The Dandarnelles Disaster

by Dan Van der Vat

  The War Council had spawned a Dardanelles Committee which met for the first time on 7 June. Churchill was a member: on 19 August, obviously having lost faith in the enterprise he had initiated, he suggested trying for a separate peace with Turkey, but was told that the Russians would never consent. Criticism of the conduct of the campaign mounted in the London press and (especially) in Australia. General Hamilton, who hardly ever left his command ship, was finally recalled in October 1915, to be replaced initially by Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Monro from France, who promptly advised Kitchener to withdraw the army from the peninsula. Monro was diverted to the Salonica front shortly afterwards, leaving General Sir William Birdwood in command; on 23 November Monro was appointed commander-in-chief in the eastern Mediterranean while Bird-wood was named commander at Gallipoli. Around this time, when Keyes went to London to press yet again for another naval assault on the Dardanelles, he saw Kitchener, who decided to go and see for himself. At the end of November another kind of disaster struck the hapless Mediterranean Expeditionary Force: the worst and most prolonged snowstorm in living memory reduced Allied strength by 10 per cent in a few days. Kitchener accepted Monro’s advice and made one of his oracular pronouncements: nobody would die in the withdrawal.

  The War Council in London decided to evacuate the Gallipoli peninsula on 7 December 1915. Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay were evacuated in stages by de Robeck’s fleet without loss by 20 December, to the astonishment of Liman and his Turkish troops (and no doubt of their opponents, who had predicted losses as high as 50 per cent). Just 3 men were wounded as 83,000 troops were taken off the beaches in less than two weeks – without alerting the Turks. A quarter of them were taken off on the last two nights. The extraordinarily successful evacuation was led by Commodore Keyes, using 37 of the new motor lighters (‘beetles’) ordered as landing craft in Churchill’s days at the Admiralty. Thus encouraged, the Dardanelles Committee decided on 27 December to clear Cape Helles as well.

  Some 35,000 men of four divisions were still dug in; the French Expeditionary Force was withdrawn without loss on New Year’s Day 1916, leaving 19,000 British. Men of the gallant 29th Division were moved by boat to plug the gap left by the French in the last landing of the Gallipoli campaign. Liman ordered an attack on 7 January; fortunately for the British Kemal was ill, and the attack was beaten off with such a hail of fire that no Turk reached the attenuated British line, where the British Army’s famed musketry skills enabled the veterans of the 29th to give the impression that their numbers were much greater than was the case. Finally, on the night of 8–9 January, the rump of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force was withdrawn by the Royal Navy, again without loss. The last to go left rifles on the parapets of their trenches and planted helmets on sticks to give the impression that the abandoned positions were still occupied. The last man to leave was probably Major-General F. S. Maude, who had also been at the Suvla evacuation: he had forgotten his valise and just made the last boat out from W beach.

  The vain struggle for the accursed peninsula had gone on for 259 days, involving a total of a million men, half of whom became casualties – dead, wounded or sick. Twenty Turkish divisions were released for other fronts; the Allies had to find another million men to fight the Turks and Central Powers in campaigns in the Balkans and the Middle East consequent on the failure in 1915 to knock Turkey out of the war.

  The Royal Navy and its French ally did not confine their operations in the Aegean to supporting the troops with landings, supply, medical care and shore bombardments. Submarines featured prominently in Allied naval activity in the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara, while German U-boats scored several spectacular successes in the Aegean. When the E15 was grounded in mid-April, her sister boat E14 got through into the Marmara at the same time, to lurk until the end of the month. The first submarine of the Royal Australian Navy, AE2, was however the first to score there, sinking a Turkish gunboat on 25 April as the landings were proceeding. On the same day Lieutenant-Commander Hersing, IGN, took the first German oceangoing submarine, U21, out of Wilhelmshaven to begin an adventurous voyage to the eastern Mediterranean. Two days later E14 struck at last, sinking a Turkish gunboat and a transport; but also on the 27th AE2 was damaged by a Turkish torpedo-boat and forced to scuttle: her crew of 32 went into captivity. But submarine successes forced the Turks to stop sending troops by sea on the hitherto safe internal route to Gallipoli: for a while they were forced to march over the unhelpful ground of the peninsula, especially when the Queen Elizabeth sent a transport to the bottom at the Narrows with four shells fired from seven miles off. On 1 May E14 sank another transport with 6,000 Turkish troops aboard in the Marmara. But on the same day the French, much less lucky in this form of warfare, lost their submarine Joule to a mine with all hands.

  On 11 May the cryptanalysts at Room 40 warned de Robeck that U-boats were approaching. Two days later HMS Goliath was sunk with the loss of 570 men by a small Turkish torpedo-boat, the Muavenet-i-Millet, commanded by a German lieutenant. On the 17th the small submarine UB8 got to Smyrna: shortly afterwards she lay off Mudros and on the 30th she sank a curious victim – the steamship Merion, which was decked out with plywood and canvas, plus poles for ‘guns’, to look like the battlecruiser HMS Tiger. By then Lieutenant-Commander Nasmith’s E11 had sunk eight enemy vessels, including a torpedo-boat, in the waters off Constantinople during her latest patrol. But it was a U-boat, Hersing’s U21, that brought off the most dramatic coup by any submarine in the underwater campaign, on 25 May. Hersing sank two old battleships, HMSs Triumph and Majestic, within a few hours. The former went down off Gaba Tepe near Anzac Cove with the loss of just 73 men, the latter turned turtle off Cape Helles in seven minutes with the loss of only 43 crew. U21 then proceeded to complete her long voyage to Constantinople, having evaded three Allied attacks and had her tanks filled with the wrong fuel off Spain. Two smaller submarines, UB8 and UB7, joined her in June.

  While sinking a French ammunition ship off Cape Helles on 4 July, U21 was damaged and had to be docked at Constantinople. But two large replacements were about to set off from the Baltic: U34 and U35. The British E7 surfaced to fire her single gun at the Berlin–Baghdad railway on the coast of the Gulf of Ismid on 17 July, blocking it. Ten days later the French submarine Mariotte got caught in the Turkish anti-submarine nets in the Dardanelles and was lost with all hands. The same fate was meted out to E7 on 4 August; trying to free herself from the nets she set off a mine and was lost. After torpedoing a 5,000-ton Turkish steamer on 7 August, forcing it to beach, E14 was joined by E11 to shell Turkish troops marching along the road south from Bulair – who were there because of earlier submarine attacks. The next day E11 sank the old Turkish battleship Heireddin Barbarossa and went on to sink two transports and two ammunition ships, all south of Bulair on the Aegean coast of Gallipoli. E14’s beached victim had the dubious honour on 12 August of being hit by the first torpedo to be launched by air, from a British seaplane. Two other ships in the Marmara were subjected to the same indignity; one of them sank.

  A day later UB14 sank the British troopship Royal Edward, an 11,000-ton converted ferry off the island of Cos: 865 troops out of 1,366 aboard drowned. On 2 September the same U-boat sank the SS Southland, another transport, but with few casualties. On the 3rd E11 returned from her spectacular second patrol, during which she sank 2 warships, 27 steamships and 57 sailing vessels, nearly all by gunfire. But the E7 was trapped in nets off Nagara on 5 September; the ever-busy UB14 arrived and set explosive charges to send her to the bottom. In the broader Mediterranean, through which ships bound for the Aegean had to pass, two U-boats, U33 and U39, sank a total of 16 larger steamships totalling 62,000 tons in September.

  It was not until 30 October that the French succeeded in getting a submarine into the Marmara proper, but the Turquoise was spotted, shelled, forced ashore and captured. On searching through her papers, the enemy found a plan for a rendezvous with the British E20. The ubiquitous UB14 turned up instead and sank th
e British boat on 6 November. But during the month and into December, Nasmith’s E11 completed a record patrol during which he sank 46 vessels in 48 days: his last victim was a Turkish destroyer. On 9 December 1915 E2 set off from Mudros and entered the Dardanelles. On 2 January 1916 she was recalled, the last Allied submarine to penetrate the strait. The campaign had not only sunk half the Turkish merchant fleet; it had also caused a severe coal shortage in the Ottoman Navy.

  De Robeck’s surface warships were mainly preoccupied with supporting the army, but every now and again there would be a separate operation against the enemy coast. Battleships shelled the Turkish naval base of Smyrna on 6 April, and HMS Lord Nelson bombarded Chanak from a safe distance on 30 April, setting the town ablaze. Two months later, on 25 June, she did it again, this time assisted by a spotter in a captive balloon.

  After the army’s withdrawal from the Gallipoli peninsula, naval activity in the eastern Aegean faded away. But a residual naval guard force remained as insurance against an enemy foray out of the Dardanelles. The possibility was dismissed as highly unlikely, with the result that, in January 1918, the Royal Navy was caught out – by SMSs Goeben and Breslau. Again …

  CHAPTER 10

  The Inquest

  The escape of the Goeben, the detonator of the struggle for the Dardanelles, led to the extreme rarity of a court martial in wartime of an admiral on a charge of failing to attack the enemy: he was acquitted, to the chagrin of many of his peers, but the least that can be said about the result is that there was a powerful element of doubt in the case against him and he was entitled to the benefit thereof. The double failure of the Royal Navy and then the British Army to force a passage through the strait led to the Dardanelles Commission, set up by parliament in August 1916, which began hearing witnesses in September and delivered an interim report in April 1917, to which the final report added very little in essence, while giving much extra detail on such matters as medical provision. It would be facile to dismiss the Commission’s work as whitewash, as so many official inquiries have been in Britain: compare the wartime inquiry into the ‘Channel Dash’ by three enemy heavy ships from Brest to Germany via the Channel in broad daylight in February 1942; or more recently the inquiry into the Falklands War of 1982, to say nothing of the second Northern Ireland ‘Bloody Sunday’ inquiry, in its twelfth year at time of writing, with the bill approaching £200 million. But the Dardanelles Commission, although it delivered a number of strictures about the conduct of this part of the First World War and the leading individuals involved in it, clearly pulled punches too as it analysed witness statements, which were usually anything but spontaneous and sometimes very carefully prepared. The Commission could have been a lot harsher in its judgements; but it is fair to say that it did not – could not – shy away altogether from the many embarrassing failures by the war leadership. It is possible to discern, despite the emollient prose, clear elements of scepticism and even disapproval. In a sentence, the Commission concluded that the whole undertaking had been a ghastly mistake resulting from poor preparation and execution, a less than shattering finding in itself but embellished with nuggets of criticism. By summarising and analysing the report in this chapter and stripping the elaborate text to its essentials, it is possible to arrive at a coherent and not uncritical overview of the events described in this book.

  The Commission was chaired by Lord Cromer, a scion of the Baring banking family with a distinguished colonial career in India and in Egypt, where he had been Agent and Consul-General – de facto ruler – from 1883 to 1907 (the post held by Kitchener from 1911 to 1914). Cromer died in January 1917, before the Commission could produce the second and final part of its findings. He was succeeded by Sir William Pickford, a High Court judge. The secretary throughout was Sir Grimwood Mears, a senior civil servant who was responsible for the text of the report.

  Thirty-five witnesses were called, including Churchill – who gave evidence over five days, unlike all the rest (maximum of a single day) – Asquith, Fisher, Hankey, Hamilton, de Robeck and Carden, other admirals, generals, politicians and civil servants. The witness of lowest rank was a mere commander, RN (retired), who had been seconded to the Turkish Navy just before the war. Among those not called were Lord Kitchener, who died at sea in June 1916 (though his private secretary was questioned); Admiral Limpus; General Birdwood; any Australian, New Zealand or other Allied official or officer. But the overriding concern was with the conception, preparation and conduct of the campaign by the civil, naval and military leaderships. ‘It is indeed obvious that none but officials could throw any light upon the special subject which has … engaged our attention’, says the report.

