Grasping Gallipoli

by Peter Chasseaud

All the western end of the Gallipoli Peninsula is of broken hilly character, which combines with lack of water and consequent lack of population and roads to render it an unfavourable area for military operations. No general, if he had the choice, would land a considerable force upon it at any spot below the narrows.33

  Clearly, this was a view which upheld the need for a landing at Bulair. Yet despite the view of an expert – later to be attached to the Admiralty – and given that the strategic aims of the campaign were to simply support the naval operation through the capture of the high ground, and removal of the threat of shore batteries, a landing in the south-western part of the Peninsula was necessary, with a consequently limited range of options available to the Allied commander-in-chief. How he gathered information, and used this, will be a major preoccupation of the remainder of this book.

  Notes

  1. Outlined in technical terms by Perincek, D, American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin, 75, pp. 241–57; and Sengor, A M C and Yilmaz, Y, Tectonophysics, 75, pp. 181–241.

  2. Masefield, John, Gallipoli, New York: Macmillan, 1916; although a work of propaganda (see Macleod, Jenny, Reconsidering Gallipoli), the words of the Poet Laureate well express the beauty of the landscape.

  3. These aspects of the terrain are well discussed in Aspinall-Oglander’s official history (1929), as well as in most one-volume accounts, the most important of which remains Rhodes James (1965). The contemporary, propaganda-influenced account by John Masefield (1916) describes the landscape well, as does Nevinson (1919). Surprising detail about the geology of the region is contained in Hargrave, John, The Suvla Bay Landing (1964).

  4. Preserved in the British Geological Survey at Wallingford are logs taken on the Peninsula during the period of post-war British occupation. These provide information not readily available, to the Allies at least, during the war.

  5. Doyle, P and Bennett, M, ‘Military Geography: The Influence of Terrain in the Outcome of the Gallipoli Campaign 1915’, in Geographical Journal, 165, March 1999, pp. 12–36.

  6. For example, Mitchell, C W, Terrain Evaluation, 2nd edn, Harlow: Longman, 1991; Mitchell, C W and Gavish, D, ‘Land on which battles are lost or won’, in Geographical Magazine, 52, 1980, pp. 838–40; Parry, J T, ‘Terrain evaluation: military purposes’, in Finkl, C W (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Applied Geology (Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences, Vol. 13), New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1984.

  7. Parry, op. cit.; Mitchell, op. cit.

  8. Ibid, and Patrick, D M and Hatheway, A W, ‘Engineering geology and military operations: an overview with examples of current missions’, in Bulletin of the Association of English Geologists, 26, 1989, pp. 265–76.

  9. Mitchell, op. cit.

  10. Doyle and Bennett, op. cit. have discussed this in some detail. A summary and explanation are given here.

  11. United Nations (1982).

  12. Callwell, Maj.-Gen. C E, The Dardanelles, London: Constable, 1919 (2nd edn 1924). p. 31.

  13. von Sanders, Gen. Liman, The Dardanelles Campaign (trans. and with comments by Col. E H Schulz), US Army Corps of Engineers, 1931, p. 8.

  14. Sengor and Yilmaz, op. cit.

  15. Crampin, S and Evans, R, ‘Neotectonics of the Marmara Sea region of Turkey’, in Journal of the Geological Society of London, 143, 1986, pp. 343–8.

  16. Ibid, and Perincek, op. cit.

  17. Sengor and Yilmaz, op. cit.; Ternek, Z; Erentöz, C; Pamir, H N and Akyürek, B, 1:500,000 lçekli Türkiye Jeoloji Haritasi. Explanatory Text of the Geological Map of Turkey, Istanbul, Ankara: Maden Tetkik ve Arama Genel Müdürlügü Vayinlarindan, 1987.

  18. von Sanders, op. cit., p. 8.

  19. Named Achi Baba on all British maps since at least 1908 (GSGS 2285).

  20. Karatekin, N, ‘Hydrological Research in the Middle East’, in Reviews of Research on Arid Zone Hydrology, UNESCO, 1953, pp. 78 –95; Pamir, H M, ‘Hydrogeological research in the basin of the Ergene, in Proceedings of the Ankara Symposium on Arid Zone Hydrology, UNESCO, 1953 pp. 224–31; Groundwater in the Eastern Mediterranean and western Asia, Natural Resources/Water Series No. 9, New York: UN, 1982.

  21. Well-logs in the possession of the British Geological Survey at Wallingford, drilled by the British as occupying power in the 1920s, also confirm this.

