At the next CID meeting in November, Admiral Sir John Fisher, the First Sea Lord, said, ‘Germany now controls the Dardanelles, and we could no longer hope to bribe the defenders to let us pass.’ He was opposed to any attack on the strait, especially one by the navy alone, and hoped it would never happen. The General Staff and the Naval Intelligence Division agreed at a conference on the Dardanelles question in December 1906 that a squadron of older armoured ships might break through to Constantinople but would be battered on the way back; and if the Turks abandoned the city there would be no real profit anyway. The army might be able to land 5,000 troops on Gallipoli for a surprise coup de main against the coastal artillery from the rear, but the force would be difficult to extricate and would have to hold on until heavily telegraphed, heavy reinforcements could be landed. That left the possibility of a large-scale combined operation, which could hardly expect to achieve surprise and would therefore have to make a landing opposed by strong defensive forces with modern guns – unless the fleet could somehow cover the landing in such a way as to enable the troops to seize a sufficiently large beachhead from which to launch a landward advance. Naval officers thought their army colleagues were overlooking the huge and swift recent advances in warship technology, including high explosives, rangefinders and massive long-range guns of a new standard of accuracy, but all agreed that large military and naval forces would be needed and heavy casualties were inevitable. War Office and General Staff studies in 1908 and again in 1911 reached the same conclusions.
The CID’s ninety-sixth meeting in February 1907 had concluded: ‘The Committee consider that the operation of landing an expeditionary force on or near the Gallipoli Peninsula would involve great risk, and should not be undertaken if other means of bringing pressure to bear on Turkey were available.’ The subject did not come up again at the CID itself in peacetime, even when Turkish territorial ambitions in the Persian Gulf appeared to threaten British interests in the region. Both the Admiralty and the War Office consistently took it as read that should it be necessary or advisable to attempt to force the Dardanelles in order to coerce the Ottoman government, a full-scale, combined naval and military operation was the only strategy. There could be no question of the Royal Navy attempting the task unaided.
Thanks to its intervention on Turkey’s side in the Crimean War, the underlying motive for which was, as ever, to frustrate Russian ambitions in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, Britain enjoyed lasting prestige and even popularity in Turkey. This endured despite British inroads on Ottoman territory in Egypt, Persia, the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean plus loud public criticism of Turkish oppression of its minorities (Turkey’s cavalier approach to human rights was still a bone of contention a century later). Until almost the end of the nineteenth century Turkey looked to Britain and its navy for protection from Russian expansionism, but in the last quarter German influence began to gain ground at Britain’s expense.
Yet the British naval mission, while hardly hyperactive during this period, was still in place in Constantinople. Rear-Admiral Arthur Henry Limpus led it in his official capacity as naval adviser to the Ottoman government and was personally popular among the Turks. Soon after his appointment by Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, in 1912, Limpus displayed energy in trying to revive the Turkish fleet, as part of British efforts to help the Turks recover from their setbacks in the Balkan wars. In this he was encouraged by his political chief, who was virtually alone among British ministers in favouring an alliance with Turkey. Churchill was enthusiastically supportive of the ‘Young Turks’, especially when they brought down Sultan Abdul Hamid, ‘the Damned’, who was personally responsible for the persecutions. Churchill met Enver, then briefly military attaché in Berlin, while officially observing German Army manoeuvres in 1909, when the Turk was aged just 27. Enver called on Churchill in London in 1910, the year he became First Lord. In September they met again when Churchill spent five days in Constantinople.
