The Dandarnelles Disaster

by Dan Van der Vat

  At this bleak juncture Fisher, shocked by the Goliath catastrophe, announced the withdrawal from the Aegean of the Queen Elizabeth, to be replaced by two more old battleships plus two of the new monitors, each equipped with 14-inch guns. Kitchener went to the Admiralty on the 12th and objected to the recall of the super-dreadnought, describing it as a desertion. Fisher exploded: he threatened to walk out of the Admiralty never to return unless the ship left for home and the North Sea that very night. Churchill consented, without enthusiasm, and that evening de Robeck ordered her out of the Aegean in response to the Admiralty’s telegram. It was a purely operational decision, and Fisher had every right to make it, and indeed to expect the First Lord’s unconditional consent, if not approval.

  Two evenings later, Churchill paid a brief visit to Fisher’s office before dinner. As the two men normally got on very well, it was an amiable half-hour’s conversation on routine questions of supply and replacements in the Aegean. As usual the admiral went to bed early. When he returned to his office at about dawn on 15 May, there were no fewer than four notes from Churchill, containing decisions on operational matters. He wanted to send two of the latest submarines to the Aegean, then two big 15-inch howitzers, extra 9.2-inch guns and more monitors. This was too much for the First Sea Lord, who had gone to bed thinking everything had been settled, only to find, as so often, that one could never be sure when it came to Churchill and the Dardanelles. For the ninth time Fisher announced his resignation, and this time he was going to make it stick. He told the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, of his intention; the Chancellor told Asquith, who immediately sent a note to the admiral, ordering him in the King’s name to stay in place. Fisher went to see him and said he would not be dissuaded. Churchill himself could not talk him out of it this time. In a note on the 16th even more excitable than usual, littered with capital letters and underlinings and exclamations, Fisher accused his chief of still being intent on driving the fleet through the Dardanelles: ‘I know you so well … You will remain. I SHALL GO. It is better so.’ He stayed in his official apartments at Admiralty Arch, determined this time to keep out of reach of Churchill’s overwhelming persuasiveness and planning to get away to his friend the Duke of Hamilton’s estate in Scotland.

  The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, Grey, urged him to sit tight and say nothing. The shell crisis was about to bring down the Liberal government and Asquith felt obliged to form a coalition Cabinet with the Conservatives in order to stay in power. Could this mean that Churchill would not be in the new administration, or at least not at the Admiralty? Fisher seemed to weaken: he might stay on, he indicated, if neither Churchill nor Balfour, whom he disliked intensely, became First Lord. Meanwhile Churchill on 17 May chose the excessively malleable Admiral of the Fleet Sir Arthur Wilson to replace Fisher, a choice which appalled Jellicoe, the Grand Fleet commander, who described Churchill as a ‘danger to the empire’ (Wilson accepted the offer but changed his mind on the 19th). Later on the 17th, Room 40 discovered that the High Seas Fleet was about to deploy in the North Sea arena. Fisher was told but still refused to return to duty, believing that the Germans were not about to make a major foray (in fact some battlecruisers came out, but only as distant cover for a large mine-laying operation near the Dogger Bank; the Grand Fleet came out too, but the Germans very soon turned for home). The Second Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Frederick Hamilton, stood in at the operations room. The King, the Prime Minister and his government and the Admiralty classed Fisher’s absence as desertion because his resignation had not yet been accepted. Some spluttered that he should be taken out and shot; but they all still wanted him to stay.

