The Dandarnelles Disaster

by Dan Van der Vat

  De Robeck was determined to prevent the enemy from learning the stranded boat’s secrets, so on the next night Lieutenant-Commander E. G. Robinson, who had won the VC for leading gun-demolition parties ashore in February, led two picket boats, each carrying a single torpedo in a deck launcher, in a stealthy advance towards Kephez. They too came under heavy shellfire when caught in Turkish searchlights, which however also conveniently lit up their target. Both torpedoes were fired at the submarine, but as the two boats withdrew one was hit below the waterline by a Turkish shell and began to go under. Robinson’s boat rescued the men on the other and withdrew; just one man was lost. It was only on the morning of the 18th, when an aeroplane flew over the scene, that the gallant raiders learned that their attack had succeeded and the E15 had been destroyed. For the moment, submarine forays were suspended.

  Among those captured from the E15 was a Lieutenant Palmer of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, until recently the British vice-consul at Chanak, who was on de Robeck’s staff as an intelligence officer and became the subject of a tantalising rumour. He was personally interrogated by the Turkish commander of the Dardanelles forts, Colonel (later Major-General) Jevad, and apparently took the highly dangerous decision to provide some disinformation: talking freely about the Allied invasion plans in an apparent bid to save his neck, he said that the main focus would be the neck of the peninsula – Bulair and the Gulf of Saros. There is no proof, but this ‘revelation’ may well have influenced Liman von Sanders’s dispositions in the five days before the invasion (which included an elaborate feint against Bulair).

  Meanwhile the largest fleet in terms of tonnage ever seen in the Mediterranean was gathering at Mudros: warships and naval auxiliaries, troop transports, supply ships and attendant vessels, more than 200 in all. Mudros, a capacious bay which normally had room to spare for the Allied naval forces, was not big enough for the whole of the invasion fleet, obliging the RND’s and the French transports temporarily to make for Trebuki on the island of Skyros to the south-west, while those of the 29th and ANZAC divisions filled Mudros along with the warships. These numbered 59; strength had not declined since the losses incurred in the defeat of 18 March – on the contrary. There were once again 18 battleships, including 3 French, 12 cruisers (4 French) and 29 destroyers (5 French). These were supported by a dozen submarines (4 French), 5 French torpedo-boats, 6 fleet minesweepers and 20 trawlers, a seaplane-carrier, a submarine depot-ship – and one balloon ship with which naval gunfire could be observed.

  The naval forces were organised into seven squadrons (one French under the irrepressible Guépratte). Admiral Wemyss, de Robeck’s secondin-command and still acting governor of the Mudros base, was entrusted with the direction of the southern landings as flag officer of the First Squadron, by far the largest with 6 battleships, 4 cruisers and 6 fleet minesweepers – the Fourth Squadron of just 2 cruisers and 12 trawlers was also attached to his flag, which he flew on the cruiser Euryalus, more manoeuvrable than a battleship and able to go closer inshore. Rear-Admiral Stuart Nicholson was his second-in-command, leading the battleships and flying his flag on the Swiftsure. Rear-Admiral Cecil Thursby commanded the Second Squadron of 5 battleships, a cruiser and 8 destroyers, the seaplane-carrier and the balloon ship, which were to cover the ANZAC landing. A small Third Squadron (one battleship, and 2 each of cruisers, destroyers and trawlers) conducted the feint against Bulair. The Fifth consisted of the battleship Agamemnon, 10 destroyers, three minesweepers and two trawlers: their task was to sweep the mouth of the strait for mines and to lay nets against enemy submarines. Admiral Guépratte’s Sixth Squadron of three battleships (plus one British) and four cruisers (one of them Russian), seven destroyers and five torpedo-boats, covered the temporary landing on the Asian shore. A Seventh Squadron of just four destroyers was detached to blockade the port of Smyrna (now Izmir) against sallies by torpedo-boats like the Demir Hissar.

