Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  When the War Council reconvened in the late afternoon, Churchill—accompanied by Fisher—was able to announce that everyone at the Admiralty agreed that the navy would undertake the operation. Fisher’s conversion seemed, for the moment, to be complete. “When I finally decided to go in,” Fisher said later, “I went the whole hog, totus porcus.” Indeed, Churchill had been so successful that Fisher added Lord Nelson and Agamemnon as well as Queen Elizabeth to the operation. “This I took as the point of final decision,” Churchill wrote. “After it, I never looked back. We had left the region of discussion and consultation, of balancing and misgivings. The matter had passed into the domain of action.”

  Fisher, momentarily defeated, remained unconvinced. In his own mind, his position was clear: he had favored a joint attack but he fiercely opposed a purely naval attack. He had made this view clear to the First Lord, to the prime minister, and to his colleagues at the Admiralty. Under pressure, he had been persuaded to support the attack. “When the operation was undertaken, my duty from that time on was to see that the government plan was carried out as successfully as possible with the available means. I did everything I could to secure its success. I put my whole heart into it and worked like a Trojan.” But in private, he never stopped expressing his personal opinion. “The more I consider the Dardanelles the less I like it,” he wrote to Churchill on March 4. At the end of March, he wrote, “A failure or check in the Dardanelles would be nothing. A failure in the North Sea would be ruin.” On April 5, he wrote to Churchill again, “You are just simply eaten up with the Dardanelles and cannot think of anything else. Damn the Dardanelles! They will be our grave!”

  CHAPTER 24 The Minefields

  The whole fourteen-mile length of the Straits from the entrance at Cape Helles up to the Narrows at Chanak was within range of different types of Turkish artillery; indeed, there was no point in this stretch of water where a hostile vessel could not be hit by direct fire. The defense was constructed in three layers. The entrance was guarded by the outer forts, old, crenellated masonry structures, built on the white cliffs of the northern or European side. The massive fort of Sedd el Bahr, built in the seventeenth century against the Venetians, housed a mixed group of guns: two 11-inch, four 10-inch, and four 6-inch guns, with ranges up to 8,000 yards; this seemed ample, as the distance across the mouth of the Straits was only 4,000 yards. Nearby, around the point, the Cape Helles fort contained two 9.4-inch guns, which could reach out to 10,000 yards. Across the Straits, on the low green banks of the southern or Asian side, the Kum Kale fort housed two 11-inch, four 10-inch, one 8-inch, and two 6-inch guns. Another fort on the Asian shore contained two 9.4-inch guns. In sum, a total of sixteen heavy and seven medium-range guns defended the entrance to the Dardanelles. Inside the entrance where the Straits widen to four and a half miles, the Turks had established an intermediate defense consisting of medium guns, mostly 6-inch, situated in five permanent batteries, one on the European side, the other four on the Asian side. After the Allied bombardment in November 1914, the Germans and Turks made additions to this intermediate defense, bringing in eight mobile 6-inch howitzer batteries of four guns each. The number of searchlight batteries covering the minefields was increased to eight.

  The ultimate defense of the Dardanelles lay at the Narrows, fourteen miles upstream from the entrance. Here, where Leander supposedly swam and where Xerxes built his bridge of boats, the channel is less than a mile across. The Narrows were protected by two massive ancient fortresses, at Kilid Bahr on the European shore and Chanak Kale on the Asian. In front of each of these old citadels, just above the beach, fortifications with heavy earth parapets had recently been constructed. Here, the Turks had mounted seventy-two guns of differing ranges and calibers, ranging from 14-inch and 11-inch down to 9.2-inch. Although less than a score of these guns were of modern design and ammunition was limited, they posed a formidable obstacle. And more ominous even than the guns were the minefields laid just below the Narrows, between Kephez and Chanak. Here, 324 mines were arranged in ten lines, ninety yards apart.

