by Peter Hart
Overall the British attitude to Gallipoli has been one of wishful thinking, filtered through romantic classicism; a tragedy acted out by doomed new romantic heroes, as typified by the likes of Rupert Brooke, Dick Doughty Wylie and Charles Lister. But one slightly macabre story concerning the post–war treatment of Doughty Wylie’s grave shows the dark comedy that keeps breaking through to undermine any attempt to rewrite Gallipoli as a classical tragedy for our modern age.
His grave was located on a small knoll just outside of the village. I was requested by the Imperial War Graves Commission to make the site more permanent as his widow had in view building a monument over it. We went to the spot and I instructed my men to make a trench down to solid ground around it, then to pour concrete in it and to cap the whole grave with a 6″ slab of concrete. We got started first by removing the tangle of barbed wire over it and then carefully removed the top soil. Within a few inches his body became visible huddled in a crouched position enveloped in a ragged uniform with belt.5
A. E. Cooper, Imperial War Graves Commission
Cooper marked off the precise location of the special foundations he required for the new grave and then rode off on his horse to inspect the other war cemeteries under his jurisdiction. On his return he looked to see how his men were getting on with their task.
I did not know whether to laugh or cry! What had obviously happened is that the trench in the soft soil had collapsed so that my men removed the body from the grave and finished the excavations. Then they had placed his skull at the top of the grave and made a geometric pattern of his bones – even down to the finger bones. I hurried to get the foundations around the bones and waited to put the concrete slab over him. I hope he now rests in peace.6
A. E. Cooper, Imperial War Graves Commission
The imagined dignity of death in a righteous cause should always be overlaid with the brutal realities of that forfeit: the sudden end of a life, the hurried burial, the grieving widow or family back in England, but here we have the surrealistic use of the corpse as idle plaything. The scale of Doughty Wylie’s sacrifice is not undermined by such sordid realities; but let no one use such heroes as examples to young soldiers without allowing them to consider the whole picture. Death is not glorious; it is almost always squalid, or at least slightly tawdry in its aftermath. The chimera of imperishable fame is the cruellest hoax of all – for no name lives forever and all deeds are ultimately either forgotten or mythologised out of all recognition. Ultimately it must be remembered that the British heroes died for a losing cause in 1915.
In contrast to the British, the French have always rather downplayed the doomed campaign for the Dardanelles. This may seem perverse, as for the most part their troops fought both bravely and with considerable skill against terrible odds. They were backed by their magnificent artillery, which not only had to deal with the Turks in front of them but had to support the British attacks. All this, while engaging and suppressing as best they could the batteries firing into their flank from the Asiatic coast just across the Dardanelles. Yet, to the French, Gallipoli was always a British campaign. Their more pressing concerns were closer to home and, while their losses at Gallipoli were painful, these were dwarfed by the incredible casualties they suffered on the Western Front. Perhaps one day French historians will re-evaluate their role at Gallipoli; one can only hope so.
The Turks too had their heroes, although few of their names have survived. But they too sacrificed their tomorrows for their country. And of course they did emerge victorious in the 1915 campaign. The best remembered, Mustafa Kemal, would rise to become the leader of his country as Kemal Atatürk.
The English brag about the soldiers and officers who fought gallantly and bravely at Ari Burnu landings and at this front. But think about the enemy which landed at Ari Burnu’s shores equipped with the most advanced war machinery and determination, and was, by and large, forced to remain on these shores. Our officers and soldiers who with love for their motherland and religion and heroism protected the doors of their capital Constantinople against such a strong enemy won the right to a status of which we can be proud. I congratulate all the members of the fighting units under my command. I remember with deep and eternal respect all the ones who sacrificed their lives and became martyrs for this great objective.7
Kemal Atatürk
Yet we must also beware the potent Turkish mythology centred on their successes at Gallipoli which seeks to forget the denouement of the wider hostilities. For the Turks were to comprehensively lose the war, totally defeated when they surrendered on 30 October 1918. There was even a second, totally unopposed and now forgotten, landing of British troops at V Beach on 10 November 1918. By the end of that year all those potent symbols of Turkish resistance – Krithia, Achi Baba, Third Ridge, Chunuk Bair, the Kilid Bahr Plateau, the Narrows forts and even Constantinople itself – were under the iron grip of the Allies. The French were back in occupation of Sedd el Bahr and a British division was encamped in the plain adjoining Maidos. That was the eventual outcome of the war – Allied victory and total Turkish defeat. Indeed, no one could have put it more bluntly than Atatürk himself did in his renowned ‘Six Day’ speech to the Second National Conference in 1927.
