• Churchill overstated the degree of enthusiasm shown by his expert advisers. These were not asked for their views by the War Council, nor did they proffer any, which was wrong. Churchill, Asquith and the other politicians should have insisted that they speak and give their views to the full Council.
• The potential reward of a successful, surprise combined attack at the Dardanelles was so great that it was a major mistake to throw it away by staging a purely naval assault, which could not possibly have succeeded on its own.
• Once the decision to prepare an attack was taken on 16 February and troops were gathered in the region, it was clear to all the world that abandonment of the project must entail serious damage to British prestige. There could be no compromise between withdrawal after an unsuccessful naval probe and a full-blown combined assault.
• Churchill was not informed of Kitchener’s decision on 20 February not to send the 29th Division after all, resulting in the loss of three weeks and much damage to the prospects of the eventual invasion.
• The decision to abandon the purely naval assault after 18 March was inevitable.
• The fact that the War Council did not meet between 19 March and 14 May, despite the invasion on 25 April, was ‘a serious omission’: it should have met to reconsider the entire project. The Prime Minister, or failing him the other politicians on the Council, should have pressed for a meeting.
• Kitchener failed to make use of the General Staff, rendering his workload impossible and causing confusion and inefficiency.
• Fisher was wrong to believe that he should remain silent at War Council meetings or resign, if he did not agree with his chief. Such a principle would if adopted cause damage to the public service.
• Some advantage was gained from the overall failure at the Dardanelles, mainly in tying down so many Turkish divisions; but whether this was worth the ‘loss of life and treasure involved is, and must always remain, a matter of opinion’.
Casualty figures for the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns vary. The latter accounted for the lion’s share. The official Turkish figures give, in round figures, 87,000 dead and 165,000 wounded. Some authorities round up the Turkish casualty total to 300,000. The Allied figures give 46,000 killed by all causes, including disease, drowning and accidents, and some 220,000 wounded or otherwise incapacitated. Roughly speaking we can probably agree on over a quarter of a million casualties on each side, half a million in all. This is a fraction of the butcher’s bill on the Western Front; but it is no less horrifying, considering the small area involved and the numbers of men who fought on and over that appalling battlefield – and why.
CHAPTER 11
What Became of Them
Among the principal personalities involved in the Dardanelles campaign two figures stand out, one from each side: Winston Churchill, the initiator and greatest of all political survivors, and Mustafa Kemal, who became known as Atatürk, the father of his country. But in reviewing the fates of leading participants, including the Ottoman Empire itself, and other powers and personalities involved in the events of 1914–15 in the Aegean Sea and the Dardanelles, it seems appropriate to start with the two Germans and the two Turks who initiated those events: Ambassador Wangenheim and Admiral Souchon; War Minister Enver Pasha and Interior Minister Talaat Bey.
Hans Baron von Wangenheim, the larger-than-life diplomat who did not hesitate to use a mailed fist in negotiation but brought off the Turco-German secret pact in 1914 with aplomb, lived long enough to see the Allies rebuffed at the Dardanelles and held in check in the subsequent Gallipoli campaign. But he died on 25 October 1915, reportedly of overwork which probably exacerbated cardiovascular symptoms, before the Allied divisions withdrew. He was only 56 and had just returned from sick leave. To his credit, in July 1915 he delivered an official protest against the indiscriminate massacres of Armenians by the Turks, a genocidal crime which remains officially unacknowledged in Turkey nearly a century later. While expressing German sympathy for Turkish internal security concerns, he warned of the dangers likely to arise from ‘these rigorous measures’ involving indiscriminate expatriation accompanied by ‘acts of violence, such as massacre and pillage’. General Liman von Sanders also protested.
