The Turks and their German allies predictably began laying mines, ultimately in ten lines, across the Dardanelles, mostly south and west of the Narrows, on 3 August 1914. There is some confusion in the records about whose inspired idea it was to lay an eleventh line of mines parallel to the shore of Erenkeui Bay, on the Asian side of the Dardanelles and about two miles south of the last of the ten transverse lines – the mission of the Nusret on 7–8 March. Credit for the decisive idea is usually given to a Lieutenant-Colonel Geehl, described as a Turkish mining expert. Research for this book established that Geehl, whose name is rather more obviously German than Turkish, was one of hundreds of German officers serving in the Ottoman forces. German naval sources spell his name as Gehl and give his rank as ‘Torpedist-Captain’ – roughly equivalent to a lieutenant-commander RN. As the Dardanelles defences were assigned to the Turkish Army, German naval officers working on them wore Ottoman Army uniforms. Mine specialists belonged to the same branch of the Imperial German Navy (IGN) as torpedo experts.
But in a post-war ‘debriefing’ interview with Brigadier-General C. J. Perceval of the British Army in 1919, the Turkish Major-General Cefat Pasha, in charge of the Dardanelles defences at the beginning of the war, said: ‘I had a special line of eight [sic] mines laid in a line parallel to the Erenkeui Bay on the south side of the channel. I considered these would be less likely to be detected, owing to their being parallel to and not across the channel, and that they might catch a ship keeping to the south …’ The interview is in the records of the Dardanelles Committee of officers from all three British armed services, who investigated every aspect of the campaign in great detail (as distinct from the Dardanelles Commission, which conducted the official inquiry into the defeat in 1917–18). Other Turkish sources give Commander Nazmi the credit for the idea of the eleventh line of mines. General Cefat spoke of eight mines; others mentioned 20 and 24.
The German sources refer to 26, and ascribe the idea to Admiral Guido von Usedom, the German flag officer appointed inspector-general of the defences of the straits by the Turks and given the rank of general in their army for the purpose. The mines had been handed over to Usedom’s ‘special command’ by Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, appointed head of the Ottoman fleet soon after he evaded a British chase and brought the Mediterranean Division of the IGN into Turkish waters on 10 August 1914. His message to Usedom said: ‘Fleet [command] recommends mines to be kept in reserve for the time being, and to lay them as a tactical barrier when specific enemy movements can be predicted.’ They were delivered to the fort at Chanak, the main bastion on the Asian side of the Narrows. During the heavy Anglo-French naval bombardments of 19 and 25 February the defenders observed that the attacking battleships used Erenkeui Bay, in the broadest part of the strait south-west of the Narrows, to manoeuvre out of the firing line, reverse course and return to their anchorage at Mudros on the island of Lemnos. It seemed safe therefore to predict that in the next attack they would do the same.
Having sailed close to the Asiatic shore the couple of miles from Nagara to the fort, the engines held to 140 revolutions, the crew of the Nusret stopped to collect their mines. They weighed anchor again at about five a.m. and crossed over to hug the European coast as far as possible and thus obtain some shelter from the rough weather coming from the north-west over the Gallipoli peninsula. Conditions were less than stormy but had proved unpleasant enough to lead the British to forgo their usual night destroyer-patrol in the area south of the Narrows, a fact noted by the defenders and Commander Nazmi. He seized the opportunity of carrying out his mission, as planned some days before, undetected by the enemy. Dawn was breaking over Erenkeui Bay as the minelayer arrived.
After Hakki had crossed the strait again towards the Asian shore, Nazmi laid his mines in a row that ran from north-east to south-west, in line with the shore of the bay and about one and a half miles out. They were laid at intervals of some 100 metres – considerably less than the length of a battleship – and set to float at a depth of five metres. The sailors let a weighted mine slip into the water every 15 seconds. The sowing lasted less than seven minutes. Smaller ships, such as destroyers, could sail over the mines with impunity, their crews blissfully unaware of their presence in such an area, whereas a battleship with its deeper draught was highly likely to strike a mine while manoeuvring. The Nusret, still rolling in the heavy weather, returned to harbour undetected by the Allied besiegers.
