Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  Hamilton’s new base was at Alexandria, where his staff moved first into a large old house that had once been a brothel and had neither electricity nor running water; after dark, the staff worked by candlelight. A few days later, the army leased the Hotel Metropole for its offices. Practical information about Gallipoli was scanty. No one knew the depth of water off the beaches, the location or condition of the roads, or whether the peninsula contained any wells or fresh water springs. (Later, they were to discover that numerous springs, bubbling with fresh water, were on the ridges, where they kept the Turks plentifully supplied. Water for the Allied troops on the beaches had to be brought in barges from Egypt, 700 miles away.) There were too few small boats to carry the troops ashore, so throughout the Middle East, dozens of trawlers, lighters, and caïques were purchased for cash; in one day, British officers bought forty-two large lighters and five tugs at Piraeus. Fifteen hundred donkeys were bought or rented with their keepers and drivers. As the days passed, hundreds of ships descended on Lemnos and Mudros. The island and its little town had become the forward marshaling point for a huge naval and military operation; the immense natural harbor now was filled with battleships, cruisers, destroyers, troop transports, tramp steamers, water barges, tugs, and hospital ships.

  At Alexandria and Mudros, the staff examined the question of where the army should land. Kitchener had forbidden a landing on the Asian coast, and landings on the shore inside the Dardanelles were ruled out because they would come under fire from the guns of the Narrows forts and the howitzers on the Asian shore. The peninsula’s Aegean coast remained. De Robeck, trying to be helpful, suggested that Hamilton land his army at Bulair, on the peninsula’s neck, thereby cutting the road to Constantinople and isolating the Turkish army on Gallipoli. Hamilton personally reconnoitered Bulair from the bridge of a British cruiser and saw that his troops would have to come ashore into a swamp, then assault a ridge of high ground honeycombed with earthwork fortifications that 10,000 Turks had been constructing for a month. With Bulair ruled out, the possible landing sites were reduced to three: Cape Helles, on the tip of the peninsula; Ari Burny, thirteen miles up the western coast of the peninsula; and Suvla Bay, a beach about a mile north of Ari Burny. Eventually Hamilton and his officers drew up their plan: the 29th Division would land on the five small beaches at the tip of the peninsula around Cape Helles. The Anzacs would go ashore at Ari Burny and, as a temporary diversion, the 16,000 troops of the French division would land at Kum Kale on the Asian side. Hamilton’s hope was that by the evening of the first day, the 29th Division would seize the crest of Achi Baba, which dominated southern Gallipoli, and that the Anzacs would secure the heights of Sari Bair, astride the peninsula’s middle. But Hamilton’s first concern was the moment of landing itself. The troops were to be carried to Gallipoli aboard warships; a mile from the coast, the men would climb down into the ships’ boats and be towed by tugs nearer the shore; close to the beaches, the boats would cast off and be rowed the final few hundred yards. In order to put a large number of men quickly ashore, an imaginative variation was proposed: the 6,000-ton collier River Clyde would be packed with 2,000 men, then run up on the beach, whereupon the soldiers would disembark from holes—romantically designated sally ports—cut in the ship’s sides. “In my mind, the crux was to get my army ashore,” Hamilton later wrote. “Once ashore, I could hardly think that Great Britain and France would not in the long run defeat Turkey.”

  As the landings approached, a sense of exhilaration swept through the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. It was assumed that the enemy was utterly inferior. Men in the ranks looked forward to “bashing Abdul” and “shoving it to Johnny Turk” while young officers, including the poet Rupert Brooke and the prime minister’s son, Arthur Asquith, steeped in the classics taught in England’s public schools, carried copies of the Iliad. “It’s too wonderful for belief,” Brooke wrote to Asquith’s daughter, Violet. “I had not imagined Fate could be so benign. . . . Will Hero’s Tower crumble under the 15-inch guns? Will the sea . . . be wine-dark? . . . Shall we be a Turning Point in History? Oh God! I’ve never been quite so happy in my life, I think.” In England, everyone, including his friends the Asquiths, the Churchills, Bernard Shaw, and Henry James, was reading the poet’s war sonnets:

  Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,

  And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping . . .

  and

  If I should die, think only this of me;

  That there’s some corner of a foreign field

  That is for ever England. . . .

