A Naval History of World War I

by Paul G. Halpern

  The main Turkish attack came at night in the early hours of 3 February in the Tussum sector just to the south of Lake Timsah. Only three boatloads of Turkish troops managed to get across the canal; they were all quickly killed, wounded, or captured. Turkish artillery fire during the day found the range of the Hardinge, which suffered some damage and had to move up to Lake Timsah to avoid the danger of being sunk in the fairway. The Turkish artillery then turned on the Requin, which located the battery and managed to silence it. The Turkish attack was a failure, and the Turks soon began their retreat. The British did not seek to exploit it; they did not have an overabundance of trained troops, and Kitchener had warned Maxwell not to risk a reverse. They were also ignorant of Turkish strength and movements, as the French seaplanes, after hard use, had suffered mechanical breakdowns. The pursuit was limited to 10 miles from the canal. By 11 February the canal was reopened for night traffic. It had only been closed for daytime traffic on the 3d. The vital lines of communications were never seriously interfered with.18

  The naval aspect of the defense of the Suez Canal became purely secondary with the development of the Dardanelles campaign. In fact the Dardanelles campaign was probably the most effective defense of Egypt, for the best Turkish troops and most experienced officers were withdrawn from Palestine. For the remainder of the year, Turkish efforts against the canal were more in the nature of pinpricks. The Turks did make attempts to mine the canal; the defenders found tracks in the desert and, on one occasion, an abandoned mine. The launches regularly searched for mines, but on 30 June the Holt liner Teiresias struck a mine in Little Bitter Lake and swung about, blocking the channel. The Suez Canal Company managed to clear it that night. This was the only Turkish success. The threat remained, however, and with the end of the Dardanelles campaign at the close of the year, the decision was taken to establish the line of defense roughly eleven thousand yards to the east of the canal, beyond artillery range.19 Egypt and the canal were not seriously threatened again, and the British reverted to the offensive in which the navy played its usual role supporting the seaward flank of the army.

  In late 1915 a threat to Egypt developed from the opposite direction, the west. The problem concerned the Senussi, a religious sect that had been waging war against Britain’s ally Italy in Cyrenaica. Italy’s hold on her Libyan colony, wrested from the Turks in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12, was tenuous, and after the outbreak of the world war in Europe, the Italian army pulled back to a few coastal points, leaving the vast interior to the desert tribes. In the absence of real roads, the British and Egyptian frontier garrisons were dependent on the sea for their communications. There was little that could be spared for the Egyptian coast with the Dardanelles campaign in progress and the Macedonian campaign just beginning. Unfortunately, at this moment the Entente’s control of the sea in the Mediterranean was seriously challenged for the first time by the appearance of German submarines. On 5 November U.35 sank the armed boarding steamer Tara, an 1,800-ton former London and Northwestern Railway Company steamer, off the Egyptian coast. The survivors were subsequently towed by the U-boat to the Cyrenaican coast and handed over to the Senussi. U.35 then returned to Sollum and attacked a pair of Egyptian Coast Guard gunboats at their moorings, sinking the Abbas and damaging the Nuhr-el-Bahr. The British decided to evacuate Sollum, which had already been unsuccessfully attacked by the Senussi, and concentrate at Marsa Matruh, roughly halfway between Alexandria and the frontier. Sollum was evacuated on 23 November, but the hard-pressed naval commander at the Dardanelles, Admiral de Robeck, had to lend Peirse the sloop Clematis and six trawlers to cover the evacuation and concentration of approximately forty-five hundred troops, laboriously transported at night in the trawlers. By 11 December the British were ready to begin their counteroffensive. These operations were successful; Sollum was reoccupied on 14 March, the survivors of the Tara and the torpedoed transport Moorina were rescued by armored cars led by the Duke of Westminster in a daring raid on an oasis approximately 120 miles west of Sollum on the 17th, and the threat to Egypt from the west was ended.20

  THE DARDANELLES CAMPAIGN

  The Dardanelles campaign was probably the most famous of the overseas campaigns of the First World War. It is considered the “what might have been” of the war and has been a subject of fascination and controversy ever since. It is also inextricably linked with one of the major figures of the twentieth century, Winston Churchill. At first, however, the Dardanelles was only one of the first lord’s schemes, competing with projects such as Borkum, in which for a time he was far more interested. The project became increasingly attractive after the turn of the year. It seemed to offer a way to use Britain’s maritime strength in a traditional manner, exercising leverage at a critical point and avoiding the deadlocked struggle in France, where some British leaders resented the constant demands of the French for more and more men. The French, with their larger army, also had the decisive say on the western front. The Dardanelles was certainly a critical point: if the Strait could be seized, the road to Constantinople would be open and the Ottoman capital would be at the mercy of the guns of the Allied fleet. It was confidently assumed Turkey would be forced out of the war, thereby removing the threat to Egypt and the Persian Gulf oil fields. Furthermore, the route through the Black Sea to Russia would be opened. Success at the Dardanelles would have its effect on the Balkan situation, where the Serbians had been fighting desperately, but so far successfully, to resist the Austrians. The attitude of neutrals such as Italy, Bulgaria, and Romania would be affected. The Russians, who had been badly battered by the Germans in the autumn of 1914, also appealed for assistance in January. Grand Duke Nicholas, commander in chief of the Russian armies, asked for some diversion to counter a Turkish offensive in the Caucasus mountains. An offensive at the Dardanelles also would have the immediate advantage of deflecting the anticipated attack by the Turks on the Suez Canal.

  Churchill, who was renowned for his persuasive powers, managed on 13 January 1915 to secure the provisional consent of the War Council for preparing a naval attack on the Dardanelles. The fact that success seemed possible without the commitment of substantial bodies of troops made the project seem attractive, although it is now apparent Churchill did not have the wholehearted support of the naval and military experts that he assumed he had. Moreover, that support was often based on the assumption that the naval attack could be easily broken off if the prospects for success did not appear promising.21 Fisher’s support was particularly equivocal; he considered the Dardanelles a diversion from what he assumed to be Churchill’s wilder and more dangerous schemes, such as Borkum. Fisher, however, became steadily opposed to the idea on strategical grounds; the ships and men were needed in the North Sea. After the failure of the naval attack in March, Fisher’s opposition grew to the point where he would resign over the issue.22

  The French agreed to their naval forces cooperating with the British in the Dardanelles attack. This was a squadron of old battleships under Rear Admiral Emile-Paul Guépratte, which had been working with Rear Admiral Sir Sackville Carden, British naval commander at the Dardanelles, since the autumn. The real reason for French participation was admitted by Victor Augagneur, the French minister of marine, later during the war: the French did not want to see the British fleet appear off Constantinople alone in an area where they had considerable interests. The military commitment was made to draw the diplomatic benefits from a success. The chief of the French naval staff was, in fact, rather skeptical of the British plan, largely because of the lack of troops to seize the Turkish fortifications once they had been reduced by the fleet.23

  On 28 January the War Council approved the commencement of the naval attack. The British, at least initially, had no need for French naval reinforcements. They had the new superdreadnought Queen Elizabeth with long-range 15-inch guns—whose absence from the Grand Fleet made Fisher particularly nervous—the battle cruiser Inflexible, ten predreadnoughts, later joined by the semidreadnoughts Agamemnon
and Lord Nelson, four cruisers, sixteen destroyers, twenty-one minesweeping trawlers, six submarines, the seaplane carrier Ark Royal, and two destroyer depot ships. The French contribution was four predreadnoughts, a cruiser, six torpedo boats, and four submalines. The Allied fleets planned to work methodically but cautiously to avoid excessive risk or losses, silencing the fire of concealed guns, keeping down the fire of machine guns and trenches so the minesweepers could work. They calculated that they might advance only a mile a day, but the steady advance would shake the morale of the defenders and the Turkish capital. Two battalions of Royal Marines also were sent out for temporary landings, along with a squadron of “dummy” warships, that is, merchantmen whose upper works had been altered to resemble dreadnoughts for the purpose of deception.24

  However imposing this Allied naval force might have been, the hopes for its success rested on faulty tactical assumptions. The effects of flat-trajectory naval guns on land targets were overestimated, whereas the difficulties of spotting and fire control were underestimated. Ships were also at a disadvantage when facing shore batteries; they were inherently more vulnerable. There was an equally questionable strategic assumption that the Turks would throw in the sponge once the fleet had blasted its way past the fortifications and appeared off Constantinople. In other words, warships alone would do the job. There is no way of knowing what really would have happened, but Admiral Souchon, chief of the Mittelmeerdivision, did not think the Allied ships in the Marmara would be able to accomplish anything without strong landing detachments. They might fire off their ammunition at Constantinople or the Turkish fleet, perhaps setting fires, but if the Turkish fleet did not oblige them by giving battle and retired into the Bosphorus, the British and French eventually would have to withdraw back through the Dardanelles when they ran short of coal.25

  The doubts that a purely naval attack would succeed were strong enough to cause the British government to hedge. Colonel Maurice Hankey, secretary to the War Council, wrote on 10 February: “From Lord Fisher downwards, every naval officer in the Admiralty who is in on the secret believes that the Navy cannot take the Dardanelles position without troops. The First Lord [Churchill] still professes to believe that they can do it with ships, but I have warned the Prime Minister that we cannot trust to this.”26 A partial meeting of the War Council on 16 February agreed to send the 29th Division to Lemnos, a Greek island roughly 50 miles to the west of the Dardanelles, which the British were using as a base. The Australian and New Zealand troops from Egypt also would proceed to Lemnos. Lord Kitchener blocked the move of the division at a full meeting of the War Council on the 19th; in his opinion the Australian and New Zealand troops would suffice. He would not finally agree to send the 29th Division until 10 March, by which date there was no possibility of it being employed in the impending naval attack. The French cabinet also decided on 18 February to send a division to Lemnos once they heard the British were doing so. They reached the decision before consulting the army chief of staff, General Joffre, and for the same reason they had committed their naval forces. The British should not be allowed to establish themselves alone in the Levant. The French did suggest postponing the naval operations until the arrival of the troops, but Churchill, with Kitchener’s approval, was opposed. Churchill argued that every delay would add to the danger that German or Austrian submarines would arrive and prejudice the moral effect in the Turkish capital.27

  The British and French bombardment of the Turkish forts at the entrance to the Dardanelles began on 19 February, and then was delayed by bad weather until the 25th. The naval guns outranged the guns of the forts, and the latter proved relatively easy to silence. By 1 March the Allies were ready to proceed to the next phase of the operations, the destruction of the intermediate defenses and the clearing of the minefields below Kephez Point. The plan now began to go awry, for the ships were operating in the restricted waters of the Strait, where minefields kept the battleships at a distance while mobile Turkish batteries including howitzers kept the battleships on the move, reducing the accuracy of their fire against the forts and hampering sweeping. Carden reported that it was impossible to locate and silence the concealed Turkish guns and howitzers solely by ship’s fire. It was necessary for the ships to anchor for accurate and deliberate long-range fire, but this was very difficult when they were within range of those concealed guns. Minesweeping with slow trawlers, manned by volunteer fishermen rather than by regular naval personnel, was also much more difficult than expected, particularly when they had to move against the swift Dardanelles current. Commodore Keyes, now chief of staff at the Dardanelles, concluded, “We are going to get through—but it is a much bigger thing than the Admiralty or anyone out here realized.”28

