The Dandarnelles Disaster

by Dan Van der Vat

  One of the aspects of the Dardanelles fiasco that preoccupied the Commission more than most was a question of protocol: the position and rights of the expert advisers. Much was made at the time, and has been ever since, about whether such people as Fisher, other attending admirals and generals were members of the War Council or invited guests, consultants who, like Victorian children, spoke only when spoken to. Kitchener’s position was unique as both minister and chief military adviser. The only other general officer who attended regularly was Sir James Wolfe Murray, Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 25 October 1914, who expressly told the Commission that he had never once been asked for his opinion. Churchill, however, was not his own leading expert or classed as one; the First Sea Lord, Fisher, and Admiral of the Fleet Sir Arthur Wilson, VC, who had no official position but was frequently asked by Churchill and the Admiralty for his views, were the principal naval advisers to the Council, sometimes supported by Vice-Admiral Sir Henry Oliver, the Chief of War Staff at the Admiralty, and/or Admiral Sir Henry Jackson.

  A puzzled Lord Cromer asked Fisher for his assessment of the role of the advisers. ‘We were not members of the War Council … We were the experts there who were to open our mouths when told to,’ the admiral said.

  Q (Cromer): Nothing else?

  A (Fisher): Nothing else … The members of the Cabinet were members of the Council, and the others were simply there ready to answer questions if asked.

  Q: And they never were asked?

  A: They were sometimes, because I was asked how many battleships would be lost, and I said twelve.

  Q: But they were never asked anything about the Dardanelles? A: No.

  Wilson concurred when his turn came. Churchill was by no means the only politician who completely disagreed. When he had addressed the Council, it was on behalf of the entire Admiralty, he said, incorporating the opinions agreed at its daily meetings.

  I was expressing those opinions in the presence of two naval colleagues and friends who had the right, the knowledge and the power [author’s emphasis] at any moment to correct me or dissent from what I said, and who were fully cognisant of their rights.

  Foreign Secretary Grey said the Council went entirely by the opinions of Kitchener and Churchill on military and naval matters. He and Balfour each agreed that when it came to the experts their silence meant consent to, or at least absence of serious disagreement with, their minister’s opinion. Lord Crewe, Secretary for India, and Lord Haldane, who succeeded Lloyd George as Chancellor, bluntly admitted that the politicians on the Council talked too much and the experts too little; but they also thought that the silence of the latter meant at least acquiescence. Lloyd George, Chancellor during the relevant period, strongly agreed. Asquith, the Prime Minister of the day, did not agree that the experts should give their opinion only if asked, but also thought that if they did not dissent, then they assented (an inversion of the familiar oversimplification of differences of opinion: if you are not for me, you are against me). Hankey, neither politician nor technical expert although a former Royal Marine officer, came down ‘very strongly’ on the side of the politicians: silence meant consent. The fault here seems to lie with Asquith, who as chairman could have ensured that each person present was invited to speak, or at least that the military and naval advisers were consulted there and then, at least on crucial professional and technical matters. But he preferred brevity and the appearance of consensus.

  One other oddity about the War Council’s proceedings, presided over by a Prime Minister who was anything but forceful and decisive, was the subject of complaints from Admiral Wilson and General Murray, who separately testified that they had left key meetings of the Council, such as that of 13 January 1915, with no clear idea, or no idea at all, of what decisions had been taken. Asquith repudiated this, suggesting that some participants might have gone before he recited the conclusions. Hankey supported him in this; but on looking through his notes of Council meetings, one can understand the confusion. The Commission rightly concluded that ‘the functions of the experts were, to a great extent, differently understood by the experts themselves and the ministerial members of the Council’. This was an extremely important, not to say disastrous, difference of interpretation, which Asquith could have eradicated at a stroke.

