Grasping Gallipoli

by Peter Chasseaud

  The Director of Military Operations’ obsession with the security of Egypt and the Canal led to an extraordinary survey being made in Ottoman territory on the eve of the war. Major Stewart Francis Newcombe RE executed, with Lieutenant J P S Greig RE, a topographical survey of southern Palestine (a continuation of a post-Akabar-Crisis survey of Sinai) in the early months of 1914, using T E Lawrence and Leonard Woolley as archaeological cover. They returned to England via Carchemish in Syria, where they called on Lawrence and Woolley, and then via the Taurus Mountains where the Germans were directing the boring of the tunnels of the Berlin–Baghdad railway. This ‘tourism’ was as thinly veiled as the earlier survey, and both had direct application in the event of war. Newcombe and Greig encouraged Lawrence and Woolley to follow them on this route, and to take photographs of the railway works. Naturally all four passed through Constantinople, where they may have met Cunliffe Owen, whence the Orient Express whisked them on to Paris and London.

  The December 1914 issue of the Geographical Journal carried a four-page report by Newcombe and Greig, illustrated with a map and photographs (possibly taken by Lawrence) on ‘The Baghdad Railway’.73 Specifically, this dealt with the Taurus Mountains tunnels section between Dorak and Karapunar reconnoitred on horseback and on foot in the second half of May 1914. This must have been submitted for publication before war broke out between Britain and Turkey. Woolley later remarked that this was ‘the only piece of spying that I ever did before the War’.74 The southern Palestine survey had annoyed the Turks, as no doubt had the Taurus reconnaissances.

  The Dardanelles had, as Cunliffe Owen pointed out, a mysteriously low priority. The idealistic Liberal government, while not averse to taking measures to defend imperial frontiers, appeared to be very much opposed to the Army and Navy making plans to attack Constantinople via the Dardanelles. General Staff feasibility studies were one thing, but serious, coordinated intelligence-gathering and planning was quite another.

  British intelligence to 1914

  The dispersion of many of the existing General Staff from the War Office in August 1914, their replacement by ‘dug-out’ officers, and the subsequent hiatus created by Kitchener’s arbitrary rule, does not excuse any pre-war intelligence failures. There was hardly a pre-war failure of topographical intelligence collection and processing inasmuch as the good War Office and Admiralty reports on the Turkish defences and the topography of the Gallipoli Peninsula and Dardanelles, well-illustrated with maps, plans, panorama sketches and photographs, had been prepared and printed, as a direct result of the Akaba crisis, in 1908 and 1909. The War Office report, and the one-inch map (in two sheets), were prepared under Spencer Ewart (Director of Military Operations August 1906–August 1910). The one-inch map, which was not a bad map in itself, was based on the old French 1:50,000 map, and had been prepared as a possible operations map.

  The crucial point here is that it was not possible to prepare any more accurate map as no other compilation material was in the possession of the War Office – the Turks themselves only had a 1:50,000 scale map, and had only just begun to make their large-scale (1:20,000 and 1:25,000) regular surveys of the Dardanelles area immediately before the war, in 1912–13 (though more localised large-scale surveys had been made previously – see Chapter 6). Given that the possibility of operations in the Dardanelles had been discussed at high level since 1906 (and for a century before), this was a serious, but not insurmountable, drawback. Such maps could possibly have been compiled from various sources – clandestinely acquired Turkish maps (the Turkish 1:25,000 sheets were still in process of survey and reproduction, but earlier 1:20,000 surveys had been done), reports and surveys by agents, reports by military attachés, and close study of air photographs. A considerable pre-war intelligence attack on the Turkish target would have been necessary to acquire the information needed, and this at a time when the Allied governments were trying not to offend the Turks. It is significant that the foreign section (later MI6/SIS) of the new Secret Service Bureau (SSB, set up around October 1909 at a time of German invasion scares) in London, under Commander Mansfield Cumming was, from 1910 to 1914, responsible to its main customer, the Admiralty, although it also supplied intelligence to MO5 at the War Office.75 Moreover, shortage of funds meant that ‘its restricted energies were almost entirely directed against Germany’,76 in particular aimed at the acquisition of intelligence relating to (non-existent) German planning for a surprise attack on England. Thus there appears to have been no direction of ‘energies’ by the SSB (foreign section) against Turkey. The prime concern in England was with the German naval and invasion threats. The NID was, of course, collecting intelligence on the Dardanelles defences, and the military attachés on these and other aspects, such as topography and land defences, of the area.

