Churchill's Wizards
Page 9
On the actual day of the Allied attack, Churchill was visiting French trenches among the sand dunes of the Belgian coast where barbed wire ran right down into the North Sea, snagging corpses covered in seaweed and washed to and fro by the tides. He says he tried not to think about what was happening in the Dardanelles, though he knew that if they succeeded there, this stagnant deadlock in France and Flanders could be broken. Back in London the next day, the politicians and top brass seemed intent on persevering. Fisher said the Navy could safely lose a dozen battleships.
But by 23 March, Rear Admiral de Robeck had lost his nerve and sent Churchill a cable saying that the Dardanelles could not be taken by the navy without the army first destroying the artillery on shore. Some Turkish guns were mobile, others hidden; they could not be spotted from the sea or from the air by the Ark Royal’s weedy Sopwith seaplanes. This telegram filled Churchill with consternation. Delays only gave the enemy time to reinforce. Because Captain Hall’s Room 40 had decrypted messages between Berlin and the German commander of the Ottoman Navy, Churchill composed a telegram to send to de Robeck:
We know the forts are short of ammunition and supply of mines is limited. We do not think the time has yet come to give up the plan of forcing Dardanelles by a purely naval operation.
But the three senior admirals in London backed the judgement of de Robeck as the man on the spot; Churchill’s cable was written but never sent, and the purely naval attack never resumed. Churchill bowed to the sea lords’ decision ‘with regret and anxiety’.
This was a crux of history. What might have happened had the Allied ships kept pressing on through the Dardanelles in the third week of March 1915? Believers, like the daring attacking submariner Commodore Roger Keyes, tried to revive Churchill’s idea of the naval-only assault through the straits to seize Constantinople, but were overruled. Ten years afterwards, commanding the Mediterranean fleet, Keyes steamed through the Narrows and was overcome with emotion. ‘My God,’ he said at last, ‘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.’
For the rest of his life, Winston Churchill would have the dead of the Dardanelles and the disasters of Gallipoli laid at his charge. What he hoped would be ‘one of the great events in the history of the world’ did not happen. The truth is that the amphibious landing on the peninsula in April 1915 was neither Churchill’s plan nor his original concept: he had put his faith in the ships alone forcing their way through the straits to capture Constantinople.
When Earl Kitchener of Khartoum pronounced that the army would carry through the operations, it was easier said than done. The ‘Incomparable’ 29th Division of British infantry who joined the Expeditionary Force had been sent more as garrison troops than as an amphibious invasion force. The organisation required for each of the two roles was quite different. The ‘Constantinople Expeditionary Force’ planning was ad hoc, because not they but the Royal Navy was meant to force the Dardanelles. Ships had been loaded haphazardly, with units separated from their equipment, guns from their ammunition, and not much thought given to what was going to be needed first. There were too few engineers, and no provision for building piers, jetties and cranes at the beachhead. There were not enough smaller boats to ferry supplies and people ashore. Medical stores and personnel were inadequate. No one had thought about the water supply. There wasn’t even a big base where all this could be sorted out, because the nearest Greek islands, Imbros and Lemnos (where there was a big harbour at Mudros) did not have enough water. So the ships had to go 800 miles to Alexandria in Egypt. ‘There are three islands here,’ soldiers said, ‘Lemnos, Imbros and Chaos.’
All this gave General Liman von Sanders of the German Military Mission four weeks to organise the Fifth Turkish Army to defend the Dardanelles. There was no secret about the British intentions, but von Sanders did not know exactly where they would land and so split his forces into three equal parts of 20,000 men, to cover the northern neck of the peninsula at Bulair, the southern foot of Gallipoli and the Asiatic side. Obvious landing-beaches in the south of the peninsula were mined, wired and lightly garrisoned, with forces held in reserve to move where needed. Commanding the 10,000 men of the Turkish 19th Division in reserve at Bigali down south in the peninsula was a lieutenant colonel called Mustafa Kemal, the future Atatürk, founder of the Turkish republic and president of Turkey from 1923 to 1938.
