Once ashore, and having become resigned to a stalemate at Anzac and Helles at least, the local use of terrain for resource provision and defensive works was reasonably handled. The most important problem lay in the provision of water supplies from groundwaters. This was only really a major problem at the Anzac front, where groundwater supply was limited and ephemeral. All previously known or newly dug wells exploited either the water-bearing limestones of the coastal areas or the alluvial/lacustrine sediments of the river valleys, beaches and coastal plains. The geologists attached to or advising the Allied forces were conversant with the problem, and the only effective solution was the use of imported supplies, clearly a costly and hazardous exercise.
The use of terrain for defensive purposes was efficiently handled on the Anzac and Helles fronts, particularly in the construction of adequate trench systems and in the use of tunnelling and dugout construction in slopes out of sight of the opposing Turkish forces. However, the inability to provide suitable rest camps close to the front line led to a severe diminution in the health and well-being of the troops. A clearly inadequate understanding led to the use of the dry seasonal ravines on the dip slope leading from the summit of Achi Baba. Many men were killed and much material lost in the flooding of the wet, winter season, adding to the discomfort of the troops.
Terrain intelligence
We can conclude from the evidence of Francis Maunsell, Frederick Cunliffe Owen, Charles Woods, Major L L R Samson, the War Office, the Naval Intelligence Division and many other sources that a British intelligence attack on the target of the Dardanelles defences and Gallipoli Peninsula was in operation in the early 20th century. However, it is also apparent that this intelligence effort did not have a high priority, was not properly resourced, directed or coordinated, and although it achieved a great deal, particularly in terms of technical information on the coastal defences and topographical information on landing places and the terrain of the Peninsula itself, it did not succeed in obtaining a copy of the recent Turkish large-scale survey of the Peninsula, or a fully detailed copy of the Greek plan for capturing the Peninsula. Further, the intelligence was not processed in such a way as to inform operational planning. Indeed, apart from the various Greek and Anglo-Greek plans there was no effective combined operational plan until one had been formulated in-theatre by Hamilton, after conferring with de Robeck following the failure of the naval attack on 18 March.
There were also at least two disastrous diplomatic failures. The first was the failure properly to appreciate and respond to the significance of the Young Turk revolution and the associated Turkish inclination towards Germany, which a more aware British policy might have prevented, and in so doing have secured Turkish neutrality. This in turn could have maintained Balkan neutrality. The second was the failure to install a military attaché at Athens from the beginning of the war, a failure which Cunninghame considered fatal from the point of view of securing Greek support; an early surprise attack on the Gallipoli Peninsula and the Dardanelles, using Greek troops and British ships, had a good chance of success. While the Germans had successfully appreciated the great strategic benefits of a proactive foreign policy to assist their Drang nach Osten, the British were sadly lethargic. As so often in Anglo-Islamic relations in the 20th and 21st centuries it was a case, as J K Galbraith might have put it, of private affluence and public squalor. Many influential private individuals were strongly pro-Turkish, and in a different context pro-Arab, but at diplomatic level, despite many warnings, relations were allowed to moulder.
Although a great deal of information was collected at the War Office before the war, and during the early months of the war, it was not properly collated, analysed, evaluated and distributed. The strange, catatonic, almost comatose condition of the War Office under Kitchener in 1914–15 has yet to be completely understood, but it is clear that the General Staff system had broken down, that most senior officers were in dread of that charismatic commander and statesman, and that initiative and forethought were non-existent. In Callwell’s Directorate of Military Operations (MO2), frequent changes of key personnel had destroyed much of the corporate memory and, except for the brief flurry of activity at the beginning of September, the many relevant individual documents and reports lay secure and undisturbed in their safes and pigeonholes until mid-March 1915, when Hamilton and Braithwaite were suddenly summoned, briefed and despatched. Even after this date, there is evidence that the MO2 staff officers were not at all clear what information they already had – on water supply, firewood, roads, etc. – at their fingertips. That these officers were mostly staff-trained before the war, and were designated as ‘passed staff college’ (psc) in the War Office List, seemed to be of little significance when it came to handling intelligence material. The American Thomas G Fergusson, whose excellent book on British Military Intelligence14 gave fulsome praise to this aspect of pre-war work, recognised this deficiency: none had received much specific training in intelligence work, and there had been no Intelligence Corps in peacetime. They had however, at the Staff College, been instructed in combined operations.
Besides the material in MO2, crucial intelligence, books, documents, photographs, maps and charts also lay in Huddleston’s MO5 Library, in Hedley’s Geographical Section, and also at the Admiralty and the Foreign Office. More open source material was readily available at the Royal Geographical Society, the Geological Society and Geological Survey, the British Museum Library and elsewhere, had any ‘theatre intelligence section’ existed to gather and collate it. An impressive dossier could easily have been compiled at this stage. As it was, the material supplied by Callwell was very impressive, as we know from the dramatic moment when, having asked to be recalled before the Dardanelles Commission to put the record straight, he produced a bag full of the relevant documents and poured out the contents in front of the commissioners. This material included the 1905 Report on Eastern Turkey in Europe, the Naval Intelligence Division Report (NID 838) of 1908, the secret War Office Report on the Defences of Constantinople of 1909, with its voluminous appendices of photographs, maps, plans and charts of the Peninsula, and much more. We do not have a definitive list of the documents which Callwell and MO2 provided, but all the evidence suggests that it was an impressive collection. More information and documentation was sent after Hamilton and Braithwaite had left London, and still more was being gathered by Maxwell’s Intelligence under Clayton in Egypt.