  On the eve of the landings, the force suffered its most famous loss when Brooke, only twenty-seven, died on a hospital ship from blood poisoning. “He died at 4.46 [in the afternoon],” wrote one of his friends, “with the sun shining all round his cabin and the cool sea breeze blowing through the door and shaded windows. No one could have wished a quieter or calmer end than in that lovely bay, shielded by the mountains and fragrant with sage and thyme.” His friends buried him that night on the top of a hill in a grove of olive trees.

  A few hours later, the invasion fleet was off Cape Helles. Other young men would remember the moment: “Nature was so peaceful, a dead flat calm, an oily sea, a silent, beautiful rock-crowned island . . . no sound or movement in the water or air, no sign of the prodigious eruption of metal which was to greet the dawn.” “On deck it is hardly light and the weather is cool. . . . There are ships everywhere . . . a whole fleet surrounds the peninsula. A light mist covers everything and white flaky clouds cling to the valleys. . . . We are now at the last lap, waiting our turn . . . not a breath of air, not a sign of movement. It is still a sheer impossibility to believe that we are at war.”

  Then came the opening thunderclap of the naval bombardment. The landings began at 5:30 a.m. and the men came ashore onto beaches tangled with barbed wire, swept by machine guns, and blasted by howitzers. Under a tempest of fire, boats were shattered and sank; others, filled with dead and dying, drifted away. Men clambered out of the boats, floundered up to their shoulders in the water, and were cut down, screaming. Others stepped into water too deep for them and, weighed down by their equipment, drowned unnoticed. Bodies floated out to sea or lay a few feet from shore, lapped by the wavelets. Before the sun was high, a wide crimson stain spread for a hundred feet out from the beach across the blue-green water. The River Clyde, with its cargo of 2,000 men packed tightly in the hold, ran in toward the beach until its propellers churned the sand near the ruined Sedd el Bahr fortress. Three hundred Turkish soldiers with machine guns waited behind a small ridge, holding their fire. The “sally ports” opened, the British infantry rushed forward, the machine guns chattered, and the gangways became choked with dead and dying men. On other beaches there was less resistance and, by nightfall, 33,000 British and Australian and 3,000 French troops were ashore. Five thousand men had been killed or wounded.

  The landings failed to achieve even their first day objectives. At Cape Helles, Hamilton had hoped to seize the crown of Achi Baba before nightfall; from these heights, his artillery could range over the entire lower peninsula. From Anzac Beach, he had expected the Australians and New Zealanders to storm the crests of Chunuk Bair and Sari Bair; from these summits, they could then move down to seize the town of Maidos on the Straits and cut the peninsula in half. Instead, the British assault forces scarcely penetrated beyond the beaches. During May, three major attacks were launched on the village of Krithia, near Achi Baba, but the front advanced only a few hundred yards. When Hamilton suggested to Major General Aylmer Hunter-Weston, commander of the 29th Division, that he attack at night to cut down on casualties, Hunter-Weston replied, “Casualties? What do I care for casualties?” Hamilton, true to his nature, did not overrule his subordinate. When ground was taken, the Turks immediately counterattacked. On May 19, a mass of 30,000 Turks charged the Anzac lines; 10,000 Turks fell; the Anzacs lost 600.

  The front was stalemated. The Allies could not se
ize the ridges; the Turks could not hurl their enemies back into the sea; and the killing ground of the Western Front was reproduced at Gallipoli. The weapons were the same: the rifle, the grenade, the machine gun, and the spade. At Anzac Beach, where the entire beachhead covered only 400 acres—less than half the size of New York City’s Central Park—a labyrinth of trenches fronted by barbed wire was cut into the steep hillsides. Fire steps for snipers were set into the trench walls, with periscopes peeping over the top. To make it impossible for Allied warships to fire at the Turks without endangering their own men, Sanders ordered his soldiers to dig their trenches as close to the Allied trenches as possible; sometimes, the Allied and Turkish trenches were no more than fifteen feet apart. From the Allied front lines, hundreds of little paths ran down to the beach, worn smooth by men and animals bringing water and supplies; at one point Hamilton noted that he was unable to take the offensive because half of his men were carrying water and the other half were digging.

