courage to rush more ships through the Dardanelles they could have got to Constantinople,’ Enver admitted.8
The August offensive might well have succeeded had the vacillating General Stopford answered Hamilton’s expectations and pressed his troops forward at Suvla Bay as soon as they had landed. It was confirmed after the war that only a few companies of Turkish troops were deployed along the Sari Bair ridge on the day of the landings. They should easily have been overwhelmed before the commander of the Turkish forces, General Liman von Sanders, had time to regroup and bring waiting reinforcements down from Bulair, at the neck of the peninsula. As Britain’s official historian, Brigadier General Cecil Aspinall-Oglander noted: ‘A study of the Turkish records for 6 and 7 August suffices to show that a very small turn of Fortune’s wheel would have steered it through to success.’9
In 1936 General Birdwood made a return visit to Gallipoli where he was hosted by army chief of staff General Fahretein Pasha, who had been on the staff of von Sanders during the war. Asked about his memories of Suvla, Fahretein replied: ‘When we saw your troops landing there we were taken utterly by surprise, and we wired to Constantinople advising the Government to evacuate the capital, as the British would be through.’10
Sir Ian Hamilton’s active military career ended the day he left Imbros in October 1915. He was already 62 and in peacetime would have been close to retirement. The Dardanelles Commission report contained nothing to preclude his return to active service but the two-year interregnum of the inquiry made it implausible. By early 1918 it was too late. The task of turning the tide against Germany had been denied the contribution that might have been made by Britain’s most experienced general. In March 1919 Churchill, by then Secretary of State for War of a nation once more at peace, offered Hamilton a return to active duty as head of the British army’s Northern Command. Hamilton, then 66 and vastly more senior than anyone who had previously held the post, declined on the grounds that it should go to a younger officer.11 He later completed 50 years of army service as Lieutenant of the Tower of London.
Keith Murdoch would end the war on active service of another kind, his journalistic and political career flourishing. The damning evidence of the journalist’s gross errors of fact and deliberate misrepresentations in his Gallipoli letter—confirmed under questioning at the Dardanelles Commission—remained safely hidden from public knowledge. The transcript of his evidence, along with that of all other witnesses, remained classified and out of bounds to historians for decades. The letter itself, controlled by Murdoch family copyright, was not made available for public scrutiny until a substantially edited version appeared in Desmond Zwar’s biography In Search of Keith Murdoch in 1980.
During Billy Hughes’s four-month sojourn in London in early 1916, Murdoch consolidated his position as the prime minister’s most trusted assistant in Britain. After his return to Australia, Hughes launched a campaign in favour of conscription—an issue that would soon split the Labor party and lead Hughes and other defectors to form a new government in alliance with the Liberals. Murdoch was enlisted to help drive support for a ‘yes’ vote in the plebiscite. Once more the man wearing the press badge was preoccupied with his role as an unofficial government agent.
Sent to France to gauge the mood of the troops on the issue, Murdoch quickly discovered that Australian volunteer soldiers were overwhelmingly opposed to forcing others to serve. British Commander-in-Chief Sir Douglas Haig was not as welcoming to the brash Australian government emissary as Sir Ian Hamilton had been at Gallipoli, two years earlier. Haig refused permission for Murdoch to convene meetings at which soldiers addressed other soldiers supporting conscription. He would allow only civilians to give speeches. ‘It was only by fighting his whole staff that I got him to agree to any meetings,’ Murdoch lamented to Hughes.12
The campaign, and an increasingly hectic lobbying round in Whitehall on behalf of Hughes, sharpened Murdoch’s appetite for political intrigue, as Zwar wrote: ‘As he met more and more of the great, Murdoch himself was becoming a little like the irascible little man who pulled the strings: he too started interfering. It was not enough to cable back his opinions to be printed in the various Australian newspapers.’13
Murdoch proposed and won the backing of Hughes for a campaign to persuade the British to form all five Australian divisions on the Western Front into a single army corps. Haig initially rejected the idea as unworkable after a meeting with Murdoch. He eventually agreed to the proposition when it was supported by General William Birdwood, the AIF commander. Birdwood was then given charge of the new corps.
After the British 5th Army failed to withstand the German Spring Offensive of 1918, General Hubert Gough was sacked and Birdwood was appointed to replace him. Now the way was open for an Australian to lead for the first time all the Aus
tralians fighting in Europe. The two most obvious candidates for the highest field command to be held by an Australian in the war—and the rank of lieutenant general—were Birdwood’s chief of staff, Major General Cyril Brudenell White, and the 3rd Division commander, Major General John Monash. Monash was the preference of both Birdwood and Haig. He was the more senior general and unlike White, who was a highly respected administrator, Monash had extensive experience commanding troops in battle.
But both Murdoch and Charles Bean were vehemently opposed to Monash and joined hands in a shameful alliance to lobby against his promotion and, after Monash was appointed, to have the decision overturned. Murdoch and Bean were determined that White should have the job and went to extraordinary lengths in pursuit of the objective, lobbying politicians and senior military men over many weeks and—in the case of Murdoch—sending skewed press dispatches in support of the objective.
Bean’s eager involvement in the scurrilous campaign was driven by his almost hero-worshipping regard for White and by the anti-Semitism that infected his view of Monash and the world. In his official history of the war, Bean would credit Monash’s ‘Jewish blood’ for giving him great capacity for tireless careful organisation in preparation for the Battle of Messines. That same blood, in Bean’s view, disqualified him as a candidate for the top Australian soldier’s job. ‘We do not want Australia represented by men mainly because of their ability, natural and inborn in Jews, to push themselves,’ he declared in his diary.14 Bean was also irrationally suspicious of the Prussian heritage of a soldier whose Australian patriotism—and capacity for killing Germans and their allies—was beyond question. There had been no love lost between the general and the official correspondent since Monash had chided Bean for failing to properly report on the impressive efforts of his 4th Brigade at Gallipoli. The scholarly general had also dismissed the journalist’s account of Messines as ‘the apotheosis of banality’.15