  These units in all their complexity were ready for battle on 19 April. All first-wave troops sailing on warships and the River Clyde had rehearsed an opposed landing by then and 23 April was chosen as what would now be called D-Day. For this to be achieved, the first vessels would need to move out of Mudros on the 20th, but as so often in the history of the Dardanelles campaign the weather dictated otherwise and de Robeck had to order a 24-hour delay on the 19th and again on the 20th. Troops on ships exposed to the rough swell suffered miserably from seasickness. Only at midday on the 23rd did the weather turn fair, and vessels began to leave Mudros in their predetermined order. Seaplanes reconnoitred enemy defences and five aeroplanes took off from Tenedos to bomb Maidos on the European side of the Narrows. This had the unhelpful effect of driving up to 2,000 Turkish troops westward out of the village to positions one and a half miles closer to Anzac Cove.

  The first wave of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, the covering units for the subsequent main landings, went ashore after dawn on 25 April 1915 at seven places more or less simultaneously. French troops landed in the vicinity of Kum Kale on the Asian side, while British units landed on five beaches at the Aegean end of the Gallipoli peninsula south of Suvla, earmarked clockwise and from east to west as S beach in Morto Bay, V and W (on either side of Cape Helles), X and Y to the north. S and Y beaches were last-minute embellishments of the plan of attack, broadening the front. The objective for 25 April was the high ground at Achi Baba, just over 700 feet above sea level. The invaders never reached it, still less their ultimate objective, the Kilid Bahr plateau overlooking the Narrows from the west.

  ANZAC units landed a little before the others a dozen miles to the north of the Cape Helles landing places – on the wrong beach. What was to be immortalised as ‘Anzac Cove’ is a small indentation on the Aegean shore of the peninsula with a narrow beach, overlooked by sheer cliffs. Between there and the promontory of Gaba Tepe to the south is the rather longer and gentler shore of what was labelled Brighton Beach by the Allies. This is where they were meant to land; but in the dark Admiral Thursby’s Second Squadron overshot and herded them ashore too far to the north. Their objective was the high ground of Chunuk Bair, less than two miles to the north-east as the crow flies. But between the impossibly difficult landing place and the targeted height (850 feet) lies a tortured landscape of ridges and ravines covered in scrub and small trees. Walking across it in peacetime is a daunting, ankle-breaking prospect; fighting over it (in both senses) could only be a very bloody business. This objective too was never secured.

  General Hamilton, who moved his headquarters to the Queen Elizabeth on 24 April, disposed of an invasion force for the southern tip of the peninsula consisting of three divisions: the British 29th under Major-General Aylmer Hunter-Weston, the French 1st Division under Général de division Masnou and a scratch composite division under Major-General A. Paris, the commander of the Royal Naval Division, elements of which were added to the 29th, French and composite divisions. The French troops, six battalions of colonials and six from Metropolitan France, were the bulk of General Albert d’Amade’s French Expeditionary Force. The 29th included three British brigades and one Indian (Sikhs, Punjabis and Gurkhas), totalling 20 infantry battalions; the composite was made up of one Australian, one New Zealand and one naval brigade, ten battalions in all. Divisional troops variously attached to the three divisions included artillery, signals and engineer units, the RND’s Motor Machine-Gun Squad, a battalion of the French Foreign Legion, an RND Cyclist company and Algerian Zouaves.

  At sunset on 23 April there assembled, at an anchorage north of the island of Tenedos, the cruiser Euryalus with Admiral Wemyss aboard, two battleships, three transports carrying a battalion each for W, V and S beaches and towing between them a dozen lighters to take them ashore, the River Clyde weighed down with troops, and tugs pulling extra pontoons. To carry out their elaborate feint, the bulk of the RND and its transports and escorts were the first to move on the 24th, at dawn, as they had the furthest to go: from their anchorage at Skyros to a position off the tiny island o
f Xeros at the head of the eponymous gulf, due north of Bulair. The French ships had left Skyros three days earlier to take up temporary station off Mudros, where their admiral took the opportunity to organise unpromising landing rehearsals for the unpractised troops. The French moved on to an anchorage off Tenedos. The bulk of the 29th Division in their transports congregated on the open sea off the mouth of the strait, while the ANZAC units bound for Z beach collected five miles offshore on three of Admiral Thursby’s ships, with their supplies in four transports; the main ANZAC force assembled off Cape Kephalo on the island of Imbros. The two British battalions bound for Y beach, escorted by two cruisers and sailing on two transports, gathered off Tekke Burnu, at the south-western tip of the peninsula.

