The Dandarnelles Disaster

by Dan Van der Vat

  Although the British could not know this, the Turkish Army appears at this stage to have had no more than a single infantry division in the peninsula. They blindly estimated there were two or three, up to 40,000 troops. The offer from Premier Venizelos of Greece to provide three divisions (up to 60,000 men) for an invasion of Gallipoli on 1 March was formally vetoed by a suspicious and grudging Russia on the 3rd.

  But optimism prevailed at the War Council when it met in London that day; ministers busied themselves counting chickens before they hatched. A message arrived from Russia saying that Admiral Eberhard was readying the Black Sea Fleet to deliver an army corps to attack the Bosporus and Constantinople in two to three weeks, as soon as Carden’s fleet broke through, which was expected to happen by 20 March. A Russian naval liaison officer was already attached to Carden’s staff. Three monitors were even detailed to prepare for operations in the Danube after sailing up to Constantinople and onward through the Black Sea. The Council decided that there would be no simultaneous invasion by the 60,000 troops expected to be on hand by 20 March; they were to wait for the navy to complete its work, assisted only by small numbers of troops as necessary, and to be landed afterwards to march on Constantinople and join hands with the Russian corps coming from the north. Still no combined operation, even though the army’s man on the spot, General Birdwood, had reported more than once that the navy could not succeed alone. Kitchener however was unmoved. Carden was left to his own devices, and planned to attack the main forts guarding the Narrows, using the Queen Elizabeth’s 15-inch guns firing ‘over the top’ of the peninsula.

  Delightful early spring weather on 4 March prompted de Robeck to order the third pinprick landing, by two companies of Royal Marines with naval demolition parties, to complete the neutralisation of the Helles and Orkanie subsidiary forts on the European and Asian shores respectively. A subdivision of three battleships covered each shore. As a diversion, Canopus was sent north along the Aegean coast to preoccupy any troops in the Bulair area. Brigadier-General C. N. Trotman, commanding the marines, supervised the landings from a destroyer; other destroyers brought the men from the island of Imbros, where they had spent the night.

  A company of the Plymouth battalion, RM Light Infantry, went ashore first, on the Asian side, only to discover that the Turks were well prepared this time with shrapnel shells and snipers. The men had to take cover under the battered walls of Kum Kale until the ships closed in and shelled the defenders, who retired despite the best restraining efforts of German officers. But the marines’ advance was bitterly contested all the way by snipers and infantry. The marines withdrew after dark at the end of a long, hard day without achieving any of their objectives but with 44 casualties, 17 of them fatal. The other Plymouth company landed a little later on the European side and met a similarly stiff reception. The marines withdrew in the afternoon with three killed and one wounded, again without reaching their objective, and General Trotman abandoned the operation that evening. Only later was it discovered that both objectives had actually been permanently silenced for once by bombardment from the ships on 25 February. The time had clearly expired for using troops in penny-packets for pinprick raids: the Turks might have retired when attacked from the sea, but this did not mean they would not regroup and fight back from another position. In the same spirit, they were evacuating the forts for trenches during bombardments and returning to their guns when the ships turned their attention elsewhere.

  Carden’s next target was the inner defences of the Narrows, inevitably the strongest in the Dardanelles. The European side boasted three main forts centred on Kilid Bahr, equipped with the heaviest cannon of up to 14-inch calibre. Opposite, at Chanak, were two main forts, one of which, the strongest of them all, had two 14-inch pieces that could reach 17,000 yards plus seven 9.4-inch (15,000 yards) and the latest German rangefinders, all of quite recent manufacture. This fort, Hamidieh I, was reported to be manned entirely by Germans. The fixed positions, as usual, were supported by movable field guns, howitzers and heavy machine-guns. To attack the European forts at the Narrows the Queen Elizabeth took up a position south of Gaba Tepe previously swept for her on the Aegean side of the peninsula, some 15,000 yards from her targets. As seaplanes were still generally too feeble to be reliable spotters, usually unable to rise above rifle range, three old battleships were to take it in turns at 12-minute intervals to observe the fall of shot from inside the strait, where however they had to keep on the move to evade enemy artillery fire. They could get no closer than seven or eight miles from the target because of the minefields and their covering guns. The super-dreadnought fired her first shot at noon on 5 March. Two seaplanes went up but one crashed and the other’s pilot was hit by a rifle bullet but survived. The Queen Elizabeth shrugged off no fewer than 17 hits from the mobile artillery, which did no notable damage but were a considerable nuisance, causing a fire at one stage. She set off an ammunition store with one of the 33 15-inch shells she fired but had to stop for bad light.

