Officers on other ships assumed that a lucky howitzer gunner had hit Bouvet’s magazine. The six newly arrived battleships bombarded the banks; by four o’clock enemy fortress fire had ceased altogether and the British minesweepers advanced. They were working skillfully, cutting mine cables with their kites, when a howitzer shell landed among them; then they panicked and turned about. Another line of trawlers advanced; the same thing happened. This was irritating, but hardly worrisome. Graver by far was the misadventure of Inflexible, which was mysteriously hit at 4:41 P.M. not far from the place where Bouvet had gone down. Listing heavily to starboard, Inflexible left the battle line. De Robeck suspected a mine. Less than five minutes later a third battleship, Irresistible, was struck near the same spot. She, too, was out of action. Now senior officers were both alarmed and mystified. The trawlers had swept these waters. De Robeck believed there was only one explanation: the enemy was floating mines down with the current. He broke off action and ordered a general retirement. During the withdrawal a fourth man-of-war, Ocean, was lost the same way and in the same waters as Bouvet, Inflexible, and Irresistible.
Keyes, who stayed behind to direct the rescue of the stricken vessels, moving back and forth in a cutter by the light of a few surviving Turkish searchlights, was far from discouraged. Both banks of the Dardanelles were quiet. He had, he wrote afterward, “a most indelible impression that we were in the presence of a beaten foe. I thought he was beaten at 2 P.M. I knew he was beaten at 4 P.M.—and at midnight I knew with still greater certainty that he was absolutely beaten; and it only remained for us to organize a proper sweeping force and devise some means of dealing with the drifting mines to reap the fruits of our efforts. I felt that the guns of the forts and batteries and the concealed howitzers and mobile field guns were no longer a menace. Mines moored and drifting about could, and must, be overcome.”93 Returning to the Queen Elizabeth, he was, therefore, astounded to find de Robeck distraught. His career was ruined, the admiral moaned; his losses would never be forgiven; as soon as the Admiralty saw his action report, he would be relieved and dismissed from the service. Keyes replied that Churchill would never act like that. The day had been anything but a disaster. Except for the crew of Bouvet, fewer than seventy sailors had been hit. The disabled ships could be repaired; all were destined for the scrap heap anyway. Obviously the next step was to convert British destroyers into sweepers—the tackle, wire mesh, and kites were available on Malta—and continue the attack. They were bound to break through.
The enemy agreed. De Robeck’s misfortune, they knew, was a freak. His four unlucky ships had been hit because they had sailed too close to shore. Ten days earlier a Turkish colonel had supervised the laying of a string of twenty mines parallel to the Asian bank of the Dardanelles, just inside the slack water. The British sweepers had missed them, but they weren’t much of an obstacle; in skirting them the Allied warships would still have an eight-thousand-yard-wide channel in which to maneuver. Surely, the Turks reasoned, the English admiral would not repeat his error. British fleets had ruled the world’s waves for two hundred years. They could hardly be stopped by the shattered defenses left at the Narrows. The Turkish guns still in service were almost out of ammunition—some were completely out—and no more shells were available. Once the Allies were past Chanak they would face nothing but a few ancient smooth-bore bronze cannon aimed in the wrong direction. Mines would not trouble them. The Turks had none left. Those which had been laid in the Dardanelles had been collected from mines which the Russians had been floating down the Black Sea in hopes of blowing up the Goeben and Breslau.