  To overwhelm these defenses, the Admiralty collected warships from around the world. Admiral Carden was given the new superdreadnought Queen Elizabeth with eight 15-inch guns, the battle cruiser Inflexible with eight 12-inch guns, and twelve British and four French predreadnought battleships carrying a total of fifty-six 12-inch and eight 10-inch guns. Eight of the old battleships—Cornwallis, Irresistible, Ocean, Albion, Canopus, Vengeance, Majestic, and Prince George—were scheduled for scrapping within fifteen months, but meanwhile their old 12-inch guns were to wear themselves out bombarding old Turkish forts at the Dardanelles. The Admiralty also had added Triumph and Swiftsure, the odd pair of 10-inch-gun battleships originally built for Chile, now—with Spee eliminated—free to return from the Far East. The four French battleships—Suffren, Bouvet, Gaulois, and Charlemagne—were contemporaries of the British predreadnoughts and similarly armed. Carden also had four light cruisers, fifteen British and four French destroyers, and four British and four French submarines. Lowliest, and at this time of unrecognized significance, were twenty-one British and fourteen French fishing trawlers converted into minesweepers. Two battalions of Royal Marines were assigned to serve as a temporary landing force, not to be put ashore against entrenched opposition or a superior force. Carden’s deputy was Rear Admiral John de Robeck, who was happy to be transferred from the dull assignment of commanding old cruisers patrolling against unlikely German raiders off Cape Finisterre, and Carden’s Chief of Staff was the indefatigable Roger Keyes, shifted from command of the long-range submarines based at Harwich on the North Sea. In 1906 and 1907, Keyes had served as naval attaché at Constantinople and often had hired a steamer in order to study the Dardanelles forts through his telescope. Now he was to serve under the three British admirals who, in sequence, commanded the fleet at the Dardanelles from January 1915 to January 1916.

  Carden’s rear bases were Malta and Alexandria, but his advance base was established at Mudros on the Greek island of Lemnos, sixty miles southwest of the Dardanelles. Mudros was an immense natural harbor, two or three miles across and thirty to forty-five feet deep, capable of sheltering hun-dreds of vessels. Greece was not at war, but the Anglophile Prime Minister, Eleuthérios Venizélos, permitted the Allies to use the island as a base against Greece’s age-old enemy, Turkey. When Rear Admiral Rosslyn Wester Wemyss arrived on February 22 to serve as base commander at Mudros, the sleepy Aegean village was not remotely prepared to become a major naval or military base. It contained only a church and seventy or eighty small houses of stone, timber, or mud, inhabited by fishermen who also grew olives and grapes. The harbor had only a single small wooden pier. There were no materials for constructing larger piers, no facilities for loading or unload-ing ships, no shore accommodations, and not enough fresh water. When, on March 4, 5,000 Australian troops arrived from Egypt, they were forced to remain aboard their ships from where they looked out on the brilliant blue water of the harbor and, beyond, a landscape of dry grass, small gnarled trees, and bare, windswept hills.

  Carden’s attack on the outer forts began in radiant sunshine on the morning of February 19. The sea was calm and there was no breath of wind when Carden’s flagship, the battle cruiser Inflexible, and five British and four French predreadnought battleships anchored in transparent blue water and began a slow, deliberate, long-range bombardment of the forts, 12,000 yards away. The Turks, their guns out of range, remained silent. At 2:00 p.m., Carden closed to 6,000 yards, where his battleships’ secondary armament opened heavy fire. Still, the Turkish guns did not reply. But at 4:45 p.m., when Carden sent Vengeance, Cornwallis, and Suffren in closer still—to 3,000 and 4,000 yards—the Turkish forts on both sides of the straits erupted into a hot cannonade, showing that they had not been destroyed at all. Then, with daylight fading and some of the forts shrouded in smoke and dust, Carden ordered a cease-fire. His deputy, Rear Admiral de Robeck in Vengeance, requested permission to prolong the attack, b
ut Carden refused. The results of the bombardment were inconclusive. The Allied ships had fired 139 12-inch shells. The forts had been hit many times, but the Turkish guns had continued to fire back. Ultimately, the sailors learned that it was not sufficient simply to hit the forts with heavy shells; the only way to put a gun permanently out of action was to achieve a direct hit on the gun. The artillerymen serving the guns were equally hard to hit; under bombardment, they simply retreated into shelters and waited. In this respect, the day’s events had supplied a useful lesson: to be effective, it was not actually necessary to destroy individual Turkish guns with direct hits. The ships could dominate the battle simply by keeping enemy gun crews away from their guns; then the battleships could move in ever closer and eventually would be able to pulverize forts, guns, and gunners at point-blank range.