  Rotating fire-spotting was abandoned as unreliable. On 6 March one ship was used, though constantly on the move, to provide the greater reliability of ‘one pair of eyes’. Carden asked for land-based (i.e. army) aircraft, of which none was available to him. He also asked the Admiralty to change its mind and let him send the Queen Elizabeth into the strait for direct shooting. This was approved but Carden decided to wait awhile. On the 6th, one more attempt at an indirect bombardment was made, the target this time the second fort on the Asian side, Çemenlik. If anything, this experiment worked even less well than the previous day’s. The big battleship was forced to pull back half a mile by accurate coastal artillery fire and started shooting only at 12.30 p.m. She managed just five rounds in an hour before being forced to move again, opening the range to ten miles. After only two more shots, de Robeck ordered her to cease fire while deploying his five older battleships in a direct barrage against various forts inside the strait from about six miles.

  That night the minesweepers made another attempt to sweep as far as Kephez but were driven back by a torrent of fire aided by searchlights. On 7 March Carden tried a new approach: the French squadron volunteered to tackle a number of mobile batteries that had just been located, while the most modern pre-dreadnoughts, Agamemnon and Lord Nelson, fired on the Narrows forts from seven to six miles off. A very heavy, possibly 14-inch, shell plunged on to the Agamemnon at one p.m. and caused considerable damage aft. Her partner scored direct hits on magazines in two Asian forts, which exploded. More and more shells hit the attacking pair before they withdrew in mid-afternoon. But for the intense fire kept up by the French battleships, the damage would have been worse. The Lord Nelson was holed below the waterline, the Agamemnon set off a floating mine, but both ships retired safely with only minor casualties. Meanwhile, at the other end of the Sea of Marmara, the Russian fleet put in a rare appearance to shell ports near the Bosporus. British light cruisers bombarded military installations in the Bulair area from the Aegean. That night it was the turn of the French minesweepers to enter the strait, but they could make no headway against the current.

  By now Carden and his staff were deeply frustrated by the lack of progress, while the Turks and their German advisers could justifiably congratulate each other on a supple, spirited and well-directed defence; their shooting and their tactics alike were clearly improving. On 8 March Carden moved his flag to the Queen Elizabeth and ordered her into the strait, inside a cordon of four older battleships, to shell all five Narrows forts in turn. It was an embarrassingly hesitant operation, inhibited by a chronic shortage of heavy ammunition. And the weather closed in; the super-dreadnought got off just 11 shots at one of the forts, all of which stayed silent while mobile batteries once again laid down an irritating curtain of fire. The big ship may – or may not – have scored one hit. The British and French battleships withdrew at 3.30 p.m., foiled once again after 18 fruitless days.

  At the meeting of the War Council in London on 10 March, Field Marshal th
e Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for War, announced that he had changed his mind.

  CHAPTER 7

  Crescendo

  The situation on both western and eastern fronts against Germany, said Kitchener, was now sufficiently stable to enable him to release the 29th Division, of 18,000 men, for dispatch to the Aegean. The BEF launched a four-division attack on German positions at Neuve Chapelle in Flanders that very morning of 10 March, a qualified success. With ANZAC (now 34,000 infantry and cavalry), a French division (18,000), the RN Division (11,000) and eventually a Russian corps of 47,000 (only available once the Anglo-French force had reached Constantinople) there were more than 125,000 troops on hand for land operations against western Turkey, 80,000 for the Gallipoli peninsula. But even now Kitchener did not think in terms of a combined operation. In his view the troops were there to intervene if the naval assault failed. Despite his ‘U-turn’ on the 29th Division, he had not changed his underlying attitude since early February, when he said that if the navy needed army support, ‘that assistance would be forthcoming’. His earlier idea that the attack on the strait could simply be abandoned if it did not work was no longer relevant. So much effort and precious ammunition had been expended that British prestige was at stake, and not just that of the Royal Navy. Kitchener had vacillated for three weeks before committing just one British Army division, resisting Churchill’s most passionate pleas. By 10 March it was too little, too late: the Turks had not only added many guns to their mobile artillery but already increased their infantry strength in the peninsula from one division to three, with more to come.