Turkey had already ordered a dreadnought battleship in 1911, to be built on Tyneside and named Reshadieh. The ship was launched in September 1913. There was no dock big enough for such a large vessel in Constantinople, so in December 1913, as the ship, 23,000 tonnes and armed with ten 13.5-inch guns, was being fitted out, the Turks concluded another deal with Armstrong’s and Vickers, the two shipbuilders whose close co-operation would one day lead to a merger, for shore facilities for her. The two companies were also commissioned to regenerate the neglected ships of the Ottoman fleet but had made little progress when the war broke out. In the same month Turkey successfully made an offer for another battleship, the Rio de Janeiro, nearing completion on Tyneside. The ship, 27,500 tonnes with 14 12-inch guns, at the time the world’s longest dreadnought, had been commissioned by Brazil, which then found it could not afford the cost. She was renamed Sultan Osman I. Both ships were to be ready for delivery in July 1914. The contracts, which ran to a total of £6 million, were funded by nationwide public subscription and special taxes in Turkey and by Ottoman government bonds issued in London, supported by international bank loans. The Turks wanted the ships to shore up their flagging prestige – and quite possibly to recover the Aegean islands they had lost to Greece and Italy in recent years.
But as war with Germany looked imminent it was their friend Churchill who decided to take over both ships as a last-minute, instant reinforcement for the British Grand Fleet in the North Sea. Some 500 Turkish sailors had arrived in a steamer at Newcastle upon Tyne to man the ships and take them home. Under the contracts Britain was actually entitled to commandeer them (with full financial compensation) in a national emergency. Churchill made his decision to do so on 28 July 1914 – the day before the Grand Fleet was sent in a body to Scapa Flow after a naval review at Portland on the south coast of England. This strategic move had a decisive effect on the outcome of the war because it meant that the planned naval blockade of Germany could begin without delay. Regardless of subsequent errors by himself and others, this was Churchill’s most important contribution by far to ultimate victory. The Cabinet approved the seizure of the Turkish dreadnoughts on 31 July and British sailors backed by troops took them over on 1 August. The move raised the number of dreadnoughts in the Grand Fleet to 22 (with 13 building), compared with Germany’s 13 (10 on the stocks): Reshadieh became HMS Erin while Rio de Janeiro, after only a few days as Sultan Osman I, was born again as HMS Agincourt. The instant expansion of the Grand Fleet’s big-gun strength by 10 per cent understandably caused universal outrage in Turkey, swinging political and public opinion decisively towards Germany at the critical moment.
Unbeknown to the British and most of the rest of the world, the timing could not have been worse.
CHAPTER 2
The German Answer
Germany offered Russia a free run in 1875 to pursue her enduring ambition to dominate the route from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean by achieving control of Constantinople, preferably by occupying it. This was a startling departure from the usually unspoken consensus among the European powers that Russia should never be allowed unfettered access to the Mediterranean. In exchange Bismarck, intent as ever on constraining France, asked the Tsar for a free hand in western Europe. The Russians could not fail to be tempted but, no doubt anticipating trouble with Britain and other powers over such a unilateral settlement of the ‘eastern question’, turned it down. This prompted an expansionist Second Reich to look eastward to extend its political power and economic interests.
From 1875 the Emperor Wilhelm I and his Chancellor, Bismarck, set out to woo the Ottoman Empire. Germany turned two blind eyes towards the brutal internal repression of Sultan Abdul Hamid which had aroused widespread protests in Britain and western Europe. When British and French banks turned down Turkish requests for loans, Germany would provide. Even though the Congress of Berlin, chaired by Bismarck, effectively dismantled Turkish rule in the Balkans in 1878, the Germans continued with some success to increase their influence in Constantinopl
e. The German military mission was revived and extended. In 1882 Colonel Kochler was appointed deputy chief of staff of the Turkish Army, succeeded on his death in 1883 by von der Goltz; in the same year the railway route from Berlin to Constantinople was opened, with work continuing on the extension to Baghdad. The state visit of Kaiser Wilhelm II, more crudely ambitious for Germany than his father, in 1898, underpinned German domination into the twentieth century.
