by Peter Hart
Churchill was horrified by reports of the bloodbath of trench warfare, which reinforced his desire to use the potential of the Royal Navy to achieve victory. The question was how? Even before the stalemate on the Western Front, Churchill was keen to move the war along, by deploying naval power to harass and confound his enemies with a variety of ingenious schemes. One recurring fantasy was to establish a destroyer base on the German islands of Borkum or Sylt in the North Sea, thereby provoking a huge naval battle and a presumed British victory. Churchill foresaw a dramatic landing of Russian troops on the German Baltic coast, leading inexorably to German defeat. Then there was the incredible plan to use the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in a series of landings on the Belgian and Dutch coasts in defiance of all common sense and minor inconveniences such as Dutch neutrality. Another scheme, directed against the Turks, was to use the Greek Army to seize the Gallipoli Peninsula and thereby allow a British fleet to enter the Sea of Marmara. This Anglo-Greek Scheme was originally drawn up by Rear Admiral Mark Kerr, the Chief of the British Naval Mission in Greece, and in its most ambitious format envisaged diversionary attacks using in total 50,000 men, while 2,000 would capture the Kum Kale forts, 30,000 would take the Bulair Lines and 60,000 would land along the coast south of Gaba Tepe to take the Kilid Bahr forts from the rear. This scheme had been rendered stillborn, at least in the first instance when the Greeks, hampered by internal political divisions, remained resolutely neutral.
Churchill was not alone in harbouring doubts as to the efficacy of committing the nation’s strength to the Western Front. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, pointed to imagined opportunities from attacking Austria or by threatening the Turks with a landing at Alexandretta in Syria, while a speculative memoranda from Maurice Hankey, the Secretary of the War Council, recommended Balkan alliances to threaten Turkey. Gradually the concept of operations against Turkey seemed to be drifting to centre stage.
Then, on 1 January 1915, against this backdrop of increasing debate, the Russians asked for a naval or military demonstration against the Turks to ease the pressure caused by the Turkish offensive driving through the Caucasus mountains. The Russians had attacked the Turks almost immediately war broke out via the Caucasus and had caught the Turks, who were not yet fully mobilised, by surprise. A counter-attack had restored the situation, but then Enver, determined to regain territory lost to the Russians during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8, personally led the Third Army into an encircling offensive centred on Sarikamis, deep in the Caucasus mountains, on 22 December. This apparently rash move was initially successful, cutting off a substantial Russian force and threatening a repeat of the Tannenberg fiasco meted out to the Russians by the Germans on the Eastern Front back in August 1914. It was at this point that the Russians appealed for help.
The logical British response should have been regretful refusal. The BEF was already fully committed and needed every reinforcement it could get. At the same time the Grand Fleet, commanded by Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, had been stripped of its notional superiority by a series of unfortunate incidents. The sinking of the Audacious on 27 October 1914, the damaging collision between the Conqueror and the Monarch on 27 December, miscellaneous engine problems and the usual refits had left it for a brief period with potentially just seventeen dreadnoughts, to the fifteen of the High Seas Fleet. The departure of three of Jellicoe’s battlecruisers in operations to avenge the humiliating defeat suffered by the British South Atlantic Squadron at the hands of the German East Asiatic Squadron at the Battle of Coronel on 1 November 1914 had left his margin of superiority wafer thin. Then there was the worrying question of the superior construction and resilience of German dreadnoughts, intended mainly for operations in the North Sea, in contrast to the British ships which had to have the capability of serving across the oceans.
Despite these pressing considerations, Lord Herbert Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, went only halfway to a sensible position of refusing to send any aid. In his interim reply he pointed out that there were no troops available, but added the rider that if there was any demonstration in favour of the Russians it would have to be naval and at the Dardanelles. By introducing this qualification he left the gate not just ajar, but hanging off its hinges. At the Admiralty, the First Sea Lord Admiral Sir John Fisher was ambivalent about such a demonstration. Dubious as he was about the validity of further naval bombardments following the experiment of November 1914, he nevertheless saw possibilities if the navy was supported by a large army generated by the Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs and Russians – not the most likely collection of bedfellows. In contrast, Churchill saw this as the chance to push forward one of his favoured schemes and, on 3 January 1915, he convened a meeting of the Admiralty War Group, which sent a message to Vice Admiral Sackville Carden, Commander of the East Mediterranean Fleet, asking him whether it was practical to force the Dardanelles by ships alone using only the older predreadnoughts and some measures to reduce the risk of Turkish mines. This reasonable enough question was fatally loaded by a final statement which indicated clearly the answer Churchill required: ‘The importance of the results would justify severe loss.’11 The answer was unsurprising as Carden responded that, although the Dardanelles could not be rushed, they ‘might be forced by extended operations with a large numbers of ships’.12
This was very different from Fisher’s view that the operation would require large numbers of troops in support, but by this time Churchill had attained a position of ascendancy at the Admiralty. Ten years before Fisher had been a pre-eminent figure in the Royal Navy forcing through innovations such as the genesis of the Dreadnought. But, having been recalled from retirement in October 1914, he was finding that, at nearly 74 years old, his naturally combative eccentricity had met its match in Churchill. Fisher’s views wavered wildly depending on whom he was dealing with. To Jellicoe he appeared firm in maintaining the strength of the Grand Fleet, but in his dealings with Churchill he veered from manic support of the wildest schemes to an equally hysterical opposition. His recall from retirement had been a terrible mistake. This chronic instability at the heart of the Admiralty left Churchill pulling the strings and able to sideline or simply ignore professional naval advice at will.