  An important witness to, and participant in, the naval attack on the Dardanelles was Commodore Roger Keyes, who was appointed Carden’s chief of staff just before the bombardments began. Previously commodore in command of submarines at Harwich, he was a relative rarity in the upper reaches of the contemporary Royal Navy – a leader with a generous, not to say over-generous, supply of attacking spirit. The future admiral of the fleet and hero of the Zeebrugge Raid in 1918, Keyes, described elsewhere as ‘all gung-ho and no staffwork’, was acutely disappointed by Carden’s lack of inspiration and angered by the poor performance of the minesweepers. His prolific letters to his wife present a vivid account of events before, during and after the naval campaign against the forts, supplemented by volumes of post-war memoirs.

  Keyes, determined that something drastic should be done about the minefields, had a major row with Carden on the evening of 9 March. The admiral planned to sail to Mudros on the 10th to inspect the expanding base there, taking the Queen Elizabeth and Inflexible with him, the latter to be sent back to Malta to replace two of her gun barrels while Carden transferred his flag to the former. He also let his deputy, Rear-Admiral de Robeck, prepare to sail up the Aegean to reconnoitre the Bulair area at the northern neck of the peninsula at the same time. This meant that a mere captain RN, Arthur Hayes-Sadler, commanding HMS Ocean, would temporarily be the senior officer at the Dardanelles.

  This filled me with consternation [Keyes wrote]; it was vital and essential to clear the minefields without further delay. How could the captain of the Ocean be expected to initiate new and perhaps rather desperate methods in the absence of the two admirals …

  We must attack the minefields vigorously, and I wished to satisfy myself that we were going to do so. For instance that night all that was proposed was a reconnaissance by two picket boats – when we had 35 sweepers – that was not acting vigorously …

  The position of commodore, signified by a single broad gold stripe on the sleeve, is not a true rank in the Royal Navy but only a mark of special responsibility for an officer who remains a substantive captain (the next step up the ladder of rank being rear-admiral). As Keyes was lower down the captains’ list than Hayes-Sadler, he was not entitled to give the latter orders unless at the behest of Carden or de Robeck. Carden accepted Keyes’s argument at 11 p.m. and signalled de Robeck to stay put. Keyes next won over the second-in-command to the idea of a sweep as near the Narrows as possible, but with an important difference. One battleship, the Canopus, one light cruiser, destroyers and picket boats would accompany seven trawlers (allowing for the 500-yard minesweeping wires, two and a half inches thick, such was all there was sea-room for) up the strait as near to Chanak as possible. The wires, each supported not only by a minesweeper at each end but also by a large wooden kite in the middle to help maintain the correct depth, were to be deployed only when the trawlers put about. This time they would sail downstream with the current instead of having to fight it with their inadequate power. Fewer than half of the 21 trawlers available on 18 March could make 14 knots. If a pair snared a mine, they had to encircle it with the cable, tow it away and set it off by rifle fire. The technique was hopelessly inadequate in calm waters with no enemy fire; in the often choppy strait, especially under shellfire and searchlights, it was impossible. Keyes asked Captain Heathcote Grant of Canopus (also senior to him) for permission to accompany him and observe. He requested from the Admiralty permission to give the trawlermen a bonus if they were successful: ‘they were not supposed to sweep under fire, and had not joined for that’. He also wanted to stiffen the crews with volunteer junior naval officers and ratings, but permission did not arrive in time.