Already the exodus from Constantinople had begun. Gold, art treasures, and official archives had been moved to Eskişehir, in western Turkey. Two special trains, their fires banked, stood ready in the station at Uskudar, just across the Bosporus, to carry the sultan, his harem, his suite, foreign ambassadors, and wealthy pashas and beys into the interior. There was an air of panic in the streets. The city’s two arsenals, visible from the water, could be easily destroyed by naval gunfire. After the war the Turkish general staff declared that “a naval attack executed with rapidity and vigor” would have found the capital’s garrison “impotent to defend it,” and Enver Pasha, Turkey’s wartime military dictator, added: “If the English had only had the courage to rush more ships through the Dardanelles they could have got to Constantinople.” The Goeben and Breslau had weighed anchor and were preparing to steam away across the Black Sea. Otto Liman von Sanders, the senior German general on this front, said afterward that if de Robeck had ordered a renewal of his attack on March 19, he would have found the city undefended. “The course of the World War,” he said, “would have been given such a turn in the spring of 1915 that Germany and Austria would have had to continue the struggle without Turkey.” Keyes steamed through the strait in 1925. His eyes filled. He said: “My God, it would have been even easier than I thought. We simply couldn’t have failed… and because we didn’t try, another million lives were thrown away and the war went on for another three years.”94
He had sensed this at the time. So had Churchill. Far from recalling de Robeck, when Winston read his report of the March 18 action he immediately dispatched four more battleships to his command. The French similarly replaced the Bouvet with the Henry IV. The French admiral, unlike the British, was eager to return to the Narrows. Jacky Fisher was not. He had waxed hot and cold on the operation, and Winston never knew, from one day to the next, what stand his first sea lord was going to take. Before the struggle in the Narrows he had grumbled, “The more I consider the Dardanelles, the less I like it.” Yet after the battle it was Fisher, not Churchill, who first proposed to make good the British losses with new battleships. “De Robeck is really better than Carden,” he said, “so Providence is with us.” On the afternoon of March 19, when the Admiralty’s director of naval intelligence brought them newly intercepted German messages, providing details of the shell shortage in the Narrows forts, Fisher read the report aloud, waved it over his head, and shouted: “By God, I’ll go through tomorrow!” Winston scanned it and said: “That means they’ve come to the end of their ammunition.” Fisher danced a jig and cried again: “Tomorrow! We shall probably lose six ships, but I’m going through!” Yet a few hours later, at a somber meeting of the War Council, he declared that it was impossible to “explain away” the losses of such great vessels, that he had always feared that the price of forcing the Dardanelles would be twelve sunken battleships, and that he would prefer to lose them elsewhere.95
What troubled him? It was Gallipoli. He cried to Lloyd George: “The Dardanelles! Futile without soldiers!” And he said: “Somebody will have to land on Gallipoli sooner or later.” Before the attack he had sent Churchill a memorandum: “Are we going to Constantinople or are we not? If NOT—then don’t send half a dozen battleships to the bottom which would be better applied at Cuxhaven or Borkum. If YES—then push the military co-operation with all speed & make the demonstration with all possible despatch at both extremities of the Gallipoli Peninsula.” Admiral Jackson concurred and set forth his reasons: “To advance further with a rush over unswept minefields and in waters commanded at short range by heavy guns, howitzers, and torpedo-tubes, must involve serious losses in ships and men, and will not achieve the object of making the Straits a safe waterway for the transports. The Gallipoli peninsula must be cleared of the enemy’s artillery before this is achieved…. The time has now arrived to make use of military forces to occupy the Gallipoli peninsula, and clear away the enemy on that side. With the peninsula in our possession, the concealed batteries on the Asiatic side, which are less formidable, could be dealt with more easily… and the troops should be of great assistance in the demolition of the fortress’s guns.”96
This was, of course, a gross distortion of the situation. No one had suggested rushing over unswept minefields, the battleships were invulnerable to the shore batteries in the Narrows, and the artillery at the mouth of the strait, which had been cast
in the days of sailing ships, was useless even against trawlers, whose helmsmen could steer beyond their range. Nevertheless, Fisher had a point. Eventually someone would have to occupy Gallipoli. That was why Churchill, supported by a majority of the cabinet, had wanted to send out the Twenty-ninth Division and the Australians and New Zealanders (Anzacs) in February. After Kitchener had vetoed that, the operation became what Winston called “a legitimate war gamble.” It was a good gamble. Liddell Hart has described it as a “sound and far-sighted conception, marred by a chain of errors in execution almost unrivalled even in British history.” Once Constantinople fell, the Turks would have been unable to fortify the peninsula. Russians—and, almost certainly, new Balkan armies—would have been lunging across their frontiers. Had the czar not been a dolt, the conquest of Gallipoli would by now have been complete. Peter Wright, a member of the War Council, later wrote: “Our navy was in command of the sea; the Greeks were eager to join us and attack in the peninsula with their whole army. The Gallipoli campaign should have succeeded without the loss of a single English soldier.”97
Before the year was out it would cost over a quarter-million Allied casualties, counting 47,000 Frenchmen sacrificed in support operations. All were lost in vain; every inch of the peninsula would remain in enemy hands. The lion’s share of the blame must be laid at the door of Lord Kitchener. Unlike French, Haig, and Wilson, mesmerized by the butchery in France, K of K grasped the possibilities in the east. He had told the War Council that if the fleet could not “get through the straits unaided, the Army ought to see the business through.”98 Yet he had been evasive when Churchill argued passionately for a combined military and naval operation, and, at a time when a relatively small British expedition could have done the job, he had mulishly refused to release the idle Twenty-ninth Division. Gallipoli was no natural fortress. Except for a series of jutting heights known as Sari Bair, it was relatively flat and largely barren, covered with stony soil, coarse scrub, a few olive trees, and scattered flocks of sheep and goats. Thinly held, as it was before the tumult in the Narrows alerted the Turks, Gallipoli could have been seized in a few days, almost without bloodshed.
Now that England was committed in the Mediterranean, with Grey telling the council that failure there “would be morally equivalent to a great defeat,” Kitchener, speaking as secretary for war, told the startled cabinet that “the military situation is now sufficiently secure to justify the despatch of the XXIX Division.” The trench fighting at Neuve Chapelle was at its height; barring unexpected developments there, nineteen thousand Tommies could embark five days hence. The war minister, a firm believer in locking the barn door after the horse has escaped, had also decided to commit the Anzacs to Gallipoli. Altogether, counting the Egyptian garrison and the Royal Marines, the “Mediterranean Expeditionary Force,” as he called it, would number over seventy thousand. The council was excited; as Churchill wrote afterward, “Everybody’s blood was up.” The commanding general would be Kitchener’s protégé and Winston’s old friend, Ian Hamilton. K of K told Hamilton: “If the Fleet gets through, Constantinople will fall of itself and you will have won, not a battle, but the war.”99
Asquith thought Hamilton “a sanguine enthusiastic person, with a good deal of superficial charm… but there is too much feather in his brain.” His performance in small wars had been superb. He had fought well at Majuba, on India’s North-West Frontier, and in South Africa, and had been a keen military observer in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. None of this was evident in his appearance. He was scrawny, bowlegged, and birdlike in his movements, and his manner was almost effeminate. He also wrote poetry and kept a voluminous, gossipy diary, which diminished him in the eyes of bluff officer types. Clementine disliked him, but Winston regarded him as dashing and chivalrous; he wrote Kitchener of the appointment: “No choice could be more agreeable to the Admiralty, and to the Navy.”100 Churchill wanted him in the eastern Mediterranean, and he wanted him there fast; on the first lord’s orders, a special train would take the general to Dover, he would cross the Channel on H.M.S. Foresight, another special train would rush him from Calais to Marseilles, and there H.M.S. Phaeton, a fast cruiser, would pick him up and carry him to his command. Churchill saw him off at Charing Cross Station, whence Chinese Gordon had left on his own fateful journey to Egypt over thirty years earlier. Because of Kitchener’s touchiness, Hamilton explained, there would be no communication between him and the Admiralty. Winston said nothing, but it was a deplorable decision. The train pulled away amid gay shouts, and the dainty general settled down to study a prewar report on the Dardanelles, an out-of-date Turkish army handbook, and a highly inaccurate map of Gallipoli.
