British leaders at the time never suspected that it was the other way around: that Turkey was seeking an alliance with Germany, and that Germany was reluctant to grant it. Even after the war was over, when it was discovered that Talaat and Enver had sought the alliance, details of how the Ottoman Empire and Germany forged their alliance remained obscure. Contemporaries and a number of historians blamed Winston Churchill, who was said to have driven the Turks into Germany’s arms; but the still-emerging evidence from diplomatic archives tells a different and more complex story—which began in 1914, on the eve of a sudden war crisis that neither Churchill nor his Cabinet colleagues had foreseen.
5
WINSTON CHURCHILL ON THE EVE OF WAR
I
In 1914, at the age of thirty-nine, Winston Churchill was about to begin his fourth year as First Lord of the Admiralty in the Liberal government of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. Though he administered his important departmental office ably and vigorously, he was not then the imposing figure the world later came to know. His energy and talent—and his gift for publicizing his own exploits—had brought him forward at an early age; but it was largely the amused indulgence of the Prime Minister and the powerful sponsorship of David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, that sustained him in his governmental position. He was a decade or more younger than the other members of the Cabinet, and the opinion was widespread that he was not sufficiently steady or mature to have been entrusted with high office.
He still spoke with the trace of a schoolboy lisp. His face had just begun to lose its last hints of adolescence. Only recently had the belligerent tilt of the head, the brooding scowl, and the thrusting cigar started to take command; and his sandy hair had begun to thin a bit. He had put on some weight in recent years, but was not yet portly. Of ruddy complexion, medium height, and with a hint of rounded lines, he was physically unprepossessing; only with hindsight could it have been seen that he would one day appear formidable.
It was not his person but his driving personality that fascinated those who encountered him. He was a mercurial figure, haunted by the specter of his brilliant, diseased father who had died a political failure at the age of forty-five. Fearing that he, too, would die young, Churchill had shamelessly elbowed friend and foe aside in his dash to the top in the short time that he believed still remained to him. Some suspected that, like his father, he was emotionally unbalanced, while others regarded him as merely too young. He combined aspects of greatness with those of childishness; but his colleagues recognized the childishness more readily than they did the greatness. He was moody; he took things personally; and he often embarked on lengthy tirades when instead he should have been listening or observing. Though generous and warm-hearted, he was not sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of others, and often was unaware of the effect produced by his own words and behavior. He was noisy; he brought passion into everything he undertook. Colleagues who aimed at detachment and understatement found him tiresome.
He often changed his views; and since he always held his views passionately, his changes of mind were as violent and extreme as they were frequent. He had been a Tory and now was a Liberal. He had been the most pro-German of ministers and had become the most anti-German. He had been the leading pro-Turk in the Cabinet and was to become the most anti-Turk. To his enemies he appeared dangerously foolish, and even his friends remarked that he allowed himself to be too easily carried away.
Unlike the others, he disdained to play it safe. He had soldiered in India, seen war in Cuba and the Sudan, and become a hero by escaping from a prisoner-of-war camp in South Africa. Taking risks had brought him fame and had catapulted him to the top in politics. He was happy in his marriage and in his high government office, but his temperament was restless: he sought worlds to conquer.
Three years before—in the summer of 1911—an unexpected opportunity had opened up for him to fulfill some of his ambitions. At that time, during the course of a brief international crisis, the Asquith government had been shocked to learn that the Admiralty was not prepared to carry out wartime missions in support of the army. To their amazement, Cabinet ministers at the time were told that the Royal Navy was unable to transport a British Expeditionary Force across the English Channel. They also learned that the Admiralty was unwilling to create a Naval War Staff. It became clear to Asquith and his colleagues that a new First Lord of the Admiralty had to be appointed to institute basic reforms.
Churchill, then Home Secretary, angled for the job, and his mentor, Lloyd George, proposed him for it. Predictably, his candidacy was hampered by his youth. At thirty-six he was already, with a solitary exception, the youngest person ever to serve as Home Secretary; and his many enemies, who claimed that he had pushed himself forward with unseemly haste, argued that he had run ahead of himself. To them he appeared to possess in excess the characteristic faults of youth: obstinacy, inexperience, poor judgment, and impulsiveness. The other leading contender for the position of First Lord expressed warm admiration for Churchill’s energy and courage, but echoed the usual accusation that the young Home Secretary was too apt to act first and think afterward.1
For whatever reason, the Prime Minister decided to take a chance on Churchill; and the record of the Admiralty from the summer of 1911 to the summer of 1914 showed that he had won his wager. Inspired by Lord Fisher, the retired but still controversial Admiral of the Fleet, Churchill had transformed the coal-burning nineteenth-century fleet into an oil-burning twentieth-century navy.
II
Elected to Parliament for the first time in 1900, Churchill took his seat (in 1901) as a member of the Conservative Party: a Unionist (the term usually used at this period), or a Conservative, or (using the older word) a Tory. But on the bitterly disputed issue of free trade, in 1904, he crossed the floor of the House and joined the Liberals.