A fleet of 200 ships carried the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force from Lemnos across the wine-dark sea towards the coast where the city of Troy had once stood. General Sir Ian Hamilton deployed six divisions. The two French ones landed at Kum Kale, on the Asiatic side of the straits, but this was merely a feint, as was the diversion by the Royal Naval Division at Bulair at the neck of the peninsula in the north. The main attack was on the southern peninsula, by 30,000 men of the British 29th Division and the two divisions of Anzacs (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps).
It was planned that the British would land at five beaches around Cape Helles to take the high ground at Achi Baba; the Anzacs were to land a dozen miles away at Gaba Tepe to seize the Sari Bair ridge. From there they would advance together on the Pasha Dagh plateau that dominated the ‘Narrows’ section of the Dardanelles. They had maps but as yet no photoreconnaissance. Kitchener, thinking that the Turks would run away, said there was no need for aeroplanes.
The first man on the peninsula was one of the last men out, nine months later, and his initial job was deception. Lieutenant Commander Bernard Freyberg of the Royal Naval Division was born in London but raised in New Zealand. He had been with Pancho Villa’s revolutionary forces in Mexico at the outbreak of war, made his way to England and got into the Royal Naval Division by badgering Churchill on Horse Guards Parade. Not twenty-four hours after burying his brother officer, the poet Rupert Brooke, in a moonlit olive grove on the island of Skyros, he swam two miles to the beach below Bulair. It was Saturday night, 24 April 1915, and he was semi-naked, thickly oiled with engine-room grease, with only the whites of his eyes visible in a mask of brown. He was towing a bag of seven flares to set off on shore to make the Turks think a landing was already underway there, a long way north of the real landing-sites. This action won Freyberg the first of his four DSOs.
The Sunday was a serenely beautiful spring day, with the blue Aegean calm and smooth, ideal sea conditions for a landing just before dawn. At Gaba Tepe in the north, the first of 15,000 Anzac troops were landed under cliffs, over a mile north of beach ‘Z’, where they should have been. It was not disastrous, just another muddle. John Buchan describes the Australians dropping their packs to scramble a hundred feet up through myrtle scrub and a yellowy rock-garden of spring flowers, purple cistus, grape hyacinth, anemone, asphodel and amaryllis, to entrench under fire at the top of the cliffs, staring straight into the rising sun.
‘Now you have only to dig, dig, dig until you are safe,’ General Hamilton told the Anzacs. This is where the Australians started earning the nickname ‘Diggers’, only putting down their spades to resist counter-attacks with their bayonets. In months to come Anzac Cove would resemble a mad mining camp, quarried from apricot-coloured rock and dirt by half-naked, sun-bronzed men.
At ‘S’, ‘Y’ and ‘X’ beaches around Cape Helles, other landings were relatively easy or unopposed to begin with, but the invaders did little with them. Troops from ‘Y’ wandered to within yards of Krithia village, which was deserted, then returned to the beach. At that moment, they outnumbered all the Turkish defenders of Cape Helles. No Allied soldier ever got that close to Krithia again.
At ‘W’ beach the thundering naval bombardment stopped. The 1st Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers were still packed tight in two dozen clinkered ship’s boats with their tow-ropes cast, each being rowed ashore by four naval ratings, when accurate Mauser rifle fire from the Turkish redoubts started hitting them. Commander Charles Samson of the RNAS flew
overhead in a Maurice Farman. ‘I saw Hell let loose,’ he wrote. ‘The sea was literally whipped into foam by the hail of bullets and small shells.’ Only two boats got to shore. Tipped overboard from boats which could not land, weighed down with up to 70 pounds of kit, pith-helmeted men struggled in four feet of water to get towards the barbed wire and mines on the beach. If wet sand jammed their rifles, bayonets were their only weapon. Over 500 were killed and wounded; the dead included 63 of the 80 naval ratings. ‘Why are they resting?’ said people looking through ship’s binoculars at the still bodies on the beach.
