Grasping Gallipoli

by Peter Chasseaud

  MO3

  Foreign Intelligence – Asiatic Section

  MO4

  Geographical Section (GSGS); Topographical Section (TSGS) until 1907

  MO5

  Special Section (Section A included Wireless Telegraphy and Ciphers; Section B was the General Staff Library); in 1909 the Special Intelligence Bureau was added, for Counterintelligence; in 1912 the Special Intelligence Section was created to coordinate British covert intelligence operations abroad

  MO6

  Medical & Sanitary information re Foreign Armies

  In the decade from 1904 to 1914, hardly a year went by without British geographers and officers setting foot on both shores of the Dardanelles for reconnaissance purposes. Much of this reconnaissance was directly instigated by the War Office, but some was more nebulously associated. During Charles Close’s time as Chief of the Topographical/Geographical Section (1905–11), serious preparations began to be made for war against Germany and it became obvious that plans would have to be made and maps printed to meet all possible contingencies. This was the function of a General Staff. Close, and later Hedley, was responsible for the preparation of maps of all possible theatres of war including the Dardanelles, not just of France and Belgium, under the instructions of the DMO. This meant that the meagre resources of the Geographical Section had to be spread rather thinly. From 1906 onwards, the War Office and Ordnance Survey printed many maps and diagrams of the possible area of operations, covering the topography, communications, telegraphs, army corps districts and headquarters of Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. Preparations were thorough for this potential theatre of war, except for the lack of large-scale sheets suitable for directing artillery fire. Maps of other possible theatres of war were also prepared, including the two one-inch Gallipoli Peninsula sheets of 1908 with their secret defence overprints.47 No further maps of the Peninsula were prepared or printed before the war, apart from small-scale (1:250,000) sheets.

  The Intelligence Branch at the War Office had developed a formidable reputation in the 19th century, enhanced by the renown of its counterpart in Simla. In the early 20th century the Branch had been downgraded and subsumed into the Directorate of Military Operations; it relied primarily on attachés’ reports, which were often of great value. As international tension rose in the early years of the new century, it became apparent to many that plans would have to be made and maps printed to meet all possible contingencies. As Kaiser Wilhelm II flexed his imperial muscles and expanded his navy, serious preparations began to be made for war against Germany. Treaty obligations towards Belgium would have to be honoured in the event of a German invasion of France through Belgium, and this might involve the landing of an expeditionary force. There was, however, no specific undertaking to land such a force. Pre-war Staff ‘conversations’ with the French, originating with the Entente Cordiale of 1904, were based on this eventuality.

  In 1906 Major-General Grierson, Director of Military Operations from 1904 to 1906, began serious conversations with the French, which resulted from 1911 in a detailed scheme to land an expeditionary force in France and concentrate it in the Maubeuge–Le Cateau–Hirson area. His successors, Spencer Ewart (DMO 1906–10) and Henry Wilson (DMO from August 1910 to the outbreak of war), pursued studies of the British scheme of operations.48 Major General Sir Henry Wilson was the co-architect of the ‘Wilson–Foch’ scheme for Anglo-British cooperation in the west, and General French’s Chief of Staff designate for the BEF’s coming campaign. For the western theatre there was certainly no shortage of topographical information, and in any case Wilson spent many pre-war summers cycling around the Franco-Belgian frontier and the BEF’s intended Concentration Area.

  For other, less predictable, theatres it was a very different story, though the British attachés in Constantinople supplied a stream of first class information on the Dardanelles defences and the terrain of the Gallipoli Peninsula. Wilson seems to have been understandably obsessed with the French theatre, to the practical exclusion of others, including the Dardanelles, and he took a dim view of Turkish capabilities. During a visit to Constantinople in October 1913, he formed the opinion that the Turkish Army was neither serious nor modern, was unadapted to western thoughts and methods, and was badly commanded, badly officered and badly equipped.49 While this was perhaps understandable in view of the mixed performance of the Turkish Army in the Balkan Wars, the experience of its fighting powers in 1915–18 was to prove how wrong he was.