  The news of the resignation leaked into the public domain on 18 May, and the entire national press urged him to remain: he should be made First Lord himself, on the model of Kitchener and the War Office. Most admirals wanted him to stay as the only man who could at least stand up to Churchill, if not restrain his wilder ideas. Buoyed up by the great breadth and depth of sympathy and support for him, Fisher finally overreached himself, setting out six imperious conditions for staying on in a long memorandum to Asquith on 19 May. No Churchill, no Balfour, no Wilson; the new First Lord to be kept out of operational matters, which must be wholly reserved to Fisher, along with appointments, dockyards and establishments; disband the RN Division, bring the two ‘Nelsons’ back from the Aegean; more mines, more aircraft …

  Asquith simply concluded that the old admiral was out of his mind, at least temporarily, but still refused to accept his resignation. He let Fisher know through an intermediary on 22 May that Churchill would not be First Lord in the new Cabinet. Sympathisers including Hankey advised the admiral to go away on leave before he completely destroyed himself. Asquith let him go to Scotland, even though he had still not accepted the admiral’s resignation. But when Arthur Balfour was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty that very day, everybody in the know recognised that this would be the last straw for Fisher, who would never work under the Tory veteran. Asquith therefore finally accepted his resignation later on 22 May. It was a sad and embarrassing ending to the glorious career of the Royal Navy’s greatest modern leader.

  Winston Churchill was informed on 17 May of Asquith’s plan to form a coalition government, preferably without him. The Conservatives expressly wanted the turncoat Churchill excluded from the Admiralty, especially if Fisher was not going to be there as a restraining influence. The King favoured the appointment of Balfour. Churchill held out for the War Office if he could not keep the Admiralty; he tried to persuade Fisher to stay on with a seat in the Cabinet if he could only stay on at the head of the navy, behaving as if he and not Asquith were forming a government. Fisher, still avoiding a direct encounter with his old chief, said no three times: he was not coming back in any capacity unless his arrogant conditions were accepted (which he must have known could not happen; indeed it is possible that he produced them as a way of burning his boats, to ensure that his resignation was accepted). On 21 May Churchill conceded defeat and recognised that Asquith would not reappoint him. Retaining his dignity, he condescended to accept the post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a Cabinet sinecure. The press and the admirals were openly delighted with the fall of the pushy young minister: only the Observer predicted that he would be back, that ‘his hour of triumph will come’.

  Admiral Sir Henry Jackson, aged 60, was appointed First Sea Lord.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Gallipoli Campaign

  Hamilton, on his arrival in the Aegean, was contemplating a landing on the western side of the neck of the Gallipoli peninsula, at the Bulair line. As the Phaeton conveyed him along the coast of the peninsula and up the Gulf of Xeros towards Bulair at its neck, he could not fail to notice that every part of a generally difficult coastline where the ground was even remotely suitable for a landing had already been fortified, at least by trenches and barbed wire. He soon concluded that Kitchener’s theory of a landing at Bulair, forcing the Turks to evacuate the peninsula and retire towards Constantinople, was baseless: their infantry and artillery were being supplied by sea on the Marmara side. If the peninsula is viewed as a pistol pointing at Constantinople, Suvla on the Aegean coast is the point at which the stock turns into the handle. Below Bulair and above Suvla Point there was almost nowhere suitable for a large-scale landing; below it there were several beaches open enough for invasion, particularly at the end of the ‘butt’ from Tekke Burnu round Cape Helles to Morto Bay on the strait side.

  Apart from the two battalions of Royal Marines and the 3rd Australian Brigade, already camping out at Mudros, Hamilton decided that all troops were to assemble at Alexandria (the French at Port Said), where their supply ships would be emptied and refilled or, in modern parlance, ‘combat-loaded’, so that their contents were stored in the correct order – last in, first out – for supporting an opposed landing by troops. This was a logistical and logical principle new to the Admiralty’s Director of Transport, Graeme Thomson, a civilian sh
ipping expert appointed by Churchill against the advice of his admirals and the Secretary to the Admiralty, Sir Graham Greene. The Aegean Squadron also had to prepare for its new role of supporting operations on land, all of which meant that the enemy had several more weeks to get ready and that there was no possibility of strategic, and not much of tactical, surprise.

