Young Titan

by Michael Shelden

  Asquith was so besotted with Venetia that he routinely divulged top-secret war plans to her in his letters. “This is very secret,” he would write, and then give the details of some confidential mission or troop movement, jeopardizing lives by his indiscretion. Indeed, his many letters to her are filled with passages that discuss the war as if it happened to be a mildly diverting parlor game, but one being reported to him secondhand like the moves in a long-distance chess game.

  He had no business fighting a war. Worried that the Royal Navy wasn’t getting into enough fights on the high seas, he issued a less than inspiring war command that made him sound more like an elderly aunt bossing a nephew than a leader directing vast armies: “As I told Winston last night . . . it is time that he bagged something, & broke some crockery.”8

  But if the prime minister couldn’t lead, who could? Of course, it didn’t take Winston long to decide that he would have to step in and fill the void. He had everything that his Cabinet colleagues lacked for war—youthful energy, battlefield experience, and the will to win. And some of them conceded that these were indeed his advantages, at least early on. In the opening months of the war when he seemed to be everywhere at once—meeting with an admiral here, discussing strategy with a general there—Lord Haldane wrote him, “Asquith said to me this afternoon that you were the equivalent of a large force in the field & this is true.”9

  Churchill took this praise to heart. He shocked the military, and most of the nation, when he abruptly decided to throw himself into combat as a field commander in all but name. As First Lord of the Admiralty, he wasn’t supposed to be on the bridge of a battleship under fire, much less commanding troops on the front lines. But on October 3, when he went to the Belgian port of Antwerp to observe the fierce fighting there, he ended up staying three days and leading the beleaguered forces as if he had suddenly been transformed into a general. He was under continuous and heavy fire, and the sheer violence of it—as well as the drama of a last stand against an overwhelming German force—awakened every fighting instinct in his body. Serving alongside Belgian troops as well as Royal Marines and units of the Royal Naval Division—which he had established in August—Churchill was determined to hold the city until reinforcements could arrive.

  He was so caught up in the mad energy of the moment that he seemed to forget everything else but the battle. An Italian war correspondent recalled seeing him moving among the troops dressed in a cloak and yachting cap and seemingly oblivious to the heavy shrapnel falling on all sides. Lacking sleep but with his mind spinning relentlessly, he came up with all kinds of ideas for defending the city—some good and some bad. The worst came when he wired Asquith requesting that he be allowed to resign as First Lord and be given “full powers of a commander of a detached force in the field.” In the heat of battle he lost all sense of priorities, thinking that holding Antwerp was everything. But the only priority that mattered to him at that second was winning.

  He was lucky to get out alive when a senior officer arrived to take command, enabling him to make his way back to London. The reaction to this adventure among his colleagues in the Cabinet ranged from disbelief to soaring admiration. Sir Edward Grey was bursting with pride. He wrote to Clemmie, “I feel a glow imparted by the thought that I am sitting next a Hero. I can’t tell you how much I admire his courage & gallant spirit & genius for war.”10

  Though Antwerp was later taken by the Germans, the battle delayed their advance toward the French coast, and they were prevented from seizing the Channel Ports. All the same, Antwerp’s fall soon took away the “glow” of Winston’s heroics, leaving him a figure of fun in some eyes. His exuberance in battle had misled him into thinking he alone could save the city, and his critics were quick to condemn him for leaving his work at the Admiralty to wage a hopeless fight in a Belgian port. H. A. Gwynne, the editor of the Morning Post, led an effort to hold Churchill solely responsible for what the paper called the “Antwerp blunder.” Gwynne and others were convinced that the First Lord had rushed into the battle and had placed British troops in danger to serve his own personal ambition for glory.

