But as the Commission observed, amid patronising remarks about the oriental mind, if a serious attack was made and it failed, ‘the result would be to give a shattering blow to British prestige and influence throughout the East’. The inquiry report however goes on to note, with some complacency, that at time of writing (early 1917) the attack had indeed failed, and had even been followed by serious British setbacks in the Mesopotamian campaign against the Turks, ‘but, so far as can at present be judged, the political consequences … have been so slight as to be almost inappreciable’. But not even Kitchener with all his experience of ‘the Eastern mind’ could have foreseen this. Those who thought on these lines had in mind a purely naval attack on the outer forts and a withdrawal if this did not produce a result that could be exploited: they were not thinking of the far more damaging idea of abandoning a serious military landing once made. The politicians, Kitchener and Admiral Wilson were all confident, until the solely naval approach was dropped, that British prestige could be preserved, yet the failure of the fleet in March 1915 was followed by the invasion of Gallipoli in great part to salvage British prestige, like a losing gambler trying a ‘double or quits’ bet. The result of the second failure was a much bigger loss of prestige, which could be offset (but never quite eradicated) only by the eventual overall Allied defeat of the Turks on all their other fronts. The effect on the many participating Indian troops, for example, of witnessing at first hand the inability of their colonial masters to carry all before them (to put it no higher) would start the long process of undermining the authority of the British Empire.
The Commission next turned to the seductive argument about the efficacy of modern artillery, in particular the power and enormous range of naval guns, seen by many on the War Council as vitiating Nelson’s advice against ships attacking forts: vide Liège and Namur or Antwerp, said Churchill. But this was misleading because of the high, ‘lobbing’ trajectory of the heavy German howitzers, their use of aircraft for spotting the fall of shot and their massive armies, on hand to exploit immediately the effect of the guns. Naval guns had almost flat trajectories except at extreme range, and needed to score direct hits on shore-based cannon to disable them, a well-nigh impossible feat at long distance. The best a naval gun could do was to achieve a downward trajectory of 21 degrees with a reduced propellant charge; a howitzer shell could be fired to fall at an angle much closer to 90 degrees, like a bomb from an aircraft. Naval guns in short were not appropriate for dealing with land fortifications, hidden and/or mobile batteries, or shore-based torpedo tubes which were believed (to an exaggerated extent) to exist in the strait. The fleet also faced the problem of minefields (effectively covered by searchlights and the elusive shore artillery) and eventually the threat of submarines; and seaplanes were not sufficiently powered at the time to rise above ground fire or even the prevalent strong winds – always assuming they could take off at all in the choppy waters. Outside the strait ships could observe the fall of each other’s shot whereas inside they could not, for lack of sea-room; on 18 March they barely bothered to try. The fall of the Belgian forts, the inquiry in effect concluded, had been a false analogy: a snare and a delusion.
After the War Council meeting of 13 January the views of Churchill and Fisher on the Dardanelles diverged more and more, with the admiral wanting to drop it not just because it overrode his Baltic idea but because it was not a combined operation and would therefore fail. Asquith was just one War Council witness to this generally recognised difference of opinion: he received a dissenting memorandum from Fisher on 25 January. Churchill claimed he was unaware of the extent of Fisher’s misgivings before this. Fisher had wanted to absent himself henceforward from War Council meetings but attended with his chief a private meeting in Asquith’s office before the 28 January triple session. When Churchill briskly reported that the Russians and the French were pleased with the Dardanelles plan which would go ahead in the middle of February, Fisher protested that he understood the matter would not be raised in Council that day. He got up to leave but was headed off by Kitchener, who persuaded him not to resign and to resume his seat – the admiral was after all the only one present who disagreed with the Dardanelles operation, Kitchener told him. Yet Wilson too was sceptical, if not as strongly as Fisher, but also kept silent. At the hearings, Wilson said Churchill had ‘passed over’ dissent at the Admiralty: ‘He was very keen on his own views.’ He repeatedly said he could do it without the army; ‘he only wanted the Army to come in and reap the fruits, I think was his expression.’ Churchill had minimised the risk from mobile guns and talked as if armoured ships were immune from damage. Churchill’s response was that in so far as Wilson was opposed, he too favoured a strategic alternative, like Fisher. Nobody had ever argued to him that the operation was something that could not work.
Churchill invited Fisher to see him in the First Lord’s office after the first session of the day, and the admiral ‘definitely consented’ to undertake the operation. At the second session in the evening Churchill announced to the War Council that the Admiralty, with the agreement of Lord Fisher, had ‘decided to undertake the task with which the War Council had charged us so urgently’ (it will be recalled that the 13 January meeting called for preparations, and that no urgency had been attached). Churchill told the Commission, presumably with a rhetorical flourish:
This I take as the point of final decision. After it, I never looked back. We had left the region of discussion and consultation, of balancings and misgivings. The matter had passed into the domain of action.
The purely naval ‘demonstration’ which 15 days earlier had passed into ‘preparation’ had now reached its third degree: ‘action’ by the fleet. The fleet would attack the Dardanelles unaided, with Constantinople as its objective.