  Staff officers from MO2 and MO3 (Foreign Intelligence Sections) were encouraged to travel abroad to gather intelligence; they had rather more freedom of action than the accredited military attachés.50 Colonel Gleichen made a ‘little spy journey’ to Holland with the Royal Marine George Aston of NID in 1907, going on to Denmark and Sweden. In 1908 he visited Spain, Morocco and France, and in 1909 travelled via Vienna, Belgrade, the Danube through Rumania and Bulgaria, and the Black Sea, to Constantinople where he spent ten days cultivating Turkish notables and ‘trying to acquire as much information as I could’. It was obvious to Gleichen that in Turkey ‘our British star was sinking and the German one beginning to shine brightly’.51

  From 1902 to 1911 the Special Duties Section at the War Office was so small that it could only recruit and direct secret agents overseas on a very limited basis. During this period it therefore financed, from its very limited budget, the travels of MO2 and MO3 officers. The expenses of ‘Secret Service’ conducted by the War Office (and perhaps also by the Admiralty) were carried on the Foreign Office budget.52 The War Office Special Intelligence Section (part of MO5) was created in 1912 to coordinate covert intelligence operations overseas,53 and presumably had a larger budget. It does not appear to have directed many resources against the Dardanelles, which may well have been considered more of an Admiralty (NID) matter but, as we have seen, Wilson was not particularly bothered with that area.

  Lieutenant H Charles Woods, an officer of the Coldstream Guards from 1900 to 1907, undertook unpaid clandestine intelligence work in 1905 and 1906 on behalf of Colonel Surtees, the military attaché in Constantinople. This involved not only road and military resource reconnaissances in the Balkans, reports on which were sent to the War Office complete with sketch maps and photographs, but also, in late 1906, a clandestine reconnaissance of the south-western tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula. His instructions from Surtees were:54

  1. To ascertain the exact locality from which the forts defending the narrows, particularly the Yildiz/Tepeh fort south-west of Kilid Bahr, could be best attacked by surprise and commanded from the rear;

  2. To find out the most suitable landing places on the north-west coast of the Peninsula, and

  3. To reconnoitre the ground between these beaches and the hills overlooking the forts.

  His first step was to obtain a teskereh, or ordinary permission to travel, to pay a visit by sea to William Grech, the British vice-consul at the port and town of Gallipoli who, without attempting to obtain further permission, arranged a secret trip in a small sailing boat across the Narrows to Chanak, on the Asiatic Shore, where they landed unnoticed after hiding in a tug, and met the British vice-consul with whom Woods stayed. The venture was helped by the facts that Grech was associated with the tug company of that name which had facilities at Chanak, and that his house at Chanak fronted the water. Such devious methods were necessary as Woods could not obtain a visa for Chanak without attracting suspicion, particularly in the aftermath of the Akaba incident when tension between Britain and Turkey was still high and the British Cabinet and military and naval authorities were seriously considering the question of forcing the Dardanelles. The Turks were understandably wary of the British at this time, and Grech and the Chanak vice-consul impressed upon Woods that all strangers landing on the south-western part of the Peninsula were under very close surveillance. The Peninsula was not normally accessible to foreigners because of the strategic importance of its coastal forts and batteries, and the three decided to use the
cover of a hastily improvised shooting party to enable Woods to get a view of the terrain.

  Early the following morning Woods re-crossed the Dardanelles, sailing, again secretly, for the Greek-populated village of Maidos in a boat normally used for carrying water and, on landing, headed for a mile north-west up onto the high ground in rear of the forts – the Kilid Bahr Plateau – before turning south over rough country towards the fort. Describing the going, he provided crucial terrain intelligence: ‘The whole of this area is made up of irregular, almost rocky hills and steep sided valleys covered with prickly bushes and scrub, which made it necessary at times to go on hands and knees.’ Reaching the Kilid Bahr Plateau after a couple of hours, he found a good vantage point from where he could look down at the rear of Yildiz Fort, containing some twelve large guns, about a mile away to the south-east and some forty feet lower. The fort was open at the rear, and completely undefended. He immediately decided, as Grover had done thirty years before, and ‘knowing that the all-important forts defending the Narrows are located in the immediate neighbourhood of Kilid Bahr’, that an attacking force should be landed at a point to the west, across the narrowest part of this end of the Peninsula, only five miles from the forts. This pointed to beaches in the vicinity of Gaba Tepe, preferably to the north-east (Brighton Beach, south-west of Anzac Cove). Landings here would have the advantage of using the grain of the country rather than fighting against it; the valleys ran roughly west–east, favouring rapid movement along them, whereas a force landing at Cape Helles, twelve miles away from the forts, would have to cross the valleys and their intervening ridges to reach the Kilid Bahr Plateau.55 He reckoned that, despite the rough country, a landing force with artillery could reach the forts in a few hours. This scheme was also that recommended by General Callwell, the DMO, in 1914–15.56

  Woods discovered that the water supply to the forts was carried from the high ground by aqueducts and pipes, and that Kilid Bahr was connected to Sedd-el-Bahr by telegraph lines. He also headed across the Peninsula towards the north-west coast, where he reconnoitred landing places from Suvla southwards, and discovered a new look-out station at Gaba Tepe which compromised his favoured landing area. A surprise attack, he considered, could have dealt with this. He immediately wrote a report on the Peninsula which he sent via the Constantinople Embassy to the War Office. A key point of this report, which was supported by a sketch map, was that landings could only succeed if they were surprise attacks and the Turks had no time to entrench the hills defending the forts. The report was received in January 1907 by Major G D Symonds of the Intelligence Department at the War Office (MO2b), and in February Woods was asked to go the Admiralty to brief Captain Charles Ottley, Director of Naval Intelligence, and other naval officers.

  Following the outbreak of war in 1914, Woods reminded Naval intelligence about the report but, possibly because the War Office could not find it, NID could not get a view of it. Yet Ottley must have seen it in 1907. Luckily, Woods was able to supply a rough copy.57 In essence, such was the logic of the terrain that he was repeating what Grover and the other British soldier-surveyors had decided three decades earlier. In 1908 Woods published his first book, based on his experiences.58 He visited the Dardanelles again in 1909, while gathering information for his second book, and this time reconnoitred the military road from Uzun Kupru to Gallipoli, which was currently being reconstructed and improved, and the Bulair Lines. The book was published in 1911,59 in which year a French edition also appeared.60

  Only a year later, September 1910 saw yet another close reconnaissance of the Peninsula, focusing like those of Grover and Woods on the Gaba Tepe–Kilid Bahr area, this time by Major L L R Samson, the ‘military consul’ in Adrianople and an officer of considerable standing within the intelligence community. His report, completed on 28 September and forwarded to the War Office, was entitled Report on Landing Places at Kaba Tepe (Gallipoli Peninsula) with two roads leading therefrom to Maidos and the Kilid Bahr Plateau. Road Traversed 8th to 10th Sep. 191061 (see Appendix IV). Samson, later to head the British military intelligence station in Athens during the war, was an acute observer, and provided a remarkably detailed report on the beaches and their exits, the inland terrain, and the nature of the going along roads and tracks, particularly with an eye to landing and moving artillery.

  In April and May 1911 the historical geographer Dr Walter Leaf, who was researching for a book on the Troad, took a set of panoramic photographs from the land and sea of the shores of the Dardanelles, including Sedd-el-Bahr, Kilid Bahr, the Narrows, Morto Bay, Sestos, Chanak, Kum Kale, the island of Tenedos and many other places on the Asia Minor side, during a five-week reconnaissance with F W Hasluck, the acting Director of the British School at Athens, escorted by an armed Turkish gendarme. Apart from taking some 400 excellent terrain photos, showing in detail the estuaries, harbours (such as they were), beaches, cliffs, hills, tracks, vegetation, scrub and tree cover of the localities, and checking and correcting the Troad areas of Admiralty charts and Philippson’s and Kiepert’s maps,62 he also took 142 aneroid observations to check heights, and ascertained the state of recent Turkish survey activity in the area.

  An article by Leaf – ‘Notes on the Troad’ – which contained some of the photographs and a wealth of terrain information, including the state of repair of the roads and tracks, was published in The Geographical Journal in 1912,63 accompanied by a hill-shaded 1:600,000 map. Leaf’s book, entitled Troy, A study in Homeric Geography, was published by Macmillan in 1912.64 Strangely, a further article was published in Country Life on 17 April 1915, only eight days before the Allied landings on the Peninsula and at Kum Kale. After correspondence with Hinks and Reeves, officers of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), in July 1915, copies of some of the photographs were ordered for the Society, being accessioned on 27 August 1915.65 It did not apparently occur to anyone at the War Office or Admiralty to contact Leaf to obtain photographs or information following the outbreak of war.

  The period of the Balkan Wars focused international attention on the Dardanelles and the Gallipoli Peninsula, and war conditions, together with the presence of many military attachés, journalists and adventurers, made intelligence-gathering relatively easy. In March 1912 Colonel English returned to the Gallipoli Peninsula with Lt F G Hill, and executed a prismatic compass survey which was plotted on a trace of the War Office 1:250,000 sheet (series TSGS 2097) covering the Peninsula. This drawing was given to the Royal Geographical Society Map Room on 1 July 1912.66 In early 1912 Justus Perthes of Gotha published a 1:100,000 map of the Dardanelles defences, Die Befestigung des Westlichen Dardanellen-Eingangs, by D A Janke. This prime example of ‘open source’ intelligence was acquired by the RGS on 11 March 1912.67

  The journalist Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett later told the Dardanelles Commission that during the Balkan Wars, when he was in Constantinople, the Turks had maps of the Peninsula, and that he obtained a set of these – ‘which were not the best’ – which Sir Ian Hamilton, also in Turkey at the time, asked him to send to England. However, it is clear that Ashmead-Bartlett knew little if anything about Turkish large-scale mapping; he dwelt on the fact that the ‘Turks chiefly relied on the great Austrian Staff map, which was a very fine map which they were in course of preparing in the Balkans. It was not completed at the time of the Balkan Wars. Whether it was completed when this war broke out I am not sure.’68 This Austrian Staff map was not at all the same thing as the Turks’ own large-scale military surveys of the Dardanelles area. Ashmead-Bartlett was not a reliable witness when it came to maps.

  Lt-Col. Frederick Cunliffe Owen RA, a General Staff Officer (GSO2) of MO2 (2b) until the beginning of October 1912 (and later the military attaché at Constantinople), gave a crucial insight into War Office strategic thinking and planning intentions, or lack of them, when he stated that his sub-section’s instructions regarding Turkey, given by the DMO (Henry Wilson) and the section’s GSO1, were ‘to concentrate upon Syrian, Mesopotamian and Egyptian frontier zones….
No instructions envisaged any particular study of military operations in the neighbourhood of the Straits.’ He recalled that in the period of the Balkan Wars, the British ‘military vice-consul’ at Adrianople (Captain Townshend was followed there by Major L L R Samson) ‘carried out a reconnaissance about 1912 of the country, as far as I can remember south and west of Bulair and Maidos, and made sketch maps’.69 He may have had Samson’s 1910 reconnaissance in mind, or that of English and Hill in 1912. Whichever it was, the report and maps would have been sent back to the War Office.

  Cunliffe Owen went to Constantinople as military attaché in December 1913, and in the spring of 1914, using his cover of amateur yachtsman, ‘made his own tour down to Chanak, Gallipoli and the entrance to the Straits’.70 In March 1914 he warned London that there were at least forty-seven German officers in the German Military Mission; many were holding important positions, being given ‘executive functions’ in Constantinople and other Ottoman centres.71 As the situation in the Balkans worsened, he redoubled his efforts:

  From … July onwards, I made frequent reports as to any activities in the region of the Dardanelles and as the situation became more intense, I reported at considerable length about troops, movements and installations in regard to armaments, location or setting up of mine fields, collection of shipping and appreciations.72

  Much, if not all, of this intelligence was passed on by the War Office to the Naval Intelligence Division.

  Thus, to our certain knowledge, apart from providing information about the Turkish Army and defences, and political and strategic intelligence, British army officers had conducted surveys and reconnaissances on the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1854–5, 1876–7, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1909, 1910, 1912 and 1914, and possibly on other occasions, while the ‘Homeric Geographer’ Walter Leaf conducted his own in 1911. No one at the War Office or elsewhere could subsequently legitimately complain of lack of opportunity or information. Many British explorers had travelled through near and distant parts of the Ottoman Empire, and a remarkable body of knowledge was shared among the members of such bodies as the Royal Geographical Society and the Palestine Exploration Fund. It is unsurprising that Colonel Hedley, the Chief of the Geographical Section of the General Staff (MO4), was a member of both. No doubt the Greeks, Russians, French and others were also conducting their own reconnaissances.