  “The whole adventure,” Gwynne wrote, was “a Churchill affair and does not seem to have been considered or thought over, or consented to, by the Cabinet.” The outraged editor sent letters to the prime minister and other Cabinet members demanding Winston’s dismissal. To the proprietor of his paper, he wrote of the First Lord, “Imagine our Fleet being commanded by a man of this caliber. A man who gets an idea into his head and without waiting to consider or think . . . involves us in a quite new expedition; and this at a time when every man we have to spare is wanted at the front.”11

  In fact, Churchill had gone to Antwerp after consulting closely with Kitchener and Grey, both of whom had agreed that it was vital to keep the Germans from entering the city for as long as possible. Churchill’s job had been to persuade the Belgians to keep up the fight, and in support of his mission, Kitchener had pledged to supply up to fifty thousand troops. When Asquith learned of the plan, he backed it entirely. “The intrepid Winston set off at midnight & ought to have reached Antwerp by about 9 this morning,” the prime minister had told Venetia on October 3. “If he is able to do himself justice in a foreign tongue, the Belges will have listened to a discourse the like of which they have never heard before. I cannot but think that he will stiffen them up to the sticking point.”

  For a while Churchill’s presence in the city was instrumental in maintaining the Belgian resistance to the Germans. “Winston succeeded in bucking up the Belges, who gave up their panicky idea of retreating,” wrote Asquith on October 5. But by the time Churchill left Antwerp on the sixth, the resolve of the exhausted Belgian army was already crumbling, and the city fell four days later. Asquith didn’t find any fault with Winston’s efforts, placing the blame on the Belgian forces, and on the French for failing to provide more support.12

  In later years Churchill defended his actions at Antwerp but admitted that “had I been ten years older, I should have hesitated long before accepting so unpromising a task.”13

  History is full of leaders who send others to die without facing the fire themselves, yet some of Winston’s fiercest critics singled him out for ridicule for doing the opposite. At the time of the battle for Antwerp, however, those Cabinet ministers who were fully aware of the facts felt nothing but admiration for Churchill’s courage and resourcefulness. “He is a wonderful creature,” Asquith said of him on October 7, “with a curious dash of schoolboy simplicity . . . and what someone said of genius—‘a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain.’ ”14

  * * *

  The Royal Navy that Churchill helped to build in his thirties suffered its share of setbacks, but it held its own against the German naval threat and would emerge triumphant at the end of the First World War. In many ways the early months of the war posed the greatest danger. A weak navy might have been caught off guard and marginalized early on; the landings of the British Expeditionary Force in France might have come under attack, and the troops pushed back into the sea. But by the end of 1914 the risk of sudden and catastrophic knockout blows had been eased by the barbed-wire standoff on the Western Front.

  Afraid of risks, many of the generals and politicians running the war were content to let the stalemate play out, and to hope that by some stroke of luck, or perhaps the occasional sacrifice of thousands in an attack of brute force, they would create a breakthrough. Churchill hated this kind of grinding warfare and wanted to do something innovative in its place. He was looking for a dramatic way to shift the battle lines and deliver decisive blows instead of pinpricks. Unimpressed with many of the leaders at the top, he decided to seek help from someone whose unconventional views he admired—Jacky Fisher.

  Over the initial objections of the king, who thought he was too old and too erratic, Admiral Fisher returned to active service at Churchill’s invitation in late October 1914. Bringing him back to the Admiralty would turn out to be Winston’s worst decision o
f the war. The king’s fears were justified. Age was starting to catch up with Fisher, who was nearly seventy-four, and was as difficult as ever—if not more so. By the beginning of 1915 some of his subordinates were beginning to wonder what he could possibly contribute to the war effort.