  Hamilton soon realized that the War Office’s prediction that the Turks would fiercely oppose the landings, but that once the troops were ashore, opposition would crumble, had come from a world of fantasy. Equally, he had seen that Kitchener’s statement that “the cross fire from the fleet . . . must sweep that stretch of flat and open country so as to render it untenable by the enemy” bore no relation to reality at Gallipoli. As the painful and dangerous position of the army became more obvious, many men in the fleet offshore, watching with their own eyes, felt frustrated and humiliated. Keyes in particular was ashamed of the navy’s inactivity. The Allied fleet now was immensely more powerful than it had been on March 18. Thirty-eight new minesweepers had been added, crewed by volunteers from the lost ships, and twenty-four destroyers had been converted for minesweeping. When de Robeck, Wemyss, and Keyes met on Queen Elizabeth on May 9, Keyes urged resumption of a full-scale naval attack on the Narrows. De Robeck agreed to put the suggestion before the Admiralty, but his signal to London was unenthusiastic: “From the vigour of the enemy’s resistance, it is improbable that the passage of the fleet into the Marmara will be decisive, and therefore it is equally probable that the Straits will be closed behind the fleet,” he wrote. “The temper of the Turkish army in the peninsula indicates that the forcing of the Dardanelles and subsequent appearance of the fleet off Constantinople would not of itself prove decisive.” Keyes saw the message before it went, but, knowing the First Lord better than the admiral did, he believed that, even with the cold water thrown on it by de Robeck, this proposal would inspire Churchill to push a new attack through the Admiralty and the War Council. What Keyes did not know was the growing precariousness of the First Lord’s position in London, and the strength of the forces gathering for his overthrow.

  Week by week, Fisher’s irritation with Churchill’s methods of administering the Admiralty had continued to grow. He had never liked the stream of imperious memoranda that flowed from the First Lord, or Churchill’s habit of sending operational messages to admirals and captains, which Fisher considered lay solely within his jurisdiction as First Sea Lord. But the greatest source of Fisher’s mounting resentment was his apprehension about the Dardanelles. He feared that the Dardanelles were draining away the strength of the Grand Fleet and that he could do nothing to stop this. “The more I consider the Dardanelles the less I like it!” he wrote to Churchill on March 4. “No matter what happens it is impossible to send out anything more, not even a dinghy!” After the failure of the naval attack of March 18, Fisher, although relieved that the primary burden had been assumed by the army, still fought every suggestion and begrudged every instance of additional naval aid. “We cannot send another rope yarn to de Robeck,” he wrote to Churchill on April 2. “We have gone TO THE VERY LIMIT!!! And so they must be distinctly and most emphatically told that no further reinforcements of the fleet can be looked for! A failure or check in the Dardanelles would be nothing. A failure in the North Sea would be ruin.” Churchill attempted to set aside Fisher’s complaints with good humor: “Seriously, my friend, are you not a little unfair in trying to spite this operation by side winds and small points when you have accepted it in principle?” Later, however, the First Lord would write that during these weeks, “every officer, every man, every ship, every round of ammunition required for the Dardanelles became a cause of friction and had to be fought for by me, not only with the First Sea Lord but to a certain extent with his naval colleagues.”

  [In early May, Fisher’s resentment against Churchill took a distinctly malicious turn. On May 5, the First Lord was in Paris at Asquith’s request, participating in the negotiations that were to bring Italy into the war on the Allied side. Before coming home, the First Lord stopped to visit his friend Sir John French, at BEF headquarters. While her husband was away, Clementine Churchill invited Fisher to lunch. After lunch, on his way out the door, the old admiral turned to her and growled, “You are a foolish woman. All the time you think Winston’s with Sir John French, he is in Paris with his mistress.” Clementine, to whom Winston was faithful throughout his life, was stunned.]

  Meanwhile, the Conservative opposition was becoming aware of the increasing antagonism between the political and professional leaders of the navy. Most Conservatives disliked Winston Churchill. They remembered his famous walk across the aisle in 1904, and the label of “turncoat” had never been removed. Many Conservatives—and not a few Liberals—saw in Churchill’s adventure in Antwerp, his frequent visits to France, evidence of the First Lord’s immaturity and unwillingness to restrict himself to his proper sphere. Some found him personally abrasive. In particular, there no love lost between the First Lord and Andrew Bonar Law, the Canadian-born former Glasgow businessman who had replaced Balfour as leader of the Conservative party in 1911. Bonar Law believed that Churchill was too filled with quixotic, dangerous schemes, too quick to resent criticism, too obstinate to admit fallibility—in short, too irresponsible—to hold high office. Churchill, for his part, underrated Law as a fourth-rate politician and made little attempt to conceal his contempt.