  22. Beeby-Thompson, A, Emergency water supplies for military, agricultural and colonial purposes, London: Crosby Lockwood & Son, 1924; UN (1982), op. cit.

  23. For a full account, see Doyle and Bennett, op. cit.

  24. Beeby-Thompson, op. cit.

  25. And noted as such on British military maps (GSGS 2285, 1908).

  26. Hargrave, J, op. cit. Hargrave was a boy scout, and may well have been au fait with elementary geological principles; he certainly makes references to ‘sandstones and schists’, both hard rock types that define the northern ridges.

  27. GSGS 2285 (1908), for all its shortcomings, refers to the state of vegetation (‘low scrub’ or ‘cultivated slopes’); it clearly denotes cliffs, and the ‘steep sandy bluffs’ of Anzac, as well as the valleys and steep slopes of the Suvla area. The panoramas, drawn some time in the immediate run-up to the landings, also clearly define these features.

  28. Ekins, Ashley, ‘A ridge too far: military objectives and the dominance of terrain in the Gallipoli Campaign’, in Celik, Kenan and Koc, Ceyhan (eds), The Gallipoli Campaign International Perspectives 85 years on, Turkey: Cannakale Onsekiz Mart University, 2001, p. 11.

  29. The 1:40,000 maps issued, based on the 1908 maps, indicate the steepness of the limestone cliffs that surround the cape, and highlight the narrowness of the landing beaches in this area.

  30. War Diary, 2nd Lowland Field Company RE, in The National Archives TNA (PRO) WO 95/4309 & 4319; Anon., [‘GLC’], 1997. ‘Engineers at Gallipoli, 1915’, Royal Engineers Journal, 111, pp. 31–9.

  31. Beeby-Thompson, op. cit.

  32. Suvla Bay is dismissed by most authors due to the problem of high ground, but suggestions that it provided a viable alternative are given by the near contemporary accounts of H W Nevinson in The Dardanelles Campaign (1918) and Maj.-Gen. C E Callwell in The Dardanelles (1924).

  33. Hogarth, D G, ‘Geography of the war theatre in the Near East’, in Geographical Journal, 65, pp. 457–471 (p. 461).

  CHAPTER 2

  Genesis of the Gallipoli Campaign

  The Dardanelles, that strategic waterway connecting the Aegean Sea and Mediterranean with the Sea of Marmara and ultimately, connecting through the Bosphorus, the Black Sea, has been a point of interest to military minds for centuries. Constantinople, the modern city of Istanbul, sits astride the Bosphorus and guards the entrance to the Black Sea thereby controlling entry to the winter ports of Russia. Because of this and a myriad of other reasons, Constantinople, the seat of the Sublime Porte, the name commonly used for the Ottoman Court and the Turkish Government, has long been coveted, particularly by Greece and Russia.

  At the other end of the Marmara lies the Dardanelles, a narrow passageway between European and Asian Turkey, a tightly constrained waterway created by geological faulting over millennia. In European Turkey, the shores of the Dardanelles are guarded by the Gallipoli Peninsula, a narrow finger of land named after its principal settlement. Opposing this is the Asiatic Shore, the Aegean expression of the great Anatolian Peninsula, the greater part of modern Turkey, and the heart of the ailing Ottoman Empire in 1915. Fortified for centuries, the idea of squeezing a fleet of ships between the beetling brows of the shores of the Dardanelles has continually exercised the mind of the military of many nations, particularly so in the complex diplomacies of two centuries before the Gallipoli landings of 1915.

  It is not possible to examine the relationship between operational planning on the one hand, and geographical intelligence on the other, without taking account of the political decision-making process, and of the extent to which the military and naval authorities were admitted to this decision-making in wartime. It is therefore necessary to look at the pro
longed period during which Britain’s strategic gaze, not to mention that of other European nations, was drawn to ‘The Sick Man of Europe’, and during which the consequent ‘Eastern Question’ was one of the dominant issues of political and public debate. Conflict with Russia over her approach towards India, or with Turkey over Egypt and the Suez Canal, inexorably raised the question of operations in the Dardanelles on several occasions, and on each of these occasions led to surveys, reconnaissances and intelligence-gathering initiatives which added to the data bank of available information.