  The Commission also explored in detail the changes in the modus operandi of both the Admiralty and the War Office on the outbreak of war in 1914, which profoundly affected the conduct of the war in general and the Dardanelles operations in particular. Under letters patent, various acts of parliament and Orders-in-Council, the First Lord of Admiralty was ‘solely responsible to the Crown and Parliament for all the business of the Admiralty’. The role of the First Sea Lord was to advise him on large questions of naval policy and operations. Neither First Lord nor First Sea Lord was legally required to consult the rest of the Board of Admiralty – three other sea lords, two civil lords, a permanent secretary (civil servant) and a parliamentary secretary (junior minister). Both leaders were dyed-in-the-wool autocrats and sidelined the Board. The War Staff Group was formed at the very beginning of the war, was strengthened when Fisher returned as First Sea Lord and soon displaced the Board in the direction of the war at sea. It included First Lord and First Sea Lord, Chief of Staff Oliver, Admiral Wilson, Permanent Secretary Sir Graham Greene and Churchill’s Naval Secretary, Commodore de Bartolomé. The relegation of the Board caused friction and resentment; it was not formally consulted about the Dardanelles. Churchill later expressed regret about this; Fisher never did. For his part Asquith had no idea of how the Admiralty was run, and was not interested.

  The Army was formally run by the Army Council, consisting of four ex-officio military members, a finance member and a civil member. The Secretary of State for War was solely responsible to Crown and parliament for all army business. The Permanent Secretary of the War Office was also secretary to the Army Council, which did not meet very often before or during the war. In fact the army was really administered by the War Office and directed entirely by the Secretary of State until Kitchener’s death, after which there was a formal re-separation of powers in favour of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. The biggest change had come at the beginning of the war, when most senior officers at the War Office were given, by previous arrangement, field or staff positions with the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front. Their administrative replacements were obviously less experienced, giving even more impetus to Kitchener’s assumption of sole and supreme authority. The Commission was unusually emphatic, by its lights, in condemning Kitchener’s approach. It was ‘much to be regretted that the principles of the devolution of authority and responsibility upon which the War Office system was based were ignored by Lord Kitchener’. The evidence showed that he ‘was not in the habit of consulting his subordinates’, that he issued orders over the heads of departmental chiefs, sometimes without the knowledge even of the Chief of General Staff, ‘and, in fact, that he centralised the whole administration of the War Office in his own hands’.

  Add to these habits the awe in which the field marshal was held, even by Churchill, and it becomes clear that it is no exaggeration to say he was running the war single-handed – simultaneously generalissimo and recruiting sergeant, as seen in that immortal poster. His greatest contribution to the outcome of the war was his recognition, almost alone at the outset, that far from being ‘over by Christmas’, it would last for years, and his consequent, forceful campaign to raise the huge new armies Britain would need to see it through. What he said, went – until the failure at Gallipoli, when even his authority began to slip and the power of the CIGS was restored by a special Order-in-Council. Centralisation had worked well when Kitchener was fighting in the Sudan and bringing an end with an iron hand to the Boer War, but even that campaign was simplicity itself compared with the Western Front, or Gallipoli. The onset of war in August 1914 brought far-reaching changes in governance, the Commission noted. The Cabinet ceded control of the war to
the War Council, which replaced the Committee of Imperial Defence; the Board of Admiralty was superseded by the War Staff Group; and the War Office came under the absolute control of a single individual.

  The Commission went on to note that an attack on the Dardanelles had always been regarded as a very difficult proposition, by navy and army alike. There could be no question of a naval assault without military support, and naval attacks on forts did not work anyway. But such developments as the revolution in artillery technologies and the deployment of aircraft might be seen as overriding traditional doctrine.

  The trial bombardment of the entrance forts at the Dardanelles on 3 November 1914 had been a mistake, serving to alert the enemy without achieving anything much. On the 25th Churchill suggested, as the best means of forestalling an attack on Egypt, a full-blown assault on the Gallipoli peninsula. Kitchener did not dismiss the idea but thought it premature. Then on the second day of the new year came the plea for a ‘demonstration’ against the Turks from Grand Duke Nicholas, whose Russian armies were under pressure from them in the Caucasus. The Foreign Office relayed Kitchener’s positive reply. We have noted that the Prime Minister apparently did not see this rather important telegram before it was sent, but that did not mean he would not have approved had he seen it … The same applied to the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, who said his department had been used merely as a means of communication. Churchill did not see it either but concluded that it was the result of his long talk with Kitchener on the evening of 2 January. The latter told him that he did not believe a demonstration would be a real help to the Russians, although the Dardanelles was the only place where it might just have a positive effect: but no British troops would be available for a new front for months.

