THE DARDANELLES DISASTER
Also by Dan van der Vat
The Grand Scuttle: The Sinking of the German Fleet at
Scapa Flow in 1919
The Last Corsair: The Story of the Emden
The Ship That Changed the World: The Escape of the Goeben
to the Dardanelles in 1914
The Atlantic Campaign: The Great Struggle at Sea 1939–1945
The Pacific Campaign: The U.S. – Japanese Naval War 1941–1945
Freedom Was Never Like This: A Winter in East Germany
Stealth at Sea: The History of the Submarine
The Riddle of the Titanic (with Robin Gardiner)
The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer
Standard of Power: The Royal Navy in the 20th Century
Pearl Harbor: The Day of Infamy – An Illustrated History
D-Day: The Greatest Invasion – A People’s History
THE DARDANELLES
DISASTER
Winston Churchill’s
Greatest Failure
DAN VAN DER VAT
Duckworth Overlook
First eBook edition 2011
This edition first published in 2010
First published in the UK and in the US in 2009 by
Duckworth Overlook
90-93 Cowcross Street
London EC1M 6BF
[email protected]
www.ducknet.co.uk
Copyright © 2009 by Dan van der Vat
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
The right of Dan van der Vat to be identified as the Author of
the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with
Sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
eISBNs
Mobipocket: 978-0-7156-3974-0
ePub: 978-0-7156-4058-6
PDF: 978-0-7156-4059-3
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface: Blunder upon Blunder
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Voyage of the Nusret
PART I – THE FATEFUL ALLIANCE
1.The Turkish Question
2.The German Answer
PART II – THE ALLIED RESPONSE
3.Blockade
4.Councils of War
5.‘We have no troops’
PART III – FAILURE AND AFTER
6.The Battle of the Dardanelles
7.Crescendo
8.Heads Roll
9.The Gallipoli Campaign
10.The Inquest
11.What Became of Them
12.The New Turkey and Middle East
Epilogue: The Tale of Two Ships
A Note on Sources
Select Bibliography
Index
For James and Katie
from their grandfather
List of Illustrations
The Sea of Marmora and approaches
(Illustrations between pages 82 and 83)
General Lord Kitchener of Khartoum in 1900. akg-images
The Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill, MP, First Lord of the Admiralty, in 1915. akg-images
Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher of Kilverstone. Getty Images
Lieutenant Norman Holbrook, RN, and the crew of submarine B11 after sinking the battleship Messudieh inside the Dardanelles, December 1914. Imperial War Museum
Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, architect of the Imperial German Navy. Wiener Library
Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim, German Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, in 1914. akg-images
Rear-Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, commanding the Mediterranean Division of the Imperial German Navy, in 1914. Margot Souchon
General Otto Liman von Sanders in Turkish service, defender of Gallipoli, 1914-15. Imperial War Museum
The Allied fleet sailing for the Dardanelles. Imperial War Museum
SS River Clyde grounded at ‘V’ beach after playing ‘Trojan horse’ for the Cape Helles landing. Imperial War Museum
French soldiers from the Colonial Regiment inspect a smashed searchlight. Imperial War Museum
The Kaiser and Enver Pasha converse on the deck of the Goeben. Imperial War Museum
The commanders and chiefs of staff on HMS Triad: (L to R) Commodore Roger Keyes; Vice-Admiral John de Robeck; General Sir Ian Hamilton; Major-General W.P. Braithwaite. Imperial War Museum
The man who answered the ‘Turkish Question’, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. akg-images
The undoing of the Allied fleet. The Turkish minelayer Nusret – the modern copy at Çannakale. Author’s photograph
Atatürk’s verdict on the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns. Author’s photograph
Preface
Blunder upon Blunder
The official biographer of Winston Churchill, central figure in the Dardanelles disaster of 1915, writes that ‘[Admiral of the Fleet Lord] Fisher’s return to the Admiralty coincided with Britain’s only serious naval defeat of the war’. Fisher had been recalled from retirement to his old post as First Sea Lord on 30 October 1914: the reference is to the Battle of Coronel on 1 November, when Vice-Admiral Graf Spee’s German cruisers crushed a British squadron off Chile. Yet much of the same third volume of Sir Martin Gilbert’s biography is necessarily devoted to Churchill’s leading role, as First Lord of the Admiralty, in the Royal Navy’s abortive effort to reopen the Dardanelles after Turkey had closed them in August 1914.
As the political head of the navy Churchill personally presided over this unique fiasco, which led to his dismissal and almost destroyed his career. Since his style of administration could hardly have been more ‘hands on’, he did not merely preside over the disaster but intervened, if not interfered, in almost every operational and political aspect of it, large or small, often acting beyond his powers and presenting his Cabinet colleagues with faits accomplis. Yet his proposal to outflank the Central Powers – Germany, Austria-Hungary and their allies, including Turkey – by attacking the latter as the weakest link in a front deadlocked from Belgium to the Balkans – is now widely accepted as the boldest strategic concept of the First World War. However, as with so many other failed British military enterprises, it was undermined by appalling incompetence in execution. Churchill’s great error was to go ahead with the navy alone after Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, insisted that there were no troops available for the combined operation which contemporary informed opinion (including Churchill and Kitchener) had long since agreed was necessary to force the Dardanelles.