  De Robeck’s May 9 telegram precipitated the Admiralty crisis that had long been simmering. Churchill wanted to renew at least a limited attack on the Narrows forts to cover clearance of the Kephez minefield. Fisher stood fast; here was another attempt by the First Lord to hurl more men and ships into the bottomless pit of the Dardanelles. On May 11, he wrote to Churchill, “Although I have acquiesced in each stage of the operations up to the present . . . I have clearly expressed my opinion that I did not consider the original attempt to force the Dardanelles with the fleet alone was a practicable operation. . . . I cannot under any circumstances be a party to any order to Admiral de Robeck to make any attempt to pass the Dardanelles until the shores have been effectively occupied.” Two days later, Fisher, attempting to buttress his position, wrote directly to the prime minister: “I honestly feel that I cannot remain where I am much longer as there is an inevitable and never-ceasing drain daily (almost hourly) on our resources in the decisive theatre of war. . . . We are all diverted to the Dardanelles and the unceasing activities of the First Lord, both by day and night, are engaged in ceaseless prodding of everyone in every department afloat and shore in the interests of the Dardanelles fleet.” The strain between the two leaders of the Admiralty, therefore, was already acute. On May 13, it was further aggravated by the loss of another battleship at Gallipoli.

  From the day of the landings, the sea around the Gallipoli peninsula had been unchallengeably British and French. The waters had been crowded with Allied ships: battleships, cruisers, and destroyers pounding the Turkish lines; transports, supply ships, hospital ships, and trawlers anchored off the beaches or gliding about their nautical business. This scene, which had provided the embattled soldiers with a powerful sense of security at their backs, had been taken for granted. Then came the sinking of Goliath.

  Hugging the cliffs on the dark, moonless night of May 12, the Turkish destroyer Muavenet, commanded by a skillful German, crept
down the European side of the Straits. Not more than a hundred yards offshore in Morto Bay lay the old battleship Goliath, anchored and awaiting the new bombardment assignments, which would come with morning. The destroyer, approaching the battleship through the mist, was seen and hailed—too late—by an officer on Goliath’s bridge. Muavenet surged forward and fired three torpedoes. The battleship rolled over onto her side, turned turtle, floated a few minutes upside down, then plunged to the bottom. The battleship Majestic, anchored nearby, switched on her searchlights. “The sea for an area of half an acre was a mass of struggling, drowning people, all drifting down towards us with the current,” said a Majestic officer. Because the current that night was running at 4 or 5 knots, not a single man, even those in life jackets, was able to swim the short distance to shore. Five hundred and seventy men were drowned and 180 were saved. In human terms, this was the greatest loss suffered by the British navy in the Dardanelles campaign. For Turkey, it was a triumph. Every man in the destroyer’s crew received a gold watch and an embroidered purse filled with gold from the sultan.

  When the news reached London that afternoon, Fisher’s concern about the vulnerability of Queen Elizabeth was violently stimulated. To calm the First Sea Lord, Churchill immediately agreed to bring the superdreadnought home and to replace her at the Dardanelles with new monitors carrying 14-inch guns. Fisher “was very much relieved at this and was grateful,” the First Lord later recalled. Unfortunately, that evening the argument was rekindled. When Kitchener appeared at the Admiralty to discuss another matter, Churchill showed him the telegram he and Fisher had drafted but not yet sent regarding Queen Elizabeth. Kitchener, surprised, became extremely angry. He protested vehemently that the withdrawal of the principal warship at Gallipoli meant that the navy was deserting the army—and this, after the army had come to the navy’s assistance when the fleet had failed to force a passage of the Dardanelles. Fisher, witnessing the field marshal’s anger and listening as Churchill attempted to reassure Kitchener, flew into a rage himself: “The Queen Elizabeth would come home; she would come home at once; she would come home that night or he [Fisher] would walk out of the Admiralty, then and there.” Kitchener rushed back to the War Office and scribbled a note to Asquith, complaining that Fisher “could not stand the fear of losing the ship. I may say that I have had to face the loss of some 15,000 men in the operations to help the navy.” If the dreadnought departed, the field marshal warned, “we may have to consider . . . whether the troops had better be pulled back to Alexandria.”