  At this stage political, naval and military opinions, including Churchill’s, were unanimously in favour of a combined operation. His view apparently remained the same as it had been in March 1911, when he told the Cabinet in a memorandum that ‘it is no longer possible to force the Dardanelles, and nobody would expose a modern fleet to such peril’. Kitchener clearly envisaged a demonstration by the fleet alone because he could spare no troops, but in no sense an attempt to force the strait by the navy on its own. He also claimed to have been strongly influenced by Churchill’s enthusiastic description of the latest battleship, HMS Queen Elizabeth, the most powerful in the world at the time, and her dispatch to the Aegean. By the same token Kitchener was very upset when she was withdrawn to the North Sea in May 1915.

  Even so, Churchill asked Admiral Carden on 3 January 1915 whether he thought that it was ‘a practicable operation to force the Dardanelles by the use of ships alone’. The rest of the telegram made it clear that the question was virtually rhetorical, one that students of Latin would recognise as a nonne question – one expecting the answer yes. And indeed that was Carden’s answer, albeit a qualified one: yes, given time and lots of ships, the Dardanelles ‘might be forced’. In his evidence to the Commission he tried to hedge: ‘I did not mean distinctly that they could be forced.’ What he really thought was that one needed to destroy the entrance forts and enter the strait to find out whether it could be forced. The Commission noted: ‘No reservation of this sort was made in [Carden’s] telegram … [of] January 5.’ Churchill’s reply the next day was dubiously worded: ‘High authorities here concur in your opinion’, followed by an invitation to send a shopping list of ships required and a plan of attack.

  This sentence, the Commission felt, suggested that Admiralty opinion was generally in favour, leading Carden not unreasonably to assume that Lord Fisher, the highest authority under Churchill, and such advisers as Admiral Sir Henry Jackson, Fisher’s eventual successor as First Sea Lord, approved. Fisher said in evidence he did not think he had been shown this message before it was sent, because he would have objected. Churchill disingenuously testified, stretching his text to the limit, that he never meant to suggest Fisher approved: the ‘high authorities’ he had in mind were admirals Jackson and Oliver (chief of staff). In fact Jackson had been working on an appraisal of a solely naval attack, which he wrote on 5 January but which did not reach Churchill until after the ‘high authorities’ signal had been sent. Jackson’s assessment was anything but enthusiastic, pointing out that a fleet passing up the strait into the Sea of Marmara, and more particularly its supply ships that would have to follow, would come under fire from shore-based artillery, infantry and torpedo tubes: there would be no point in threatening or even capturing Constantinople with the fleet ‘unless there were a large military force to occupy the town’. Boiled down to its essentials, Jackson’s opinion was neither for nor against, but since he was opposed to an attempt to ‘reach the Straits’, anything beyond shelling the outer forts would not meet with his approval unless it was absolutely clear that advantage would result, as he told the Commission. With that serious proviso he went along with Carden’s four-step plan, wirelessed on 11 January, in a memorandum dated the 15th. Besides, he added, it was not his place to interfere with naval policy except if invited to do so by a superior …

  We also know Fisher had his doubts all along, which he managed to suppress some of the time out of loyalty and gratitude to Churchill for his reappointment in 1914. Admiral Oliver testified that he only went along with the Carden plan on the understanding that if no progress was made it could be called off at any time. Not unreasonably, the Commission concluded that the Admiralty at large would have preferred a combined operation but nobody objected to a bombardment of the outer forts. This was accepted reluctantly, but accepted it was, on the understanding, also expressed by Kitchener, that it could be abandoned if unsuccessful. Therefore in signalling to Carden that ‘high authorities here concur’ Churchill was not so much being economical with the truth as profligate with a half-truth, and in so doing gave a misleading impression. Coming as it did from a master of the English language, that could not have been an accident.