A good medium-scale (one-inch) initial operations map, compiled in 1908, was provided by MO4 (Geographical Section), and this was enlarged to 1:40,000 by the Survey of Egypt. While Hedley at MO4 had properly arranged for a survey section to go out with the expedition, it was decided at a higher level that this should not proceed, and it only followed much later when it was apparent that survey was vital for artillery work. Following the landings, much better and larger-scale maps were prepared in Egypt from captured material, and even larger-scale trench diagrams were compiled from air photos and lithographically printed at GHQ MEF. An Allied trigonometrical survey was also initiated which, before the evacuation, covered the whole Allied zone, the Asiatic Shore and the Peninsula up to the Achi Baba line. Systematic air photographic coverage was flown to provide the detail to hang onto this trig framework. The survey and mapping service performed extremely well in the face of serious shortages of men and matériel, but there is no doubt that it would have done even better if there had been proper forethought at the highest levels at the War Office. Hedley knew what was needed, but Kitchener (himself a surveyor who should have known better) was not anxious to send scarce resources to the Dardanelles. The evidence of every previous war had indicated that survey support should be provided right from the beginning, and that it was a false economy to hope that operations could proceed without it, or with one starved of resources. As The Times History of the Anglo-Boer War pointed out, the British Army suffered at the outset of that war from lack of cartographic preparation; it also noted: ‘accurate mapping is not a very expens
ive operation: at any rate its cost bears a very small proportion to the total cost of preparing for or conducting a campaign.’
In the period lasting many months when the General Staff and Admiralty should have been formulating a coordinated plan for combined operations and making vital preparations, nothing was done. The expedition’s ships were not loaded for an assault landing. The attempt by the Navy to go it alone in March resulted in the loss of what surprise remained, and triggered frantic efforts by the Turks to fortify the Peninsula. Henceforth it would be a much tougher nut to crack.
Comparisons with D-Day, 1944
Having documented in this book the lamentable preparations for the tragic Dardanelles operations, it is instructive to compare and contrast the intelligence, mapping and planning aspects of the Gallipoli and D-Day operations. Operation OVERLORD, with NEPTUNE, its naval counterpart, was the largest amphibious assault in history, and could not have been more different from the Gallipoli landings of 1915. On 6 June 1944, after years of joint planning and benefiting from the topographical preparations for, and experience of, the earlier landings in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, over 150,000 men landed from more than 4,000 ships along eighty kilometres of Normandy coastline. Careful examination of existing maps revealed that because of its relatively flat terrain and lack of obvious physical obstacles, the area was the most suitable for an Allied invasion.15
While the Gallipoli operations plans were hastily cobbled together in a few weeks following the failed naval attack in March 1915, the preparations for D-Day took place over a period of two or three years, which began once the invasion threat to Britain had faded following the German invasion of Russia in June 1941. In this period vast quantities of new maps – many drawn up from existing maps, postcards and photographs, and updated using aerial photos and intelligence from various sources – were prepared. The defences were carefully studied in a special Theatre Intelligence Section which prepared the defence overprints for the assault maps. The Allies revised and extended existing map series, and also augmented these with new series, new types of maps and other forms of geographic support, benefiting from the topographical preparations for, and experience of, the Dieppe raid (RUTTER and JUBILEE) of August 194216 (for which 1:12,500 and 1:25,000 sheets with defence overprints were prepared from air photographs) and the landings in North Africa (TORCH) in November 1942, and Sicily (HUSKY)17 and Italy in 1943. General Montgomery, commanding the ground forces in Normandy, commended the D-Day survey effort, stating that ‘at no time did map supply fail or prejudice the conduct of operations’.18 In turn, the planning and experience of the Normandy landings informed the preparations for Operation ANVIL, the landings in the South of France on 15 August 1944.19
Apart from the special requirements for the amphibious operation of the landing itself, the essence of the problem was the same as that which had faced the British Army in the First World War – the need to create an accurate topographical base map, at a large scale suitable for artillery work and target location, on which could be pinpointed and overprinted the intricate enemy defences. Smaller-scale maps would be required for movement and for air operations. The most up-to-date editions of available pre-war French, and pre-war and wartime British, map series provided the cartographic base for the Normandy operations,20 and continual and increasing air photograph coverage and provision of photogrammetric resources underpinned the mapping and geographical support programme – particularly the wide variety of oblique and vertical sketches and plans of the beaches, sheets of the 1:25,000 artillery map and 1:12,500 sheets of the immediate invasion area. British, Canadian and American army mapping and admiralty charting agencies, air forces and field survey units were all involved in the preparations of the previous two years.21