The consequences would be apparent at the meetings in January 1915 of the War Council. The future strategic direction of the British war effort was largely entrusted to this committee, which combined elements of the Cabinet and the Committee for Imperial Defence. Made up of leading politicians and their service advisers, its aim was to focus discussion rather more closely than had proved possible in Cabinet, yet its own constitutional position remained somewhat vague. The first two meetings, on 7 and 8 January, had given a firm commitment to fight side by side with the French on the Western Front, but it had also been decided to discuss at a further sub-committee possible alternative fronts for deployment of the New Armies that were being raised by Kitchener in his capacity as Secretary of State for War. The intention was to have serious plans ready for alternative deployments should the French no longer need support, or no further advance be possible on the Western Front. At the meeting on 13 January, Churchill was armed with Carden’s freshly minted outline plan to force the Dardanelles using ships alone, which had reached the Admiralty on 11 January. Although Churchill put his case persuasively to the assembled War Council, the proceedings degenerated into near farce. Every wild scheme for alternative theatres of war was given a renewed airing and every hobbyhorse dusted off in the rambling debate that followed. In the end nothing of consequence resulted apart from the poorly expressed instruction that the Admiralty should prepare a naval expedition ‘to invade and take the Gallipoli Peninsula, with Constantinople as its objective’ commencing February 1915.13 Churchill had got his way and Fisher had failed to express adequately his opposition to a solely naval scheme.
However, this decision taken by the War Council on 13 January 1915 cannot just be attributed to the actions of Churchill. Every ministe
r and service adviser present was directly culpable for allowing Britain’s strategic priorities to drift in an effort to find an easy solution to the pressing problems that weighed down on them in the first years of the Great War. First of all they placed at risk the naval war against Germany, which at that stage should have been firmly centred on the prospective battle for control of the North Sea. Geography and the distant blockade of the Grand Fleet had given de facto control of the seas across the globe to the Royal Navy once the last of the German commerce raiders and the East Asiatic Squadron had been destroyed. Although the blockade of Germany was not dramatic in its results in the short term, that did not remove its primacy at the centre of British global strategic policy. A naval defeat and loss of control of the seas would surely doom Britain. As Churchill himself put it, ‘Jellicoe was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.’14
One thing was certain: Germany would never be beaten by an ill-conceived adventure launched against Turkey. There was no back door to Germany; no easy route to victory; no allies propping her up, the removal of which would trigger a sudden collapse. Germany operated on interior lines of communications and, even in the event of a Turkish defeat, would merely have rushed reinforcements to the Austrians to make the Balkan mountain ranges all but impregnable. If Germany was to be defeated, then better by far on the Western Front where the British and French could fight side by side and with a minimum of logistical problems. Britain had to fight the war as it was, not how visionaries dreamt it might be. Germany was encamped in France, occupying a good part of the industrial heartland, with armies poised ready to strike at Paris and to seize the Channel ports. Britain could not just abandon her ally while pursuing quixotic adventures in the Middle East. The defeat of France would recast the map of Europe for a generation or more. To any British statesman worth his salt it was axiomatic that no one country could be allowed to secure hegemony over Europe. And it was equally crucial to prevent Germany from gaining control of the Channel ports which would raise the spectre of an invasion of Britain.
Above all the guilty men of the War Council forgot the sound principle of war: concentrate on the main enemy on the main front. They were generally motivated by the best of intentions, yet their names should be recalled with at the very least a raised eyebrow: Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, the former Conservative Party leader Arthur Balfour, the Lord Chancellor Lord Haldane and Liberal politicians Lewis Harcourt, Reginald McKenna and the Marquess of Crewe. They and their advisers, Cabinet Secretary Maurice Hankey, First Sea Lord Sir John Fisher and Chief of Imperial General Staff Lieutenant General Sir Archibald Wolfe Murray, were the men that bore the collective responsibility for everything that was to follow. Their excuse was that they believed they were only using a fleet of obsolescent ships that could abandon operations if they ran into trouble. This is fatuous. A serious operation of war should not be undertaken in such a casual fashion; hundreds of men’s lives cast away on a whim, as if in a mere game of sport that could be abandoned at half time. Many of those responsible managed to evade the consequences of their culpability during their lifetimes, but history has a long memory.