Wilhelm Anton Theodor Souchon, flag officer of the Imperial German Navy’s Mediterranean Division in 1914 and subsequently commander-inchief of the Ottoman fleet, was promoted to vice-admiral in the Imperial Navy in 1915 and was awarded the highest decoration in the Kaiser’s gift, the Order Pour le mérite, in 1916. He managed to gain and retain maritime supremacy in the Black Sea for Turkey, despite a series of increasingly desperate encounters with the Russian Black Sea fleet in which the Goeben and Breslau were often damaged, sometimes seriously, and despite the appearance of two new, locally built and heavily armed Russian dreadnought battleships in 1915: fortunately for Souchon they were a touch slower than the Goeben. In September 1917 he was recalled to Germany to take command of the Fourth Squadron of battleships in the High Seas Fleet. In August 1918 he was promoted full admiral and appointed the Kaiser’s principal naval adviser, by then a sinecure. He retired from the truncated Reichsmarine in March 1919 and died in Bremen at the age of 81, having seen his country’s second defeat in a generation, in January 1946.
The word ‘feisty’ could have been coined for Enver Pasha, the restless revolutionary who took it upon himself to conclude the fateful treaty with Wangenheim. Enver had no compunction about squeezing the Germans financially during the First World War. ‘What have they done for us which compares with what we have done for them?’ he would ask rhetorically. Turkey (with not inconsiderable help from the Germans) had defeated the British fleet and seen off the Allied armies from Gallipoli, had tied down large numbers of Russian troops in the Caucasus and British imperial troops in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Palestine, all of whom would otherwise have been deployed against the Central Powers. They even scored a few early victories against uninspired British generals, especially in Mesopotamia. But, although the Russians fared badly against the Turks in the last weeks of 1914, prompting the plea from Grand Duke Nicholas to Britain on 2 January 1915 for a demonstration against them, the situation was transformed by a Russian victory as early as 4 January, at the Battle of Sarikamish in Armenia. There Enver, having snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with an ill-judged divisional manoeuvre in the snow, narrowly escaped capture as 70,000 Turks froze to death. But the closure of the Dardanelles had undeniably crippled the Russian war effort and economy alike, increasing enormously the internal pressures that led to revolution in 1917 and military defeat in 1918. Churchill agreed with Ludendorff of the German General Staff that Turkey’s intervention in the war had lengthened it by two years, or almost 100 per cent. Without it, Russia would surely have emerged on the winning side, perhaps with the Tsar still on his throne.
As war with Turkey loomed in autumn 1914, the British took steps to safeguard their oil supply, tiny though its contemporary needs seem when compared with those of today. The navy was in the throes of switching from coal to oil while the needs of the army and the two air arms would obviously grow quickly. Their main supply point in the region was the Persian port of Abadan, in the British sphere of influence; on the opposite bank of the Shatt-al-Arab waterway is Basra, then an important Turkish military base. The first British force to arrive in October 1914 consisted of 5,000 troops from the Indian Army, supported by the navy’s Persian Gulf flotilla. Basra was captured on 23 November and used as a main base for operations against the Turks in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Within a fortnight General Barrett advanced northward to take the junction of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates at Qurna.
The Turks struck back early in 1915 but their major counter-offensive was beaten back at the Battle of Shaiba in April, when Barrett was relieved by General Sir John Nixon, under orders from the Indian (but not the British) government to capture Baghdad. He moved further north to seize Turkish bases on the two great rivers, consolidating the British imperial gri
p on southern Mesopotamia. But Baghdad was still 250 miles away, supply lines were too long, the climate was unbearable, troops keeled over in droves, and the ‘Marsh Arabs’ were hostile. Basra was incapable of handling enough supplies, which then had to be forwarded upriver. Nixon, who based himself there, was over-confident and dismissive of the Turks. He sent Major-General Charles Townshend’s 6th Indian Division up the Tigris in September 1915, overriding the latter’s opposition. At first the Turks retreated but at Ctesiphon, about 25 miles short of Baghdad, Town-shend was halted, badly mauled and beaten back at the end of November, taking refuge in Kut, which was besieged by four Turkish divisions early in December. The Indian government and a reluctant London administration mustered three divisions, two from India earmarked for the occupation of Baghdad and a third from Gallipoli, for the relief of Kut. But General Nur-ud-Din, the Turkish commander, defeated three Anglo-Indian attacks along the Tigris early in 1916.