As a political renegade, Churchill was distrusted by both parties—not entirely without reason, for his political instincts were never wholly at one with either of them. He tended toward Liberalism on social and economic issues, but on questions of foreign and defense policy his instincts were Tory. Churchill was belligerent by nature and out of sympathy with the streak of idealistic pacifism that ran through the Liberal Party. He inherited a genius for warfare from Britain’s greatest general, his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough; he had been schooled at a military academy rather than at a university; he had served on active duty as an army officer; and he was enthralled by the profession of arms. When Violet Asquith, aboard the Enchantress in 1912, looked out at the lovely Mediterranean coastline and exclaimed, “How perfect!”, he replied, “Yes—range perfect—visibility perfect—If we had got some six-inch guns on board how easily we could bombard…”2
As war clouds suddenly gathered over the summertime skies of 1914, Liberal pacifists seemed to be out of touch with events while Churchill at the Admiralty seemed to be the right man at the right place at the right time.
6
CHURCHILL SEIZES TURKEY’S WARSHIPS
I
On the outbreak of war, Winston Churchill briefly became a national hero in Britain. Although the Cabinet had refused him permission to do so, he had mobilized the fleet on his own responsibility in the last days of peacetime and had sent it north to Scapa Flow, where it would not be vulnerable to a German surprise attack. What he had done was probably illegal, but events had justified his actions, which in Britain were applauded on all sides.
Margot Asquith, the Prime Minister’s wife, once wondered in her diary what it was that made Winston Churchill pre-eminent. “It certainly is not his mind,” she wrote. “Certainly not his judgment—he is constantly very wrong indeed…” She concluded that: “It is of course his courage and colour—his amazing mixture of industry and enterprise. He can and does always—all ways puts himself in the pool. He never shirks, hedges, or protects himself—though he thinks of himself perpetually. He takes huge risks [original emphasis].”1
Mobilizing the fleet d
espite the Cabinet’s decision not to do so was a huge risk that ended in triumph. In the days following Britain’s entry into the war even his bitterest political enemies wrote to Churchill to express their admiration of him. For much of the rest of his life, his proudest boast was that when war came, the fleet was ready.
At the time, his commandeering of Turkish battleships for the Royal Navy was applauded almost as much. An illustrated page in the Tatler of 12 August 1914 reproduced a photograph of a determined-looking Churchill, with an inset of his wife, under the heading “BRAVO WINSTON! The Rapid Mobilisation and Purchase of the Two Foreign Dreadnoughts Spoke Volumes for your Work and Wisdom.”2
The battleships were the Reshadieh and the larger Sultan Osman I. Both had been built in British shipyards and were immensely powerful; the Osman mounted more heavy guns than any battleship ever built before.3 Each originally had been ordered by Brazil, but then had been built instead for the Ottoman Empire. The Reshadieh, though launched in 1913, had not been delivered because the Turks had lacked adequate modern docking facilities to accommodate her. With Churchill’s support, Rear-Admiral Sir Arthur H. Limpus, head of the British naval mission, had lobbied successfully with the Ottoman authorities to secure the contract to build docking facilities for two British firms—Vickers, and Armstrong Whitworth. The docking facilities having been completed, the Reshadieh was scheduled to leave Britain soon after the Sultan Osman I, which was to be completed in August 1914.
Churchill was aware that these vessels meant a great deal to the Ottoman Empire. They were intended to be the making of the modern Ottoman navy, and it was assumed that they would enable the empire to face Greece in the Aegean and Russia in the Black Sea. Their purchase had been made possible by patriotic public subscription throughout the empire. The tales may have been improved in the telling, but it was said that women had sold their jewelry and schoolchildren had given up their pocket-money to contribute to the popular subscription.4 Admiral Limpus had put out to sea from Constantinople on 27 July 1914, with ships of the Turkish navy, waiting to greet the Sultan Osman I and escort her back through the straits of the Dardanelles to the Ottoman capital, where a “navy week” had been scheduled with lavish ceremonies for the Minister of Marine, Ahmed Djemal, and for the cause of British-Ottoman friendship.
Churchill, who was reckoned the most pro-Turk member of the Asquith Cabinet, had followed with care, and had supported with enthusiasm, the mission of Admiral Limpus in Turkey ever since its inception years before. The British advisory mission to the Ottoman navy was almost as large as the similar German mission to the Ottoman army, led by the Prussian General of Cavalry, Otto Liman von Sanders. The two missions to some extent counter-balanced each other. British influence was thought to be strong in the Marine Ministry. German influence was strongest in the War Ministry. In London little was known of Middle Eastern politics, but Churchill enjoyed the rare advantage of having personally met three of the five leading figures in the Ottoman government: Talaat, Enver, and the Minister of Finance, Djavid. He therefore had been given an opportunity to learn that Britain’s conduct as naval supplier and adviser could have political repercussions in Constantinople.