The Dardanelles disaster swelled the rising tide of complaints in Britain about ‘bungling in high places’. After the navy’s failure was bloodily redoubled by the army’s at Gallipoli, heads eventually rolled, including Fisher’s and Churchill’s; and to survive as Prime Minister, Asquith was forced to replace his Liberal administration with a coalition Cabinet.
The Royal Navy’s abortive solo attempt to reopen the Dardanelles was prompted by another naval failure: the ineptly missed opportunity to deploy immensely superior forces to stop and destroy the Mediterranean Division of the German Imperial Navy in the first week of the First World War. Rear-Admiral Wilhelm Souchon was allowed to take his two ships, a battlecruiser and a light cruiser, over 1,000 miles from Sicily across the eastern basin of the Mediterranean to the Dardanelles. He eluded both the bulk of the French fle
et and the British Mediterranean Fleet, which by itself was much his superior in firepower and numbers of ships, even though he could so easily have been trapped in the Strait of Messina between two groups of British ships each endowed with firepower superior to his. This incident was the subject of one of my earlier books, The Ship That Changed the World (1985), to which this volume forms a sequel.
The consequences of Souchon’s escape to Turkish waters, enabling the Germans to activate their secret alliance with Ottoman Turkey by provoking Tsarist Russia into a war against the Turks, were recognised by both British and German leaders as worth two extra years to the Germans and their allies in a war that lasted just over four. The Dardanelles strait was closed to the Entente powers – Britain, France and Russia – and the latter was effectively cut off, unable to export grain to the other two, who likewise were prevented from delivering much-needed munitions in return. The British were prompted to try to reverse this, not only to reopen the link but also to turn the eastern flank of the Central Powers by passing through the Dardanelles strait into the Sea of Marmara, knocking Turkey out of the war by threatening Constantinople, passing through the Bosporus into the Black Sea, joining hands with the Russians and going up the Danube to attack Austria-Hungary from the rear.
The failure of the great seaborne bombardment of the Dardanelles forts in March 1915, a leisurely seven months later, in a bid to reverse the Germans’ diplomatic and strategic coup, only served to compound its results exponentially. Compared with the consequences of the Royal Navy’s double failure – Souchon’s escape and the rebuff at the Dardanelles – the defeat at Coronel, handsomely avenged within weeks at the Battle of the Falkland Islands, where Spee’s squadron was all but wiped out, was a marginal skirmish of minor strategic significance. The abortive attempt to reopen the Dardanelles by naval gunpower alone, judged by its consequences, may therefore stand as the Royal Navy’s most significant failure, certainly in the First World War, probably in the twentieth century and possibly in all the 500 years of its existence. A victory for the Spanish Armada in 1588 or for Napoleon’s navy at Trafalgar in 1805 would have been rather worse, but neither came to pass, becoming instead the Royal Navy’s most important victories. A British failure to overcome the U-boat blockade imposed by the Germans in each world war would surely have surpassed the Dardanelles fiasco in gravity but was narrowly averted in each case.
This gives the Dardanelles campaign – Turkey’s only military triumph in 1914–18 – pride of place in the brief list of Britain’s strategic maritime failures. Chronologically, and also in terms of suffering and loss, the ensuing Allied failure to seize the Gallipoli peninsula by military force in order to outflank the Dardanelles defences takes first place among the results. This was intended to help the fleet and its supply ships to get to Constantinople without being shelled from the shore. The bloody slaughter in the Gallipoli campaign, a smaller-scale but sometimes even more intense extension of the stalemate on the Western Front, understandably draws the general reader’s eye from the naval failure of which it was the first consequence. This book however focuses on the primary role of the Royal Navy in these extraordinary events.
It does so without footnotes. I have managed to rub along without them in nine previous forays into naval history, convinced as ever of my belief that general readers, for whom this and all its predecessors are intended, are not interested in them. If they have anything in common with me, they may actually be irritated by having to interrupt what I hope is a good read by going to the back of the book, only to see such immortal notations as ‘op. cit.’ or ‘ibid.’.
The Note on Sources, and the Select Bibliography at the end reveal the material and earlier works on which I drew to assemble this story.
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank the following for the support and assistance I have received over the many years I have explored the Dardanelles story, taking on other projects but always returning for another look at a subject which has fascinated me ever since I first took an interest in naval history 30 years ago.
The staffs of the British Library, the London Library and the libraries of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames; the staffs of the British National Archives (known as the Public Record Office when I started), and the German Federal Military Archives in Freiburg-im-Breisgau; the Turkish Naval and Army Museums in Istanbul and the Naval Museum at Çannakale.
I am no less grateful to Annette Boon for help with my non-existent Turkish; Rezan Muir and the Turkish Area Study Group; Dr Kenan Çelik, formerly of Çannakale Onsekiz Mart University and latterly battlefield guide, who took me on an invaluable personal tour of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli.