The Commission chided Fisher and Wilson for keeping silent and concealing their misgivings. ‘They must have … been aware that none of the ministerial members of the Council had any expert naval knowledge’ – not excluding Churchill. The latter was also very much at fault for concealing the two admirals’ doubts instead of inviting them to speak to the Council, which could have enabled its members to reach a conclusion in full possession of all the facts and arguments. Instead he pressed his case very strongly: ‘he was carried away by his sanguine temperament and his firm belief in the success of the undertaking which he advocated.’ He had deluded himself about the degree of support he had won from his naval advisers and suppressed their misgivings, about which, in the psychological jargon of today, he was obviously ‘in denial’. The other politicians on the Council should also have sought the express advice of the silent experts; a short adjournment to seek the opinion of more experts from outside could then have been called, the Commission said. But the Council, dazzled by the potential rewards of success, gave insufficient attention to the disadvantages that would accrue ‘in the not improbable case of failure’. There is no mention of Churchill’s widely attested rhetorical persuasiveness, but it must now be clear that it played the leading part in bringing about a commitment by Britain’s war leadership to the solely naval attack on the Dardanelles.
Neither the Admiralty nor Carden, nor of course the politicians, gave much thought to what else would need to be done if the fleet forced its way into the Sea of Marmara. Turkish resistance was arrogantly discounted: they would withdraw once the fleet got in; there would be a revolution in Constantinople. But doubt did begin to creep into some minds, particularly in the military. The question of Britain’s prestige in the event of a setback was by no means dead, giving rise to growing unease, but the Commission could not put its collective finger on a single moment or event that marked the palpable shift of opinion towards a military intervention. Major-General Charles Callwell, Director of Military Operations at the War Office at the material time, said simply: ‘We drifted into the big military attack.’
Kitchener had promised as early as 9 February 1915 that if the navy needed help from the army at a later stage, it would be
forthcoming. Jackson advised Carden on 15 February to keep in mind the likely need for a large military intervention as the fleet progressed, and to collect transports to deliver it: a naval bombardment was not to be recommended ‘unless a strong military force is ready to assist’. On 16 February ministers met informally (no Hankey present to take a note) and initiated the movement of the 29th Division to the Aegean, of more troops from Egypt, of Royal Marines and of horse boats and landing craft, while the Admiralty was to organise the construction of transports and lighters sufficient for 50,000 men. All this was endorsed by the War Council proper, and Hankey said that the 16 February meeting was the ‘all-important decision from which sprang the joint naval and military enterprise against the Gallipoli peninsula’. Callwell’s concept of drift seems entirely appropriate: Kitchener’s reluctance to release troops had prevented, before spring 1915, the combined operation which the received wisdom had unanimously recommended – but so had Churchill’s impatience. As a result, the naval and military attacks were not combined at all, allowing the enemy to fend them off one after the other. Had the army gone in first, closely followed by the fleet, the outcome could and should have been entirely different – provided of course that the military side of operations had been executed rather more efficiently than was the case.
The first serious bombardment of the outer forts took place on 19 February 1915. Carden said in evidence that ‘the result of the day’s action … showed apparently that the effect of long-range bombardment by direct fire on modern earthwork forts is slight’. Guns that seemed to have taken hits opened fire when the ships came within range. The demolition parties had found that some 70 per cent of the targeted guns were still in working order when they landed, even though the forts were in a terrible state. Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, a gunnery specialist and flag officer of the Dover Patrol, told the Commission that ‘if they actually destroyed 30 per cent in the short time they did very well’. Even this modest and conjectural figure was too high.
Around the time of the first major bombardment Kitchener underwent a change of heart. He told the War Council on 24 February that if the navy did not get through unaided, ‘the army ought to see the business through’. He recognised that Britain’s prestige would be badly damaged in the East after all by a withdrawal that would be seen as a failure. Churchill told the same meeting that he was not contemplating a land attack, but the naval one might be held up by mines, making a ‘local military operation’ necessary. The Admiralty had prepared to start moving the 29th Division to the Aegean on 22 February, but on the 20th Kitchener said it would not be leaving, provoking a row with Churchill, who all but begged for its release and warned that it would not be his fault if a disaster resulted from the lack of sufficient troops. Was this a disguised acknowledgement that a purely naval assault was not going to be a pushover after all? But the War Council, as usual, took Kitchener’s side on 26 February; yet he told General Birdwood that very evening to consult with the navy as to how best the ANZAC and RN divisions and Royal Marines might be used if needed. Clearly at this confused juncture the viability of a solely naval assault was generally in doubt and the deployment of as many as three divisions of troops, some 50,000 men, was regarded as an option, though not yet decided. On 5 and 6 March Birdwood told Kitchener at some length that he did not believe the navy could break through on its own; these messages and better news from Russia and the Western Front prompted Kitchener to announce on 10 March that he would release the 29th to the Aegean after all. The Commission agreed with Churchill that his long delay had been a major contribution to the failure of the entire enterprise.
