Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  On the night of March 18, Chanak, in peacetime a busy commercial town of 16,000 at the Narrows, was deserted; buildings were burning, the streets were filled with rubble, the forts were pitted by huge craters. But the bombardment had put only eight big guns permanently out of action, and the Turks and Germans had suffered only 118 men killed and wounded. The explanation was that when the shellfire became intense, the artillerymen simply left their guns and retreated into earth shelters. Nevertheless, the attack had compelled the Turkish and German gunners to fire more than half of their ammunition. At 4:00 p.m. the Chanak wireless station reported that ammunition at the Hamidieh fort, the defense’s strongest point, was running out. When the Allied ships withdrew, the Turkish heavy guns were left with only twenty-seven long-range high-explosive shells—seventeen at Fort Hamidieh, ten at Kilid Bahr. The howitzers protecting the minefields had fired half of their supply. What was to happen when the battle was renewed? Once the big guns exhausted the ammunition on hand, it would be simply a question of how long the howitzer batteries could keep the minesweepers away from the minefields; some thought one day, others two. Thereafter, in a matter of hours, the minesweepers would sweep a channel through to the Narrows. And beyond the Narrows, there was no defense.

  One last hope remained: Goeben. The battle cruiser’s hull had two large holes—now temporarily plugged—caused by Russian mines struck off the Bosporus. She was ordered to raise steam; if the Allied ships broke through, she was to fight to the death. At 5:00 p.m. on March 18, she sailed past the Golden Horn and the Sultan’s palace, headed west toward the Dardanelles. At 6:00 p.m., a signal came that the Allied fleet was withdrawing. Through the night, Goeben lay in the Sea of Marmara, awaiting the renewal of the Allied attack the following day.

  Meanwhile, in Constantinople, the government and the populace were convinced that the Allied fleet would break through. All Turks respected the near legendary power of the British navy; no one believed that a collection of ancient forts and guns at the Dardanelles could bar its way. Accordingly, word of the massive bombardment precipitated an exodus from the capital. The state archives were evacuated and hidden; the banks were emptied of gold; many affluent Turks already had sent their families away. The distance from Gallipoli to Constantinople was only 150 miles; most Turks expected that less than twelve hours after they entered the Sea of Marmara, British battleships would arrive off the Golden Horn.

  The German and Turkish artillerymen at the Dardanelles were certain that the Allies would resume their attack in the morning. Through the night, they worked, determined to fight as long as they had ammunition. At dawn on March 19, the men were standing by their guns. When there was no sign of enemy ships, they presumed that the cause was the bad weather that had come up in the night. On the afternoon of March 19, Goeben was ordered to return to her base near Constantinople. Then, as the bad weather subsided, and day followed day without a sign of the Allied fleet, the defenders began to understand that they had won. They could not know, of course, of the terrible worries that had afflicted the Allied commanders because of the unexplained loss of Bouvet, Irresistible, and Ocean. The cause—as Admiral de Robeck did not know until after the war—was a single brilliant exploit: in darkness on the night of March 8, a Turkish mine expert, Lieutenant Colonel Geehl, had taken a small steamer, Nousret, down the Straits. Near the Asian shore, he had secretly laid a new line of twenty mines, 100 to 150 yards apart, perpendicular to the ten lines already stretching across the Straits. During the days before the massive attack of March 18, British trawler crews had never discovered these mines, nor had British airplanes spotted them from the air. For ten days, they had waited beneath the surface of the blue-green water.

  After three hours’ sleep, Roger Keyes arose on the morning of March 19 and, as he often did in times of stress, shaved with a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” propped in front of him.

  [ If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . .

  If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

  And treat those two imposters just the same . . .]

