Sir Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton, General Officer Commanding Home Forces, was working in his room at Horse Guards, London, on 12 March 1915 when a messenger arrived with a summons to Kitchener’s office. The general was 62 years old, tall, slender, elegant and erudite, not the most useful attributes for popularity in the officers’ mess. He had nevertheless distinguished himself in one of the British Army’s many inconclusive entanglements in Afghanistan in 1878 and rose to be Kitchener’s chief of staff at the end of the Boer War in 1901. His photographs give an effete impression. He was regarded by his peers as both passive and over-confident.
‘We are sending a military force to support the fleet now at the Dardanelles, and you are to have command,’ Kitchener told him, without preamble. In his Gallipoli Diary Hamilton drily noted: ‘At that moment Kitchener wished me to bow, leave the room and make a start … My knowledge of the Dardanelles was nil; of the Turk nil; of the strength of our own forces next to nil.’ There had been no previous hint of the appointment. Kitchener looked up and barked, ‘Well?’ A reticent man, Kitchener was reluctant and curt when Hamilton started asking questions, but then opened up and became almost garrulous. Hamilton was told that he would have under command ANZAC (General Birdwood), the 29th (Major-General Hunter-Weston) and RN (Major-General Paris) divisions and a French division (Général de division d’Amade). Hamilton asked for four territorial divisions as well and was answered in the negative, with expletives. He also asked for submarines to stop the Turks supplying their forts by sea: a good idea but they were not in his chief’s gift. He was told that his chief of staff would be Major-General W. P. Braithwaite.
When the latter joined other generals (who were as amazed as Hamilton by the appointments) in Kitchener’s office, he asked for some of the latest army aircraft, to which Kitchener snapped: ‘Not one!’ The army’s role in the Aegean, the field marshal said, was to be a ‘second string’, on the assumption that the navy would succeed: ‘But if the admiral fails, then we will have to go in.’ There were to be no piecemeal operations: the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF) was to be used as a whole and only on the European side of the strait. It would have no reserves of manpower (the normal practice on the Western Front was an initial extra allowance of 10 per cent for the inevitable casualties). Kitchener believed that once the fleet broke through and threatened Constantinople, there would hardly be any need to land troops anyway. The French and the Russians could be left to get on with occupying the city while British imperial troops controlled the railways and strategic points to south and west while the fleet dominated the Marmara, so that the 29th and RN divisions could be sent to France. Kitchener was a one-man band, unable to delegate yet with no interest in organised staffwork. His ‘plans’ for the MEF were vague to non-existent. At least Hamilton was able to dissuade him from tempting fate by naming the new command the Constantinople Expeditionary Force … The Secretary for War, indulging his penchant for oracular pronouncements, terminated the interview with the words: ‘If the fleet gets through, Constantinople will fall of itself and you will have won, not a battle but the war.’
Hamilton left London’s Victoria station for Dover on a special train at five p.m. the next day. Churchill himself came to see him off. In his pack the general had a textbook on the Turkish Army dated 1912; a pre-war report on the Dardanelles defences from the late British naval mission; an out-of-date map; and two small guidebooks. He had no staff yet, apart from Braithwaite. Waiting at Dover was a destroyer with the unintentionally ironic name of HMS Foresight to take him to Calais. The port was, not inappropriately, fogbound for hours. Hamilton finally reached Calais at 10.30 p.m. and entrained for Marseilles, where the light cruiser Phaeton was waiting to take him on to the Aegean. He arrived at Tenedos, the small island between Lemnos and the Dardanelles used by the Allies as a forward base, at three p.m. on 17 March. Earlier in the day the Phaeton had passed another British cruiser conveying Vice-Admiral Carden in the opposite direction, to Malta.