The group of powers which included the Ottoman Government had been defeated in the Great War. The Ottoman Army had been crushed on every front. An armistice had been signed under severe conditions. The prolongation of the Great War had left the people exhausted and impoverished. Those who had driven the people and the country into the general conflict had fled and now cared for nothing but their own safety. The Army had been deprived of their arms and ammunition, and this state of affairs continued. The Entente Powers did not consider it necessary to respect the terms of the armistice. On various pretexts, their men-at-war and troops remained.8
Kemal Atatürk
In the end Gallipoli was just a small staging post – one of many – in a global conflict that would ultimately be decided on the Western Front. Winston Churchill, the individual most responsible for launching the attack on the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915, was the same man who cared little how the Turks would react when he ‘stole’ their battleships from them in August 1914. Yet, when Turkey joined the German side, Churchill suddenly found it vital to knock them out; indeed, he came to believe that the whole secret of beating the Central Powers lay in removing Turkey from the war. But the Easterners were totally wrong in their dangerous fantasies. As the campaign progressed, both Churchill and Hamilton were sucked into the fatal trap of thinking that their project was all-important, of failing to consider the far more telling requirements and priorities of other leaders and fronts. Little thought was given to Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, who faced the German High Seas Fleet across the North Sea knowing that a serious naval defeat could lose Britain the war in an afternoon. No consideration at all was given to Field Marshal Sir John French taking on the unfettered might of the German Army on the Western Front. Others who should and did know better failed to rein back the protagonists in their Gaderene rush to disaster. The Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, the greatest British soldier statesman of his age, feared the consequences of a diversion of resources. He also feared the effects on India and the Middle East of a reversal against the Turks, but despite those fears he failed to take any effective restraining action. The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John Fisher, knew the importance of concentrating naval resources in the North Sea, but allowed himself to drift along in the reassurances of the charismatic Churchill until it was far too late. And nor should the other members of the War Council escape the blame for failing to pay due care and attention in the decisions they took in January 1915, committing hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors to a doomed expedition.
By diverting resources to Gallipoli the Allies exposed themselves to a greater possibility of defeat by the Germans on the Western Front. They also ran the risk of the Turks to soundly thrashing them, with negative consequences for British stand
ing across the Islamic world – exactly what happened and the very result that Kitchener originally dreaded. But beating the Turks would have had no impact if the Germans had triumphed elsewhere. The real battle would be fought on the Western Front where Germany, the driving force of the Central Powers, had to be beaten if the war was to be won. Germany was possessed of the finest army and one of the most robust economies in the world. Millions would have to die before she could be brought to accept defeat. Yet in the end Germany was beaten in the series of gigantic toe-to-toe battles in 1918. Battles in which the much-maligned British generals, under the command of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, employed the sophisticated ‘All Arms Battle’ tactics collectively developed over the preceding four years. Battles centred on the employment of massed artillery to suppress the ability of defending troops to fire on attacking troops. And yes, battles where the Australian Corps and New Zealand Division, both by then forged into brilliantly led veteran forces, set the benchmark for the Allies in the art of modern warfare. It was these battles that drained the last lifeblood from the German Army. But this was a world away from the irrelevancies of Gallipoli. A professional world away from blindly optimistic schemes sketched out without reference to the forces required to beat a dangerous and experienced enemy, the Turks, who had almost everything in their favour.
Crucial to an understanding of the failure at Gallipoli is an appreciation of the short comings of the British Army of 1915. The military technology, staff work, logistics, weaponry and tactics at Hamilton’s disposal were inadequate for the task. There were simply not enough guns at Gallipoli for the Allies to have any chance against Turkish troops that were well dug in, with barbed wire, machine guns and artillery support.
There were fifty-six 18-pdrs at Helles when I assumed command on the 29th May, and subsequently they were increased to seventy-two at the end of July. The total amount of ordinary 18-pdr ammunition I could therefore allot justifiably for the artillery preparation before an attack of our four British infantry divisions never exceeded 12,000 rounds. The complete absence of HE was severely felt, as shrapnel was of little use for destroying trenches, machine gun emplacements, etc. During June two batteries and during July two more batteries of 5″ howitzers arrived at Helles. Some of these howitzers were very old and worn by corrosion, and were consequently inaccurate. As for heavy artillery, practically speaking there was none! Consequently we had no heavy guns capable of replying to the Turkish heavy guns which enveloped us on three sides, and from whose fire our infantry and artillery suffered severely. My feelings as artillery commander, unable to give them anything like the support they would have had in France or Flanders, may be guessed. In Gallipoli the VIII Army Corps at Helles, which was composed of four British Divisions, never had enough field artillery or ammunition to support more than one Division, and never possessed sufficient heavy artillery to support more than one Infantry Brigade.9
Brigadier General Sir Hugh Simpson-Baikie, Headquarters, VIII Corps
There it was in a nutshell. The British Army triumphed on the Western Front because, as a crucial part of the development of the ‘All Arms Battle’, they eventually won the artillery war. At Gallipoli they never even got started: it was a campaign that needed hundreds of guns that did not exist, fired by gunners not yet trained, using complex artillery techniques that had not yet been invented, firing hundreds of thousands of shells not yet manufactured. It required infantry tactics not yet painfully developed in the heat of battle and support weapons not even imagined. It needed a logistical infrastructure that did not and probably never could exist in the eastern Mediterranean. It needed an experienced body of general and staff officers able to operate in a coherent fashion at all levels of command, who could analyse any prospective operations for practicality and pitfalls before issuing the orders in good time to allow lower echelons to carry out their own operational planning.