Enver’s reward for his part in the revolution of 1908–9 included a short stint as military attaché in Berlin in 1909, which consolidated his admiration for all things German, especially the army: he became the most enthusiastic supporter of the German connection in the CUP leadership and the government. By then Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, appointed German ambassador to Constantinople in 1897, had come to personify Germany in Turkish eyes. A bulky, Bismarck-like figure with duelling scars on his face, he exuded confidence and a certain brutal charm. He was succeeded in 1912 by Baron Hans von Wangenheim, another imposing personality in the Prussian mould but rather more polished and subtle. He worked as tirelessly as his predecessor to build up German influence in Turkey. As the threat of general war grew, he bent all his efforts to achieving a formal alliance with the Ottoman Empire. General Liman von Sanders took over, and strongly expanded, the military mission in December 1913, bringing with him 70 officers who effectively took over the Turkish Army within a few months. As war broke out, spreading to Turkey within three months, there were 800 German military advisers, who were soon to be reinforced by naval ones.
In autumn 1912 Turkey, fearing an attack on Constantinople itself by Bulgaria, whose heavy artillery could be heard from the city, had called a meeting of ambassadors of all the participants in the Congress of Berlin of 1878 to ask for an international naval force to protect the Ottoman capital and the lives and property of foreign citizens living there. Nine nations agreed to take part, including Russia. The British sent two cruisers and even the small and elderly Royal Netherlands Navy managed to provide one. The Kaiser, whose country had hosted the Congress, was angry and embarrassed when he awoke to the fact that the Imperial Navy had no presence in the Mediterranean, apart from the modest gunboat it kept at the Golden Horn, like the other powers, to look after its interests and privileges (the humiliating ‘capitulations’ whereby Turkey conferred virtual legal immunity on resident citizens of the principal powers). The United States was content to be represented merely by the gunboat it normally kept on station. On the advice of Admiral Tirpitz, co-architect with himself of the High Seas Fleet, Wilhelm, always on the lookout for chances to assert Germany’s claim to great-power status, created the Mediterranean Division of the Imperial Navy on a whim in November 1912, sending it to fly the Kaiser’s imposing black and white naval ensign off Constantinople as the tenth constituent of the protection squadron. It consisted of just two shining new ships, both in the process of completing their sea trials at the time: the battlecruiser Goeben, with the light cruiser Breslau as her sole escort.
The pair caused a sensation when they arrived at Constantinople on 15 November. The Goeben was not only by far the most impressive ship in the squadron and its only dreadnought; it was also the fastest and most powerful capital ship in the entire Mediterranean. The divisional flag officer, Rear-Admiral Kummler, placed himself at the disposal of the French vice-admiral nominally commanding the force, France being the leading naval power in the Mediterranean. The foreign warships were in the event not called upon to take any action as the Turkish front against the Bulgarians managed to hold firm and save Constantinople. The squadron dispersed in due course, but the Mediterranean Division remained in being, free to use the naval bases and harbours of Germany’s allies, Austria-Hungary and Italy. The German presence in the inland sea was to be permanent, a new piece on the strategic board which however aroused little concern in the French and British Mediterranean fleets, both of which were much larger: the British alone possessed three battlecruisers in the region, any one of which fired a heavier broadside than the Goeben, although each was inferior in armour and speed. Britain also disposed of an array of heavy and light cruisers plus destroyers. The French had two dreadnoughts and 17 other, sometimes elderly, battleships with several squadrons of lesser vessels.
Admiral Kummler was relieved in October 1913 by Rear-Admiral Wilhelm Anton Theodor Souchon, aged 49, son of an artist of Huguenot descent. He hoisted his flag on the Goeben in Trieste and immediately set out on a detailed exploration of his area of operations. Showing the flag at friendly, neutral and potential enemy ports not only offered an endless series of floating drinks parties but also opportunities to study local conditions. He met the commanders-in-chief of the Austrian and Italian fleets but was not impressed by their French contemporary, Vice-Admiral Augustin Boué de Lapeyrère, whom he called upon at Messina in Sicily (Souchon’s acquaintance with the port would soon prove very useful). He never met Admiral Sir Berkeley Milne, commander-in-chief of the British Mediterranean Fleet, whose policy was to send a strong British contingent to any port visited by the Germans as soon as possible afterwards, to counteract any favourable impression gained by the locals. The Kaiser called this transparent spoiling tactic ‘spitting in the soup’.