  The War Council had met on 13 January 1915 against a backdrop of stalemate on the Western Front. The Austrians had suffered defeats but the Russians and the Serbs were both in a bad way and the Balkan neutrals were immune to diplomatic persuasion as long as the Allies were unable to produce a victory. How could Britain deliver a blow against the Central Powers? An attack on the Dardanelles seemed, except to Fisher, to be the only practicable proposition at the time, and the potential results of success verged on the dazzling: Russia massively relieved in every sense, Bulgaria won over, the flank of the Central Powers turned, even the ‘Turkish Question’ definitively answered after centuries of doubt … But the only germane question was whether or not a purely naval attempt was the right course. Churchill spelt out Carden’s stage-by-stage plan to use modern naval guns against the allegedly antiquated enemy artillery and neglected fortifications; there were plenty of old battleships to spare, plus the Queen Elizabeth; in a matter of weeks the fleet could enter the Marmara and sink the Goeben; field guns and rifles ashore would be no more than an inconvenience. Hankey noted: ‘Lord Kitchener thought the plan was worth trying. We could leave off the bombardment if it did not prove effective.’

  Fisher did not speak up. The political witnesses were agreed that had he objected, the project would almost certainly have been cancelled. But Asquith also thought that the old admiral’s unspoken objection was based mainly on the fact that he wanted to use the fleet differently, in an operation in the Baltic, the other flank of the Central Powers, rather than on his belief that a solely naval attack was too risky. As the Commission was working in wartime, the Baltic option was not mentioned in its first report; but its conclusion that the real reason for Fisher’s resignation was because the Dardanelles had blocked his pet project is a misleading over-simplification, not to say bizarre. Fisher told the Commission he believed from the outset that the solely naval attack was doomed to failure and was therefore opposed to it, but no witness said he had mentioned this misgiving at the time. Churchill’s evidence makes it clear that as far as he was concerned F
isher’s silence meant consent. The 13 January meeting ended with the decision to prepare for a naval expedition to ‘bombard and take the Gallipoli peninsula with Constantinople as its objective’. That this apparent, albeit misleading, clarity was rare is shown by the very next paragraph of the report, which says that nobody could review the mass of evidence given to the Commission ‘without being struck with the atmosphere of vagueness and want of precision which seems to have characterised the proceedings of the War Council’. Some, such as Churchill, read the conclusion of the 13 January meeting as tantamount to a go-ahead for a solely naval attack, while Asquith said it merely told the Admiralty to prepare for one: he understood the matter would be discussed again when it had done so. All witnesses agreed that the decision related to a naval attack without troops. The ‘demonstration’ of 3 January had been superseded ten days later by ‘preparations for a purely naval attack’ with the ultimate objective of Constantinople, which everybody knew could not be attained without a large army.

  On being given his ‘mandate to prepare’ an attack on the Dardanelles, Churchill lost no time in contacting the French government to ask for active support. M. Victor Augagneur, the Minister of Marine, came over to London to discuss the matter. His predecessor, Dr Gauthier, had resigned on health grounds (he suffered a breakdown when the Germans declared war) on the day Britain went to war (4 August 1914). Even so the ministry, as we saw, had failed to force Admiral Boué de Lapeyrère, commanding the fleet, to obey the war orders he had himself played a major part in drawing up, a large contribution to the escape of the Goeben. Augagneur, who would himself leave office in the wake of the double failure at the Dardanelles in 1915, was no student of Clausewitz, having once delivered himself of the not very bon mot that ‘in war one does not improvise’. The French government agreed to leave the command in the Aegean to the British while retaining supremacy in the Adriatic and the rest of the Mediterranean, in accordance with the Anglo-French naval understanding that left the British in charge in the Channel and North Sea. Augagneur agreed to place a squadron at the disposal and under the flag of Admiral Carden, and also echoed Kitchener, Hankey and the rest by saying that the enterprise could always be abandoned if it did not make progress.