  As Turkish Minister of War and commander-in-chief, Enver Pasha expected the Allied fleet to return as soon after 18 March as the weather allowed. So did the inspector-general of the army, Otto Liman von Sanders. Soon after the withdrawal of the enemy ships on the 18th Enver asked Liman to his office and appointed him commander of the forces defending the Dardanelles – the Turkish Fifth Army. The two men had been at serious odds over Enver’s dispositions, which had placed penny-packets of troops on each side of the strait under separate European and Asian commands. Until February there had been only one infantry division in the vicinity, divided into small detachments based at Bulair, Gaba Tepe on the Aegean coast south of Suvla, Maidos (now Eçeabat) opposite Chanak at the Narrows, Cape Helles at the southern tip of the peninsula and at Kum Kale, facing Helles on the Asian shore. On 19 February a second division arrived, so that there could now be one division on each side of the strait. If the Allies were indeed coming ashore, it was highly likely that they would land simultaneously on both sides. Liman had been arguing for drawing a line across the waterway rather than along it, with an integrated single command for the whole area under threat of invasion, and the autocratic Enver wanted to get rid of him. But the situation had become much more urgent in the light of the great bombardment and the apparent likelihood of its renewal. Given the command, Liman determined to do it his way and was given the go-ahead on 24 March. The German general immediately requested and was granted extra divisions, raising his total to six, and departed by sea on 25 March to the little town of Gallipoli (now Gelibolu) that gave its name to the peninsula. On the same day, as it happened, General Hamilton left for Alexandria to supervise his army’s preparations.

  Liman set up his headquarters in the abandoned French vice-consulate on the 26th. Like Hamilton, he had arrived in post in a rush and without a staff, but this was soon remedied: he had plenty of German officers already stationed in Turkey to choose from, although he relied in the main on Turkish staff officers, with a German artillery commander. He was also receiving detailed intelligence about enemy preparations at Mudros on Lemnos, at Tenedos island, just off the Asian side of the Dardanelles, and in Egypt. The general’s dispositions were straightforward. Discounting a landing from inside the strait, he placed two divisions (the 11th and 3rd) to the south-west on the Asian shore where landing conditions were good; two – the 5th and 7th – at the north-eastern end of the peninsula near Bulair (Liman believed for a dangerously long time that this must be the main target); one, the 9th, to the south-west, covering Cape Helles, and one inland in the south under his direct command as a mobile reserve, ready to move to the most threatened area when the main thrust of the enemy attack became clear. The head of this under-strength, newly formed reserve division, the 19th, was a certain Lieutenant-Colonel (later Lieutenant-General, finally Marshal) Mustafa Kemal. Divisional commanders, usually holding the rank of full colonel, were warned to be ready to move units to specially threatened areas: the chosen strategy was forward but not fixed defence with a mobile reserve, although as many as five lines of trenches had been dug, Western Front-style, complete with sandbags and wire, at the most likely landing areas. Apart from a small handful of aircraft based at Chanak, the defenders had no aeroplanes or seaplanes. By the beginning of April, Liman had some 60,000 infantry under command, plus about 25,000 support troops, including artillerymen. Cavalry was of no use on the peninsula’s tortuous terrain.

  General Hamilton and his staff left Alexandria on a requisitioned Cunard liner on 8 April and arrived at Mudros on the 10th, when a conference was held on de Robeck’s flagship, the Queen Elizabeth. The overall plan for a main landing at the southern tip of the peninsula was agreed by the naval and army officers as the most useful for the navy’s ultimate objective of breaking through the straits; it was also agreed that if naval fire support was to be of any use, the initial landings would have to be made in daylight, and from warships with landing vessels, mainly rowed cutters, in tow until the final approach, rather than from mercantile transports, which would have to stay out of range of enemy fire until beachheads had been secured. Once the first wave, known as the covering force, had established beachheads, the main body would be rowed ashore as soon as their troopships had closed up. The landing beaches V, W and X were small, enabling a combined maximum of 18 towed and rowed cutters at a time to unload, amounting to a first wave of 2,200 troops. Some 45 minutes would elapse before a second wave could be landed in this way; to increase substantially the size of the covering force, therefore, an ingenious variation on the theme of the Trojan horse, which had turned the trick for the besieging Greeks on the other side of the Dardanelles 3,000 years earlier, was proposed by the captain of a destroyer, Commander Edward Unwin, RN. His idea was to cram another 2,000 troops on an inconspicuous-looking collier, the SS River Clyde, and run her ashore on V beach as soon as the first troop-tows had arrived. She was equipped with a shielded machine-gun nest on the foredeck and would tow a steam barge, which was to run itself aground in turn in the shallower water ahead of the collier. Also in tow were flat-bottomed lighters to be used with the grounded barge as a pontoon bridge from the River Clyde’s bows to help the soldiers get ashore. Plates were cut from her sides near the bows, and plank walkways were suspended from them forward, to enable the troops to reach the bridge. Unwin retained command.