The two commanders never met. Vice-Admiral Carden had been in pain for some days, and on 16 March doctors advised him to give up the command and take sick leave as a matter of urgency. The symptoms were similar to those of duodenal ulcers, their presence hardly surprising after the unaccustomed strain on an administrator of protracted and unsuccessful command of a very large fighting force. The problem of the succession was quickly resolved. There were two rear-admirals on hand: the senior, Rosslyn Wemyss, was in command at Mudros, the main base for Dardanelles operations, and could not be spared from a complex task; John de Robeck was however the obvious choice because he had been Carden’s deputy, knew the plans, understood the problems and was well known in the fleet. Wemyss gracefully stood back as de Robeck was promoted over his head to acting vice-admiral on 17 March and ordered to take over, with Wemyss as his deputy, though remaining in charge of the vital task to expand the Mudros base as swiftly as possible. De Robeck was asked by the Admiralty if he approved of Carden’s plan and was expressly given the choice to reject or amend it. He replied that it would go ahead unaltered and as intended on 18 March if the weather was suitable.
John Michael de Robeck was a scion of the Anglo-Irish nobility who joined the navy as an officer cadet at the usual age of 13 in 1875. A rear-admiral since 1911, he had begun the war as flag officer of the Cape Verde and Canary Islands station before his assignment as Carden’s deputy in January 1915. Unlike his predecessor he was an imposing figure, tall and broad, popular with both superiors and inferiors and noted for his charm and resolve. He was younger than Hamilton. Keyes stayed on as chief of staff, a happier man now that a rather more convincing commander was in charge.
Vice-Admiral de Robeck implemented the reorganisation of the fleet prepared by Carden. The 18 battleships were once again in three divisions, but the second and third were enlarged. The First consisted as before of the four strongest ships, Queen Elizabeth (fleet flag) and Inflexible, the two dreadnoughts, in the first subdivision, and Agamemnon and Lord Nelson in the second. The Second Division now included eight older British battle-ships in three subdivisions of four, two and two, led by Captain Hayes-Sadler in HMS Ocean. The Third Division was led by Rear-Admiral Émile Paul Aimable Guépratte in Suffren (flag), and the three other French ships in the sixth subdivision, supported by two further British battleships in the seventh, placed under his flag. Carden’s plan called for the attack to be opened by the First Division in Line A, starting some 14,000 yards from the Narrows forts, while Line B was formed by the French quartet. The seventh subdivision pair moved to flanking positions to cover both lines as they took it in turn to bombard the forts, the French advancing through the British line to fire at closer range from the limit of the swept area, so from about 8,000 yards. The minesweepers were ordered to start work under the big guns at the same time, after the first two hours of bombardment. The Second Division’s third and fourth subdivisions plus the two flanking ships would relieve the French for the closest shelling. Picket boats were to dance attendance on the battleships, always on the lookout for floating mines. Planes would take off every hour to observe the fall of shot: their wireless sets could transmit but not receive. Troops from the RN Division were loaded on to seven transports to give the appearance of an imminent landing at the northern end of the Aegean coast of the peninsula. This feint was meant to draw enemy troops away from the scene of the attack.
The ships were to fire at six main forts which between them housed 42 guns of eight-inch or greater calibres, including six 14-inch. There was an unknown but doubtless profuse number of mobile batteries of howitzers and field guns on either side of the strait. All this and more was set out at a captains’ conference chaired by de Robeck aboard his flagship, Queen Elizabeth, on the afternoon of 16 March. That night and the next, minesweepers swept the previously cleared area and found nothing new. Since Erenkeui Bay, a feature on the Asian side which offered extra sea-room for manoeuvre and turning, lay south of the innermost limit of sweeping it was not search
ed thoroughly. As far as the trawlermen were concerned, there were no mines in the Dardanelles before the notional 8,000-yard line chosen for the second stage of the bombardment.