  “In reality he does nothing,” Captain Herbert Richmond wrote of Fisher in January 1915. “He goes home and sleeps in the afternoon. He is old and worn-out and nervous. It is ill to have the destinies of an empire in the hands of a failing old man, anxious for popularity, afraid of any local mishap which may be put down to his dispositions. It is sad.”15

  Churchill may have thought he needed Fisher’s advice, but it would take him longer than Captain Richmond to realize that the old admiral was “worn-out.” Meanwhile, Churchill thought that he had stumbled on a great plan for changing Britain’s fortunes in the war. As was so often the case, Asquith felt it necessary to share the latest top-secret developments with Venetia. “His volatile mind,” Asquith said of Winston on December 5, 1914, “is at present set on Turkey & Bulgaria, & he wants to organize a heroic adventure against Gallipoli and the Dardanelles.”16

  At first, Asquith was firmly set against the idea. The narrow Turkish strait of the Dardanelles was a long way from the Western Front. There were advantages to subduing Turkey (Germany’s ally) and then enabling Russia (Britain’s ally) to move freely through the Dardanelles and into the Mediterranean. It was the kind of grand diversion that was meant to force Germany to shift its attention away from the Western Front. But what if it didn’t do much to improve Russia’s fortunes, or to threaten Germany? Though the strait was only thirty-eight miles long, the Turks could be expected to defend every mile with all the force they could muster. They were well aware that if an enemy fleet ever managed to get through, it could quickly reach Constantinople and attack the city at will.

  Churchill himself soon had second thoughts. At the end of December he suggested another target closer to home—the little German island of Borkum, in the North Sea, just off the coast of the mainland. A surprise invasion of it was sure to shake things up, he told Asquith. “Its retention by us would be intolerable to the enemy, and would in all probability bring about the sea battle.” Something new had to be tried, he emphasized. “Are there not other alternatives than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?”17

  For the next couple of weeks Winston promoted the Borkum attack, while Jacky Fisher and Lord Kitchener took up the Dardanelles idea. On January 12, Fisher wrote a friend that a combined land and sea assault on the strait and the Gallipoli peninsula could work so well—especially with a large commitment of troops—that “we could count on an easy and quick arrival at Constantinople.” But Winston decided to be more cautious and suggested to Fisher that they give up the Dardanelles idea. It didn’t matter whether it would be easier to fight the Turks than the Germans, he said. “Germany is the foe,” he wrote, “& it is bad war to seek cheaper victories & easier antagonists.”18

  Churchill would have done well to stick to that view, but over the next few days Fisher won him over to the Dardanelles plan when he suggested that the brand-new battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth could take part in the assault. She was armed with the 15-inch guns that Winston was so proud of, and he liked the idea that these guns could be tested at long range on the Turkish forts defending the strait. It made all the difference to him because he doubted that the Turks would stand fast after witnessing the damage that a powerful barrage from the Royal Navy’s mightiest warship could inflict on their forts. In this he was influenced by his experience in Antwerp, where the constant fire from German artillery had been so effective in breaking the will of the Belgian defenders.

  In a secret memo prepared for the Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia, Churchill wrote that the plan would involve “the systematic & deliberate reduction of the forts by the long range fire of the 15" guns of the Queen Elizabeth, followed up by direct attacks by old battleships. It is expected that the operation will take 3 or 4 weeks, & it is hoped that it may be similar in character to the methods by which the Germans destroyed . . . the forts of the outer line at Antwerp.”19

  On January 13 Winston gave his Cabinet colleagues an explanation of how the navy could take out the forts “one by one” and establish control over the strait. Lloyd George was the first to respond, saying he “liked the plan.” Kitchener said “it was worth trying.” Then Asquith gave his approval, and soon a fleet of more than a dozen battleships—most of them older vessels—were being readied for the assault.

  Almost immediately Fisher began to reconsider the plan, worried that it might fail. But others in the government began to grow more enthusiastic about its chances for success. Near the end of January, Edward Grey thought that “the Turks would be paralyzed with fear when they heard that the forts were being destroyed one by one.” In late February the prime minister was ready to take “a lot of risks,” as he told Venetia, to make the plan work. “I am strongly of the opinion,” he wrote her, “that the chance of forcing the Dardanelles, & occupying Constantinople, & cutting Turkey in half, and arousing on our side the whole Balkan peninsula, presents such a unique opportunity that we ought to hazard a lot elsewhere rather than forgo it.”20

  He was wrong. It was a disaster from start to finish. The Queen Elizabeth’s guns performed well in February, but when the older battleships moved into the strait on March 18 to attack additional forts they ran into mines, and three were lost in a matter of a few hours. As the situation went from bad to worse in the next few months, mistake after mistake was made, by both the navy and especially the army, which tried to clear Gallipoli of Turkish troops who proved to be far more disciplined and determined than the British had been willing to believe.