  The escorts blazed away at the five searchlights that lit up the scene but failed to douse them. Guns ashore put up the customary wild barrage. The trawlers formed three pairs with the seventh as leader, but the nervous crews of two of the pairs failed to maintain the requisite 500-yard distance apart, which meant they did not sweep at sufficient depth, making their efforts pointless. The third pair did better, catching and exploding two mines – only to run on to a third, which exploded under one of them. She sank, her crew all rescued by the other trawler’s. The accompanying picket boats proved slightly more effective, using grapnels to snag the mine cables and setting them off with small explosive charges. It was by far the best haul of mines so far, but it still only scratched the surface of the problem. Only two men were wounded that night. The next sweep, on the night of the 11th, was a complete fiasco: the trawlers simply fled when the Turks opened fire. Keyes was furious: ‘How could they talk about being stopped by a heavy fire if they were not hit?’ Churchill could not understand this either, signalling to Carden more than once that reasonable losses were both acceptable and expected. But neither he nor Keyes had ever been a civilian trawlerman suddenly exposed to blazing searchlights and murderous cannonades in the dark. On the 12th, permission arrived for putting a naval lieutenant as skipper aboard each trawler with three senior ratings to support him. There were scores of volunteers, enabling each battleship to part-man a trawler in this way. There was also another verbose signal, drafted by Churchill himself, to Carden, which ended: ‘We will support you in well-conceived action for forcing a decision even if regrettable losses [are] entailed.’ Keyes read this and at once commandeered a destroyer to take it personally to Mudros and hand it to Carden, who then returned to the Dardanelles. The French minesweepers had no success at all on the night of 12 March. De Robeck put the minesweeper problem down to inexperience among the fishermen manning the adapted trawlers. They did not seem to have any fear of mines ‘though they do not seem to like working under gunfire, which is a new element in their calling’.

  Carden and his staff decided on one more try on the night of the 13th, with navy men in direct command of the trawlers. The performance of the minesweepers was much more determined, but so was the gunfire from both shores, as the sweepers struggled against the current, as they turned and tried to put out their equipment and as they tried to sweep downstream. Battleships, cruisers and destroyers fired back copiously, to no noticeable effect. Only two out of seven sweepers were able to start work. One trawler was hit 84 times, though not by heavy shell, her crew saved by the steel-plate screens fitted as part of the conversion for sweeping. The five picket boats did better, cutting many mines loose which were later set off by rifle fir
e in daylight. The light cruiser Amethyst of the escort, however, deliberately drawing fire away from the trawlers, was hit by a heavy shell and suffered 24 dead and 36 wounded. Aboard the trawlers, the toll ran to just five killed and four wounded, but there was considerable damage: four minesweepers and one picket boat were put out of action. Carden decided to give up night sweeps. On 14 March Churchill, obviously still unaware that the trawlermen and their naval colleagues had put up their best performance so far, signalled to the admiral: ‘I do not understand why minesweepers should be interfered with by firing which causes no casualties.’ The First Lord, in a misguided attempt to lift Carden’s spirits, added that the Admiralty had heard the forts were running out of ammunition and in ‘despondent reports’ German officers were asking for more. It was time to press on: ‘The unavoidable losses must be accepted. The enemy is harassed and anxious now.’ The last sentence contained at best an element of truth but read more like wishful thinking.

  Carden responded stoutly enough to the signals urging him on by telling the Admiralty that he proposed to initiate an all-out attack, including a massive bombardment as well as minesweeping, by daylight on 17 March, weather permitting. He apparently remained confident that he could break through into the Sea of Marmara and requested fleet minesweepers (purpose-built or adapted naval vessels) to support his subsequent operations in the Marmara. Meanwhile he decided to use destroyers for the purpose temporarily, since more than a quarter of the trawlers had been sunk or knocked out. The Admiralty earmarked 30 more Suffolk trawlers as an interim reinforcement and ordered torpedo-boats from Suez to join Carden’s fleet as minesweepers. Two old battleships he had detached for operations off Smyrna were called back to join him, raising his force back to its maximum of 18 battleships (including the four French) by 16 March. Two more from the Channel Fleet were ordered to stand by for detachment to the Aegean as possible reinforcements, in anticipation of losses. Commander C. R. Samson, RN, the distinguished naval air pioneer, was ordered with a squadron of 14 new, land-based naval aeroplanes to the Aegean via Marseilles to solve the observation problem that had plagued the whole Dardanelles operation; he and his aircraft would sail with General Hamilton on the Phaeton (see below). All these positive developments would have been of rather greater benefit had they been decided earlier. Carden’s renewed suggestion that troops should land in strength on the peninsula at the same time as he mounted his great attack was met with the instruction to confer with the general who was coming out to take command of a force that would amount to 60,000 by 18 March (Kitchener’s vacillation had ensured that the 29th Division would not be present in time).