  The most likely alternative sources of information about the Gallipoli Peninsula itself were the Greek naval and military staffs in Athens, and the indigenous Greek population of the Dardanelles area, some of whom were presumably already supplying information to Greek intelligence. In the absence of acquired Turkish large-scale mapping a possible, though unrealistic, solution would have been to conduct a clandestine topographical survey, a difficult proposition in such a strategically sensitive area, but not totally impossible. It would have required a small corps of trained clandestine topographers, along the lines of the pundits used by the Survey of India to execute trans-frontier surveys – the sort of operation that was everyday work for Kipling’s Colonel Creighton in Kim. This corps could have operated on either shore of the Dardanelles to create an accurate large-scale map, sustained by the local Greek population, but it is hardly likely that such survey operations could have been conducted in the relatively settled agricultural conditions of the Gallipoli Peninsula under continuous Turkish scrutiny.

  The German intelligence dimension

  From their intimate involvement with the Turkish Army and government, notably over the Dardanelles defences, the Germans had drawn a huge amount of defence and topographical information. The Turco-Italian and Balkan Wars in the immediate pre-1914 period, which saw the Dardanelles and the Gallipoli Peninsula directly threatened – and in the Second Balkan War actually attacked at Bulair by the advancing Bulgarians – also enabled the Germans (and military attachés of other states) to observe closely the defensive dispositions of the Turks. A remarkable book by a German Officer, Leutnant Georg Hans Rohde, entitled Die Operationen an den Dardanellen im Balkankriege, 1912/13,77 was published in 1914 and immediately bought by the British Museum Library (stamp: 3 Ju 1914) and the War Office Library. The book, which had two chapters on the Battle at Bulair, and one each on further events up to the armistice, the Gallipoli Peninsula and the Bulair Lines, supply and medical services on the Peninsula, and lessons and conclusions, included several maps, photographs and tables of Turkish Army organisation. Some of the photographs gave a good indication of the terrain variations.

  Rohde had been an Ordnance Officer on the Staff of the Gallipoli Commander, and knew all about the coastal defences and the dispositions made by the Turks to meet amphibious attacks or attacks on the Peninsula via the Bulair Lines. A 1:50,000 sketch map of the Bulair Lines area in the book showed trenches, barbed wire, forts, and Turkish and Bulgarian positions in February–May 1913, while a 1:200,000 map of the whole Peninsula showed the deployment of the Turkish infantry divisions, regiments and battalions, artillery, command posts, cavalry, coastal batteries and forts. It also showed an entrenched, horseshoe-shaped ‘Second Position’ running across practically the whole Peninsula, creating an entrenched camp around the town and port of Gallipoli; this meant that even if the Helles area or the Bulair Lines were captured, the Peninsula could still be reinforced from the Asiatic side via this port. He gave details of the development of the coast defences, the bombardment by the Italian fleet on 13 April 1912, the calibre, range and numbers of coast guns, towns, their populations and forts, minefields, the Bulair Lines, the further development of the land and sea defences
during the war with Italy and the Balkan Wars, including works in rear of Kilid Bahr, and applied the concepts of the famous Belgian fortress engineer General Henri Brialmont and his idea of the double bridgehead. Trenches and strong wire entanglements had been erected, machine guns emplaced, and telephone exchanges installed. During the Second Balkan War, Mal Tepe (Hill 95) near Bulair was renamed by the Turks ‘Mitrailleuse [Machine Gun] Tepe’. Aeroplanes were also used for reconnaissance and artillery spotting.