  Beginning on April 25, Australian and New Zealand troops joined a large French and British force to fight the Turks, and though both sides showed extraordinary bravery, they found themselves bogged down in the same kind of standoff that prevailed on the Western Front. Tens of thousands died as the fighting dragged through the rest of the year. The rugged terrain, harsh weather, and military incompetence turned Asquith’s “unique opportunity” into one long misadventure that did nothing to change the course of the war.

  * * *

  The blame for this tragic campaign was widely shared, but it was Churchill who was made to pay the price of failure. The young titan had pushed his luck too far. So, too, had others, but this setback was so big that a suitably big scapegoat was needed, and Winston was it. As soon as things began to go wrong, little time was wasted in pointing the finger of blame in his direction. It was in May 1915 that his colleagues and rivals began turning on him.

  As prime minister, Asquith had been the one to decide that the risk was worth taking. It was his responsibility to accept the consequences of failure. But he evaded it, as did Kitchener, who mishandled the Gallipoli campaign. As for Jacky Fisher, he would later pretend that he had been opposed to the Dardanelles plan all along. Because of his youth and his reputation for taking risks, Winston made a more convincing military bungler to a public unaware of the deliberations leading up to the disaster. It was easier to assume that he was at fault rather than such old hands as Asquith, Kitchener, and Fisher.

  Jacky was the first to turn on him. The admiral lost his nerve after the battleship HMS Goliath was torpedoed by the Turks on May 13, with the loss of five hundred men. The old admiral didn’t want merely to argue for a change of strategy or a complete withdrawal. He wanted to disassociate himself from the whole affair. On May 15 he sent Winston and Asquith his letter of resignation. Winston begged him to return, but he refused, writing melodramatically, “You will remain. I SHALL GO.”

  Then Fisher turned nasty and set out to destroy Winston by feeding incendiary comments to his enemies. “HE’S A REAL DANGER!” Fisher said of Churchill in a letter to the Tory leader Andrew Bonar Law. “W.C. MUST go at all costs! AT ONCE.” He warned that “a great national disaster was in the making” because of the failure in
the eastern Mediterranean, and he laid all the blame at Winston’s feet, saying, “I refuse to have anything to do with him.”21

  Churchill could have seen this coming. Everything that he had worked so hard for was jeopardized by the trust he had placed in the crusty old admiral, and by his failure to see the dangers lurking in a poorly conceived expedition far from the main center of action. But it was too late. He had made a dire mistake in war, and the consequence of such a mistake was usually fatal on the battlefield. In his case it meant disgrace, which was a kind of death to him, proud as he was.

  With astounding suddenness, his meteoric rise flamed out. The crash turned everything upside down. Under pressure for the government’s failures, Asquith was ready to do anything to save his premiership. His Conservative foes knew he was vulnerable, and they knew that Fisher’s resignation had exposed the flaws in the wartime government. “Suddenly the Ministerial edifice has crumbled,” wrote Lord Curzon on May 18, “kicked over by old Jack Fisher.”22

  Lloyd George didn’t see any sentimental reason for helping Winston. Sacrificing him meant that Asquith and Lloyd George could hold on to power. “Churchill will have to go,” the chancellor told his mistress on May 15. “He will be a ruined man.” As for his own responsibility in the crisis, Lloyd George insisted that it was only “very unwillingly” that the Cabinet had given its “consent to a bombardment of the Dardanelles forts.”