General Hamilton managed to put together a staff of nine from army and marine officers on the 17th, when he was also conveyed to what he called ‘that lovely sea monster, the Queen Elizabeth’, anchored off Tenedos, for a meeting in the afternoon with de Robeck, Wemyss, Keyes, Guépratte, d’Amade, Braithwaite and an army staff captain, all of whom were junior in rank to the general. Hamilton thought de Robeck ‘a fine-looking man with great charm’, whose main worry was the concealed and mobile artillery which had frustrated the minesweepers. Other pressing concerns were the minefields themselves, and the anticipated arrival of German or Austrian submarines, whose potential had been so vividly illustrated by Norman Holbrook, VC, in B11. Although no notable activity had been seen ashore since the small-scale marine landings against the guns, it was quite clear that the Turks were working very hard on the defences during darkness: the results were plain to see each morning. Seaplanes were still having difficulty rising above extreme rifle range (800–1,000 yards): ‘actually the d****d things can barely rise off the water’.
Hamilton went on to write in his diary:
[De Robeck] gave us … to understand that German thoroughness and forethought have gripped the old go-as-you-please Turk and are making him march to the Parade-Schritt [Prussian goose-step] …
The admiral would prefer to force a passage on his own, and is sure he can do so … He has no wish to call us [troops] in until he has had a real good try.
Ironically, this of course reflected precisely Kitchener’s assessment thus far of the role of the army at the Dardanelles. De Robeck asked to see Hamilton’s orders. When Braithwaite, the army chief of staff, read out Kitchener’s instructions to Hamilton with their vague generalisations and reservations, an astonished Commodore Keyes blurted: ‘Is that all?’ Hamilton admitted he had no means yet of landing a significant force – no transports, no lorries, no pack-horses, no mules. It would take weeks to assemble them. ‘Here, the peninsula looks a tougher nut to crack than it did on Lord Kitchener’s small and featureless map.’ Keyes wrote that the recital of Kitchener’s orders ‘acted on us rather like a cold douche’.
Hamilton spent the night at Tenedos on HMS Phaeton. She left there for Mudros harbour, Lemnos, at four a.m. on 18 March, the day appointed for the great naval attack. The general inspected the shore facilities at daybreak – and found them gravely wanting for a force of 50,000 or more men. Offshore, however, ‘I never saw so many ships collected together in my life.’ He sent a message to Kitchener, saying that Alexandria would have to be the army’s main base: the RN Division transports ‘have been loaded up as in peacetime and they must be completely discharged and every ship reloaded in war fashion’. Lemnos could not cope with such a task. The cruiser then took Hamilton on a fast 60-mile run along the Aegean coast of the peninsula so he could see the terrain and possible landing sites. He noted the tangle of trenches already dug at key points on the coast before the ship put about:
Sailing southwards we are becoming more and more conscious of the tremendous bombardment going on in the straits … everyone excited and trying to look calm.
Captain Cameron of the Phaeton took his ship as close as he dared to the bombarding ships:
We found ourselves on the outskirts of – dream of my life – a naval battle! … The world had gone mad … the elephant and the whale of Bismarckian parable were at it tooth and nail! Shells of all sizes flew hissing through the skies. Before my very eyes the graves of those old gods whom Christ had risen from the dead to destroy were shaking to the shock of Messrs Armstrong’s patent thunderbolts!
A less exalted recollection of the Allied bombardment, probably the loudest noise heard in the Aegean since the volcanic explosion on the island of Thera (Santorini) in 1500 BC, was provided by Marine William Jones of the battleship Prince George to the Sound Archive of the Imperial War Museum in London. His ship, of the seventh subdivision, was flanking the French battleships as they attacked the forts:
We got part way up the Dardanelles; the first ship that got sunk was the French … Bouvet – she got struck by a mine, turned over and within minutes she was sunk.
Carrying on further up the Dardanelles, we were getting shot at, missed quite a lot engaging guns, batteries and the like on the European and the Asiatic side. Further ahead of us was the Ocean, and the Irresistible …
All of a sudden, and ahead of us, there was this big explosion which caused the Ocean and the Irresistible to sink.