But it was 1915. Gallipoli shared the failings of every campaign launched in that benighted year. Indeed, it provided a checklist of the defining characteristics common to the other British Easterner military adventures in Mesopotamia, Salonika and East Africa in 1915: a lack of realistic goals; no coherent plan; the use of inexperienced troops; a failure to comprehend or properly disseminate maps and intelligence; negligible artillery support; inadequate logistical and medical arrangements; a gross underestimation of the enemy; easily disrupted communications; incompetent local commanders – all overlaid with lashings of misplaced confidence, leading to inexorable disaster. Gallipoli was damned before it began, and it ended at a level of catastrophe that could only be disguised by vainglorious bluster. Some humorists, even at the time, joked that the campaign was based on ‘Lemnos, Tenedos, Imbros and Chaos!’;10 others mythologised themselves as the victims of a tragedy beyond mortal control. Churchill was rightly pilloried in the aftermath of the failure at Gallipoli and his rebirth as a war leader during the Second World War is a testament to both his amazing political skills and the sheer forgetfulness of the average voter.
After the dust had settled, the military view of the Gallipoli campaign was largely negative throughout the inter-war years. Indeed, it was widely considered that daylight assaults on defended shores were little more than suicide and that they should not be considered except in desperation. Yet the complete British retreat from the Continent by June 1940 in the Second World War meant that landing operations against the German-occupied coastline of Europe would have to be considered. As a result, the Combined Operations Command was established to prepare plans for such offensives. By a coincidence the first director would be Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, who had served at the Dardanelles, although he was to be replaced by Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten in October 1941. Combined Operations developed a methodology that evinced considerable success in North Africa and Italy. But these were still sideshows and the real test would be the D-Day landings on the Normandy coast on 6 June 1944.
The genesis of D-Day was protracted, with plenty of planning time for the staff of the Royal Navy, Army and Royal Air Force. Experts of all kinds were drafted in to hammer out and polish all phases of the operations, with inter-service communications refined to ensure that the results dovetailed into a coherent whole. This entailed the charting of accurate maps and the collection of precise intelligence to give a detailed picture of the topography of the landing beaches. The Allies had to know the exact strength of the German forces and identify the strongpoints that could threaten the beachhead. They also had to locate the position of reserve units that would pour into the battleground once the Allies had landed and complex deception plans were created to try to confuse German High Command.
When it came to the practical aspects of beach landings it was the principles of the ‘All Arms Battle’, as used by the BEF on the Western Front in 1918, rather than the disasters of Gallipoli that acted as a template for the Allies. Modern landing craft were manoeuvred to crash on to the beach in concert and so minimise the perils of landing under heavy fire. The considerable technical developments in naval gunnery also allowed the Allies to effectively target, eliminate or suppress German batteries and machine gun posts. The whole of the landing area was smothered with plunging fire from rocket ships, while self-propelled guns, floating tanks and conventional guns were rushed ashore to ensure that the landing forces had immediate artillery support. Meanwhile, specialised airborne troops and commandos seized key tactical features. Above them in the skies massed bombers hit German troop concentrations and attempted to cut communications, while the fighters tried to secure the landing areas from German air raids. The main body of the troops was put ashore in the right place, in their correct formations and in a fit state to immediately engage the Germans. Above all, the intention was to seize a viable Normandy beachhead big enough to contain a force capable of fighting face to face with the German Army and with the potential to create a whole new Western Front. Finally, there would be no repeat of the logistical nightmare of Gallipoli. This time the Allies used prefabrica
ted Mulberry harbours, built to make a secure landing place which would allow reinforcements and supplies to be brought ashore during the crucial first phases of the operations while the PLUTO undersea pipe line secured their fuel supplies.
In all of this process the dire experiences of Gallipoli could have been cited as an example of how not to carry out combined operations on a hostile shore. For the failure of Gallipoli could not be risked again. However, the planners of the D-Day landings had learnt in a far more organic manner which, although partly drawing on the negative lessons of 1915, was more firmly grounded in the positive experiences and lessons of the combined operations already undertaken during the Second World War. Underpinning it all was the fact that the quality of staff work had improved immeasurably since 1915.
The complex planning and long gestation period that took place before D-Day throw into stark relief the truncated plans and inadequate preparations made prior to the Gallipoli operations. The Gallipoli campaign would never have been launched if a proper staff appreciation of operations had been carried out: of the enormity of the task in hand, the strength of the opposition, the nature of the terrain, the scale of the forces and the logistical back-up required to make it succeed. But thanks to political interference, lethally combined with the bullish optimism of generals who saw only opportunities, the Gallipoli campaign was launched into a void that guaranteed failure.