  What stands out from an examination of these issues during the century before the Gallipoli expedition of 1915 is the very large number of studies, naval, military and amphibious, which were made of the ‘Dardanelles problem’, and particularly those of 1854–5, 1876–80, 1904, 1906, 1908 and 1911–14. Despite this, when the time actually came to launch the 1915 operation, confusion still reigned and, despite the efforts of successive military attachés and vice-consuls, insufficient attention was focused by the General Staff on the difficult terrain of the Gallipoli Peninsula itself. In the immediate pre-war period, according to one of its intelligence officers, the Directorate of Military Operations was instructed to put most of its intelligence-gathering efforts as far as the Ottoman Empire was concerned into the frontier zones of Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt. Gallipoli did not feature to any great extent in its concerns.1

  International tensions

  As international tension grew in the approach to the First World War, Turkey slipped remorselessly into the German camp. For much of the 19th century Britain had viewed Russia as the main enemy in Asia, largely because of the perceived threat to India, and therefore supported Turkey against Russia, notably in the Crimean War of 1854–6, but in 1876–8, British public opinion, led by Gladstone, shifted away from Turkey following Turkish atrocities against the Bulgarians.

  An extreme British pamphlet of 1876 was entitled The Dardanelles for England: the true solution of the Eastern Question.2 Captain John Ardagh RE studied the Dardanelles defences and wrote a Report on the Defences of the Dardanelles in 1877,3 at a time of tension (followed by war) between Turkey and Russia. During the same prolonged crisis, in 1878, Admiral Hornby wrote a report on the problem of forcing the Dardanelles,4 while in 1880 Ardagh advocated the seizure of the Dardanelles to forestall Russia. Matters became more complex in 1882, when British relations with the Sultan further deteriorated following trouble in Egypt; the subsequent effective British occupation of Egypt led to worsening relations with the Sublime Porte, which later erupted into a serious incident – almost leading to war – in the Akaba incident of 1906.

  In 1896 Ardagh (now Colonel), very familiar with the topography and defences of the Gallipoli Peninsula and the Dardanelles, noted that an earlier study of the question of forcing the Dardanelles in the context of a possible war with France and Russia in 1888–9 had led to the conclusion that solely naval operations would be ‘both dangerous and ineffective’, and that if surprise were lost a whole army corps would be required in a combined operation.5 In the 1890s Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, almost sent the fleet through the Dardanelles, and British opinion was again alienated by Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1896.

  If Britain was increasingly alienated from Turkey, the Sultan, desperate for an ally in his dealings with Russia, sought the assistance of Bismarck’s ‘dynamic new Germany, with its formidable military machine and no apparent designs on Abdul Hamid’s domains’.6 The Germans seized the opportunity to court the Sultan. Kaiser Wilhelm II was keen to develop friendly relations with the Ottoman Empire as part of a strategic policy focused on the east, and linked this firmly with the German-inspired and engineered Berlin–Baghdad railway. German diplomatic and commercial initiatives increased, and in 1898 Wilhelm II paid a state visit to the Ottoman cities of Constantinople, Jerusalem and Damascus, an event viewed with alarm in London, Paris and St Petersburg. Between 1883 and 1895, and again between 1908 and 1911, a German military mission under General Kolmar von der Goltz was sent to Constantinople, and Germany assisted in developing the Dardanelles defences. Von der Goltz’s reorganisation of the Turkish Army did not prevent German prestige taking a bad knock in Turkey when the German-trained Army did badly in the Balkan Wars.7 The German Ambassador from 1897 to 1912, Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, and his successor Wangenheim, did much to consolidate German influence, particularly with Enver, the leader of the Young Turks’ ‘Committee of Union and Progress’, and a new German Military Mission under General Liman von Sanders, though not popular with the German diplomats as it unsettled the Russians, arrived in December 1913.8

  French influence in the Ottoman Empire was considerable during the 19th century, but although it was on the decline by the turn of the century, the Germans did not have it all their own way. Turkish officers were trained at the Ecole de Guerre and the Service Géographique de l’Armée in Paris, returning to Constantinople in 1892, and the French helped the Turkish General Staff to set up their Military Mapping Department in 1895. In 1893 the French and Russians signed an entente, leading to a further distancing of France from Turkey. The Anglo–Russian Convention of 1907, effectively creating the triple entente, pushed Turkey further into the German camp. Despite waning British prestige in Turkey, a British naval mission was sent to Constantinople under Admiral Limpus, and this was still there at the outbreak of war with Germany in 1914.