  All such officials had been working very hard at the time, and as records were not complete, many had to rely on memory in giving evidence, which inevitably produced differing versions of events, it says. What follows is a perfect example of the orotund, spare-no-comma style and careful circumlocutions favoured by the Commission:

  It can, therefore, be no matter for surprise that the evidence given as to the views expressed at the time by some of the leading officials should be, in certain cases, somewhat conflicting.

  The English for that is that there are discrepancies among the official accounts. The report goes on to observe, though at rather greater length than this, that some witnesses indulged in hindsight, and that the death of Kitchener, together with his obsession with secrecy, made it impossible to know whether his opinions and objectives had been fairly represented: even the War Council had never been taken fully into his confidence.

  Unfortunately the best source on him, his personal military secretary, Colonel Fitzgerald, had also drowned. A convoluted double negative follows:

  We have not thought that we should be justified, in deference to the consideration which is rightly shown to the memory of the illustrious dead, in abstaining from a complete revelation of the action which Lord Kitchener took during the various phases of the events under consideration, nor have we hesitated to express our views on that action. It is necessary to do justice to the living as well as to the dead.

  Kitchener’s position was historically unique at the time the Dardanelles operations were being planned and carried out; so were his prestige and authority. In effect he was running the war single-handed, without, at his own wish, benefit of staff. Churchill, who quite clearly would have liked to be running the war single-handed himself but was not, said in evidence that he never knew Kitchener to have been overruled by the War Council or anyone else. ‘When he gave a decision it was invariably accepted as final … All-powerful, imperturbable, reserved, he dominated absolutely our counsels at this time.’ By emphasising the field marshal’s crushing burden of responsibility combined with his no less crushing oracular and unchallengeable approach to command, Churchill was clearly shifting as much of the blame as possible for what went wrong on to the late Secretary of State for War, even as he went out of his way to praise the lost leader for much personal kindness to him. Kitchener’s persistent refusal, until very late in the day, to commit troops to the enterprise undeniably stoked up Churchill’s determination that the navy should go it alone. This does not of course alter the fact that the past and future First Lord with his powerful personality remained entirely responsible for his own actions.

  The report next describes the mechanics of the conduct of the war, starting with how the Committee of Imperial Defence, a mainly consultative organ, segued into the War Council, the Cabinet committee with the same initial membership that was to run the war, on 25 November 1914. The CID was mainly but not only advisory: it did make some decisions and passed them on to the relevant department of state for action. This was facilitated by the fact that the Prime Minister himself presided, with several senior ministers also present (usually the Chancellor, the Secretaries for War, Foreign Affairs and India and the First Lord of the Admiralty) along with expert advisers. Both bodies reported to the full Cabinet of 22 ministers, the CID before a final decision was take
n but the War Council afterwards; one advantage of the latter arrangement was to concentrate decision-making upon half a dozen ministers, plus Arthur Balfour, the former Conservative Prime Minister, who served on both bodies in his capacity as elder statesman; the army and navy advisers took no part in decisions, which were made not by voting but by Asquith assessing the mood of the meeting. The CID advised and consulted the Cabinet, a fact which caused much delay in the first four months of the war; the War Council acted for the full Cabinet, which was merely kept informed, and thus worked at a better pace. To speed things up even further, no formal minutes were kept of War Council meetings (unlike the CID’s), obviating the need to pass them round to those who had been present for amendment or correction; Hankey, who stayed on as Secretary, merely took a longhand note which, as we saw, remains the only detailed and continuous source on the War Council’s meetings. We may note that the efficacy of a small group running the war was offset by the technical ignorance of all the ministers except Kitchener, and the silence at the War Council of the technical experts who could have put them right (see below). If ministers knew what the experts thought, it can only have been made clear to them away from the Council, whose other members perforce remained ignorant of their views.

  The War Council in turn was dominated by a triumvirate: Asquith, Kitchener and Churchill, who made all the big decisions about the Dardanelles. Churchill modestly testified: ‘I was on a rather different plane. I had not the same weight or authority as those two ministers, nor the same power, and if they said, This is to be done or not to be done, that settled it.’ Not having been born yesterday, the Commission noted: ‘Mr Churchill probably assigned to himself a more unobtrusive part than that which he actually played.’