The plan at ‘V’ beach was to run a kind of Trojan horse of a ship ashore into the crescent between a Turkish fort and a crenellated castle, and then to disembark troops through the square sally ports cut in her port and starboard bow, over gangways and across a pontoon of lighters towed into place by a steam hopper. SS River Clyde was a 4,000-ton collier or coal transport ship which bore mottled sandy-yellow and black camouflage and the soldiers’ nickname ‘the Dun Cow’. The River Clyde, with 2,000 soldiers aboard and a dozen machine guns sandbagged in the bow, was accompanied by open cutters full of ‘Bluecaps’, 1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers, towed by steam pinnaces. From above at Seddülbahir the Turkish soldiery opened withering fire from rifles and machine guns, plus shrapnel from two ‘pom-poms’ or quick-firing cannons. This massacred the Dublins in their boats together with the first companies of 2nd Hampshires and 1st Royal Munster Fusiliers, who raced out of the Clyde, falling over each other across the lighter barges. When the shore pontoon drifted away, soldiers jumped into the water and drowned, dragged down by their kit. The naval airman Samson who flew over reported fifty yards of sea ‘absolutely red with blood’.
Men still inside the River Clyde heard nightmarish noises. They at least had food and water, which the hundreds trapped on the beach did not have. As Royal Navy big ships ventured closer to shell Seddülbahir, small boats tried to collect the wounded in the afternoon and evening. After dark, one of the staff officers on board volunteered to go ashore to assess the situation.
Lieutenant Colonel Richard ‘Dick’ Doughty-Wylie was 46 years old, a nephew of the Arabian explorer Charles Doughty and the married lover of the Arabist Gertrude Bell. He had spent twenty years as an active professional soldier in Asia and Africa before his wounds pushed him towards the job of military consul in Turkey and Abyssinia. Old soldiers never die, however. In 1909, before the Great War brought enmity with Turkey, Doughty-Wylie used Turkish regular troops to prevent a massacre of Armenians at Adama. He spoke Turkish, and his knowledge of the Ottoman Empire was seen by the Egyptian command as so useful to the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force that he was taken on to Sir Ian Hamilton’s staff.
Doughty-Wylie found men still alive sheltering under the bank on the beach below Seddülbahir and in the morning he was among the officers who rallied them. Collecting the remnants of three battalions, the Hampshires, the Dublins and the Munsters, he encouraged the attack that captured the Turkish fort on the left and the ruined village. Doughty-Wylie then came back to arrange for Queen Elizabeth’s massive guns to shell the remaining Turkish redoubt on Hill 141 overlooking the beach. When the naval bombardment finished at two in the afternoon, he personally led the infantry attack on the last fort. He had lost one puttee and was carrying only a walking stick because he did not want to bear arms against his old friends the Turks. He was buried where he fell, at the summit of the hill in the moment of victory, when a sniper’s bullet blew away the side of his face, killing him instantly. His entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ends: ‘Doughty-Wylie was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. He was the highest ranking officer to win the award during the Gallipoli campaign.’
It was a cruel spring on the Peninsula. So many soldiers were killed in the first month – more than in the three years of the Boer War, says John Buchan – that the British and the Turks organised a one-day truce on 24 May to bury their dead. Aubrey Herbert came across ‘entire companies annihilated – not wounded, but killed’ by machine-gun fire. The reek of dead men and mules going bad in the sun made soldiers vomit. Staff officer Compton Mackenzie jumped up on a parapet at Quinn’s Post that day: ‘Looking down I saw squelching up from the ground on either side of my boot like a rotten mangold the deliquescent green and black flesh of a Turk’s head.’ The smell of death and putrefaction was ‘tangible … clammy as the membrane of a bat’s wing’, and Mackenzie said it took two weeks to get just two hours’ exposure to it out of his nostrils. At night, the offshore wind carried the stench out to the ships at sea.