General Nixon was relieved on health grounds by General Sir Percy Lake, who assembled a larger force for a new advance on Kut in April 1916. This too was defeated, and on the last day of the month Townshend surrendered Kut to General Khalil Pasha, the Turkish commander-in-chief in Mesopotamia, in a blow to British military prestige even worse than the failure at Gallipoli. Britain now took direct charge of operations, placing General Sir Stanley Maude (the last British soldier to leave Gallipoli) in command in August. By autumn his reinforced troops numbered 150,000 and more British officers had been brought in to exert control over the chaos affecting supply, transport and medical services. The logistical position was transformed by the end of the year with modern aircraft, better weapons and more and more vehicles. Maude’s army expanded to a quarter of a million during 1917, outnumbering local Turkish forces by a margin of five to one. An advance towards Kut took from December 1916 to February 1917, when the siege was broken at the Second Battle of Kut. British troops finally took Baghdad in March. Most of Khalil’s troops got away and Maude continued operations to prevent them being reinforced by the Turkish XIII Corps coming from western Persia. Despite a surrender and a number of skirmishes, the Turkish Army in Mesopotamia remained in being thanks to several skilled retreats. When General Maude, probably the best local commander on either side, caught cholera and died in November 1917, British operations were scaled down under General Marshall. But the fighting in Mesopotamia continued until the bitter end – the Allied armistice with Turkey agreed on 30 October 1918, to take effect on 1 November. Another British commission of inquiry into the Mesopotamian imbroglio started work as early as August 1916 and concluded that it too had all been an appalling mistake.
Meanwhile British imperial troops were also engaged in another major campaign against the Turks on the Palestine front. It began with the abortive attack towards the Suez Canal by Turkish troops of the Fourth Army led by Jemal Pasha, now governor of Syria, and the German General Kress von Kressenstein from Liman von Sanders’s military mission. Some 30,000 Indian and ANZAC troops prevailed with minimal losses, but Kressenstein formed a small yet effective desert raiding force that caused much disruption on the Egyptian–Palestinian borders, and concomitant concern in London. Troops finally withdrawn from Gallipoli at the beginning of January 1916 were moved to the defence of Egypt under a cautious General Sir Archibald Murray, previously Chief of the Imperial General Staff and Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, from March 1916. His command was reduced to four infantry divisions by mid-year, nine having been sent to France and one to Mesopotamia. A second Turkish push towards Suez was beaten off in August.
Reinforced again to 150,000 men, Murray began an advance northward with half his force along the Palestine coast, relying heavily on cavalry and reconnaissance aircraft from the army’s Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. The Turks set up a defence line from Gaza to Beersheba, which repelled two British thrusts towards Gaza in March and April 1917. German air reconnaissance helped inflict heavy losses on Murray. He was replaced in June by General Sir Edmund Allenby as Britain built up its effort in Palestine, heavily outnumbering the Turkish defence, led from November by General Erich von Falkenhayn, the former German Chief of General Staff, based in Jerusalem. Allenby attacked the Gaza–Beersheba line, forcing Falkenhayn to form a new line 20 miles south-west of Jerusalem: but his counter-attack failed to break Allenby’s right wing as the latter advanced northward, rolling up the Turkish Eighth Army along the coast before halting for the winter rainy season. Fighting continued however round Jerusalem (both sides were under strict orders not to attack the city itself), until Allenby entered the holy city, on foot at the head of his troops, on 11 December 1917, a massively symbolic victory.
The Mesopotamian front was run down at the beginning of 1918 in favour of Allenby’s, which mustered 112,000 men in February. The British general took care to delude Falkenhayn that he would advance inland on his right while planning his major thrust along the coast to his left. On 1 March Liman von Sanders took over command of the Turkish line from the coast to the River Jordan and of the forces committed to the defensive Operation ‘Yilderim’ (lightning), down to fewer than 40,000 men in Palestine. The infrastructure of the contested territory of the Ottoman Empire, never robust, was falling to pieces amid widespread Arab revolts fomented by the British, and Enver insisted on transferring troops to the Caucasian front against Russia. But Allenby had his problems too, losing 60,000 infantry to the Western Front between March and August 1918: although Indian reinforcements arrived, he could not mount an offensive until autumn, perilously close to the rainy season. Victory at the Battle of Megiddo (Armageddon) in mid-September and rapid cavalry and motorised thrusts broke up the Turkish defence as Allenby’s forces advanced northward on a broad front towards Damascus and Aleppo. The dashing, fighting advance, one of the fastest on record since the invention of the internal-combustion engine, stands in marked contrast with almost the whole of the rest of the First World War, dominated as it was by trench warfare and the superiority of defensive tactics and weaponry over attacking forces. The British took 75,000 prisoners for fewer than 52,000 casualties (6,000 killed) over nearly three years – small change by First World War standards.