  Rohde revealed that the Greeks and Bulgarians had, during the Second Balkan War, developed a plan to attack the Gallipoli Peninsula, and it was this threat that led Turkey to make peace. He also examined the various possible ways in which such an attack might develop, including systematic land and sea combined operations. Landing places were given as Gaba (or Kaba) Tepe and (on the Asiatic side) Besika Bay. As far as the Peninsula itself was concerned:

  As landing-points on the Gallipoli Peninsula the first that should be considered are the areas at Kaba Tepe, the bays of Anafarta [Suvla] and Murmidia [Ejelmar] as well as the area north of Jenikoj [Yeni Keui; west of Bulair].

  The possession of this Turkish defence scheme may not have been much further use to the German General Staff, but it was an invaluable addition to the stream of information about the Dardanelles arriving in London (and Paris). It could be assumed that, apart from strengthening their defences in detail, the Turks, and their German advisers, would not greatly alter their defensive dispositions, which had been tested in war. Readers of Rohde’s book would be in no doubt as to the nature of modern warfare and the power of the defensive, particularly of artillery, machine guns, trenches and barbed wire.

  In 1914 a second Edition of Karl Baedecker’s Guide to Konstantinopel … Kleinasien etc. appeared, with its full complement of maps and plans.78 Copies of this were acquired for the British War Office, Foreign Office, etc.

  The Greek dimension

  The Greeks had invaded the Turkish islands of Imbros, Lemnos and Mitylene in 1912, thus acquiring advanced bases and intelligence facilities for an attack on the Gallipoli Peninsula. If any Allied attack on the Peninsula was under consideration the Greeks, who understood its terrain ‘better than any other nation’,79 were therefore the right people to consult and involve. They had long coveted European Turkey, and as the key to its acquisition, the Gallipoli Peninsula. Their army had, during the Balkan Wars of 1911–13, prepared plans for such an attack. Rear-Admiral Kerr, the leader of the British Naval Mission to Greece, had been involved with such planning since the start of 1914, and was in possession of considerable details of the Greek plan in September 1914,80 when for a short while it looked as though the Greeks would be prepared to cooperate in joint operations against Turkey.

  The British, through Kerr, knew about these plans in a fair amount of detail but, so far as is known, no full copy of the Greek plan ever found its way to Britain. The Greeks certainly passed on a considerable amount of detail about their plans. The British Military Attaché at Athens, Colonel Cunninghame, not to mention Major Samson, the Secret Service head-of-station in Athens, may have known a great deal, and it is perhaps significant that Cunninghame offered his services to Sir Ian Hamilton before the landings. Hamilton rebuffed him. Captain Frederick Cunliffe Owen, returning from his military attaché post at Constantinople in early November 1914:

  … stopped at Athens on the way. Here I took the opportunity of discussing with the Greek general staff (with whom I had been closely associated during the two Balkan wars) the question of operations at the Straits and acquainted myself with the projects and views on record with them and which they had closely studied.81

  The Greeks do not appear to have had a better map of the Gallipoli Peninsula than that in the possession of the Allies, or if they did, it was not handed over. Had such a map been available to the British, it would undoubtedly have been used to prepare a better operations map.

  In August 1914 the Russians had asked for Greek help in an attack on the Dardanelles. The Greeks, although neutral, expressed interest and, on 1 September Churchill asked the British Army and Navy to plan a joint operation involving capture of the Peninsula by the Greek Army, while simultaneously the British Navy ran through the Dardanelles to cow Constantinople. Callwell was unenthusiastic, and delivered an outline plan which he intended to be ‘dissuasive’.82 Churchill was insistent, and asked the Greeks for more details of their plan, which turned out to include landings on both sides of Gaba Tepe at the western end of the Peninsula and at Kum Kale on the Asiatic Shore, followed by further landings at the neck of the Peninsula at Bulair, and also at Alexandretta and near Smyrna.83 It is unclear how much of the Greek plan was seen by the British, though Kerr and Cunliffe Owen knew a great deal about it. The Naval Official Historian stated that the Greeks planned to land between Fishermen’s Huts, north of Ari Burnu, as far as the cliffs running north-east from Tekke Burnu, all of which ‘excellent beach’ the Turks had heavily wired and entrenched;84 this includes a three-mile stretch (Brighton Beach) north of Gaba Tepe, the designated location of the later Anzac landing.

