Winston Churchill And The Failure At Gallipoli
The starting point for this discussion is the First World War, or in early 1915 to be more precise.Whilst the trenches were being dug in Europe, Winston Churchill had an idea: attack the weakest opponent, the Ottoman Empire, in order to separate it from Germany and to establish a link with the Russian allies.As First Lord of Admiralty, Churchill argued that the Royal Navy had enough power to successfully execute the plan whilst retaining the ability to destroy the German Navy and maintain its blockade.Indeed as the majority of ships to be used were obsolete and not much use for a battle against the High Seas Fleet, the operation would make no difference to the numerical superiority of the Royal Navy.The failure of its execution nearly destroyed his political career, and tarnished his reputation in the eyes of many contemporaries.
For Great Britain, June 1940 was turning into one of the worst months of its modern history.After the swift fall of Belgium, Holland and France via the German Blitzkrieg, the British found themselves completely alone in confronting what seemed to be the invincible war machine of the Third Reich.
The war stagnates
In the Autumn of 1914, barely three months after the beginning of the First World War, the land war had reached a stalemate on the Western Front.1 On the Eastern Front there were signs that the Germans would eventually defeat Russia, especially after Turkey blocked off supplies from Britain and France.After the First Battles of the Marne and Ypres, the Schlieffen Plan, which was supposed to open the route to Paris in the same way that it had been achieved in 1870, had failed.2 In its place there was the beginning of a war of attrition which promised to be long and difficult, and which used up all the resources of the combatants.Its symbol was to be trench warfare in which thousands of men would die for each disputed inch of ground.Bloody attrition in which the battles would end with hardly any change to the position of the Front.The various High Commands soon realized that this situation could lead to an eventual collapse of soldiers’ morale.They all started to look for ways to break the stalemate; Churchill believed that he found one.It was a way that would allow the Royal Navy to take some of the strain off the Allied armies and gain glory by shortening the conflict.3
Winston Churchill at this time was First Lord of the Admiralty, the minister with responsibility for the Royal Navy.The Liberal Prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith had appointed him to this latest government position after he had been Home Secretary.Churchill left the Conservative Party in 1904 to which he was linked ideologically by class and to which he would return ten years later.4 However in 1915 many Conservative politicians still disliked him, a factor that would prove decisive in sealing his political downfall after the Gallipoli operation.As First Lord he had employed his considerable energies into modernizing His Majesty’s warships, following in the footsteps of Admiral Jacky Fisher the inspiration for the dreadnought and the battlecruiser.5 At this point the Royal Navy was the primary defender of Britain, its empire, and its global trading links.It was important to maintain the theoretical superiority held by the Royal Navy over the High Seas Fleet of Kaiser William II in the hard-fought arms race between Great Britain and Germany.Always open to any idea, which might lead to an advantage over Britain’s rivals, Churchill had favoured the creation of the first naval air service, the progressive replacement of coal by fuel oil to power the navy’s ships.Of course the switch to oil meant that Britain now took a greater interest in keeping supplies from the Persian Gulf secure.The formation of a naval general staff was set up for better operational co-ordination, which had gained him the support of the younger officers.6
The Russians, confronting the armies of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey, had just suffered a massive defeat by the Germans under the command of Hindenburg and Ludendorff at Tannenberg and had asked for urgent help from the British.Turkish entry into the war meant it would take longer for the Russians to make good their huge material losses.7 This led Churchill to dust down an old plan he had formulated during the Balkan Wars (1912 – 1913) in the event of Vienna intervening in those conflicts.The Balkan Wars had been disastrous for Turkey, and strengthened the belief of Churchill that Turkey would not be able to resist the planned offensive through the Straits.He was convinced that, with a few alterations, not only would the plan work in the existing situation, but would grant a strategic initiative to the Entente powers, something the Allies had not achieved since the beginning of the war.Perhaps if the plan had been executed more effectively then his judgement would have been fully vindicated.8
The Military Operation
The new plan was slightly reminiscent of an episode in Churchill’s only novel Savrola written in 1898 where a fleet forces some straits.9 The plan called for a major landing of Greek troops on the Gallipoli peninsula (the European key to the Dardanelles straits) and a smaller landing of Franco-British troops on the Asian side.Both groups of troops would be protected by a strong British naval squadron, which would bear the major responsibility for the operation.This fleet would consist of battleships and cruisers.Though these ships might be considered obsolescent in the Atlantic theatre, once they had overcome the weak Turkish defences and entered the Sea of Marmara, they would be able to destroy the enemy positions with their high calibre guns.10 Their final objective was Constantinople, the Ottoman capital itself.If Constantinople fell then the Ottoman empire would rapidly collapse, or so at least it was hoped.11 The Royal Navy believed that a successful operation would make amends for the failure to stop the German battlecruiser Goeben sailing to Constantinople, transferring to Turkish control and then shelling Russian ports to announce the Sultan’s decision to fight with Germany.12 Churchill’s plan would have had more chance of being fully and unquestioningly carried out by the Royal Navy if Prince Louis of Battenberg had remained as First Sea Lord, yet he was driven out of his office by a vicious newspaper campaign.Battenberg’s German birth made him deeply unpopular by the end of 1914, it was his resignation which allowed Fisher to return to the Admiralty.13
