Churchill would not have believed he was describing his own route to ‘psychic dynamite’, and he may not have been a prophet in the Old Testament sense; but he had remarkable intuition. Many of his contemporaries recognized it, including Violet Bonham Carter, the daughter of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith and a close friend of Churchill. She wrote that her father was ‘deeply impressed’ by Churchill’s forecast of the beginning of the First World War. Churchill, then in his thirties, provided a prediction ‘uncanny in its exactitude’. Three years later, the sequences and timing he listed in his analysis ‘were almost literally verified’, Carter wrote. ‘Once again Winston’s daemon was “telling him things.”’45
That ‘daemon’ also gave Churchill a strong intuitive understanding of military strategy.46 As he moved through the ranks of government in the years ahead, his tactical understanding would be sharpened on the biting edge of failure as well as success.
3
From the Admiralty to the Trenches
What vile & wicked folly & barbarism it all is.
WINSTON CHURCHILL, IN A LETTER TO HIS WIFE, CLEMENTINE, 15 SEPTEMBER 1909
‘AFTER HIS ADVENTURES in the Boer War, Winston Churchill was the most petted young man in England,’ writes René Kraus.1 But Churchill had little time to rest in the caress of glory. He was moving inexorably towards headlines that would blare his humiliation and downfall. He would soon be reminded that public acclaim is fickle and that no one should trust his heart to the fleeting siren of fame.
Churchill learned this truth with wrenching painfulness slightly more than a decade after his return from South Africa as a conquering hero. Through the ensuing years, he rose through the governmental ranks to his initial major wartime leadership role as First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War.
The run-up to that conflict included rising tensions in the Balkans, sabre rattling among the European powers in North Africa and a naval armaments race between Britain and Germany. In August 1911, at the ebb of one of the many crises that had brought the world to the brink of war, Churchill – now thirty-seven and bearing the stresses of his role as Home Secretary – went to Somerset, the site of Prime Minister Asquith’s manor house, for a much-needed rest. It was ‘a place of magical beauty, stillness and peace’, wrote Violet Bonham Carter. But during those tense days, three years before the outbreak of war, Churchill was restless even while looking out on the soft countryside and meditating on the lines of a poem by A. E. Housman:
On the idle hill of summer,
Sleepy with the sound of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.
Far and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth go by,
Dear to friends and food for powder,
Soldiers marching, all to die.2
Housman’s verse was so evocative to Churchill’s soul because, as he wrote later, ‘I could not think of anything else but the peril of war.’3 Churchill went about his duties, but the looming conflict was the ‘only … field of interest fiercely illuminated in my mind’.4
Seated on a hilltop, Churchill surveyed ‘the smiling country which stretches around Mells’5 as Housman’s words roamed through his mind. Viewed against the backdrop of Churchill’s concerns about war, Housman’s lines become spectres.
In 1920, two years after the end of the First World War, Churchill would return to Mells and would paint a portrait there of an archway leading to a pergola washed in subtle violets. But in 1911 there was no settling tone – only ‘anxieties’, as Churchill himself put it.6
Meanwhile, Asquith was wrestling with conflicts within the Committee of Imperial Defence, where some believed that the Admiralty was failing to work cooperatively with the Imperial General Staff. Lord Haldane, the Secretary of State for War and one of Asquith’s dearest friends, told the prime minister he would no longer bear responsibility if the clash between his staff and the Admiralty could not be quieted. In September, Asquith went to Scotland, hoping to find a measure of calm on the golf course. However, ‘his mind was preoccupied with the change at the Admiralty.’7
Churchill joined Asquith in Scotland on 27 September, and they golfed in ‘golden autumn sunshine with sea gulls circling overhead’.8 Asquith’s mood began to lift, and laughter rang over the links. However, tension returned with a visit from Haldane.
Churchill was called away for an evening on Home Office business, but he returned by the next afternoon and again went golfing with Prime Minister Asquith.
