A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  French assented to Haig’s plan. He wanted the attack to happen as soon as possible, before the politicians decided to give the BEF piecemeal to Joffre and independent action became impossible. March 10 became the chosen date despite the fact that the ground at Neuve Chapelle was always waterlogged in springtime and would not be suitable for infantry operations until April at the earliest. Joffre, asked to mount a supporting attack at Arras on the same date, waited until March 7 to take his revenge by replying that the British failure to take over his line near the coast had left him without enough manpower to help. The British decided to proceed anyway.

  Weather aside, Haig had chosen his battleground well. The sector that he had targeted was a bulge in the German line, a salient exposed to fire from three directions. It was defended by only fourteen hundred Germans equipped with only a dozen machine guns, with few reserves nearby. The wetness of the ground made entrenchment impossible, so that the Germans were up on the surface, behind sandbag barriers that provided scant protection against artillery. Haig had forty thousand men, many of them Indian colonials, to throw into the attack. Their way would be cleared by fire from a concentration of artillery that would not be equaled until 1917: one field gun for every five yards of front, one heavier piece for every nineteen.

  All these weapons opened fire at seven-thirty A.M., and for thirty-five minutes they turned the German line and the areas immediately behind it into an inferno where almost nothing could survive. Then they stopped, and the infantry, bayonets fixed, began their advance. Taught by experience to expect the worst, the troops at the center of the British line instead found almost no resistance. The defenders, everywhere except on the outer edges of the barrage, had been virtually annihilated. What was supposed to be the second line of defense was unoccupied and, when the British reached it, gave no evidence of having been occupied in months. When the Tommies moved through wrecked and abandoned Neuve Chapelle to yet another German line, it too proved to be empty. Only an hour and a half after setting out, they had reached their objective for the day. Ahead was empty territory, open and undefended. Haig had broken completely through—the first of only three times in the entire war that the German line would be torn open in this way. And only about a thousand German reserves were near enough to join the survivors within the next twelve hours. The gate to a tremendous victory stood wide open.

  The story of how this triumphant beginning came to nothing is a chronology of mistakes, confusion, and leadership so deficient that it explains why Max Hoffmann, when Ludendorff later in the war exclaimed that British soldiers fought like lions, replied that fortunately for Germany they were “led by donkeys.” Haig had limited his attack to a front only two thousand yards wide. This was not only unnecessary in light of the thinness of the German defenses—which the British were aware of—but too narrow an opening for such a large force to pass through efficiently. But when questions had been raised by Edmund Allenby, a cavalry commander who later would win fame in the Arabian Desert, Haig swept them aside with the observation that Allenby knew nothing about handling such large numbers of troops. Another difficulty was that a four-hundred-yard-wide sector at the northern end of the German line had not been shelled according to plan and was still intact when the advance came. Although the guns responsible for bombarding the sector in question had not arrived until the night of March 9 and therefore could not be ready for action the next morning (platforms had to be built, telephone lines installed), nothing was done to assign the sector to other batteries. The result was a pocket of German defenders who, untouched by the bombardment, were able to bring machine-gun fire to bear on the attackers both directly ahead of them and to their south. This fire need not have been enough to stop the main offensive, but it and a similar problem at the other end of the attack zone caused the officers on the scene to order a halt until the machine guns could be dealt with.

  There followed a series of almost inexplicable delays, most painfully at the center, the point of breakthrough, where the colonel in charge requested permission to continue his advance but received no answer. Behind him tens of thousands of troops and support units found themselves jammed together at the too-narrow hole in the line, barely able to move and not knowing what they were expected to do. Meanwhile small German units began to arrive from all directions, and though they were pitifully few they brought machine guns and light artillery with them and quickly threw together new defenses. When the attack finally resumed at the end of the afternoon, the opportunity was gone.

  Haig tried again the next day and yet again on March 12, but the Germans were growing stronger by the hour and soon were counterattacking. When Haig finally gave up, his gains included little beyond the ghost town of Neuve Chapelle. He had lost 11,600 men, the Germans 8,600—the numbers being mere abstractions that, as always, veil thousands of stories of lives lost and wrecked. The recollections of one British veteran of Neuve Chapelle provides a peek behind the veil. “I was wounded in the battle and taken to a casualty clearing station,” said Cavalryman Walter Becklade. “I was beside a fellow who had got his arms bandaged up—I’d simply got my right arm bandaged. He was trying to light his pipe but couldn’t get on very well so I offered to fill and light it for him. But when I’d lit it I suddenly realized he had nowhere to put it, as he’d had his lower jaw blown away. So I smoked the pipe and he smelt the tobacco, that was all the poor chap could have.”

  Lessons had been learned on both sides. The Germans acquired new confidence in their ability to hold off attacks even when outnumbered, and Falkenhayn became less reluctant to spare troops for the east. The British, on the other hand, learned a tragically false lesson. French and Haig concluded that Neuve Chapelle had failed because the opening artillery barrage had been too short. Henceforth they would insist on whole days of bombardment at the start of any offensive.