Marine Jones’s memory tended to accelerate and telescope events, as we shall see. Engine Room Artificer Gilbert Adshead served aboard the Lord Nelson (he was below deck in the aft dynamo room which supplied the ship’s electricity, but it had a ventilation shaft with an internal ladder leading up to the quarter-deck and was topped with a ‘mushroom’ cap offering slits to look through):
To see that bombardment, never having seen demolition like that before, well, it seemed terrible to me at any rate because the forts seemed to be knocked completely down and we did silence most of the guns. And on our last operation when they had an all-out attack – every ship available – to see if we could definitely finish off the forts and make them surrender, we carried on but we lost about half a dozen ships that day. We lost … the Bouvet – I actually saw that, it was a terrible sight …
We made very good progress and we stopped the forts firing, and we were astonished when … the Admiralty said that the naval ships were to no longer attack in the Dardanelles because we’d lost too many ships on this final operation … If we’d only carried on for a little while longer the Turks with their German assistants would have run up a white flag because we’d put so many guns out of action and they were very short of ammunition and they couldn’t have carried on for much longer.
The future Captain Henry Mangles Denham, RN, was a newly promoted sub-lieutenant aboard HMS Agamemnon. He told one of the most bizarre stories of the bombardment: how Commander St Clair, the battleship’s executive officer, ordered ratings to descend on ropes to paint the side of the ship facing away from the direction of fire.
They were quite safe, the men who were painting, because they were on the disengaged side and they couldn’t be hit, and at the time we didn’t think it particularly unusual. We had to take the opportunity, and we only wanted half the armament manned, so it was quite logical for the other half, the safe side of the ship, to be painted.
Denham thought that Keyes, rather than Carden or even de Robeck, had been the driving force during the campaign. The 18-year-old was on the lookout in the crow’s nest on 18 March and felt the impact of the hits on the ship below; he was profoundly shocked to witness the sudden death of the Bouvet.
The fleet had got on the move from Mudros from 8.15 a.m. It was a perfect early spring day with a gentle breeze, a little early haze that soon cleared and a cloudless sky. The minesweepers reported finding nothing new in the cleared zone up to four miles short of the Narrows. At 10.30 the Agamemnon, behind a destroyer screen, led the way for the First Division, which was flanked by the seventh subdivision, Prince George and Triumph on either side. Half an hour later the first Turkish howitzers opened up from north of Kum Kale on the Asian side. At 11.30 the battleships took up their initial firing positions seven miles short of the Narrows and started the bombardment. By this time mobile guns and howitzers were blazing away at the heavily armoured ships, which were in line abreast: Queen Elizabeth (flag) with de Robeck aboard nearest the European shore, next Agamemnon, then Lord Nelson and finally Inflexible. The flagship first targeted the fort Hamidieh I on the Asian shore, firing across her partners, which attacked various positions on the European side. All four were in action within ten minutes, laying down a deliberate fire, the forts apparently remaining silent while the hidden and movable guns did their irritating worst. At Çemenlik just below Chanak at the Narrows there was a
great explosion at about noon as an ammunition store was hit. The fort was abandoned for the time being, as was Dardanos near by, a seaplane pilot reported.
Stand on the ramparts of the Çemenlik fort (now incorporated into an excellent naval museum) today and look across the Narrows and you are bound to see a few of the ships that make a total of about 60,000 passages per year through the straits – one every ten minutes. Many of them are huge tankers, sailing in ballast high out of the water towards the Black Sea or lying low as they return fully laden with oil or liquid gas towards the Mediterranean. The tankers, the bulk carriers for grain or minerals, the ugly container ships and the like are often much bulkier than any First World War battleship, yet they look manageably small at a distance of a mile or less against the cliffs on the European side. The bombarding warships four or more miles to the south-west therefore may not have appeared particularly fearsome as clouds of black smoke were thrown up by their funnels and their guns – until the shells roared in with a noise like an express train and detonated, usually harmlessly in earth but occasionally to more dramatic effect. Within the fort there lies an undetonated heavy naval shell, rusting away in front of the hole it bored into the stone of a thick wall. Many of the guns used in the defence are also on display, some with their breeches blown out.
The Dandarnelles Disaster Page 16