I could not have finished this book without the support through many vicissitudes of my former agent, Jonathan Pegg, late of Curtis Brown, and his successor, Shaheeda Sabir; and of Peter Mayer and especially Mary Morris of Duckworth Publishers. Further acknowledgements are in the note on sources.
None of these is responsible for any error, for which I alone am to blame.
Introduction
The Voyage of the Nusret
The modest Turkish harbour of Nagara, on the Asian shore of the Dardanelles, lies less than four miles north of the Narrows, the most constricted section of the strait between the Sea of Marmara and the Mediterranean. It was from there that the minelayer Nusret set sail half an hour before midnight on 7 March 1915, under the command of Yuzbashi (Lieutenant) Hakki Bey of the Ottoman Navy. Alongside him on the open bridge stood Birindji-Yuzbashi (Lieutenant-Commander) Hafiz Nazmi Bey, leader of the naval minelaying specialists who had sown the Dardanelles minefields. He was accompanied by a German mine specialist called Bettaque; another German naval officer, Engineer Reeder, was in charge of the engines below. He had checked them and the boilers to enable the vessel to achieve silent running with minimal smoke output. Their unspectacular afterthought of a mission would change the course of the First World War and of world history: it was to be the most effective and devastating minelaying operation ever undertaken, and was to engender the turning-point of the Dardanelles naval campaign.
The 364-tonne vessel was that rarest of objects in the Turkish fleet of the period – a modern, purpose-built craft, ordered in 1910 from the Germaniawerft shipyard in Kiel in the far north of Germany and commissioned into the mostly decrepit Ottoman Navy in 1913. She was 40 metres long with a draught of 3.4 metres and capable of 15 knots. Her twin shafts, driven by two coal-fired, triple-expansion engines, made her suitably manoeuvrable, and she was armed with a pair of 47-millimetre quick-firing guns forward plus two parallel racks on her long, open afterdeck with a capacity of twenty mines each. Her single tall smokestack loomed abaft the bridge. Although the Nusret rated two inconspicuous lines in the 1914 edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships, she was not even noticed by Mr James Stewart, who was leading the regeneration work on the Ottoman Navy on behalf of Armstrong and Vickers until forced to stop when Turkey and Britain went to war. At the behest of the Royal Navy in October 1914, he had compiled an exhaustive, ship-by-ship report on the Turkish fleet, right down to tugs and motor launches, without bothering to mention Turkey’s sole up-to-date minelayer.
The modern naval mine was first used by the Russians in the Crimean War (1854–6) to protect their harbours. The earliest types did not contain enough explosive to sink a ship: two British gunboats struck them but were only moderately damaged and did not sink. Essentially, until more sophisticated varieties were developed before and during the Second World War, the sea-mine was a moored, floating bomb, held in place just below the surface by a cable attached to a weight lying on the seabed and set off when a vessel struck one of its detonator ‘horns’ – the contact mine.
Initially used defensively to protect harbours, mines were sown offensively for the first time by both sides in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. In April 1904 the Imperial Japanese Navy used mines to blockade the Russian Pacific Fleet in its Manchurian base of Port Arthur. When the Russians ca
me out, two heavily armoured battleships struck mines: one, the flagship Petropavlovsk, sank within minutes; the other, Pobeda, was badly damaged and towed away. The rest returned to harbour and stayed there. Among the dead on the flagship was Admiral Makarov, Russia’s best contemporary naval commander. A month later the Russians laid a minefield in their turn in the waters outside Port Arthur. Two out of six modern Japanese battleships hit mines: the Yashima succumbed in a few minutes while the Hatsuse sank a few hours later while under tow. None the less Admiral Togo’s four remaining capital ships managed to defeat eight badly led Russian battleships in the decisive Battle of Tsushima at the end of May 1905. The unprecedented and spectacular success of a cheap and simple weapon against some of the period’s most powerful ships, the strategic armaments of the day, shocked the world’s leading navies, most of which had observers on both sides during the conflict. Whereas the transverse lines of mines in the Dardanelles can be seen as purely defensive, the Nusret’s postscript of an eleventh line, in a separate area known to be used for manoeuvre by enemy battleships, was unmistakably offensive in character.
International conventions required mines to be constructed so as to defuse themselves if they broke free of their cables, and the use of free-floating mines was prohibited. These rules were soon broken in the opening months of the First World War. The humble contact mine as used in that war proved capable of embarrassing the world’s most powerful fleet, the US Navy, as recently as the late 1980s when Iran sowed them in the Strait of Hormuz: the Americans had no minesweepers in commission and had to rely on allies to provide some.
By 1914 mines were much more powerful than 60 years earlier, capable, as we have seen, of mortally wounding mighty battleships by exploding under their hulls, undermining the main belt of armour around a heavy ship’s vitals. A typical German ‘Carbonit’ mine contained 80 kilograms of explosive. Thousands of mines were sown by both sides in 1914, not only defensively to protect ports but also offensively, to inhibit enemy fleets and shipping. Mines were usually laid by fast purpose-built or converted ships, destroyers and also, a little later in the war, by submarines. Aircraft were not yet strong enough for the task.
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