  Unfortunately, the fleet had no immediate opportunity to apply this new knowledge. That night the weather changed; over the next five days, gale winds whipped up the sea and heavy rain brought lightning and thunder, changing to sleet and snow. These conditions affected available light and because Carden could not afford to waste ammunition without good visibility, the fleet retreated to Mudros. Carden signaled London on February 24, “I do not intend to commence in bad weather leaving result undecided as from experience on first day I am convinced given favorable weather conditions that the reduction of the forts at the entrance can be completed in one day.”

  On February 25, the storm moved away and the bombardment of the outer forts resumed. Queen Elizabeth, Agamemnon, Irresistible, and Gaulois anchored 12,000 yards from their targets and commenced deliberate fire. Queen Elizabeth fired eighteen 15-inch shells, one by one, into a fort at Cape Helles; two of these scored direct hits and destroyed two guns. Irresistible fired thirty-five 12-inch shells into the other Helles fort and destroyed another two guns. Agamemnon adopted a casual attitude and was punished for it. When the ship anchored, her second in command, responsible for the vessel’s smart appearance, ordered men over the disengaged port side to paint the hull. The battleship was too close, however, and a Cape Helles fort fired fifty-six shells, hitting Agamemnon seven times, killing three men and wounding seven, before the ship could weigh anchor and move. At 2:00 p.m., Admiral de Robeck led the ships into the mouth of the Straits and engaged the forts at close range. The Turkish guns fell silent and, in the smoke and dense clouds of dust, it seemed the guns and forts must have been destroyed. By 4:00 p.m., they appeared to be deserted. (The Turkish and German gunners had been temporarily evacuated.) At the end of this day, the French commander, Vice Admiral Emile Guépratte, posted himself in a prominent position on the bridge of his flagship, Suffren, and led his squadron past Inflexible with the French band playing “God Save the King” and “Tipperary.” The British sailors cheered and their ships’ bands responded with the “Marseillaise.”

  The following day, the twenty-sixth, the battleships put Royal Marine landing parties ashore to cover navy demolition squads—typically fifty marines covering thirty sailors—which went through the forts at Helles and Kum Kale blowing up the abandoned guns with explosive charges. In the deserted forts of Sedd el Bahr and Kum Kale, nineteen heavy guns were transformed into scrap. In nearby gun emplacements, a dozen Krupp heavy howitzers were destroyed. One group of Irresistible marines got as far as Krithia, a village set at the foot of a hill called Achi Baba that dominated the the lower peninsula; ironically, this was the only time in the Gallipoli campaign that British troops would get as far as Krithia, four miles north of Sedd el Bahr. The cost of these land operations was nine men killed or wounded. By March 4, however, resistance was stiffening. Turkish soldiers, returning in greater strength, drove British marines and sailors from Kum Kale and Cape Helles, killing twenty-two men and wounding twenty-seven. Nevertheless, during these landings, fifty Turkish guns of significant caliber had been destroyed.

  News that a combination of naval gunfire and demolition parties had overwhelmed the old stone forts and the guns commanding the entrance to the Dardanelles pleased the Admiralty and the Cabinet. The First Lord found himself surrounded by smiling faces and impressed by “the number of persons who now were in favor of the Dardanelles operations and claimed to have contributed to their initiation.” To Jellicoe, Churchill wrote, “Our affairs in the Dardanelles are prospering, though we have not yet cracked the nut.” On March 2, Carden informed the Admiralty that, if good weather continued, he hoped to be through to the Sea of Marmara in two weeks. At its March 10 meeting, the War Council discussed what to do after the fall of Constantinople.

  The fall of the outer Dardanelles forts also impressed the neutrals. Italy, thinking of joining the Entente, was encouraged to do so more quickly. The repercussions were especially significant in the Balkans. If the British fleet was about to appear before Constantinople, and the Ottoman empire was then to collapse, none of the Balkan states wished to be absent from the feast of spoils. The Bulgarians leaned toward the Allies. On March 1, the Greek government offered three divisions—and hinted at four or five—for an attack on the Gallipoli peninsula. The Turks were pessimistic. Across from Constantinople on the Asian side of the Bosporus, two special trains stood ready on an hour’s notice to carry the sultan, his harem, and his court to refuge in the depths of Asia Minor. Inside the city, the German ambassador worried that his embassy, a huge yellow building situated on a prominent hill, would become a primary target for Allied naval guns, and began depositing his personal baggage for safekeeping at the American embassy. Far away, in anticipation that Russian wheat would soon be flowing out through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the price of wheat fell on the Chicago Exchange. In Berlin, Admiral von Tirpitz noted that “the capsizing of one little state may fatally affect the whole course of the war. The forcing of the Dardanelles would be a severe blow to us. . . . We have no trumps left.”