The European war crisis, however, propelled the newly built Turkish vessels into significance in both London and Berlin. The Reshadieh and Sultan Osman I were battleships of the new Dreadnought class. As such, they overshadowed other surface vessels and, in a sense, rendered them obsolete. By the summer of 1914 the Royal Navy had taken delivery of only enough to give Britain a margin over Germany of seven Dreadnoughts. Since the European war was expected to be a short one, there seemed to be no time to build more of them before battle was joined and decided. The addition of the two Dreadnoughts built for Turkey would increase the power of the Royal Navy significantly. Conversely, their acquisition by the German Empire or its allies could decisively shift the balance of forces against Britain. It was not fanciful to suppose that the Reshadieh and Sultan Osman I could play a material role in determining the outcome of what was to become the First World War.
Early in the week of 27 July 1914, as the First Lord of the Admiralty took precautionary measures in the war crisis, he raised the issue of whether the two Turkish battleships could be taken by the Royal Navy. The chain of events which apparently flowed from Churchill’s initiative in this matter eventually led to him being blamed for the tragic outbreak of war in the Middle East. In turn he later attempted to defend himself by pretending that he had done no more than to carry into effect standing orders. The history of these matters has been confused ever since because both Churchill’s story and the story told by his detractors were false.
According to Churchill’s history of the First World War, British contingency plans adopted in 1912 provided for the taking of all foreign warships being built in British yards in the event that war should ever occur. When the war broke out in 1914, warships were being built in British yards for Turkey, Chile, Greece, Brazil, and Holland. According to Churchill, he did nothing more than follow the regulations adopted in 1912. His version of the matter implied that he did not single out the Ottoman vessels, but instead issued orders applicable to all foreign warships then under construction; he wrote that the arrangements for the taking of such vessels “comprised an elaborate scheme” that had been devised years before and had been brought up to date in 1912.5
This account was not true. Seizing the Turkish warships was an original idea of Churchill’s and it came to him in the summer of 1914.
During the week before the war, the question of taking foreign vessels was raised for the first time on Tuesday, 28 July 1914, in an inquiry that Churchill directed to the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, and to the Third Sea Lord, Sir Archibald Moore. “In case it may become necessary to acquire the 2 Turkish battleships that are nearing completion in British yards,” he wrote, “please formulate plans in detail showing exactly the administrative action involved in their acquisition and the prospective financial transactions.”6
Admiral Moore looked into the matter, and found no administrative or legal procedure that would justify seizing the Turkish ships. He consulted one of the legal officers of the Foreign Office, who told him that there was no precedent for taking any such action. The Foreign Office lawyer said that if Britain were at war it could be argued that national interests take precedence over legal rights, but that since Britain was not at war* it would be illegal for Churchill to take the foreign-owned vessels. The lawyer advised the Admiralty that, if it really needed the ships, it should try to persuade the Ottoman government to sell them.7
The Turks suspected what Churchill had in mind, for on 29 July the Foreign Office warned the Admiralty that the Sultan Osman I was taking on fuel and was under orders to depart for Constantinople immediately, even though unfinished.8 Churchill immediately ordered the builders of both battleships to detain them. He also ordered British security forces to guard the vessels and to prevent Turkish crews from boarding them or from raising the Ottoman flag over them (which would have converted them, under prevailing international law, into Ottoman territory).
The following day the Attorney-General advised Churchill that what he was doing was not justified by statute, but that the welfare of the Commonwealth took precedence over other considerations and might excuse his temporarily detaining the vessels.9 A high-ranking permanent official in the Foreign Office took the same point of view that day but placed it in a broader and more practical political perspective. “I think we must let the Admiralty deal with this question as they consider necessary,” he minuted, “and afterwards make such defence of our action to Turkey as we can.”10
On 31 July the Cabinet accepted Churchill’s view that he ought to take both Turkish vessels for the Royal Navy for possible use against Germany in the event of war; whereupon British sailors boarded the Sultan Osman I. The Ottoman ambassador called at the Foreign Office to ask for an explanation, but was told only that the battleship was being detained for the time being.11
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Toward midnight on 1 August Churchill wrote instructions to Admiral Moore, in connection with the mobilization of the fleet, to notify both Vickers and Armstrong that the Ottoman warships were to be detained and that the Admiralty proposed to enter into negotiations for their purchase.12
For the first time Churchill noted that warships were also being built in British shipyards for countries other than Turkey. Admiral Moore had brought this to the First Lord’s attention several days before, but Churchill had not responded; now—although the other foreign vessels were not of equal importance—he ordered them to be detained, too, for completion and eventual purchase.
On 3 August the Admiralty entered into arrangements with Armstrong for taking the Sultan Osman I into the Royal Navy immediately.13 That evening the Foreign Office cabled the British embassy in Constantinople with instructions to inform the Ottoman government that Britain desired to have the contract for the purchase of the Osman transferred to His Majesty’s Government.14 The following day Sir Edward Grey sent a further cable to Constantinople, saying that he was sure the Turkish government would understand Britain’s position, and that “financial & other loss to Turkey will receive all due consideration.”15
A Peace to End all Peace Page 6