  What followed was, in too many places, a classic demonstration of the workings of what is known in polite circles as Murphy’s law: anything that can go wrong will go wrong. We have already noted that the ANZACs were delivered to the wrong beach. The Bulair feint appeared to be a waste of time and effort, provoking almost no reaction from what appeared to be unmanned defences. One small gun opened fire. In fact the effect was quite useful to the attackers in that Liman von Sanders was prompted to shift a whole division to the purportedly threatened area, and to move his own command post temporarily to a hill overlooking the central portion of the Bulair lines, where he stayed for more than 24 hours. Thus there was only one Turkish battalion at Gaba Tepe to face the ANZACs when they came ashore in the first Allied landing. The leading 1,500 men of the 3rd Australian Brigade were in position aboard three battleships five miles offshore at midnight; the remaining 2,500 troops, completing the covering force for the corps, arrived in six destroyers 90 minutes later. The water was calm and the sky all too clear, lit up by the moon until it set at about three a.m., when the warships crept towards the shore in two echelons, each towing a train of four boats to be released two to three miles offshore. Three more battleships lay further out, ready to provide covering fire. The disadvantages of landing in the dark soon manifested themselves: the naval officers commanding the motorised picket boats escorting the boatloads of troops could not pick out any landmarks and some towlines became entangled. The landing craft drifted too far north as a result.

  It was only well after the real landings had taken place far to the south that the German commander accepted that the battleship Canopus (Captain Heathcoat Grant, RN) had been leading a dummy run and sent his troops back southward, vacating the area himself.

  From Z beach the Australians pushed inland towards their objective, the heights of Chunuk Bair. The few Turkish troops facing them with their single-shot Mauser rifles began to withdraw when they ran out of ammunition – just as a lieutenant-colonel arrived to spy out the ground. It was Kemal, the divisional commander, who told them to stay put, fix bayonets and lie down facing the enemy. The Australian advance party did the same, halting their advance towards the top of the hill 1,000 yards off, providing the defenders with just enough time to reinforce decisively. Kemal happened to have a regiment on exercise on the far side of the heights and ordered it to advance to the top, leading the first 200 men himself. The main Australian column was now 400 yards away, but the rapid Turkish build-up at the top held them in check as the first Turkish field artillery pieces arrived, Kemal joining in manhandling the guns into place. Three more Turkish regiments were called in, and the Australians, now supported by the New Zealand Brigade, were held in check two-thirds of the way to the crest. The fighting lasted all day in the heat and casualties piled up on both sides in the withering fire of machine-guns. Neither side would yield. General Birdwood asked Hamilton for permission to withdraw his troops but was told to wait for the advance from the southern end of the peninsula the next day.

  Down at Cape Helles, however, a machine-gun nest on the cliff overlooking V beach cut great swathes through the three battalions emerging from the beached River Clyde as they tottered ashore along their gimcrack, wobbly landing walkways and temporary bridges. Liman’s artillery commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Wehrle, had placed one of his mobile batteries in the ruins of the exploded Sedd-ul-Bahr fort, which caused more havoc among the invaders. More were cut down as they came ashore from oar-propelled cutters. Others drowned under their own kit of heavy pack, rifle and ammunition. Landings had to be interrupted until dark, when the River Clyde completed its unloading. By that time casualties among the covering force had passed 50 per cent.

  At W beach a battalion of Lancashire Fusiliers approached an apparently deserted shore tightly packed in their cutters – only to come under heavy fire at the psychological moment from machine-guns and rifles fired by Turks in hidden slit trenches. Naval shelling had made no impression on the barbed-wire entanglements. Casualties surpassed 57 per cent.