  He knew nothing of the plight of the gunners at the Narrows, nor of the preparations made by the Turkish government to abandon Constantinople, yet he sensed that victory was near. Even so, it was clear that the attack could not be resumed for a day or two. A strong wind was blowing, which meant heavy seas, lowered visibility, and poor gunnery. But Keyes had no thought—nor was there any thought at the Admiralty or anywhere in the Dardanelles fleet—of not continuing. A message from the Admiralty urged de Robeck to attack again. Reinforcements would be sent; the old battleships Queen and Implacable were already on their way; London and Prince of Wales would follow soon; the French admiralty was sending the battleship Henri IV to replace the lost Bouvet. A meeting of the Cabinet War Council on March 19 authorized de Robeck to “continue the naval operations against the Dardanelles if he thought fit.” Keyes began organizing and equipping a new minesweeping force. On March 20, two days after the attack, de Robeck reported to the Admiralty that fifty British and twelve French minesweepers, manned by volunteers from the lost battleships, would soon be available. He hoped, he said, “to be in a position to commence operations in three or four days.”

  It was not to be; March 18 marked both the climax and the termination of the purely naval assault on the Dardanelles. Thereafter, as the days passed and the anchored fleet was buffeted by high winds and driving rain, de Robeck resumed his brooding. Writing to Wemyss, he referred to the attack as “a disaster.” Not only had he lost a third of his battleships, he still had no idea how this catastrophe had happened and how to prevent it from happening again. He had learned that naval guns had a much easier time dealing with ancient forts of heavy masonry than with temporary field works. He now knew that, to be fully effective, the fire of long-range guns must be accurately targeted by officers who can observe the locations and effect of bursting shells. Above all, he had learned that in restricted waters, mines protected by artillery that can intimidate minesweeping constitute a formidable defense against a fleet. But it was the loss of battleships that troubled him most. It did no good for Keyes to remind him that the battleships were old and on their way to the scrap heap. Battleships were the backbone of the Royal Navy; battleships were filled with brave men; and he, John de Robeck, had lost three. And he had no way of knowing that, if he attacked again, he would not lose another three.

  On March 22, a group of senior Allied commanders gathered on board the Queen Elizabeth to confer about the next step. The moment the conference began, Admiral de Robeck dramatically announced that the fleet could not force the Dardanelles on its own. At this, one of the figures seated at the table nodded. General Sir Ian Hamilton, sent out by Kitchener to command the growing ground force assigned to “reap the fruits” of the navy’s success, agreed with the admiral. Hamilton had arrived at the Dardanelles on March 17, just in time to witness the fleet’s massive March 18 attack on the Narrows forts. He had been impressed by the mighty cannonade, but he had also seen Inflexible creeping away, her bridge burned out, her foretop destroyed, her bow low in the water. He had seen destroyers with decks crowded with hundreds of men from sunken or abandoned battleships. To Hamilton, it was clear that the Turkish guns, particularly the concealed howitzer batteries that were preventing British trawlers from sweeping mines, could not be completely destroyed or suppressed by naval gunfire. This, he believed, would have to be done by troops on the ground. On March 19, the day after the naval assault, he had signaled Kitchener: “I am being 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 the forts; it must be a deliberate and progressive military operation carried out at full strength, so as to open a passage for the navy.” Kitchener, who ten weeks before had ada
mantly opposed all ground operations at the Dardanelles, now replied to Hamilton, “You know my view that the Dardanelles passage must be forced, and that if large military operations on the Gallipoli peninsula by your troops are necessary to clear the way, those operations must be undertaken . . . and must be carried through.”

  This exchange of messages was on Hamilton’s mind as he listened to de Robeck on Queen Elizabeth. Hamilton liked de Robeck, whom he described as “a fine-looking man with great charm of manner,” and he understood the admiral’s concern. Suppose the fleet, followed by the army’s troopships, managed to get through the Dardanelles with the loss of another old battleship or two. With the Turks still holding both sides of the Straits, how long could the fleet remain isolated in the Sea of Marmara starved of coal and ammunition? What would happen to Hamilton’s troopships and the thousands of men on board if their supply lines ran through a narrow strait dominated by enemy guns? And what about Goeben? With Inflexible damaged, de Robeck would have only the old battleships, none of which were fast enough to catch the German battle cruiser. Queen Elizabeth might do it, but how likely was it that the Admiralty would permit the prize superdreadnought to be exposed to the dangers involved in entering the Sea of Marmara?