Rear-Admiral Ernest Troubridge, Milne’s second-in-command and flag officer of the First Cruiser Squadron, did not meet Souchon either, but was entertained by the captain and officers of SMS Breslau during a visit to Durrazzo in the last week of peace: he left an imposing impression. Uncertain of Italy’s semi-detached role in the Triple Alliance, Souchon held talks with the Austrian naval commander-in-chief, Admiral Anton Haus, at his main base of Pola (now Pula in Croatia) and agreed that the Mediterranean Division would serve under the latter’s overall command in the event of war.
In May 1914 the Goeben continued her unceasing round of showing the Kaiser’s flag by calling at Constantinople on the invitation of the Sultan, not for the first time, nor yet the last. While she was in port on 22 May a large fire broke out at a nearby Turkish army barracks. Some 150 sailors volunteered to help (without detracting from their heroism, one may reasonably deduce mixed motives on their part: they were in the midst of coaling ship, the most hated task in the navies of the day). They rushed half-naked and covered in coal dust through the narrow streets to fight the flames; three German sailors died in the blaze and four were injured. Thousands of Turks turned out for the funeral to acknowledge their courage and sacrifice. The gesture was not primarily intended to do so, but undoubtedly conferred invaluable prestige on Germany and its navy at a very useful moment, encouraging the Germanophiles in the divided government.
The CUP coup of January 1913 brought in Mahmud Sevket Pasha as Grand Vizier. His Cabinet had a ‘distinct German colouring’ in the view of the British ambassador, Sir Louis Mallet. When Sevket was assassinated in June, Prince Said Halim Pasha succeeded him without giving Mallet reason to revise his assessment. The driving forces in both CUP and Cabinet were Enver, Minister of War from early 1914, and Talaat Bey, party leader and Minister of the Interior, originally inclined towards Russia but opportunistically turned pro-German. They formed a ruling triumvirate with Jemal Pasha, who became Minister of Marine in 1913. Halim favoured neutrality, but without passion. Halil, the Chairman of the Chamber of Deputies, and Jemal Pasha, initially pro-French, allowed themselves to be won over to Germany. But there were several other members of the government, such as Javid, the Foreign Minister, who favoured Britain and had supported an offer to London of a formal alliance, declined in 1911. As late as July 1914 the majority in the Turkish Cabinet was friendly disposed towards Britain, Enver and Talaat as usual standing out against such a policy.
Enver was born in 1881 and schooled for an army career. In 1903 he was a staff captain with III Corps in Salonica as well as a committed activist for the CUP. As we saw, his prominent role in the revolution of 1908–9 won him a posting to Berlin as military attaché. A lieutenant-colonel at the time of his counter-attack on the Bulgarians which led to
the recovery of Edirne, he was promptly promoted brigadier-general, which brought the title Pasha. Small, dapper, vain and energetic, he cut a figure rather different from that of Talaat Bey, a hard-working politician of a more traditional mould (and build) with a strong character and a bluff manner that masked considerable intelligence and shrewdness. Just 27 when he led the coup by the CUP in June 1908, Enver was anointed ‘Hero of the Revolution’ but later unsuccessfully fought the Italians in North Africa, until a humiliating peace was hastily signed with them as general war broke out in the Balkans in 1912. Energetic, ruthless and determined, Enver always cut a dashing and dapper figure and earned the not necessarily affectionate nickname of Napoleonlik – little Napoleon. In his study he kept a portrait of the French emperor on one wall and of King Frederick the Great of Prussia on another but the implicit assessment of his own military talent was seriously exaggerated.
The Dandarnelles Disaster Page 4