  The idea that military assistance might be necessary began to grow, but the military arrangements for the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force slowly gathering at Mudros, the base on the island of Lemnos, left much to be desired. The loading of stores and equipment destined for the troops at Mudros had been chaotic, and the facilities at the advanced base to correct the mistakes were inadequate. The commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, General Sir Ian Hamilton, was forced to send some of the transports back to Alexandria and to reroute others. The mess associated with the logistical side of the campaign required a month to straighten out. Rear Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss, who was now senior naval officer at Mudros, complained on 4 March: “The General has been up here from Alexandria and he seems as much in the dark as everybody else—doesn’t know where he is to disembark his army, or what the objective is when they are disembarked.” Wemyss was critical of the government: “The fact of the matter is that I am afraid they are trying to rush matters at home without giving the people who are to carry the job sufficient time or opportunity to organise the matter properly.” Rear Admiral Hugh Miller, who had been Wemyss’s assistant at Mudros, would later write, “In those early days the whole campaign seemed to me to have been very sketchily thought out” and “the naval command was most unfortunate in its appreciation of the situation and . . . the strength of the Dardanelles defences was underestimated long after their strength was being made obvious to the most inexperienced layman.”29 All of this meant that significant numbers of troops would not be ready before the naval attack.

  Ironically, in the light of traditional nineteenth-century rivalries, the British and the French were fighting at the Dardanelles for territorial prizes that would have gone to the Russians. On 10 March the War Council accepted Russian demands for Constantinople, the western shores of the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara, the Dardanelles, southern Thrace up to the Enos-Midia line, and Imbros and Tenedos. They were motivated by a desire to avoid a breach with Russia, and the possibility of a separate Russian peace with Germany.30 But as for the business at hand—forcing the Strait—could the Russians have made any military or naval contribution? Churchill back in January had asked the Russians to be prepared to act at the Bosphorus at the proper moment. The Russian reply had not been encouraging: until the completion of their Black Sea dreadnoughts, they did not consider they had any great advantage over the Turkish fleet and were dubious about the effectiveness of naval artillery on the Bosphorus fortifications. After the Dardanelles bombardments began, Grand Duke Nicholas did promise on 28 February that the Russian Black Sea Fleet would attack Constantinople and that an army of forty-seven thousand men would be used. However, the Russians would do this only after the Allied fleet had entered the Sea of Marmara and appeared off the Princess Islands. They considered forcing the Bosphorus without the assistance of the Allied fleets from the other side to be “impossible.” The Russian naval demonstration took place on 28 March—after the Allied naval failure—and was limited to a long-range bombardment of the Turkish forts at the Bosphorus. No significant results were achieved, and as far as the Dardanelles campaign was concerned, the Russians were only a distant and very indirect factor.31

  If the Dardanelles were proving a tough nut to crack, and if Russian or Greek
assistance was not available, what of some move to try to divert Turkish attention and strength from the Strait? Kitchener had his choice, already mentioned—an attack on Alexandretta. In January Churchill had replied to Kitchener that an operation at Alexandretta ought to be carried out simultaneously with the attack on the Dardanelles so that if the Allies were checked at the Dardanelles, they could claim it was a mere feint to cover the seizure of Alexandretta. Kitchener returned to the proposal at the War Council on 10 March, adding that Alexandretta would compensate for recognizing Russia’s control at Constantinople. The Admiralty supported the Alexandretta proposal because of the access it would provide to Mesopotamian oil. Alexandretta was, however, subject to French objections, and once again the project was deferred.32

  There was another diversion, an attack on Smyrna, although this should really be seen as an attempt to forestall the establishment of a German submarine base at what was Turkey’s largest port on the Mediterranean. The attack was coupled with a curious diplomatic maneuver. There were reports that the Turkish ruler of the district, the Vali of Smyrna, was pro-Allied and would be amenable to a British proposal to surrender his small craft, permit the British to sweep the minefields, and in effect neutralize the port and surrounding vilayet. There was no mention of how the Turkish commanders in the Smyrna fortifications might have been neutralized, whatever the Vali’s sentiments.