  In London, Carden’s apparent victory strengthened the conviction of the Admiralty and the War Council that the Straits could be forced by the navy alone. If, with only trifling losses, a few hundred marines and bluejackets could take almost undisputed possession of the forts on both sides of the entrance, then Lord Kitchener’s plan seemed wise: soldiers need not be used to assist the fleet at the Dardanelles—although once the ships had broken through, the army would be needed to occupy Constantinople. On the scene, however, Admiral Carden had begun to discover more immediate ways in which ground troops could be useful. Fire control officers in ground observation stations ashore would enable the ships to direct their fire more accurately on the forts at the Narrows. The howitzer and field batteries lining both sides of the Straits could be located and more easily disposed of by attack from the ground. And, as the fleet progressed, soldiers could move in and take possession of the peninsula to prevent the Turks from returning. With these considerations in mind, Carden asked General Sir John Maxwell, commanding British forces in Egypt, to provide 10,000 men to be landed on the tip of the peninsula now that the outer forts had been destroyed. The answer to Carden came not from Maxwell but from the War Office in London, which sternly declared that ground troops at this stage were not an essential part of the naval operation. Indeed, Kitchener warned General Sir William Birdwood, commander of the Anzac forces, of the riskiness of placing a small force on the Gallipoli peninsula where the Turks were believed to have 40,000 men. The troops already in camp at Lemnos, Kitchener decreed, were to remain on that island until the fleet had battered the inner forts into submission; thereupon, the field marshal conceded, it might be necessary to put a few men ashore at the Bulair neck of Gallipoli to prevent supplies from reaching isolated Turkish troops on the peninsula. Carden could not argue. A few weeks before, he had told the Admiralty and the War Council that the Straits could be forced by the fleet alone. Now he had to do it.

  Ironically, even as Carden’s success prompted men in London to self-congratulation and spurred Balkan governments to reexamine their diplomatic alignments, the naval assault on the Dardanelles was beginning to falter. The
Allied fleet now was very large, totaling ninety warships with 814 guns, including a hundred guns of the heaviest caliber. Nevertheless, from March 1 onward, the progress of Admiral Carden’s attack became progressively slower. The outer forts had been silenced and ships now could freely enter the mouth of the Straits. The next stage was to proceed up the waterway, eliminating the batteries on either side, most prominently the heavy guns in the forts at the Narrows—at Chanak on the Asian side and Kilid Bahr on Gallipoli. To achieve this, Carden meant to use the tactics that had worked on the outer forts: first, long-range bombardment; then, as the Turkish guns fell silent, closer engagement to overwhelm them with shellfire. Unfortunately, local geography, which had favored Carden in his attack on the outer forts, now favored the Turks. In attacking the outer forts, the bombarding ships had been able to use a wide expanse of the Aegean Sea to maneuver while concentrating their fire on the small land area of the forts. Now the geographic advantage was reversed: the intermediate and Narrows defenses could be attacked only from inside the narrow passageway and, as the ships moved into this confined space, they could be subjected to artillery fire from every ridge and gully up and down the shores of both sides of the Straits.

  On February 26, the bombardment of the inner forts began. The old battleships steamed past the silent, ruined outer forts and, firing at long range, did little damage to the Narrows forts. The forts, firing back, caused no harm to the fleet. The warships were, however, hit repeatedly by the mobile howitzer batteries positioned along both coasts. These howitzers could not hope to cripple, let alone sink, any of the battleships but a howitzer shell striking an old ship was harassing and disconcerting, and the battleships did their best to locate and eliminate these adversaries. The difficulty in this was quickly apparent: when the Turkish field batteries opened fire, the ships tried desperately to locate them, but the guns were so well concealed that they rarely succeeded. In addition, the howitzers shifted position from day to day. On those occasions when naval gunfire did become accurate, the Turkish and German gunners simply retired into their caves or shelters until the bombardment was over and then, emerging, used oxen to pull their guns to another hidden position in the scrub. A few hours later the guns reopened fire.