In the English-speaking world the Western Front is far better known than the Eastern, not surprisingly; in Australasia the Gallipoli campaign is even better known (its naval prelude rather less so, whether in Britain or the Antipodes); but perhaps the least-known front of all in the history of the First World War outside Turkey is the Caucasian campaign between the Turks and the Russians, the struggle for the region south and west of the Caucasian mountains – today’s Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. The Russians as ever had agents among the large Armenian population within eastern Turkey and were fomenting trouble even before war broke out: when it did, Armenian nationalist restlessness behind the lines, seen by the Turks as treachery and constituting a Turkish variation on the German post-war nationalist theme of the stab in the back, helps to explain (but not excuse) Turkish brutality towards this gifted but tragic ethnic minority. After a few border skirmishes, Enver, planning expansion at Russia’s expense, assembled two armies, the Second and Third, under his own command north of Erzerum, a slow business without a railway in the area. The opposing Russian commander, General Mishlayevski, could not hope for reinforcement against a larger enemy because of the demands of the conflict with faraway Germany, but supported an incursion into Turkey by a division of Armenian rebels, who themselves massacred over 100,000 people in north-eastern Turkey in the opening months of 1915.
The Turkish two-pronged advance petered out when the Second Army was bogged down and the Third was routed at the Battle of Sarikamish. The victorious but still outnumbered Russians could do no more than send in a corps to occupy a strip of Turkish Armenia, where 30,000 rebels were now under arms. When a provisional government of Armenia was declared on 20 April 1915, the Turks engaged in what is now called ethnic cleansing of Armenians all over Ottoman territory. Even though hundreds of thousands of Turkish
troops were engaged at Gallipoli, Enver ordered another advance on the Caucasian front in July, which was crushed by the Russians under the skilled General Yudenich in August, after which military activity declined on both sides. Yudenich was able to send a corps into Persia in November to foil both a threatened local revolt against the Allied cause and a Turkish deployment there. Despite preoccupations and bad news from the Eastern Front against Germany, the Russian army on the Caucasus front expanded to 22 divisions over the winter of 1915–16, not least to counter the release of Turkish divisions from the Gallipoli stalemate abandoned by the frustrated Allies. Yudenich captured Erzerum in February 1916 and Trebizond in April. Careful not to over-extend himself in difficult terrain, the Russian general contented himself with establishing a firm grip on Armenia in 1916. The western Allies would have liked him to advance into Anatolia in 1917 to relieve pressure on their forces in Mesopotamia and Palestine, but the internal unrest in Russia, leading to the October Revolution, led him to stay put and sit tight.
That revolution put an end to the Russian occupation, prompting more anti-Turkish revolts by the Armenians, who were not above some more ethnic cleansing of their own. A ‘republic of Transcaucasia’, set up by the Armenians, Azeris and Georgians, flashed briefly across the political firmament, collapsing under the competing aims of its constituent peoples when Armenia broke away in May 1918.
The Russian Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the victorious Germans in March 1918 was accompanied by an armistice between Russia and Turkey, whereupon the former evacuated Armenia altogether. By October 1918 the Turks withdrew from their own unprofitable operations in northern Persia, Baku and Armenia and repossessed much of the territory hitherto under Russian occupation. Enver’s last major offensive in this region served only to undermine Turkish resistance in Mesopotamia and Palestine by drawing in troops better left there.
The Dandarnelles Disaster Page 24