  The beaches codenamed S, X and Y were defended hardly or not at all. Troops who landed at S brushed aside a dozen Turks and turned to help the Lancashires at W. All in all, however, sufficient numbers had landed to acquire a solid beachhead across the south-western triangle of the Gallipoli peninsula. When Turkish prisoners stated that there were only about 1,000 defenders between the landing beaches and the objective, Achi Baba hill, they were not believed, and the British dug in, Western Front-style, instead of advancing northward. By dark on the second day, over 30,000 men had got ashore; but dead and wounded amounted to 20,000 and the beachhead looked like a slaughterhouse. A fleet of hospital ships took the wounded away to Skyros, and eventually Egypt for the worst cases. Liman rushed reinforcements southward against the Cape Helles landings; they formed a defensive line before Achi Baba under the command of Colonel Hans Kannengiesser. Eight machine-gun teams of marines detached from the two German ships arrived in support. British troops could not even get as far as the village of Krithia, half-way between the beachhead and Achi Baba. Within a few days of the landings on 25 April a stalemate had developed at Cape Helles and another at Anzac Cove. During the first landings six sailors and six soldiers won the VC. The French forces had not been badly mauled in their diversionary attack on the Asian shore opposite Gallipoli and were re-embarked to join the British at Cape Helles.

  Three battles were fought at Krithia village, on 28 April, 6 May and 4 June, as the Allies tried to break out of their southern beachhead towards Achi Baba. A few hundred yards of territory were the only gains; the losses on both sides were out of all proportion.

  Several bloody battles having failed to change the strategic situation at Cape Helles or at Anzac Cove in three months, Hamilton decided to land IX Corps at Suvla Bay, to the north of the latter, on 6 August 1915. The objective was to link up with the ANZAC beachhead and drive the Turks off Chunuk Bair and beyond. First to go ashore was the 11th Division, soon followed by the 10th. On 7 August 20,000 British troops were ashore in the blazing heat, many having landed in the wrong places, with no shelter, no water and no artillery. The next day, as desperate efforts were made to keep the troops supplied, General Hamilton actually set foot on shore for a change, to urge on his generals.

  As a diversion the Australians had launched an attack across the extremely rough ground north of Anzac Cove, penetrating the Turkish defences at the Battle of Lone Pine, one of the worst engagements of a brutal campaign. At some points the opposed trenches were only metres apart; grenades thrown by one side were actually caught and thrown back before they went off (the record was reportedly four throws with the same grenade!); local museums are full of pairs of spent bullets which fused with each other in the lethal hail of shots from both sides. Seven Australian soldiers won the VC.

  At Suvla Bay the invaders initially made good progress until the Turks arrived to oppose them in strength. The Allied commanders, brought up on the Western Front, could not believe that they had gained half a mile without serious opposition and called a halt. This and other unnecessary pauses gave the Turks just enough time to rush reinforcements northward, both to Lone Pine and then to cover the high ground to the east. On 8 August a New Zealand battalion reached the top of Chunuk Bair brief
ly but barely had time to enjoy the view of the straits before the troops came under heavy fire from adjacent high ground. The next day a small force of British and Gurkha troops got to the top of the ridge and engaged in hand-to-hand fighting and bayonet charges, but they too were driven off – by mistimed British naval gunfire. The New Zealanders hung on and counter-attacked a Turkish force sent to dislodge them. But on 9 August Liman von Sanders gave Kemal the 12th Turkish Division as a reinforcement. The counter-attack by his corps on 10 August proved decisive: he personally led them over the top. By that time the New Zealanders had been relieved by two unblooded British battalions: six Turkish battalions put one of them to flight and killed every man in the other with their bayonets – nearly 1,000 men. Both sides were exhausted and the survivors pulled back, the Turks to the heights and the Allies towards the coast. Kemal, having saved the day in the struggle for Gallipoli for a second time, was raised to general rank with the Ottoman title of Pasha.

  Liman von Sanders and the British official military historian alike concluded that the surprise achieved by the Suvla landing had been frittered away by unnecessary delays on the part of poorly trained troops led by poor commanders – donkeys led by donkeys. Kitchener sacked one corps and two divisional commanders (a third resigned). The root of the problem, complete lack of initiative, was a fatal by-product of trench warfare as learned on the Western Front. The possibility of a war of movement, of marching across open country unopposed to reach a position further forward or to turn the flank of the enemy were now alien concepts, especially for the men of the New Armies, and outside the experience of all but the oldest officers. The same had applied to the ANZACs, but they were healthier, with better physique and higher morale, unaccustomed to blind obedience. A third beachhead brought a third stalemate, as costly as the first two. Another landing was planned none the less, for which the French offered a whole army and the British earmarked two more divisions. It was postponed until November, by which time opinion in London had changed fundamentally.