At first it all seemed positive and success appeared straightforward.Turkey had been chosen because it was the weakest of the Central Powers and because it had an ill-equipped army that had not distinguished itself in the recent Balkan Wars.14 Also, by capturing the Dardanelles a direct link could be established between the Russian Empire and its Western allies that would increase the chances of final victory.15 Through this link would arrive the Ukrainian wheat considered vital to supply the needs of the industrial centres of Britain and France, in exchange for modern weapons to re-equip the wavering and ineffective armies of the Tsar.Without the Russians fighting and keeping millions of German soldiers occupied upon the Eastern Front, the prospects for an Anglo-French victory in the West seemed to be very bleak.16
From a strictly military point of view, the operation was not expected to bear too heavy a weight on the general war effort.Only obsolete warships would be used and few troops would be re-deployed from the principal European front, as the majority of troops used would be Greek.The presence of the German battlecruiser Goeben altered that situation, as newer and faster ships would be needed to stop her interfering with the operation.17 Through this campaign, not only would Greece become involved in the war, but other countries, which had accounts to be settled with Turkey (like Romania and Italy), might also join the Entente.In the best scenario Churchill believed that, with its capital threatened by Allied warships, the Ottoman Empire might be forced to seek an armistice.18
Outline
It was Winston Churchill himself who presented the plan of action to the Secretary of State for War, the authoritarian Field Marshal Earl Kitchener, and to the First Sea Lord, the operational head of the Royal Navy, the mercurial Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher.Nevertheless, contrary to what Churchill had expected, they both declared themselves against the plan.Churchill had to use more than his famous charm in order to convince those obstinate veterans.19
Through his tenacity he succeeded in convincing them.The first to agree was Kitchener, on condition that it was treated as a naval operation and involved only a small number of troops.However, it was much harder to convince the complex Fisher, notwithstanding the good relations between him and Churchill at the time.Perhaps it was because Fisher was the only one who remembered that a British fleet had tried unsuccessfully to do something similar in 1807.20 Perhaps Fisher realized that, whilst the operation seemed possible on paper, it required a co-ordination of military forces that might be difficult to achieve and might lead to disaster.Legend tells that he declared that, “those damned Dardanelles will be our tomb”.21
Be as it may, in the British press and political circles the certainty established itself that Churchill, who was considered to be a treacherous adventurer by those of his class, had used his powers of seduction and trickery to gain the agreement of the venerable Kitchener and Fisher.However, Fisher had only been against starting the operation without troops to seize the straits, whilst Kitchener had not wanted to use any troops at all.22 This opinion remained current for many years and would link his political star to the fortune of the campaign.23 Fisher demonstrated that he was capable of deflecting criticism onto Churchill, whilst Kitchener had died en route to Russia.Had Churchill not become a convenient scapegoat for the increasing lacklustre Asquith government his cabinet colleagues could have protected him instead.Churchill was dismayed at the lack of support offered to him by the Liberal Party, as he was sacrificed so that Asquith could remain as Prime Minister.24
On the other hand, the Russians and French greeted the plan with enthusiasm and the Paris government even offered its own warships in support of the operation.25 The plan got the go-ahead at the beginning of 1915, with Fisher failing to publicly declare his doubts about the prospects for success.26 Nevertheless, the campaign did not start on a good note.The prime minister of still neutral Greece had offered three army divisions, but when King Constantine I, brother-in-law of the Kaiser and known to have pro-German sympathies, found this out, he forced the resignation of the head of his government.27 For the time being the Greeks would remain neutral.The Greek army would be replaced in the operation by the 29th British Division and the ANZAC troops from Australia and New Zealand, forming the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force.This angered the generals on the Western Front who had been counting on these troops to make up their growing losses.28
It had not occurred to anyone to give any thought to the actual state of the Turkish army; in fact the Allied general staffs underestimated its fighting condition and just importantly its determination to resist the Gallipoli offensive.Had Churchill, Fisher, and Kitchener known about the strength of resistance they would have undoubtedly used more troops and waited for specialist gunboats, armoured landing craft, as well as acquiring more minesweepers.29 Better preparations and better equipment would have made it easier for the Allied troops to take their objectives and fewer of them would have died.30
Although under-equipped and short of supplies and with units not at full strength, the Ottoman forces were being re-equipped with modern weapons, especially with artillery from Germany and Austria-Hungary.31 There were significant differences between the fighting abilities of the different ethnic groups that made up the Ottoman Empire; the troops from the Anatolian interior, provided they were well led, had shown themselves to be brave fighters.Command now lay with Otto Liman von Sanders, head of the German military mission in Turkey, who took charge of the 5th Army during the campaign.32 This veteran cavalry general had had the idea of inserting German officers at all levels of the Ottoman command structure.Although these officers were unable to overcome all the deficiencies in the Ottoman forces, they were able correct some of them, especially the lack of co-ordination between different units.33 Furthermore, amongst the Turks a new generation of officers was establishing itself.Fervent nationalists with intuition and leadership capability soon showed themselves the equal of their German fellow officers.34
Mustafa Kemal was the outstanding example of these officers.This hugely respected young general was not only able to instil in his troops the necessary spirit to resist the invaders and to repeatedly counterattack, but also had the ability to modify his plans, adapting them at all times to the requirements of the campaign.35 Von Sanders also had this ability, but it was lacking in the Allied command, which reacted very slowly to changing circumstances.36
The attack begins
The naval phase of the campaign began when the fleet commanded by Admiral Sir Sackville Carden entered the straits.It was composed of twelve battleships, four of which were French, with their corresponding escort vessels.The force also included minesweepers to clear up mines that would prevent this task force sailing to Constantinople once it had flattened the Turkish forts.37 There were more ships involved than originally planned and not all were obsolescent.They included the very latest battleship Queen Elizabeth, the then pride of the Royal Navy, and other ships of recent construction.38 Carden was convinced that, once the Turkish forts had been eliminated and the straits dragged for mines, he would be able to advance unopposed on enemy territory thus rendering a military landing practically unnecessary.It was therefore vital to give the maximum support to this initial attack and in this Carden had the agreement of his superiors.Bad weather led him to stop the attack, but he tried again six days later.39
The second attempt began well.After overcoming the first Turkish gun batteries, a small Royal Navy amphibious force attacked the forts of Kum Kale and Sedd el-Bar.Everyone exuded optimism and Carden telegraphed London that in a couple of weeks he would reach the Ottoman capital.40
However, the minesweepers, faced with ceaseless fire from the short-range Turkish guns to which, they were very vulnerable, were nowhere near clearing the straits of mines.Carden in the end had alternative other than to order a retreat.Understandably Churchill could not believe the attack had failed.He pressurized Carden to make another attempt with increasing impatience.The admiral, however, not only refused, but also resigned citing health reasons for doing so.Admiral Sir John de Robeck who immediately went on the attack replaced him.41
By mid March sixteen mainly obsolete battleships, with two as reserve, once again entered the straits.There was little the Turkish artillery could do in response to the constant fire from the battleships and cruisers which little by little advanced further into the straits.But the British did not know that the Turks had installed a new line of mines in Eren Keui Bay a few days earlier.Suddenly the obsolete French battleship Bouvet hit one and in less than two minutes it sank with almost all its crew.A little later it was the turn of the British battlecruiser Inflexible that was only able to turn and escape the trap with difficulty.HMS Irresistible was less fortunate as it lost power and became a sitting target for enemy guns.The old HMS Ocean hit a mine and sank.42 Shocked, de Robeck ordered the attack to cease.De Robeck had lost the desire to attack again, yet as far as Churchill was concerned the bombardment should continue as the old ships were totally expendable even if their crews were not.When he gave this order he was unaware that the Turkish batteries had almost run out of ammunition for their major pieces of artillery.Another attack at that point would surely have been successful, and would have actually enhanced the reputation of all the people that had advocated it in the first place.43
On hearing about the disaster, a horrified Admiral Fisher banned any further naval operations, apart from those involving smaller vessels.An angry Churchill insisted that the attack should continue and had a serious altercation with Fisher.Churchill did not realize that he was creating an enemy who would effectively turn political as well as public opinion against him.44 There were also high-ranking members of the Royal Navy and the British army that intended to ensure the failure of the campaign.Notwithstanding all that had happened, a Lord Kitchener full of optimism ended by offering to complete successfully what the navy had started.Sir Ian Hamilton was put in charge of this delicate mission, a decision that affected the ability of the British forces to win the campaign.
The land phase
General Hamilton was not lacking in courage, but was incapable of standing up to his superiors and left his subordinates to take the initiative.Sometimes it seemed that Hamilton did not do anything at all, his lethargy arguably undermined the prospects of the Gallipoli campaign ending successfully.45 He had no information about the enemy’s forces and their deployment, and used tourist guides to identify the objectives.Furthermore, he showed no hurry, accumulating troops and supplies in Egypt and the Isle of Lemnos, thus wasting valuable time.He also did little to maintain secrecy over the preparations and in no time everyone was talking about the proposed operation - including the press.It was not at all difficult for the Turkish intelligence services to guess that the final objective would be the Gallipoli peninsula.The Allies had lost an ally of incalculable value: the element of surprise.Even with surprise still on his side Hamilton would have found it difficult to capture the Gallipoli peninsula and allow the Anglo-French naval forces to sail towards Constantinople.46
In contrast, Liman von Sanders showed himself to be more active than ever and knew how to make the most of the period of respite granted by the enemy.He distributed his 8,000 troops around the possible disembarkation points, leaving the 19th Division under Kemal as a tactical reserve.He also covered the beaches with as much barbed wire as he could find, he ordered guns to be removed from the fortress at Smyrna and even some ancient artillery pieces to be brought from the military museum in Constantinople to strengthen his defences.He was still not sure where the actual landing would take place, but expected it to be Bulair.47
Finally, having massed in the port of Mudros in Lemnos, the troops of General Hamilton, who commanded the operation from a distance aboard the brand new super-dreadnought HMS Queen Elizabeth, began to disembark.At the end of that first day, and despite strong resistance from the Turks, 30,000 of Hamilton’s 75,000 troops had secured themselves on various parts of the Gallipoli peninsula.However, instead of advancing they received orders to dig themselves in and to link up with the other units that had landed.In the meantime, further troops and supplies continued to arrive until they formed two important beachheads – a major one on Cape Hellas and the other at Ari Burnu.48
Unlike his British counterpart, von Sanders was on the front line and once assured that the main attack was not to be against Bulair, but against the heights of Achi Baba, he ordered that zone to be reinforced.The failed Allied attack which took place three days later, known as the First Battle of Krithia, confirmed him in his decision.He called up reinforcements and transferred any troops that could be spared from other places, so that he could mount a counter-attack which, nonetheless, failed.This situation continued for the following weeks.Although the allies were able to extend their bridgeheads (at the cost of innumerable lives), they were unable to defeat an enemy, which was continuously growing in strength and morale.49 This situation led to a stalemate similar to that existing on the Western Front, a war of attrition that used up troops and supplies in futile attacks and counter-attacks.50
At this time Churchill’s position was weakening; he had lost control of the campaign, but British public opinion thought that the responsibility for the campaign was solely his.That was mainly due to his charismatic self-promotion of the campaign and the dividends it offered to the Allies if it succeeded.In May there was a meeting of the Cabinet where Admiral Fisher, in a complete display of disloyalty, declared that he had been against the campaign from the very beginning.Fisher claimed he had been forced into supporting it and that until the army was able to secure the peninsula he would not risk his ships again.The next day he presented his resignation as First Sea Lord, which caused a crisis in the government.51 Churchill wanted to continue at the head of the Admiralty and finish the Gallipoli campaign, but he no longer had any supporters apart from the Prime Minister.A few days later a new coalition government was formed.Churchill was no longer a member of the Cabinet; this had been the price demanded by the Conservatives and the Liberals had agreed to it without question.Churchill would have to accept the lesser and in reality meaningless office of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.52 Not everybody was pleased to see Churchill leave the Admiralty.Violet Bonham-Carter, his friend and the daughter of Asquith later wrote that Churchill had been made a scapegoat because the government had provided “too little and too late,” in terms of the resources needed to gain Gallipoli.53
Meanwhile, the political and military situation had changed.The entry of Italy into the war against the Austro-Hungarian Empire opened the possibility of attacking the enemy through its underbelly, which would involve the redeployment of some of the warships from the Dardanelles to reinforce the Italian fleet.54 Furthermore, the sinking of more warships by the German submarine U21 caused the major British naval units to retire to the safer waters of the port of Mudros, thus depriving the infantry of the support of their guns.Nobody now knew what to do with a seemingly doomed campaign, which had lost its patrons.In the meantime, many thousands of British, French, and Australian, New Zealand and Indian troops were wasting away on the arid wastes of Gallipoli without the prospect of capturing their actual objectives.55