Now camouflage became important. From the moment they set foot on the charnel-house peninsula, Allied soldiers were under accurate rifle fire. They looked for shelter or dug it for themselves with trenching tools. Being neither camouflaged nor concealed put them at a severe disadvantage vis-à-vis their opponents, as the Australian Albert Facey says in his extraordinary autobiography, A Fortunate Life, which calls his time on the peninsula ‘the worst four months of my whole life’. He found himself with other Anzacs crawling about in small groups, with NCOs having to make the plans because all the officers had been picked off:
We lost many of our chaps to snipers and found that some of these had been shot from behind. This was puzzling so several of us went back to investigate, and what we found put us wise to one of the Turks’ tricks. They were sitting and standing in bushes dressed all in green – their hands, faces, boots, rifles and bayonets were all the same colour as the bushes and scrub. You could walk close to them and not know. We had to find a way to flush these snipers out. What we did was fire several shots into every clump of bush that was big enough to hold a man. Many times that we did this Turks jumped out and surrendered or fell out dead.
The War Illustrated for 21 August 1915 has a photograph of a captured Turkish sniper between two Australian soldiers in shorts with shouldered rifles. Only his bald head is visible above the mass of leafy shrubbery that hides him. The caption reads: The Turk, wily as are all Orientals, is quick to assimilate the ideas of his temporary masters. Sniping, which has been such a feature of the Great War in Europe, is also very much in vogue at the Dardanelles. This captive Turkish sniper seems to have found an effective disguise, but not so sufficiently as to escape the vigilance of his foes.
Aubrey Herbert heard about it:
The first convincing proof of treachery which we had was the story of the Turkish girl who had painted her face green in order to look like a tree, and had shot several people at Helles from the boughs of an oak.
‘Wiliness’, ‘treachery’: those were the names for camouflage and deception when enemy foreigners used them and we did not. Kangaroo-hunters of the Australian outback and deer-hunters from New Zealand’s mountains adapted to new forms of shooting. Billy Sing of the 5th Light Horse was the best-known Australian sniper. Half Indian, very dark with a thick moustache and goatee beard, Sing specialised in snap-shooting on his spotter’s commands; his record kill was nine men in one day. When there weren’t enough hand grenades, men manufactured their own from dynamite in jam tins packed with rusty metal scrap and snippets of barbed wire. Opposing trenches were sometimes no more than a cricket pitch apart.
Yet these soldiers who were fighting each other tooth and nail to the death did not, on the whole, hate their enemy. They seem to have respected each other’s cheerfulness and bravery amid shared squalor. Alan Moorehead compared this to the cruel friendliness of the very poor. ‘Abdul’, ‘Johnny Turk’ or ‘Jacko’, as the Anzacs called the Turkish soldier, was a character highly regarded by soldiers like Private Henry Barnes:
I never heard him decried, he was always a clean fighter and one of the most courageous men in the world. When they came there was no beating about the bush, they faced up to the heaviest rifle fire that you could put up and nothing would stop them, they were almost fanatical. When we met them at the armistice [24 May] we came to the conclusion that he was a very good bloke indeed. We had a lot of time for him.
Herbert shows in the book how different conditions were in the two theatres where he served, France and the Peninsula. No one ever went home on leave from Gallipoli: you left on a stretcher or sewn up in a blanket. In some French sectors, the line could be quiet for months, but on the Peninsula ‘from dawn to dawn it was genuine infantry warfare’:
But in those hill-trenches of Gallipoli the Turk and the Gentile fought with each other all day with rifle and bomb, and in the evening crept out and stabbed each other in the dark … The Turk was always on higher ground; he knew every inch of all those valleys and vineyards and scrub-strewn slopes; and he had an uncanny accuracy of aim. Moreover, many of his men had the devotion of fanatics … content to lie there and pick off the infidels till they too died. They were very brave men. But the Turkish snipers were not confined to the madmen who were caught disguised as trees in the broad daylight and found their way into the picture papers. Every trench was full of snipers, less theatrical but no less effective. And in the night they crept out with inimitable stealth and lay close in to our lines, killing our sentries, and chipping away at our crumbling parapets.