  One of two further late additions to the plan of attack was the decision to land French troops on the Asian shore near the entrance fort of Kum Kale for a short period, instead of keeping the French division back as army reserve. V beach was most exposed to shellfire from the Asian side, which the French were to neutralise before withdrawing in due course. The other amendment was Hamilton’s decision to add Y beach to the plan as an extra landing spot for 2,000 men. With them, and those going ashore at S beach, the covering force was increased to 4,900 troops plus the 2,000 on the River Clyde. Feint landings were mounted against Bulair by the RN Division and against Besika Bay on the Asian side opposite Tenedos by the French, each covered by battleships. A separate strong thrust would be made by a covering force of 4,000 ANZAC troops at Z beach some 12 miles to the north of the main assault; the balance of General Birdwood’s corps of two divisions would follow them ashore.

  For its part, the Allied navy planned to assist the army, not only by ferrying its troops ashore and supplying them, but also by attacking the Dardanelles again with a view to entering the Sea of Marmara within days of a successful landing. De Robeck recalled the great success of HM Submarine B11 in December 1914 and decided, if either or both of these enterprises failed or stalled, to send another boat into the Dardanelles. The day before, however, on 16 April, a Turkish torpedo-boat, the Demir Hissar, mounted a bold attack on one of the last troopships bringing the 29th Division to the Aegean, the SS Manitou, with about 650 soldiers and 600 horses aboard. The 100-tonne boat had a Turkish crew with German officers and had already crippled a British seaplane-carrier in the Gulf of Smyrna. She slipped away from there on the night of 15–16 April without being noticed by British ships in the area and made for the Alexandria–Mudros transport route. Unusually for a troopship, even in those earliest days of the U-boat menace, the Manitou was unescorted and incapable of defending herself as there was no ammunition aboard. The German commander, observing prize rules, ordered the master to abandon ship in three minutes before issuing the order to sink her by torpedo; but she had enough boats for only a third of those on board. They were therefore given an extra ten minutes to jump overboard, but chaos reigned. The troops had been doing boat drill when the torpedo-boat arrived, and began launching lifeboats independently, overloading and capsizing some. Two torpedoes were
fired; both missed, and the Demir Hissar made off when British destroyers approached from north and south, eventually beaching herself on the neutral Greek island of Chios, where the crew was interned. Fifty-one men died in the confusion on the Manitou. Another stable door was closed when the handful of ships still to come from Alexandria were henceforward provided with naval escorts.

  Lieutenant-Commander Theodore Brodie, RN, took one of the newest submarines in British service, E15, into the Dardanelles on 17 April. A naval aeroplane circled overhead, with Brodie’s twin brother aboard as observer. The eternal current got the better of the submarine, which went aground near Kephez Point on the Asian shore on the 20th. The Turks and Germans promptly opened fire with their artillery, killing Brodie and 6 others and taking 24 sailors prisoner. A Turkish destroyer tried to tow the wreck clear but withdrew when British planes dropped bombs; the small British submarine B6 came up the strait and tried to torpedo the E15 but had to withdraw under heavy enemy fire. Two British destroyers were the next to try but were also driven off by heavy shelling. On the morning of the 18th Holbrook’s famous submarine, B11, tried her luck but was foiled by a typical Dardanelles fog. Next two old battleships came up but could get no closer than six miles from the wreck under fierce enemy fire and withdrew without hitting it.