The lack of hygiene and the asphyxiating heat in the trenches were weakening the troops and illnesses, especially dysentery, were spreading like wildfire.56 The field medical services were overwhelmed and the nearest hospital was in Lemnos.Even the water had to be brought from Egypt or the Aegean islands.The undoubted heroism of the troops, matched by that of their opponents, served for little.They had arrived at a situation of stalemate reminiscent of that in Europe and from which there seemed to be no escape.57
The final attempt
Finally, the Dardanelles Committee decided on a final general offensive in August, the main feature of which would be a new landing on Suvla Bay, a lightly defended area.58 The landing was to be co-ordinated with an attack on the Sari Bair mountains, which would link the two fighting zones in order to create a continuous front.For this attack Hamilton had around 120,000 troops at his disposal.59
Unfortunately, notwithstanding the almost non-existent resistance to the initial landing, the lack of co-ordination between the army and the navy and a series of mistakes by the Allied command caused the campaign to descend into a chaos which prevented the advance.Both von Sanders and Kemal took advantage of the situation to bring forward reinforcements quickly in order to strengthen the weak points of the defences.60 There was a series of hard and bloody engagements.Although the Allied forces made some advances, they were scarcely worth the loss of life involved.Hamilton requested that more and more reinforcements be sent without offering any tangible results in return, this led to his dismissal.However, Hamilton with good cause suspected that reinforcements of British empire troops from Egypt had been unreasonably delayed.Soon afterwards Bulgaria declared war on Serbia and London decided to withdraw two divisions from Gallipoli in order to send them to Salonica.The removal of these divisions ended any hope that the campaign would end successfully.61
General Sir Charles Monro, Hamilton’s successor, was convinced that the number of casualties would continue to increase if the campaign was not brought to a swift end and, therefore, recommended a complete withdrawal.An unconvinced Kitchener decided to visit Gallipoli in order to examine the situation personally.He too ended up agreeing with Monro.The Allies were unaware that the Turks were at the limits of their resistance and had weakened other fronts in order to defend Gallipoli and that they were considering the possibility of asking the USA to mediate their withdrawal from the war.62 The Allied evacuation was carried out in phases over the period of a month.Unlike the campaign, the evacuation was carried out successfully and efficiently at the cost of few casualties.The key was the secrecy which the Allies were able to maintain, together with strong discipline and perfect organization, thus making the Turks believe almost to the end that the Allied troops remained in place.63
The Gallipoli campaign had cost the Allies 46,500 dead and the Turks 87,000 dead and a vastly greater number of wounded, sick, and disappeared.Nevertheless, for the Ottoman Empire the campaign was considered a victory, whilst for Great Britain it was seen as a defeat without redeeming features.64 Although the Report of the Dardanelles Commission cleared him in part from responsibility for the defeat, Churchill was wholly blamed by public opinion for the disaster.Whilst in Constantinople the Minister for War claimed responsibility for the victory, it was Kemal who was seen by his compatriots as the true victor.It was in the dry earth of the Gallipoli peninsula that Kemal laid the foundations of his future political career, which after the successful war against Greece would lead him to become Ataturk, “the Father of the Turks”.65
To conclude, Winston Churchill held a great deal of responsibility for the failure of the Gallipoli campaign, yet he was not solely guilty for that failure.Churchill put forward the proposal for the campaign at a time when Kitchener had pledged to help the Russians without any idea of how that assistance could be delivered.The Gallipoli campaign was very poorly organised, and suffered because there was little information about the state of the Turkish defences, and no
specific preparations to overcome the tougher than expected resistance.The Allied operations were severely hampered by poor communications, a problem that Churchill should have done more to resolve.Some failures were not directly Churchill’s fault, such as de Robeck’s decision to abandon the naval bombardments, or Hamilton’s mishandling of the troop landings.
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Churchill - 'A life' - Martin Gilbert
Defeat at Gallipoli : The Dardanelles : Part II : 1915-1918 - Tian Coates
The World War I Collection : Gallipoli and The Early Battles : 1914-1915 - Tian Coates
Churchill - 'A major new assessment' - Robert Blake and Wm.Roger Lewis
Gallipoli - L.A.Carlyon
Ataturk - Andrew Mango
Churchill : A Study in Failure : Robert Rhodes James : 1900-1940