When the men came in from the links, Violet Bonham Carter wrote, ‘I saw in Winston’s face a radiance like the sun.’
‘Will you come out for a walk with me – at once?’ he asked.
‘You don’t want tea?’
‘No, I don’t want tea. I don’t want anything – anything in the world. Your father has just offered me the Admiralty.’
Never had Carter seen such happiness and fulfilment in her friend.
‘This is the big thing,’ Churchill said, ‘the biggest thing that has ever come my way – the chance I should have chosen before all others. I shall pour into it everything I’ve got.’9
As Churchill walked back to his guest quarters, he looked out at the Firth of Forth, the vast waterway opening Scotland to the North Sea. In the distance, he saw two British battleships, moving under plumes of steam. ‘They seemed invested with a new significance to me,’ he later recalled.10
BIBLICAL GUIDANCE
As Churchill entered his room, his head still spinning from his appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty, his first thought was of the danger facing his nation. ‘Peace-loving, unthinking, little-prepared’ Britain, he had always felt, was characterized by ‘power and virtue’ and a mission among the nations ‘of good sense and fair-play’.11 Then his mind shifted to Germany and how he had been enthralled in 1907 when he had watched fifty thousand soldiers march in a thundering military display. Churchill contemplated Germany’s ‘cold, patient, ruthless calculations’. He recalled ‘the army corps I had watched tramp past, wave after wave of valiant manhood’. He remembered another time when he had observed manoeuvres at Würzburg consisting ‘of the thousands of strong horses dragging cannon and great howitzers up the ridges and along the roads’.12
With these thoughts racing through his mind, Churchill’s eye landed on a large Bible on his bedside table. Opening at random to Deuteronomy 9, he read these words:
Hear, O Israel: Thou art to pass over Jordan this day, to go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself, cities great and fenced up to heaven, a people great and tall, the children of the Anakims, whom thou knowest, and of whom thou hast heard say, Who can stand before the children of Anak! Understand therefore this day, that the LORD thy God is he which goeth over before thee; as a consuming fire he shall destroy them, and he shall bring them down before thy face: so shalt thou drive them out, and destroy them quickly, as the LORD hath said unto thee. Speak not thou in thine heart, after that the LORD thy God hath cast them out from before thee, saying, For my righteousness the LORD hath brought me in to possess this land: but for the wickedness of these nations the LORD doth drive them out from before thee. Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land: but for the wickedness of these nations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee, and that he may perform the word which the LORD sware unto thy fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.13
Churchill later said that ‘it seemed a message full of reassurance’.
Having observed the German military manoeuvres first-hand in the company of Kaiser Wilhelm, Churchill may well have focused on the description of the Anakim as ‘a people great and tall’. He had been impressed by the Teutonic soldiers and had noted their prowess with their powerful weapons. Now as he contemplated the possibility of having to stand against such a formidable power, he may have been tempted to adapt the words of Moses – ‘Who can stand before the chil
dren of Anak?’ – and ask himself, ‘Who can stand before the children of Germany?’ Whereas Moses had anchored his hope in the ‘consuming fire’ of an almighty God, Prime Minister Asquith apparently laid his hopes on the Royal Navy and had now set the Royal Navy squarely on the shoulders of Winston Churchill.
Reading in Deuteronomy, Churchill may have found his reassurance in the overwhelming power of God, who had promised Moses that God himself would be the Great Displacer, going before the armies of his covenant people, Israel, and dislodging the enemy from the ground it occupied.
What Churchill could not have foreseen in that moment was the German leader who would arise in years to come and who would turn his back on God, try to eradicate the Jews, and impose his own kingdom (Reich) in the place of God’s. He would try to use the Church to advance his goals, and when the faithful Church refused, he would try to destroy it.