  On March 13, the day after Haig ended his attacks, General Sir Ian Hamilton left London to take command of the not-yet-existent Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (which Kitchener had been calling the Constantinople Expeditionary Force until Hamilton suggested such a name might tempt the fates). He arrived in the northern Aegean just hours before the start of Admiral De Robeck’s March 18 attempt to force the Dardanelles and was able to witness its climax.

  The fleet that De Robeck took into the strait that morning was awesome: sixteen battleships—four French and the rest British—most of them old but every one of them enormous, heavily armored, massively armed. At the head of the formation, steaming abreast, were De Robeck’s flagship Queen Elizabeth (which carried a dozen guns that fired shells fifteen inches in diameter) and three British battleships. About a mile astern of this vanguard, also abreast, were the four French vessels, commanded by a French admiral eager for combat and cheerful about following the orders of the British. Four other battleships guarded the flanks of these two groups while the others waited outside the mouth of the strait.

  The only Turkish guns heavy enough to penetrate battleship armor were more than ten miles north at a place called the Narrows, where the sea-lane is only a mile wide. If these guns could be silenced, and if the mines that were known to lie in the Narrows could be removed, nothing could stop De Robeck from reaching the Sea of Marmara.

  Once inside the strait De Robeck stopped the Queen Elizabeth and her three sister ships at a point where their biggest guns could fire on the Narrows. They were out of range of the Turks’ heaviest guns (which were manned by both Turkish and German crews), and the guns that could reach them were too light to be more than a nuisance. For half an hour the four lead ships poured high explosives on the gun emplacements at the Narrows, knowing they had to be doing tremendous damage but unable to tell if their targets were being destroyed. Then De Robeck began the second phase of his attack, signaling for the four French ships to move past him deeper into the strait. This was a courtesy to the French commander, who had requested the honor of a prominent part in the offensive, and once his ships were north of De Robeck’s line, they
too began firing and coming under fire themselves. The clash continued for another two hours, with the fire from the Turks growing noticeably less frequent and less accurate, until De Robeck ordered the French ships to retire to the south and the ships that had not yet been engaged to come forward. Up to this point everything had gone perfectly.

  Having completed U-turns to starboard, the French battleships were moving toward the rear in single file when suddenly the second vessel in line, the Bouvet, blew up. She sank with stunning speed, disappearing in less than two minutes and taking almost her entire crew of more than six hundred with her. No one knew what had happened; the general assumption was that either a lucky Turkish shell had somehow penetrated one of the Bouvet’s shell storage compartments or an enemy submarine had entered the strait. It was in any case an isolated disaster, and otherwise everything continued to go well. The surviving French ships completed their withdrawal and were replaced by six British battleships that had not yet seen action; they moved even farther north than had the French, and for another two hours all the ships continued to fire. By late afternoon the return fire from the Narrows had almost ended. De Robeck, moving to the next phase of his plan, called the minesweepers into action.

  Rear Admiral John De Robeck

  Changed his mind about naval assault, dashing Churchill’s hopes.

  The trawler-minesweepers came under heavy fire from the howitzers in the hills and soon turned and fled. Minutes later the battleship Inflexible, which had been firing her guns all afternoon despite substantial damage to her superstructure and was now near the place where the Bouvet had sunk, was seen to heel over sharply to starboard. Her captain sent up signal flags indicating that she had hit a mine and began steering for the exit from the strait. Minutes later exactly the same thing happened to HMS Irresistible, which was so completely disabled that De Robeck dispatched a destroyer to take off her crew. In the disorder that followed, as De Robeck withdrew his gunships and sent destroyers back into the strait to tow the Irresistible to safety or sink her if necessary to keep her from falling into Turkish hands, yet another British battleship was hit and went to the bottom.

  This sudden turn of fortune had been costly—two battleships lost, two gravely damaged—but not ruinous. De Robeck at first was despondent, certain that his losses would prompt his dismissal. Instead, he received word from Churchill that four British battleships and a French replacement for the Bouvet were already on their way to join him. The minesweeping problem was quickly if belatedly remedied: the trawlers were replaced with destroyers fitted with minesweeping equipment. De Robeck, his confidence restored, telegraphed his eagerness to return to the strait and finish the job. Back in London, Churchill was delighted. Even “Jackie” Fisher, his doubts temporarily dissolved by De Robeck’s expressions of confidence, was pleased.

  But then, slowly, the tide of opinion began to turn. General Hamilton, troubled by what he had witnessed, wired Kitchener as he had been instructed to do. His message was not optimistic. “I am being most reluctantly driven towards the conclusion that the Dardanelles are less likely to be forced by battleships than at one time seemed probable,” he reported, “and that if the Army is to participate, its operations will not assume the subsidiary form anticipated.” In other words, troops were likely to be essential—troops in large numbers. An army was going to have to be landed, Hamilton said, and this “must be a deliberate and prepared military operation, carried out at full strength, so as to open a passage for the Navy.” Kitchener agreed, declaring that it was now his opinion that the next phase “must be a deliberate and prepared military operation”—not, that is, an assault by ships alone.