  Originally, Hamilton had hoped that the army would not have to land on Gallipoli and that a purely naval offensive could achieve the Allied objectives. “Constantinople must surrender within a few hours of our battleships entering the Marmara,” he had written in his diary, “when her rail and sea communications were cut and a rain of shell fell upon the penned-up populace from de Robeck’s terrific batteries. Given a good wind, that nest of iniquity would go up like Sodom and Gomorrah in a winding sheet of flame.” But now the admiral had said that this prospect was an illusion: that his battleships could not go through without help. And de Robeck, for his part, now grasped that Hamilton had come with Kitchener’s blessing to provide exactly that kind of help. The two men understood each other and no further dis-cussion was needed. Unanimously, the conference on the Queen Elizabeth resolved that the naval attack should be postponed. Nothing more was to be done by the fleet until the army that Hamilton was to command was ready to act. Because the troops and their equipment were scattered across the eastern Mediterranean, they must be assembled and organized to force an opposed amphibious landing against an entrenched enemy. The general estimated that he would need about three weeks.

  Keyes, busy reorganizing the minesweeping force, was absent from this March 22 meeting. When he returned to Queen Elizabeth and heard what had been decided, he was dismayed. “I lost no time in having it out with the admiral,” he said later. He pleaded with de Robeck not to wait; the new minesweepers would be ready on April 3 or 4; they would sweep the mines and then the fleet was bound to get through. To wait for the army to return meant giving the Turks time to rebuild their defenses and bring in fresh troops and ammunition. But de Robeck’s mind was made up: he would wait for Hamilton and the army; the navy would act in a supporting role. Nineteen years later, in 1934, Keyes, then an Admiral of the Fleet, wrote: “I wish to place on record that I had no doubt then, and have none now—and nothing will ever shake my opinion—that from the 4th of April onwards the fleet could have forced the Straits and, with losses trifling in comparison to those the army suffered, could have entered the Marmara. . . . This operation . . . would have led immediately to a victory decisive upon the whole course of the war.”

  On March 23, the day after the Queen Elizabeth conference, de Robeck broke the news to the Admiralty that he was abandoning the purely naval campaign. He proposed now to wait until April 14, when, Hamilton had told him, the army would be ready; then, together, they would conduct a combined assault against the Straits and the Gallipoli peninsula. “It appears better,” de Robeck wrote, “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.” In a further signal on March 26, he added, “I do not hold the check on the 18th to be decisive, but having met General Hamilton . . . I consider a combined operation essential to obtain great results and object of campaign. . . . To attack the Narrows now with fleet would be a mistake, as it would jeopardize the execution of a better and bigger scheme.”

  At the Admiralty, Churchill read this telegram with “consternation.” He had “regarded . . . [March 18] as only the first of several days’ fighting. It never occurred to me for a moment that we should not go on within the limits of what we had decided to risk, until we had reached a decision one way or another. . . . I feared the perils of the long delay. . . . The mere process of landing an army after giving the enemy at least three more weeks’ additional notice seemed to me a most terrible and formidable hazard.” Immediately, the First Lord drafted a message to de Robeck, overruling the decision of the conference on Queen Elizabeth and commanding de Robeck “to renew the attack begun on March 18 at the first opportunity.” Then, summoning Fisher and the Admiralty War Group to his room, he showed them de Robeck’s telegram and his own reply and asked their approval. He met “insuperable resistance. . . . For the first time since the war began, high words were used around the octagonal table,” Churchill wrote later. In the opinion of Fisher, Wilson, and Jackson, de Robeck’s message had transformed the situation at the Dardanelles. They had been willing, they told the First Lord, to support an attack by the navy alone, “because it was supported and recommended by the commander on the spot.” But now de Robeck had decided on something different: a joint operation by the navy and the army. De Robeck was the officer responsible; he knew the situation; to insist that he set aside his own professional judgment must not be done. Indeed, Fisher was overjoyed that at last the operation was assuming the form that he had always preferred. “What more could we want?” he asked. “The army was going to do it. They ought to have done it all along.” All morning, Churchill “pressed to the very utmost the need to renew the attack. . . . I could make no headway. Nothing I could do could overcome the admirals now that they had dug their toes in.” As a last resort, Churchill took the draft of his telegram to Asquith. The prime minister declared that in principle he agreed with the First Lord, but that he would not overturn the professional advice of many admirals.