  There is little about the Greek plan in the Dardanelles Commission report; Callwell stated that no full copy of the Greek plan was received in Britain, while Churchill dishonestly stated that he could not remember anything about it. Admiral Kerr later spilled the beans, when in 1922 he wrote to Captain V E Inglefield, of the Historical Section of the CID:

  … most people will have forgotten that Mr. Winston Churchill, giving evidence to the Dardanelles Commission enquiry, stated that he did not know that a Greek plan had ever been asked for or offered. There are no copies of these telegrams to be found in the F[oreign] O[ffice] or in the Legation at Athens. Mr. Churchill asked me for my copies some time ago, but I wrote to the FO as I did not want to part with mine. It was then that I found out that the FO copies had vanished. I have refrained from publishing these telegrams for fear of stirring up trouble which would not assist our country or empire, but probably would have the opposite effect. If by publishing them we could repair the incalculable damage done by the infernal mess made of the Gallipoli expedition, I would welcome sandwich [board] men walking up and down with them all over the Empire.85

  For reasons of diplomacy and internal politics the Greeks lost interest in the plan. Churchill, however, on 3 November 1914, foolishly gave the Turks the alarm by ordering the Navy to bombard the outer defence forts. Henceforth the Turks, assisted by the Germans, worked feverishly to render the Peninsula impregnable.

  The Greeks, being antagonistic to the Turks, made natural clandestine agents, and it is inconceivable that the Greek General Staff, Navy, or both, did not have good intelligence networks operating into the Peninsula and Asia Minor. The Aegean coast, with its many inlets and fishing villages, was a perfect scene for small boat operations before and during the war. As we shall see, much of the population of the Gallipoli Peninsula and the Dardanelles area generally was Greek, and a great deal of valuable intelligence was obtained from them. The important 1909 War Office Report stated that ‘the population of the Peninsula is principally Greek, but at the southern end there are several Turkish villages’.86 This was later echoed in a secret War Council paper of March 1915 entitled After the Dardanelles – The Next Steps in which Hankey noted that the greater part of the population on both sides of the Dardanelles was Greek, and that Greek information regarding garrisons was usually reliable.87 As the risk of Allied action increased, the Turks began to remove the Greek population from the threatened zones, as it posed a clear security risk.

  The mixed population and ease of movement by caique in the Aegean may possibly also have worked against the Allies; Aspinall-Oglander noted that:

  The Turks had other means, too [apart from air reconnaissance] of learning the course of events at Mudros. The island was under British governorship, but it was impossible to control the whole civilian population, or to guard against any leakage of information by means of the small local craft trading between the islands
of the Aegean.88

  The Turks after the war told British Intelligence officers that they had no agents on Imbros. They had other, very effective, forms of intelligence-gathering: the British seaplanes could not reach sufficient altitude to intercept the Turkish reconnaissance intruders, which overflew Mudros harbour almost daily from 11 April 1915.89

  The Russian dimension

  The Russian had long had designs on Constantinople and the Dardanelles, the latter representing an ice-free trade-route to the southern Russian ports. The Russians were in direct conflict with Turkey in the Caucasus, and were happy to provide any information to the Allies which would create a diversion. An attack on the Dardanelles was eminently suitable for this purpose, so they duly supplied intelligence on the Dardanelles forts and defences. In early 1915 a Russian report on the Defences of the Dardanelles was received by Admiral Carden from the British Minister at Athens; this included photographs and tracings of plans of the forts. Carden reported to the Admiralty on 11 February 1915 that his War Staff Officer had compared the Russian report with the British Official Report (NID No. 838, Turkey Coast Defences, May 1908); this officer’s comparative report (Turkey Coast Defences) went into great detail, including lines of mines.90 Dealing with the ‘Principal Differences between Russian and British plans,’ Carden’s Intelligence Officer noted that the ‘latest additions to defences given in Russian plans are very similar to the tracing sent to Intelligence Division of War Staff [London] in my letter of 26 December 1914’.91 At an early stage, the Russians were keen to participate in an attack on Constantinople and the Dardanelles, but they later declined to commit forces. Not only were they short of manpower at a critical juncture, but they were reluctant to see the Greeks in, or even near, Constantinople which they coveted for themselves.