The range of map types required was enormous, as was the air support for intelligence gathering and mapping. Again, the comparison with the Dardanelles could not be more striking. For D-Day, aircraft generally required 1:1,000,000 and 1:2,000,000 plotting maps for navigation, and 1:500,000 and 1:250,000 topographical air maps. Army/Air editions, layered in purple with emphasised spot-height boxes, were produced of all these scales, and also at 1:100,000. Fighters of the Allied air force needed 1:1,000,000 scale high-altitude topographical maps. Bombers, troop carriers, transport aircraft, night fighters and reconnaissance aircraft had to be provided with ‘lattice’ charts for radar navigation and maps for ‘gee’ navigation (position fixing by radio signals from ground stations).22 All aircrew were supplied with fabric ‘escape maps’ in case they were shot down. Airborne (glider and parachute) forces were issued with 1:25,000 colour-layered maps, 1:12,500 and 1:25,000 defence overprints, and night landing and dropping-zone maps, similar to bomber night target maps, which were designed and coloured to show the ground features as they would appear from the air in the dark. They were also supplied with landing and dropping zone traces to be used with enlarged photo-mosaics, photo-maps called ‘fly-in maps’ which included photographs of the key ground features, half-tone mosaics, ‘flak’ overlays showing the location of enemy anti-aircraft guns, and 1:5,000 village photo-plans.23 Maps showing special information were used by the operational and briefing staff on the ground in charge of controlling air forces in the battle zone during the invasion. US Bomber Command demanded oblique perspective target maps.
For D-Day, hydrographic and beach-survey preparations were meticulous. Special beach gradient and obstacle maps derived from air-reconnaissance and information provided by Special Boat Service frogmen and other sources, and ‘going’ maps showing the terrain to assist progress once ashore, were prepared for the landing craft and assault troops. For training purposes, deception maps were printed with false place-names. Tactical overprints on the large-scale sheets showed all features of the German ‘West Wall’ defences, including coastal batteries, pill boxes, minefields, trenches, etc. Special charts were prepared by the Admiralty for the approaches to the beaches, and for fire-control for the naval bombardment. Some 170 million naval charts and chart-maps were produced, incorporating the results of aerial reconnaissance.24 Further geographical support for the operations included town plans, through-way plans, Communications of Europe (1:800,000), road maps, gazetteers, guide books and relief models.25
As with the Gallipoli operations, it was difficult to supply the assaulting troops with the highest-quality maps, as these did not exist. Ground troops were hampered by the legacy of inadequate pre-war French maps, with many areas only covered by enlargements of the old hachured 1:80,000 sheets to 1:50,000. Prior to 1939, ‘re-armament’ series of 1:25,000 artillery sheets had been prepared by the Geographical Section of the General Staff (GSGS), War Office, for parts of Belgium and France, and these were now revised from air photos. As ground and close-support air forces required gridded large-scale maps for attack, and medium and small-scale maps for movement, completely new series of maps had to be prepared. New 1:25,000 (codename Benson) and 1:50,000 series were created covering the envisaged area of operations, and also 1:12,500 sheets for likely coastal areas. The standard artillery map showed roads, tracks and footpaths, hedges, walls and other field divisions. The infantry and their supporting tanks also found these new Benson 1:25,000 sheets invaluable in Normandy’s bocage countryside with its small, irregular-shaped fields and its hedges and copses, all potential defence positions for the enemy. But the lack of reliable height control and often poor relief-depiction (hachures based on 1:40,000 scale form lines) on the old French maps used as base material meant that the artillery work suffered from inadequate angle-of-sight data. Clearly maps and terrain intelligence were vital to the success of the Allied invasion of Europe.26
Conclusion
The Gallipoli Campaign was doomed to failure primarily because of a lack of commitment to it from the Allied high commands in London and Paris. Too few men, too little planning, inadequate munitions, and indecisiveness together with woefully inadequate communications ultimately led to the stagnation and defeat of the Allied troops
. At the heart of the failure lies an inadequate understanding of the nature of the terrain. Yet this need not have been so. In the decades before the landings, reports had been compiled by men who knew their business, soldiers and sailors who had cause to consider the possibility of an attacker coming to the hostile shores of the Dardanelles.
Maximum Allied gains, 1915
As is demonstrated by the comparison with D-Day in 1944, planning was everything, and the documents and records we have examined reveal that Hamilton and his Staff had more materials to hand than have been admitted to. Within the Geographical Section of the General Staff (GSGS, MO4) there were experienced men who knew what material existed, and would surely have made it available, and the defence of Callwell and others indicates that this was achieved. The subsequent scapegoating of a map – magnified in some historians’ eyes to all the maps used in the Campaign – is quite simply a method of diverting attention away from the failure of a difficult task – the landing of men on a hostile shore with the intent of attacking and gaining a Peninsula blessed with a terrain that advantages the defender. And what defenders they were – well disciplined, well-armed, well-motivated and well-led; the Turks used all the natural advantages of the Gallipoli Peninsula and sent the Allies back whence they came.
Grasping Gallipoli Page 40