We may note that three valuable weeks had indeed been thrown away, and the troopships could not start to leave until 16 March. Had they left on 22 February they might have been on hand for the navy’s ‘big push’ on 18 March; but surely not ready for an invasion, because their supply ships would still have been wrongly loaded and a regrouping in Egypt would have been no less necessary. This suggests the army could have been ready at the earliest on about 24 March rather than the actual date of 14 April. No doubt the fleet could have waited a mere extra week until the troops were ready; but there is no indication that de Robeck and Hamilton would therefore have changed their strategy in favour of a combined operation – simultaneous and co-ordinated attacks by navy and army – or that their chiefs in London, Kitchener and Churchill, would have done so either. The interval between the rebuff to the navy and the ensuing army attack might well have been much shorter, but Kitchener’s long-standing view preceded and outlasted his vacillations over the 29th Division: only if the fleet could not do it alone would the army come to its aid. In that way he was entirely consistent. So was his insistence that he would not let the 29th go until general war conditions permitted. Perhaps he was over-cautious, as the Commission concluded; but it was Churchill who lost patience and went ahead without him. By drifting along with this piecemeal approach the British government allowed the bold Churchillian strategy of a flank attack on the Central Powers via Turkey to fall between the two stools of early withdrawal after a naval demonstration and a full-scale combined assault. This was an unwise course anyway, but especially when the defence was in the hands of the disciples of Clausewitz. After all, the advice of that great evangelist of Prussian militarism was to ‘Pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination’.
The hurried dispatch of General Hamilton and his orders from Kitchener dated 13 March 1915 did not portend a change of strategy. His orders were vague. The army would go in only if the fleet attack failed; it would go in en bloc; there could be no question of abandoning the project after that; yet minor military operations ashore were not excluded. Hamilton fairly emphasised to the Commission that no plan of operations had been drawn up and he had left for the Aegean without information or arrangements for a water supply or staff preparation. Only on 19 March, the day after the navy failed, did Kitchener expressly order him to capture the Gallipoli peninsula. Just before his illness forced the handover to de Robeck, Admiral Carden had signalled that he expected a major army landing immediately after he had broken through the strait. He would confer with Hamilton on his arrival. De Robeck testified that he took over Carden’s plan, did not alter it and decided to carry it out as ordered: he would have preferred a combined operation but he understood he was under orders to force the strait with the fleet regardless, so he tried to do so. In effect the problem of supply, assuming he overcame the minefields and got through to Constantinople, was discounted because it was assumed that the Turks would surrender under the guns of the Royal Navy. ‘That was what we were always given to understand.’ But if that had not occurred, ‘we should have had to come down again. Yes, like Admiral Duckworth …’ To the causes of the Dardanelles disaster we can therefore add to Asquith’s indecisiveness, Kitchener’s vacillation and Churchill’s over-optimism a general underestimation of the enemy.
Having caused so much delay himself, Kitchener chided Hamilton on 23 March, the day de Robeck advised that the army should be called in for a combined operation, for saying that the troops would not be ready to land until 14 April: ‘I regard any such postponement as far too long. I should like to know how soon you could act on shore.’ Until de Robeck’s recommendation, the consensus at the Admiralty and the War Council was that the fleet should carry on despite the losses of 18 March. De Robeck agreed until he changed his mind after meeting Hamilton on 22 March, so advising London the next day; from then on Churchill alone wanted to press on without the army, whereas Fisher, Wilson and Jackson disagreed, believing that they should heed the advice of the commanders on the spot. ‘I bowed to their decision,’ said Churchill, ‘but with regret and anxiety.’
The Commission looked for crumbs of comfort amid the ruination of British hopes at the Dardanelles. The Russians had asked for a diversion, and they had achieved considerable success in that respect. There had been no victory to seduce the Balkan neutrals, but Bulgaria’s adhesion to the Central Powers
had been delayed for months. And the Turks had been made to keep 300,000 troops for several months on the Gallipoli peninsula who might otherwise have been deployed elsewhere against the Allies, including Russia. Enver Pasha said that if the fleet had pressed ahead despite its losses on 18 March, it might well have got through; as it was he had six whole weeks to deploy 200 new artillery pieces from Austria-Hungary in the peninsula. But the Commission, not unreasonably, took the view that after three battleships had been sunk and three or four knocked out on a single day, with the minefields uncleared further attempts would have been attended by further serious losses; if the fleet had managed to force a passage in this way, there would not have been much of it left with which to threaten Constantinople.
In the overall conclusions of its first and principal report the Dardanelles Commission focuses on our main concerns, the decision to mount a solely naval attack on the Dardanelles, its preparation and execution (the final report concentrates on the ensuing land campaign at Gallipoli). The main points include the following:
• The War Council was wrong in uncritically accepting Kitchener’s statements that no troops were available for a combined operation without investigating them. Had this been done it would have emerged that there were enough troops in the region after all, and that they would have been ready rather sooner.
The Dandarnelles Disaster Page 23