  By March 22, four days after the loss of the ships, De Robeck was brought around to Hamilton’s way of thinking. When he reported to London that he too was now skeptical of clearing the strait with his battleships, even the navy and army staffs became internally divided. No one, however, suggested calling the whole thing off. The fruits of success were too tempting: Turkey out of the war, Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania all in on the Entente side. Failure, on the other hand, might induce the Balkan states not only to remain neutral but possibly to join the Central Powers.

  General Ian Hamilton

  “The Dardanelles are less likely to be forced by battleships than at one time seemed probable.”

  At the center of the struggle, still determined to resume the naval attack, stood Churchill. He prepared a telegram ordering De Robeck to take his fleet back into the strait at the first opportunity. But when he showed his draft to several senior admirals, most of them—Fisher included—refused to endorse it. They told Churchill that it was unthinkable for London to insist on an action that the responsible admiral on the scene did not himself support. Churchill tried again to get De Robeck to change his mind—De Robeck’s own chief of staff was also arguing that a resumption of the attack was certain to succeed—but could not do so. The prime minister thought Churchill was probably right but found it impossible to countermand Fisher and so many other admirals. Finally Churchill had to accept that he was beaten.

  It is entirely possible that De Robeck would have succeeded if he had promptly returned to the strait. The Turkish and German defenders were amazed when he failed to do so, and they were not hopeful of stopping him if he did. Though most of their guns remained operable and the worst damage at the Narrows was soon repaired, their stocks of ammunition were dangerously low (a fact that was known to the British), and they had no way of resupplying. All along the strait, they had fewer than thirty armor-piercing shells. Their supplies of mines were likewise nearly exhausted. Officials in Constantinople were hurrying their families out of the city and preparing the government for flight.

  The Turks were no better prepared to deal with a military landing, but the British and French were unprepared to land. Ian Hamilton was still waiting for most of his troops, and those that had arrived were not at all ready to undertake a vastly complicated amphibious operation. Lemnos, the island being used as the British base, lacked enough fresh water for all the troops pouring in. Hamilton decided that he was going to have to transfer the troopships to Egypt, where they could be unloaded and then reloaded in proper fashion. He would have to decide where to land his forces, and how.

  In one sense at least, Hamilton now seemed to have time to spare. The Russians, with the Eastern Front stabilized, were no longer quite so desperate for relief. Their defeat at Second Masurian Lakes was now weeks in the past and had done little lasting damage. In the south, in and around the Carpathians, they were by late March again on the attack. On March 22, Przemysl had fallen after a siege of 194 days. The siege had been a nightmare for most of the starving people sealed up inside—a nightmare made all the more intolerable by the fact that the fortress’s top military officers and their mistresses had lived in luxury throughout the ordeal, waxing fat on secretly hoarded foodstuffs. In the hours before surrendering to the Russians outside, the Austrian commanders blew up their remaining supplies of shells. “The first ammunition dump exploded with a terrifying boom, the ground shook and the glass fell out of all the windows,” a Polish woman who had gone to Przemysl in an effort to save her family’s house wrote. “Clouds of ash cascaded from chimneys and stoves, and chunks of plaster fell from the walls and ceilings. There was soon a second boom. As the day dawned the town looked like a glowing, smoking crater with pink flames glowing from below and morning mist floating above—an amazing, menacing sight. These hours were perhaps the only hours like this in the whole history of the world. Countless people died of nervous convulsions last night, without any physical injuries or illnesses. By the time the sun climbed into the sky everything was still. Soldiers knelt on their balconies, praying…There is a corpse in our house, on the floor above the Litwinskis’. The man seems to have died of fear. I have to do something about him, but nobody wants to get involved, they are all leaving it to me. I persuaded one of the workmen to go down to the army hospital to ask what to do…he was told they would deal
with it tomorrow, they’ve got too many corpses today as it is, littering the streets awaiting collection.”

  With Przemysl the Russians had captured a hundred and twenty thousand troops, nine generals, and hundreds of guns—all of which reduced Emperor Franz Joseph to fits of weeping. The surrender of Przemysl freed three Russian army corps to join a spring offensive that looked increasingly promising.

  The Russians still were unable to move their accumulating surplus grain from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and so get urgently needed currency for it. Nor could the British and French send supplies to the Russians via the Black Sea ports. But the Dardanelles campaign, if successful, would solve that problem permanently.

  The suspension of the naval offensive at the Dardanelles, and the delay in getting an army offensive under way, were a huge boon to the Turks and their German advisers. They were still badly equipped and widely dispersed, but gradually, ever so slowly, they were managing to pull together a defense that just might, with much luck, be adequate to fend off Hamilton’s attack whenever it came.

  Background: The Sea War

  THE SEA WAR

  THE DARDANELLES EXPEDITION WAS BY NO MEANS THE Great War’s first demonstration of British naval power. From the start of the conflict, under the aggressive leadership of Winston Churchill, the Royal Navy had asserted control of sea-lanes around the world and denied the Central Powers access to them. But not until 1915, when the likelihood of a long war had become clear to everyone, did the importance of sea power grow equally clear.