As Churchill read this portion of Deuteronomy 9, he would have noted God’s warning about taking pride in victory. As human conquerors, men were not to take credit for victory or to declare that it was because of their ‘righteousness’ that God had favoured them over their enemy. Indeed, the divinely wrought victory would come not because of the superior worthiness of the victorious nation but because of the God-defying wickedness of the conquered.
Churchill was a prideful man, but not in the style of Lucifer, who sought to ascend to the very throne of God to displace the rightful Ruler. Beneath Churchill’s hubris was a heart of humility, sown perhaps through rejection by his father and further wrought by seasons of setbacks that were soon to follow.
Hitler, on the other hand, would one day try to present himself as a new messiah, and that same impulse was already in the heart of his spiritual predecessor, Kaiser Wilhelm, in 1911. Of course, as René Kraus aptly notes, ‘What mortal man would not become a megalomaniac if he were deified day in and day out as “the world’s most glorious prince”’, as Wilhelm had been?14 Ultimately, the Kaiser’s armies would not prevail, but only after the European continent had been drenched with the blood of its rising generations.
There was much puffery associated with being First Lord of the Admiralty – plumed hats, cannon salutes and acclamation as the leader of the world’s greatest navy. But as Churchill would soon learn, the higher the position, the greater the potential for humiliation.
THE DARDANELLES DISASTER
The winter of 1914 would inscribe the most painful of memories on Churchill’s mind, as an icy grip throttled the combatants in the First World War. ‘Russia, mighty steam-roller, hope of suffering France and prostrate Belgium – Russia is falling,’ he wrote.15 The wintery blast had frozen Russia, cutting her off from her allies, including Britain, and rendering her unable to receive their aid. Ice covered the seas, and where there was open water, there lay the Germans. Turkey, as one of Germany’s allies, had slammed shut the other access route to Russia: the Straits of the Dardanelles. Something had to be done.
Three months into the First World War, Britain and her allies had already lost about a million men, and Churchill was gravely concerned about the terrible human toll in the trenches along the Western Front. Meanwhile, in the east, the Turks were pressuring the Russians in the Caucasus. Churchill believed that freeing the Russian military to open a new front in the east by attacking Berlin would prevent more soldiers in the west from being sent to ‘chew barbed wire’.
Lord Hankey, who held the dual position of secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence and secretary to the War Council, shared Churchill’s concern. Independently, they wrote to Prime Minister Asquith about the necessity of breaking the trench-warfare stalemate.
Meanwhile, the Russian Grand Duke Nicolas wrote an urgent appeal to Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War, asking for immediate action to pull away the Turkish armies that were closing in on Russian forces in the Caucasus. Kitchener wrote to Churchill, suggesting that ‘the only place that a demonstration might have some effect in stopping reinforcements going east would be the Dardanelles’,16 the narrow strait connecting the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara in north-western Turkey. Such a manoeuvre also would open the way to the Turkish capital of Constantinople (Istanbul) and the Black Sea.
Kitchener committed Britain to action by telegraphing the grand duke that ‘steps will be taken to make a demonstration against the Turks’.17 Though Kitchener had no troops available to support an operation in the Dardanelles, he embraced a plan proposed by Hankey for a naval expedition ‘to bombard and take the Gallipoli Peninsula, with Constantinople as its objective’.18 The optimistic hope was that ‘the mere threat of naval bombardment would force the Ottoman Empire out of the war’.19 The British battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth had recently been equipped with fifteen-inch guns, and it was proposed that they be tested by using Turkish military installations for target practice. However, as Lord Hankey noted in his War Council minutes, Kitchener stipulated that ‘we could leave off the bombardment if it did not prove effective’.20 Thus, the War Council voted unanimously in favour of the operation.
The conclusion seemed logical and clear: remove Turkey from the war, and the Dardanelles would be open all the way to the Marmara Sea, through the Bosporus, into the Black Sea and onwards to the doorstep of Russia.