The stratagem worked perfectly. On 18 March 1915, the day of the climactic Allied bombardment of the Dardanelles forts, the French battleship Bouvet, 12,200 tonnes, coming out of the firing line, turned to leave the strait at 1.45 p.m. She hit a mine, exploded, keeled over and sank in two minutes, with the loss of some 640 men. Fewer than 40 survived.
And that was only the beginning …
‘Any sailor who attacks a fort is a fool.’
Vice-Admiral Horatio Viscount Nelson
PART I
THE FATEFUL ALLIANCE
CHAPTER 1
The Turkish Question
The Ottoman Empire that was dying on its feet in 1914 was founded in 1299 and captured Constantinople in 1453, putting an end to the residual eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire. Its power peaked about a century later, when it ruled not only what we now call Turkey but also the Balkans, the Levant, the Arab interior and much of North Africa, including Egypt. Defeated in the great naval battle of Lepanto in 1571 and foiled in its attempt to seize Vienna in 1683, its long decline accelerated, making it possible for expansionist European powers, most notably Britain and France, to acquire direct or indirect control of much of its territory, especially in North Africa, in the nineteenth century. Greece broke away to form an independent state in 1830, to which Crete and western Thrace (Salonica) were later added. Italy came late to the feast, seizing coastal Libya and the Dodecanese islands off the Turkish south-western coast in 1912.
Meanwhile Austria-Hungary, Germany’s ally, vied with Russia for influence in the Balkans, a tinderbox of rival nationalisms that flourished in the power vacuum left by the receding Ottomans. Bismarck, architect and Chancellor of the second German Reich, unified in 1870-1, dismissed the region as ‘not worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier’ – but also forecast that if Europe once again succumbed to war, ‘it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans’. Tsar Nicholas I of Russia declared that ‘Turkey is a dying man … He will, he must, die.’ It was as if the leading European powers had gathered round a corpse like carrion crows, ready to squabble over the remains of a once-great empire variously referred to for well over a century under such headings as ‘the sick man of Europe’ or ‘the Turkish (or Eastern) Question’.
The rivalry among the powers over Turkey boiled down to Russia’s eternal ambition to gain secure access to the Mediterranean from the Black Sea by acquiring control of Constantinople – and the determination of the others to prevent it. As Napoleon had written to his ambassador in St Petersburg in 1808: ‘The root of the great question is always there: who will have Constantinople?’ In what was merely the latest in a long series of wars between them, Russia invaded Turkey’s Danubian provinces (modern Bulgaria and Romania) in 1851 and destroyed the Turkish Black Sea fleet in 1853. This prompted Austria to intervene in the Balkans, while Britain and France supported Turkey and declared war on Russia in 1854. In Britain a disgusted Lord Salisbury, the future Prime Minister, declared that Britain had ‘backed the wrong horse’.
The ensuing Crimean War set new standards in military incompetence on both sides, with Russia losing messily by default in 1856. Nevertheless she went to war again in 1877 after the Ottomans had brutally suppressed Slav revolts in the Balkans, imposing harsh territorial terms on the defeated Turks in the Treaty of San Stefano in 1878. But later the same year Russian ambition was once again thwarted at the first Congress of Berlin, where Serbia, Montenegro, Romania and Bulgaria had their autonomy confirmed, Austria gained control of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Britain took over Cyprus. Ser
bia and Bulgaria effectively became client states of Russia. Under Bismarck Germany had joined the encircling powers in 1875, working to divide non-Turkish Ottoman territory in the Balkans between Russia and Austria in the longer term, with Berlin acting as mediator while generally avoiding closer entanglement in Turkish affairs to avoid alarming Russia.
Yet German involvement in Turkey went back to 1826, when the Sultan of the day sought Prussian help in reforming his army after an internal military revolt – the origin of the German military mission to Constantinople. In the same spirit the British were invited to send a naval mission. In 1883 the German Lieutenant-Colonel Colmar Baron von der Goltz became deputy chief of the Turkish General Staff (and inspector-general of military education); he would play a key role in the Middle Eastern campaign of the First World War and would die in harness in 1916 as a field marshal in the Ottoman Army. In 1913 another future field marshal in that army, General Otto Liman von Sanders, became chief of the German military mission – a year after Rear-Admiral Arthur Limpus was appointed head of the British naval one.
British interest in the Ottoman Empire was closely related to London’s central imperial policy: to protect the route to India via the Mediterranean, whose eastern basin the Turks dominated from north, east and south. The British began to take less and less notice of Turkey and its concerns once they had acquired control of Egypt (nominally ruled by a Turkish khedive or viceroy), the Suez Canal and Cyprus. After that, what with possessing naval bases and staging posts at Gibraltar and Malta plus their Mediterranean Fleet, the British felt the imperial lifeline was safe, complacency set in and Britain lost active interest in her role as Turkey’s traditional patron.
Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ascended the German imperial and Prussian thrones in 1888, was only too ready to fill the resulting gap, especially after he dismissed Bismarck from the chancellorship in 1890. Without the guiding hand of the consummate old statesman and power-broker, Germany managed within a few years to fall out with every major power in Europe except Austria-Hungary, thus demolishing the main element of Bismarck’s foreign policy, the shifting network of alliances isolating France to prevent her seeking revenge for her defeat and loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the war of 1870. Undeterred by the brutal and corrupt regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, known as ‘the Damned’, begun in 1876, the autocratic Wilhelm invested heavily in Turkey, most notably by financing the ‘Berlin–Baghdad railway’ project, inaugurated in 1883. New track slowly wound its way through Ottoman territory (in 1914, just two sections, in today’s Syria and Iraq, remained to be built). The overall aim was to complete a line running nearly 1,900 miles across German, Austro-Hungarian or friendly-neutral territory, except for 175 unavoidable miles through Serbia. Talks in 1895 between Britain and Germany on what to do about the crumbling Ottoman Empire led nowhere, thanks to the rapidly diverging interests of the participants. The Kaiser paid a state visit to Constantinople in 1898, during which he encouraged Turkey’s aspirations to revive its spiritual leadership of Islam, the caliphate. He can hardly have been unaware that the majority of the world’s Muslims lived within the British Empire at the time.
Elsewhere, Britain’s old enemy, France, had in 1892 concluded an alliance with Russia – not only Britain’s rival in the ‘Great Game’, the struggle for power in Central Asia, but also Turkey’s traditional foe. This marked the end of more than two decades of French isolation in Europe, as fostered by Bismarck ever since the war with Prussia. The accord was reached two years after Germany had, despite Russian pleas, chosen not to renew its 1887 ‘reinsurance’ treaty with St Petersburg, arguably Wilhelm’s greatest diplomatic blunder. Under this pact each partner had promised to remain neutral if the other got involved in war with a third party – unless Germany attacked France or Russia attacked Austria. Russia was given a free hand by the Germans to intervene in the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. This secret treaty replaced the ‘League of the Three Emperors’ (of Germany, Austria and Russia) formed in 1873 and allowed to lapse in 1887, when Austrian and Russian interests in south-eastern Europe diverged. As far as Berlin was concerned, it had already been superseded in 1879 on the conclusion of the Dual Alliance with Vienna.
Britain stood alone at this time in her concern about the relentless persecution of ethnic minorities by Abdul Hamid II, but the realignment of alliances among the leading powers only encouraged inertia in London: the route to India was safe and the vaguely formulated idea of seizing Constantinople to restrain the Sultan was dropped. London continued for the time being to follow its old policy of avoiding unnecessary entanglements on the continent of Europe, which however would not outlast the nineteenth century by more than a year or two.