Turkey was a distinctly unthreatening opponent if left to her own devices. The Turks could try to promote a Jihad, or holy war, among the Muslim populations of the British Empire, the threat of which remained a constant fear for many British statesmen for whom memories of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 still had a considerable resonance. In theory the Turks could also cut British oil supplies in Mesopotamia, but this had already been secured by a small expeditionary force in December 1914, which could have held back any Turkish retaliatory forces till doomsday. It was only British hubris that promoted a series of wasteful expeditions up the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in 1915. The Turks could launch an attack from Palestine across the Sinai Desert on the Suez Canal to cut the British route to India; they did indeed try, but, as we shall see, they failed. And of course Turkey could invade the Russian southern flanks through the Caucasus mountains – the very action that had triggered the Russian request for help. Yet even before the British response had been decided on, the Russians, assisted by atrocious winter conditions, had achieved the destruction of the Turkish threat.
The Russians encircled in Sarikamis had not given up, as predicted by Enver, but had fought on, buying time during which the weather drastically worsened. The temperatures plummeted far below zero and the ill-equipped Turks were soon freezing to death in their thousands. The Turks were also slightly outnumbered by the Russians, who had reorganised their forces and launched a counter-attack on 2 January 1915, which in turn threatened to encircle the Turkish Third Army. The result was a disaster for the Turks as the whole of their IX Corps was cut off and destroyed within a week. All that was left for the Third Army was a defensive posture; it posed no further threat to the Russian borders in the Caucasus. There was clearly no longer any need for British diversionary operations, but by then events had gained a momentum of their own.
Once the Admiralty had been given its instructions, the planning – such as it was – began in earnest. Carden had already provided a draft outline detailing the seven stages of attack on the various layers of defences that defended the Dardanelles: the outer and intermediate forts, before facing the challenge of the batteries in the forts overlooking the Narrows where the Straits measured just under a mile across. In essence the British plan was to out-range the Turkish guns and grind down the forts’ resistance before closing in with minesweepers to destroy them at close range. It was originally intended that the fleet would be made up of obsolescent pre-dreadnoughts, but it was inevitable that this principle would not be observed. First, at the instigation of Fisher, the super-dreadnought Queen Elizabeth was added, ostensibly to calibrate her massive 15-inch guns against the Turkish forts; then a battlecruiser, the Inflexible. And of course the ad hoc fleet still called on far too many of the workhorse destroyers that were needed back in the North Sea to screen and defend the Grand Fleet. Every one of these ships could be seen as a tooth drawn painfully from Jellicoe’s jaw. As the fleet was augmented Fisher’s irrationality increased as the stresses of his two-faced position towards Jellicoe and Churchill, reflecting in turn the inherent dichotomy between his inner caution and wilder schemes, drove him to distraction. Fisher’s wild threats to resign multiplied as he came to deny all responsibility for the earlier War Cabinet decision of 13 January and the planning process that he had been directly involved in just days before. This mini psychodrama came to a head at the War Cabinet meeting on the Dardanelles on 28 January. Fisher screwed up his nerve to defy Churchill, and indeed created an embarrassing scene by petulantly storming away from the Cabinet table with the intention of resigning. Kitchener managed to placate him and the meeting reconvened with Fisher’s protest generally discounted as another emotional outburst that signified little from a man many regarded as a loose cannon. It was soon forgotten amid the general enthusiasm for the scheme and all it could achieve – if successful. Not only would Turkey be out of the war, but the sea route to Russia would be open. After Kitchener reiterated that the naval attack could be broken off at any time, the decision to proceed was confirmed. But there were still no troops available for military operations.
Some of the Cabinet seems to have envisioned a Turkish defeat triggering a rash of declarations of war on the Central Powers from the Balkans. Yet the individual Balkan states held contradictory war aims, sought alliances that were not feasible and demanded conditions that no one could meet. In truth, they were all waiting for the winner of the global conflict to become apparent, at which point they would join pellmell in the race to the finish and the despoliation of the losers – whoever they might be. Complicating the issue was the general confusion relating to the situation in the Balkans: a messy Gordian knot. There was just so much seething
hatred, some nurtured across generations, but a substantial portion emanating from the recent Balkan Wars. To become the ally of one country entailed the unthinking enmity of another. The Balkan states were riven with racial, regional, religious, cultural and political chasms that could not be bridged by negotiation.
One existing ally was more than willing to become involved. The French were concerned at British ambitions in the Near East, with particular reference to Syria, which they saw as being within their own sphere of influence. As a result they wanted to march closely in step with the British in any Middle Eastern expedition for long-term imperial considerations. Thus, although the French Naval Minister, Victor Augagneur, was sceptical of the chances of a solely naval operation succeeding in forcing the Dardanelles, his underlying attitude was clear: