In 1887 that splendid and efficient intelligence officer, Henry Brackenbury, instructed the young Charles Callwell, later one of the major players in the Gallipoli saga, in the proper duties of an intelligence officer:
I shan’t expect you to be able to answer every question … right off the reel; I shan’t even expect the information necessarily to be actually available in the department. But I shall expect you not to be helpless, but to find means of getting that information somehow within a reasonable time… if you keep sucking information into the place, and if you see that [it] is properly registered and so made available when required, your particular section will in course of time become a real going concern. Its archives will enable you, or whoever succeeds you, to answer any question that I or any properly authorised person may desire to ask.14
Unfortunately, as the Dardanelles episode so graphically depicts, this advice was not always adhered to, and the ‘lack of central direction and management’ was the skeleton in the cupboard (or rather pigeonhole).
What of the putative intelligence target? The Gallipoli Peninsula had the reputation of being rugged, wild and inhospitable. The 1910 Macmillan Guide to Greece, The Archipelago, Constantinople, The Coast of Asia Minor, Crete and Cyprus (the Asia Minor part of which was revised by the geographer and archaeologist D G Hogarth, friend and mentor of T E Lawrence) noted of the Peninsula that leopards, lynxes, hyenas, brown bears, wolves, jackals and wild boars were occasionally encountered.15 The Guide, besides giving the usual information about ancient Troy and the Hellespont, stated that the castles on either side of the Narrows at Chanak had recently been restored and armed with Krupp guns.16 This was the period when the Admiralty Chart warned that vessels entering the Dardanelles during the hours of darkness would be fired on. Apart from this, no indication was given of its strategic importance.
This does not, however, give a true picture of public, as well as military and naval, awareness in Europe. The Dardanelles had been of importance in the Crimean and Turco–Russian Wars of the 1850s and 1870s, in both of which conflicts the Gallipoli Peninsula had been occupied by British and French troops, and more recently in London had been discussed at the highest level in 1906 during the Akaba Crisis, had been the subject of several joint naval and military appreciations between 1906 and 1912, and had again been involved in headline-grabbing conflicts in the Italo–Turkish War of 1911 and in the Balkan Wars of 1911–13, when the Bulgarians attacked the Bulair Lines defending the Peninsula and the Greeks were planning landings on it. The attention of the world had therefore been very much focused on the Dardanelles in the years just before the First World War, military and naval attachés had been sending back reports, intelligence officers had been gathering information, and naval and military staffs had been preparing appreciations and making outline plans. 1906 was a crucial year. Apart from the implications of war with Turkey following from the Akaba crisis, it saw the launch of the Dreadnought, precipitating the naval race with Germany which meant that the British were effectively forced to abandon the Mediterranean to the French, implicitly accepting in turn the task of defending the Atlantic coast of France. The year also saw the beginning of the Wilson–Foch military conversations which were to lead to the plan that the BEF would stand on the left of the French armies in the event of a German attack. Despite all this, Anglo–French strategic planning and naval coordination, apart from the agreement to send the BEF to France, were in a state of chaos on the eve of the war.17
In the decade before 1914, Turkey had been becoming more closely involved with Germany. If Turkey did become involved in a war on the German side, how much did those on the Allied side with a ‘need to know’ actually know about the terrain of the Gallipoli Peninsula, as opposed to its coast defences? And to what lengths did they go to find out? Today, knowledge of the world’s terrain, photographed and remotely sensed from satellites, airliners, helicopters, and various other platforms, and viewed by the public from aeroplanes flying miles above remote and inaccessible parts of the globe, makes it difficult to comprehend the difficulties of acquisition of terrain intelligence only a hundred years ago when powered flight was but a few years old. From an aeroplane floating over the Aegean towards the historic Dardanelles, can be seen today, particularly when the sun is low, practically every significant feature of this epic and tragic landscape and seascape.
But things were very difficult in late 1914 and early 1915 when, following the outbreak of hostilities with Turkey, the British were thinking about the need for amphibious combined operations to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula and push the fleet through the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara to Constantinople, to deal Turkey such a body-blow that it would capitulate. This, it was assumed, if successful would so alter the strategic balance in south-east Europe and the Moslem world that it would knock the Central Powers off-balance and lead to a speedy Allied victory.
At this time, the Allies possessed a great deal of strategic, tactical and topographical intelligence, including a medium-scale (1:50,000 and its 1:63,360 derivative) map which, although based on a Crimean War reconnaissance survey, was contoured and good enough for swift operations. This was also the situation that obtained in France and Flanders, and on the Eastern Front. In no theatre of war did either side, in 1914–15, go to war with a large-scale artillery map, except in those localised operations where fortresses had to be besieged. What both sides were not prepared for, and this is strange in the light of recent operations such as the Russo–Japanese War and the Balkan Wars, was trench warfare, in which attacks were consistently held up by barbed wire and the concentrated fire of magazine rifles, machine guns and field artillery, and therefore they had not equipped themselves with what rapidly became essential for any such operations – the accurate, large-scale, artillery map, which could be used as a base for overprinting trenches and other tactical detail, thus creating the trench map with which the First World War, on almost every front, is practically synonymous.18 Such a map could not at that time be constructed for inaccessible terrain; it had to be based on an existing national precision survey. If this was not available, and in the absence of modern photogrammetric techniques and equipment, no accurate map could be made.
The prerequisites for such an amphibious operation, apart from the availability of trained men and sufficient matériel, were surprise and good intelligence. Well-known principles of war (decide on aim and pursue it remorselessly, act offensively, concentrate at the decisive point, be mobile, achieve surprise, cooperate, security of base and communications, economy of force, etc.) were, as always, relevant; it is instructive to see how many were ignored in the Dardanelles operations. Speed was essential, as Admiral ‘Jacky’ Fisher pointed out in January 1915, quoting Napoleon: ‘CELERITY – without it FAILURE,’19 and also strength; as Stonewall Jackson observed, you had to ‘get there fustest with the mostest men’.20 You also, as a Polish officer said during the Second World War, with feeling, from bitter experience, had to be stronger.21 But first, intelligence was needed, and lots of it. It is important to ‘know your enemy’, both in terms of his military forces, dispositions, capabilities and intentions but also in terms of that equally important enemy – the terrain.
The Gallipoli Campaign includes a large number of ‘firsts’; airfield reconnaissance, beach photography from the air, map supply by air, air reconnaissance and photography of underwater obstacles (mines). These are all documented here. As an example of successful landings, followed by a failure to break out of the bridgeheads, it deserves extremely careful study to determine to what extent this success and failure were linked to the quality of geographical and tactical intelligence. Inevitably it demands comparison with the successful NEPTUNE and OVERLORD (D-Day) and subsequent operations of 1944. The similarities are obvious, but bear careful scrutiny. Both involved amphibious combined operations, cooperation with allies, deception, technology advanced for its time (e.g. indirect naval gunnery, aircraft and aerial photography, etc.). But on another level there w
as a world of difference between Gallipoli and the D-Day operations. In the case of D-Day there was a clear strategic priority and aim, well-defined political control and leadership, joint staff, planning and intelligence, a long planning period, genuine combined amphibious operations, vast resources, and a huge amount of intelligence available and well-processed (by a specially created Allied joint-staff Theatre Intelligence Section), and intelligence and operational support from the indigenous resistance movement. As has been pointed out on many occasions, the Dardanelles operations benefited from none of these.
The planners of the D-Day landings in June 1944 had a great advantage – from the time that the German invasion threat receded, at the time of Hitler’s invasion of Russia (1941), they had almost three years to prepare, and the call went out for holiday photographs of French beaches and coastal resorts; ten million were eventually received.22 Gallipoli was very different – from the start of hostilities with Turkey at the beginning of November 1914, there were almost six months to the landings on 25 April 1915, in which it must be said much planning and preparation could have been done. Without such crucial groundwork, a disaster was a certainty. And so it proved. On 16 February 1915 the War Cabinet decided that troops might be required, and decided to send them from Egypt and Britain and set up a base on the island of Lemnos. From the time that a firm decision was made to commit large ground forces on 19 March, only five weeks remained until the landings. Even at the time of Kitchener’s appointment of Sir Ian Hamilton, on 12 March, to the command of the ill-fated Constantinople Expeditionary Force (hurriedly, but too late, renamed Mediterranean Expeditionary Force for security reasons), no such firm decision had been taken.
Planning for the eventuality could and should been undertaken earlier. Such an operation had been mooted for decades, and both the Army and the Navy had studied the problems and prepared joint appreciations and reports. They had gathered much information, and could have obtained a great deal more. Any operation has to be based on organised and focused intelligence; intelligence is the handmaid of operations; it should not be vague or haphazard. Planners and commanders have to consider what information they need. Information needs have to be identified; intelligence has to be acquired by various methods, both overt and covert; it has to be processed – i.e. analysed, interpreted and evaluated; it needs to be distributed to all those with a need to know; and often it needs to be explained to those who receive it. Finally, commanders must base their plans on it, and not ignore it.
This book charts the interplay between intelligence, strategy, planning and operations; unfortunately the strategy, such as it was, was formulated without paying much attention at all to the intelligence (though the in-theatre planning took intelligence very seriously indeed), and ghastly mistakes were made as a consequence. While many in London, and almost all those on the spot, opposed the idea of ‘Navy only’ operations, and also large-scale military operations, both of these went ahead. It examines the intelligence about the Gallipoli Peninsula, and the methods by which it was acquired, both before and during the operations. In so doing it demolishes the myth, encountered in so much of the Gallipoli literature and sedulously fostered by Sir Ian Hamilton himself, that the Allies were ignorant of the terrain and were not prepared for the realities of what they encountered. Indeed, General Callwell, the Director of Military Operations in 1914–15, was so incensed by Hamilton’s deliberately misleading statements to the Dardanelles Commission, that he asked to be able to give further evidence to the Commission, and publicised this in a post-war book.
It is demonstrated here that the British were in fact well-prepared with topographical and tactical intelligence, not least from a book published in 1914 by a German ordnance officer who had served in Gallipoli, that they possessed key details of a pre-war Anglo–Greek plan, formulated by Admiral Kerr with the encouragement of King Constantine of Greece, to capture the Peninsula, and that they were well-placed to conduct a successful operation if a sufficiently long planning period had been available and surprise had not been lost. Even with a very short time for planning and preparation, an amphibious operation as envisaged by Birdwood could have been successful if it had been carried out immediately, with sufficient trained forces, without prior bombardments by the fleet which took away the last elements of surprise. It is also clear that there was systematic lying to, and collusion against, the Dardanelles Commission, by Winston Churchill, Sir Ian Hamilton, and other key players, an episode well documented by Tim Travers and Jenny Macleod.23
One of the crucial questions is the extent to which the strategic, geographical, and tactical information which had been accumulating in the War Office and Admiralty was actually made available to the political, military and naval decision-makers, and to the field commander – Hamilton – and his Staff. While various pieces of evidence point to much more having been used in the field than Hamilton claimed, it is undeniable that certain appreciations – for example the 1906 joint report and Frederick Cunliffe Owen’s 1914 reports – had a very limited circulation and were apparently not seen by Hamilton; indeed, most copies of the 1906 report had been destroyed. The surviving archival material is not always as helpful as might be expected in this respect. Even if they had not seen certain reports, Hamilton and Braithwaite were probably familiar with their main outlines and tenor.
The alleged lack of a British operational plan for the Dardanelles Campaign has long exercised many commentators. Here it is revealed that an important reason for this is that a plan did in fact exist – the Anglo–Greek plan – which, according to Churchill’s evidence to the Dardanelles Commission, he could not remember whether he was aware of or not. In fact, he was the prime instigator of this plan, instructing Admiral Kerr (Commander-in-Chief of the Greek Navy) at the beginning of September 1914 to create such a plan in conjunction with the Greek General Staff. As we shall see, this plan involved the strengthening of the Greek fleet by the British Navy and landings by the Greek Army to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula before the fleet went through the Dardanelles to Constantinople. As will be made clear, this plan was well-known to several British officers apart from Kerr, including Admiral Limpus, in charge of the British Naval Mission at Constantinople, and Frederick Cunliffe Owen, the military attaché.
The Gallipoli Campaign was launched too late, as Admiral Kerr realised. After the realisation of lost surprise, the only valid reason for launching it was to take pressure off the Russian Caucasus front. When it was launched, it failed on the first day, after which it should have been abandoned. The land campaign, the tragic and glorious development of the military operations from April 1915 to January 1916, was an irrelevance. Its only useful purpose was, briefly, to divert Turkish attention from other fronts. Unlike the Western Front, where a series of attrition battles gradually wore down the Germans, the Gallipoli Campaign could never hope to achieve anything other than through surprise.
It was perhaps a brilliant strategic idea which could only have succeeded if all factors had worked in its favour. It depended upon that concatenation of circumstances which rarely arises: good planning, sensible and prolonged preparation, superior and trained forces, capable commanders, enemy caught off-balance and looking in the wrong direction – and (Napoleon’s crucial ingredient) luck.
It could have succeeded in February 1915 but not, after prolonged naval bombardment and landings, in April. Key figures may have been playing duplicitous games; Kitchener, on 1 March, was urging Maxwell in Egypt to conceal the small size of Birdwood’s force in order that the population of the Levant and Middle East might envisage something altogether more powerful – against Alexandretta, rather than against Gallipoli. Far from surprise being lost by accident, Kitchener was actually proposing a deliberate policy of encouraging a view in the Moslem world of certainty of large-scale operations, but against Alexandretta, not against the Dardanelles. The relevant telegram read:
From Lord K. London. To Sir J. Maxwell, Cairo. Rec’d 1.3.15. 3341 Cipher. Private and Secret. Do
not allow numbers and destination of troops you are sending to Lemnos be made public, as it might be advantageous if the impression in the Levant that a larger force had been sent.24
This deception attempt may have backfired on the expedition, as by this time the Turks were becoming thoroughly alarmed over the threat to the Dardanelles.
Peter Chasseaud
Peter Doyle
September 2005
Notes
1. Aspinall-Oglander, Brig.-Gen. C F, History of the Great War, Military Operations, Gallipoli, Vol. I, London: Heinemann, 1929, p. 90.
2. See for example, Moorhead, Rhodes James, etc. That the ‘myth’ of the maps is carried forward into popular culture is seen in an American comic book (World War Stories, Gallipoli, 1965), which pictures British intelligence officers combing the bazaars in Alexandria for intelligence. This was indeed done, but for two reasons: firstly, to gather material relating to the Ottoman domains generally, and secondly, as a deception scheme.
3. Lee, John, A Soldier’s Life. General Sir Ian Hamilton 1853–1947, London: Pan, 2001, p. 146.
4. Keegan, John, Intelligence in War. Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda, London: Pimlico, 2004.
5. Occleshaw, Michael, Armour Against Fate. British Military Intelligence in the First World War, London: Columbus, 1989.
6. Andrew, Christopher, Secret Service. The Making of the British Intelligence Community, London: Heinemann, 1985.
7. Kahn, David, Seizing the Enigma. The Race to Break the German U-Boat Code 1939 – 43, Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
8. Minutes of Evidence to the Dardanelles Commission, pp. 1403–1405, The National Archives (PRO) CAB 19/33.
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