By default therefore the Ottoman Empire turned to Germany for protection, especially as Berlin was showing keen interest: and Germany’s main ally, Austria-Hungary, Russia’s rival in the Balkans, could only applaud the resulting check on Russian ambition. The Germans also poured money into a new port at Haidar Pasha, on the Baghdad railway route and the Asian side of the Bosporus, the channel between the Black Sea and the Marmara. All this now made Germany, rather than Turkey, the perceived main obstacle to the eternal Russian ambition of gaining direct access to the Mediterranean. And Germany’s growing dominance in Constantinople in the new century also made it the main threat to the British route to India. But, once the Kaiser and Admiral Tirpitz decided on the rapid expansion of the Imperial High Seas Fleet from 1898, a direct and open challenge to British world maritime supremacy, the main arena of Anglo-German rivalry became the North Sea. The first dramatic consequence of the growing anxiety in London about Germany’s headlong naval expansion was the British alliance with Japan in 1902. With the Imperial Japanese Navy, modelled on the British, prepared to help look after British interests in the Far East, the Admiralty could withdraw major naval units to European waters.
Embittered by the loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the war of 1870, France regarded Germany, which had supplanted her as Europe’s leading military power, as her main enemy ever since. Now as Britain reacted to the threat posed by the Kaiser’s naval challenge, she took another even more important diplomatic step: an understanding with France. The outcome of Wilhelm’s rash naval building programme was not only the Entente Cordiale in 1904 but also a naval construction programme to outstrip Germany’s. France eventually agreed to take the main responsibility for the naval defence of the Mediterranean, enabling the British to reduce their Mediterranean Fleet while they took the naval lead in the Channel, the North Sea and north Atlantic.
Three years after the Entente Britain reached an agreement with Russia, much the lesser threat to British interests when compared with the thrusting new Germany and its ruler’s constant demand for an undefined ‘place in the sun’. This understanding completed the Triple Entente that the Central Powers would confront in 1914. The latter were members of the Triple Alliance with Italy, but this pact required the Italians to aid their Germanic partners only if they came under attack. Since the Central Powers did the attacking in 1914, the casus foederis never arose and traditionally Anglophile Italy began the war as a neutral. All these developments formed the ABC of causation that led to war: Alsace-Lorraine (France v. Germany); Balkan peninsula (Russia v. Austria); capital ships (Britain v. Germany).
The machinations of the European powers as they sought to profit from the decline of the Ottoman Empire were matched by turbulence within it, especially in the period leading up to the war of 1914. The inept and brutal reign of Abdul Hamid II prompted a revolt by a group of relatively youthful intellectuals and military officers who were soon referred to as the ‘Young Turks’. They gravitated to the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), founded by students and young army doctors in 1869 and dedicated to modernising and liberalising the empire before it disintegrated altogether. The reformist constitution announced by the Sultan on his accession in 1876 had been set aside soon afterwards because he took the view that an ignorant population was not ready for it or worthy of it. Th
e newfangled Chamber of Deputies was suspended. Fears of further losses beyond the territorial amputations imposed at the Congress of Berlin, given the endemic unrest in the Balkans and among the Arabs, prompted the CUP in 1908 to threaten revolution unless the constitution was reinstated. This was not the first time the military had intervened in Turkish politics, nor would it by any means be the last. The Sultan complied and the CUP won a huge majority in the ensuing election to the Chamber of Deputies, which reassembled on 17 December.
But the CUP at this stage represented only one of three ideological strands to be found among the politically aware classes in Turkey: the Ottomanist tendency, which wanted to save the empire by modernisation; the Pan-Turkish movement, which wanted to unite all ethnic Turks from central Asia to Anatolia under a single flag; and the Pan-Islamic, which wanted to revive the caliphate and thus re-establish Turkish hegemony over Islam. Rivalry among imperialists, nationalists and Islamists was intense and was by no means discouraged by the end of the Sultan’s tyranny. The CUP used its parliamentary advantage to force the Grand Vizier (prime minister), Kemal Pasha, out of office in February 1909, forming a new government. A month later Islamists provoked a rising in Constantinople, supported by soldiers of the army’s First Corps, in favour of Islamic rule. The CUP brought in the Third Corps from Salonica to suppress the revolt mercilessly: 60 alleged ringleaders were hanged. Abdul Hamid was deposed and sent into internal exile in Salonica; it is not clear whether he was involved in the failed coup. His younger brother Rashid took his place under the official name of Mehmet V. He was to be the last Sultan – and the first to reign like a constitutional monarch rather than rule like a despot.
The Dandarnelles Disaster Page 2