  At a Cabinet meeting that afternoon, Churchill announced “with grief . . . the refusal of the admiral and the Admiralty to continue the naval attack.” At that point, Churchill well understood, the Cabinet’s reaction might be to withdraw from the entire Dardanelles enterprise. The attack had failed and, as Kitchener had said in an earlier deliberation, “We could always withdraw if things did not go well.” So far, “we had lost fewer men killed and wounded than were often incurred in a trench raid on the Western Front and no vessel of the slightest value had been sunk.” But Kitchener spoke up immediately. “Confident, commanding, magnanimous . . . he assumed the burden and declared he would carry the operations through by military force.” As usual, once the war lord had spoken, there was nothing more to be said. Churchill gave up and sent a message to de Robeck telling him that his new plans had been approved. Thus it was that the decision to call off the naval attack on the Dardanelles and to initiate a land campaign was made, not by a formal decision of the Cabinet or the War Council, not by the Admiralty or the War Office, but by de Robeck and Hamilton meeting one morning in the wardroom of a battleship 2,000 miles away. Thereafter, all major decisions in the campaign were made by Kitchener and Hamilton; de Robeck’s role became the providing of naval gunfire support and other services when requested. The War Council, having approved the decision and the arrangements made on the battleship, never altered them, because the War Council did not meet again until May 19, eight weeks later. By then, 70,000 Allied troops were ashore at Gallipoli and a new British government, a new First Sea Lord, and a new First Lord of the Admiralty were in office.

  No one can know whether, if the Allied fleet had tried again, the ships would have broken through to the Sea of Marmara. If so, what might have happened? After the
war, Henry Morgenthau declared that the appearance of an Allied fleet off Constantinople in March 1915 would have toppled the Turkish government and driven that nation out of the war. “The whole Ottoman state, on that eighteenth day of March when the Allied fleet abandoned the attack, was on the brink of dissolution,” Morgenthau wrote. At Constantinople, “the populace, far from opposing the arrival of the Allied fleet, would have welcomed it with joy . . . for this would emancipate them from the hated Germans, bring about peace and end their miseries. . . . Talaat [the grand vizier] had loaded two automobiles with extra tires, gasoline, and all other essentials of a protracted journey. . . . [He] stationed these automobiles on the Asiatic side of the city with chauffeurs constantly at hand. . . . But the great Allied armada never returned.”

  The first chapters of the new epic were completed. The days went by and silence settled over the Dardanelles. The weather constantly changed; mornings of warm, mirror-surface calm gave way to high winds, driving rain, storm-tossed waves, and sometimes flurries of snow. Not until the end of April, when scarlet poppies covered the fields of Gallipoli, did the tale resume its grim unfolding a few miles distant from the site of ancient Troy.

  CHAPTER 26 Gallipoli: The Landings

  From the beginning, the possibility of a land campaign had lurked beneath the surface of the naval attack on the Dardanelles. A plan to employ significant land forces had not emerged in the early discussions because Kitchener had declared categorically that no troops were available; this had prompted Churchill to say that the navy could force the Straits on its own. Originally, Fisher had been in the middle, believing that a Dardanelles campaign was a good idea, but only as a combined operation involving both the army and the navy. On February 23, 1915, he made this point to Lloyd George: “The Dardanelles: futile without soldiers. Somebody will have to land at Gallipoli some time or other.” Thereafter, as it became clear that the navy was indeed going to try to force the Straits alone, Fisher lapsed into resentment and opposition.