Roger Keyes, John de Robeck, and Ian Hamilton
Heavy seas kept de Robeck’s fleet idle on March 19, but he and Keyes put the time to good use; on the following day the admiral reported to Churchill that sixty-two destroyers were being converted into mine-sweepers, all to be crewed by bluejacket volunteers, and steel nets would soon be laid across the strait to catch any loose mines. The French, de Robeck reported to London, had been “quite undismayed by their loss.” On all Allied warships “officers and men are only anxious to re-engage the enemy.” He ended: “It is hoped to be in a position to commence operations in three or four days.” Keyes wrote his wife from the Queen Elizabeth: “I am spoiling to have at it again.” The War Council had authorized Churchill to tell de Robeck that he could “continue the operations against the Dardanelles” provided he thought it “fit.” Clearly he did, but the first lord goaded him just the same: “Queen and Implacable should join you very soon; and London and Prince of Wales sail tonight…. It appears important not to let the forts be repaired or to encourage enemy by an apparent suspension of the operations. Ample supplies of 15-inch ammunition are available for indirect fire of Queen Elizabeth across the peninsula.”101
Everything was proceeding smoothly until Hamilton sailed up on the Phaeton, studied the Gallipoli shore through field glasses, ventured into the mouth of the Dardanelles, and then sailed off to establish his headquarters on Lemnos. De Robeck wrote him there: “We are all ready for another go, and not the least beaten or down-hearted.” The general took another view. He inspected the crippled Inflexible, talked to several army officers on the island, and telegraphed Kitchener: “I am most reluctantly driven to the conclusion that the straits are not likely to be forced by battleships, as at one time seemed probable, and that, if my troops are to take part, it will not take the subsidiary form anticipated. The Army’s part will be more than mere landing parties to destroy forts; it must be a deliberate and prepared military operation, carried out at full strength, so as to open a passage for the Navy.” This was an extraordinary rush to judgment. He hadn’t seen the Narrows, was unaware of the devastation there, and knew almost nothing about the capabilities of huge naval guns. Kitchener replied immediately: “You know my views, that the Dardanelles must be forced.” If troops were needed “to clear the way,” such operations, he said, “must be carried through.” On March 22, four days after the ship-to-shore fight in the Narrows, de Robeck anchored off the island to confer with the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force’s commander in chief, who at this point had no army, no plan, but a strong distrust of swift action. Afterward they disagreed on who had said what. According to the general: “The moment he sat down de Robeck told us that he was now quite clear he could not get through without the help of all my troops.” According to the admiral, Hamilton spoke first, and having “heard his proposals, I now considered a combined operation essential to obtain great results and object of campaign…. To attack Narrows now with Fleet would be a mistake, as it would jeopardize the execution of a bigger and better scheme.”102
De Robeck’s account is more convincing—until now he had never considered discontinuing his assault—but doubtless he was easily seduced. To naval officers who had risen to flag rank during the long peace, losing ships was a crime, and he had already blurted out to Keyes th
at he felt guilty. Moreover, he knew that Fisher, the very symbol of the Royal Navy, disapproved of the Dardanelles operation. Churchill backed it, but Churchill was a politician; politicians moved from one ministerial post to another, or dropped out of the cabinet altogether. At the Admiralty, first lords came and went, while the Royal Navy lasted forever. If the army wanted to take over here, de Robeck could only feel a sense of deliverance. He asked Hamilton if the troops would be put ashore on Bulair Isthmus at the top of the peninsula. No, said Hamilton, he would land on the southern tip and fight his way up from there. De Robeck asked when. Hamilton said he needed a little over three weeks. In that case, the admiral said, he would suspend his own drive until the fighting began on Gallipoli. He telegraphed the Admiralty that the army “will not be in a position to undertake any military operations before 14th April…. It appears better to prepare a decisive effort about the middle of April rather than risk a great deal for what may possibly be only a partial solution.”103