Churchill conceived a bold plan that found great support from the War Cabinet. He proposed using a combined navy and army attack to break through the Straits and march on Constantinople. If it worked, Churchill was confident it could force Turkey to surrender, tipping the balance of power in favour of the Allies and bringing the First World War to an early end. On paper, the strategy seemed inventive and the best shortcut to victory.
In the auspicious Admiralty buildings, the ‘possibilities seemed limitless’.21 In the Dardanelles, the initial bombardment seemed successful. Constantinople braced for an almost certain assault. The Turkish Sultan readied to move himself and his entourage away from the city.
On 18 March 1915, fourteen British and four French battleships sailed into the Narrows and furiously pounded the Turkish positions. Following a line of minesweepers, the fleet eased its way up the Straits. Not all the mines were destroyed, however, and three battleships went down. Two others were disabled.
The sudden turn in the battle stunned the British fleet commander, Admiral John de Robeck, who suspended the attack until ground troops could be deployed and given an opportunity to capture the high ground along the Gallipoli peninsula. This unexpected pause ultimately led to the defeat of the British in the Dardanelles.
Commander Roger Keyes, chief of staff for the Dardanelles expedition, believed that the Turks were already beaten and that a ‘sweeping force’ to ‘reap the fruits of our efforts’ was what was needed. In his 1934 memoirs, Keyes says he believed that ‘from the 4th April, 1915, onwards, the Fleet could have forced the Straits, and, with losses trifling in comparison with those the Army suffered, could have entered the [Marmara Sea] with sufficient force to destroy the Turko-German Fleet.’22
Enver Pasha, the Turkish Minister of War at the time of the Dardanelles operation, agreed:
If the English had only had the courage to rush more ships through the Dardanelles they could have got to Constantinople; but their delay enabled us thoroughly to fortify the Peninsula, and in six weeks’ time we had taken down there over two hundred Austrian Skoda guns.23
Despite the failed naval attack, the Allies went ahead with troop landings on 25 April 1915. The British and French, along with troops from Australia and New Zealand, established two beachheads, but were unable to advance inland. Indecision on the part of the Allied command gave the Turks time to bring reinforcements and deepen the stalemate. Finally, on 7 December 1915, the British began evacuating their positions.
Before it was over, more than half a million casualties had been suffered on the battlefield – about 250,000 on each side. Of the 480,000 Allied soldiers sent to Gallipoli, 46,000 died there. With the failure of the British and French warships to advance through the
Dardanelles Strait, and the resulting evacuation of the ground troops, Gallipoli was regarded as a massive defeat for the British. Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, was made the principal scapegoat, largely because of the loss of the battleships at the beginning of the campaign.
Unable to call upon exculpatory evidence from Cabinet meetings and correspondence that would have shown his true role in the operation, Churchill honourably resigned the Admiralty, though he later said, ‘The archives of the Admiralty will show in utmost detail the part I have played in all the great transactions that have taken place. It is to them that I look for my defence.’24
With one hundred years of hindsight, the evidence today shows that the failure of the Gallipoli campaign was due to mismanagement and division within the War Cabinet. Churchill had asked for ground troops to be deployed along with the naval bombardment, but his request was initially refused. Then, just days before the planned attack, the troop support was granted, but with only half the number Churchill said he needed. Even after the ships were sunk, he wanted to advance the naval attack, but he was instructed to delay until the army arrived. By the time the ground forces were in position, too much time had passed, and the Turks had prepared their defences for the attack.
‘Time will vindicate my administration of the Admiralty,’ Churchill said at the time, ‘and assign me my due share in the vast series of preparations and operations which have secured us the command of the seas.’25
In a 2013 Discovery Channel documentary on the Gallipoli campaign, Peter Doyle – a military historian, geologist and battlefield specialist – suggested that the campaign never would have succeeded even with the best leadership because the Turkish forces held advantages of terrain over the beachheads on which the Allies landed. Still, the debate about Gallipoli continues.
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