  In the early 20th century, in the atmosphere of growing tension between Britain and Germany which arose as a consequence of the German naval challenge to British maritime and imperial supremacy, the defensive alliance between France and Russia, seen by Germany as ‘encirclement’ and committing Germany to a war on two fronts, naturally led to Russia being perceived in Britain as more of an ally against Germany than an enemy. While Germany focused all her diplomatic energy on fostering the Turkish connection, a crucial component of German ambitions in the Middle East, and without which the Berlin–Baghdad Railway could not have been envisaged, the British lost influence with Constantinople.

  The ‘Dardanelles Problem’

  Against a backdrop of diplomacy and political manoeuvring, the Dardanelles provided a focus of attention. John (‘Jacky’) Fisher (who had commanded a battleship under Admiral Hornby in 1878, following the Russo–Turkish War, when the British Fleet sailed through the Dardanelles to the Sea of Marmara) had a further opportunity to make an on-the-spot study of the problem of forcing the Dardanelles while commanding the Mediterranean Fleet from 1901 to 1904. One of the periodic early 20th century crises led Fisher, now the new First Sea Lord, to decide that even with a military landing force to neutralise the coast defences, such an operation would be ‘mighty hazardous’. While war was avoided, the strategic gaze of the British government, War Office and Admiralty was trained, not for the first time, on the Dardanelles. With Russia as a potential ally, the opening and maintenance of a direct sea route was bound to exercise British and French minds in the event of war with Germany.

  Like that of the British, the German view of forcing the Dardanelles changed over time. In 1836 General von Moltke prophesied that: ‘When the artillery-material in the Dardanelles has been properly organised, I believe that no fleet of any country would dare to sail through the Straits.’9 This view was echoed by Churchill in a Cabinet Memorandum of 1911,10 but he soon changed his tune. Following the Crimean and Russo–Turkish Wars, and bearing in mind the technological developments in ironclads, guns and munitions, many commentators had changed their view. In 1894 Captain Stenzel put forward the opposite view in his booklet Der kürzeste Weg nach Konstantinopel. Ein Beispiel für das Zusammenwirken von Flotte und Heer (The Shortest Route to Constantinople. A Case Study for Combined Fleet and Army Operations).11

  Tension flared up again in the Akaba Crisis over the Egyptian–Turkish boundary, which followed the ‘Tabah Incident’ of early 1906, and almost led to hostilities between Britain and Turkey. The Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) was told by the General Staff
that it opposed any naval or military action there,12 but yet again attention was focused on possible operations at the Dardanelles as a way of bringing pressure to bear on Turkey.

  Captain Grant Duff wrote a memorandum for the CID, dated 11 July, entitled Military Policy in a War with Turkey,14 which emphasised that ‘our overwhelming naval preponderance cannot be brought to bear on any vital point [of the Ottoman Empire] unless the fleet is prepared to take the risk of attempting to force the Dardanelles.’ After examining purely naval operations, he concluded that:

  The only remaining alternative is a joint naval and military attack on the Dardanelles defences, with the view of clearing the way for the fleet to Constantinople. Such an expedition would be suitable to our fighting forces, it would be a short operation and if successful would be immediately decisive.

  He felt justified in saying this, because the field defences of the Gallipoli Peninsula against landings were then almost non-existent.

  At this time (July 1906), Captain Ottley, the Director of Naval Intelligence, circulated a further paper to the CID. At its meeting of 26 July it concluded15 that:

  . . circumstances might arise in which the forcing of the Dardanelles, with or without an expeditionary force, would become the most certain and expeditious way of bringing a war with Turkey to a conclusion. In such a case the operation might have to be undertaken even if it entailed considerable losses. The whole question should, therefore, be thoroughly investigated by the Admiralty and the War Office and a Report should be prepared for the consideration of the Committee. The same procedure should be followed as regards the question on the seizure of Haifa and Acre, and operations directed to cut the Turkish lines of communications through Syria.

  At a critical meeting of the CID in July 1906, General ‘Jimmy’ Grierson, the DMO, gave his view that if forcing the Dardanelles should prove necessary, the best method, even though potentially costly in terms of casualties, was to land troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula to attack the forts on the European side of the Dardanelles in the rear. This contradicted Sir Charles Hardinge of the Foreign Office who, having studied the forts from the Straits and from the Asiatic coast, was of the opinion that the fort commanding Besika Bay on the Asiatic Shore should be reduced by naval fire, following which a force should be landed to capture from the rear the forts on the Asiatic side of the Dardanelles. The meeting concluded that the best way to defeat the Turks might be either a purely naval attack on the Dardanelles, or one accompanied by an expeditionary force, even if considerable losses were incurred thereby.16