The Great War at Sea: 1914-1918
Page 20
Fisher was already working his way through these midnight emanations from Churchill, the great majority of them frivolous or irresponsible, when Churchill awoke at around 8 a.m. One admiral who witnessed the extended breakfast scene in Churchill’s bedroom, wrote that ‘he presented a most extraordinary spectacle, perched up in a huge bed, and the whole of the counterpane littered with dispatch boxes, red and all colours, and a stenographer sitting at the foot – Mr Churchill himself with an enormous Corona Corona in his mouth, a glass of warm water on the table by his side and a writing-pad on his knee!’(6)
At the time of the Falkland Islands victory, with its mellow exchange of felicitations between the two men, the fuse was already burning. Five months were to pass before the explosion disabled the careers of both men, one of them permanently.
The Dardanelles catastrophe stemmed from a strategical need for a diversion and an easing of Turkish pressure on Russia, a political need for the Navy ‘to make a splash’, and from Churchill’s lack of appreciation of the meaning of sea power. Every shred of bad news from the sea, every day that passed without the expected modern Trafalgar, further weakened Churchill’s position. He was very conscious of this and also by temperament allergic to the passive role. He was not satisfied with an armada swinging on its anchors, no matter that harbours all over the world contained hundreds of German ships that would not move for another four years. As Captain Richmond wrote: ‘We have the game in our hands if we sit tight, but this Churchill cannot see. He must see something tangible and can’t understand that naval warfare acts in a wholly different way from war on shore. That [Grand] Fleet in the north dominates the position. It’s no business of ours to go trying to pluck occasional, small indifferent fruits in the south.’(7)
Richmond and the rest of the Staff recognized clearly that the Grand Fleet might never experience a battle with the High Seas Fleet. They did not view this as a disaster or as a reflection on the C.-in-C. While the High Seas Fleet remained behind its minefields and batteries it posed no threat. Britain continued to control the trade routes of the world; not an ounce of steel, not a single grain of wheat nor pound of Argentine beef could reach Hamburg from New York or Buenos Aires. Communications by sea with her widespread empire were severed for Germany on 4 August 1914. The public, and especially the men of the Grand Fleet, dearly longed for a great decisive battle in the North Sea. But first the enemy had to come out of his corner – and then, everyone fully believed, one round would suffice for the knock-out. The blockade of Napoleon had tested to the full the patience of Nelson and Collingwood. They had their day in the end but it was a long time corning.
A great number of Churchill’s depth-of night memoranda concerned alternatives to what he regarded as the deadlock at sea as well as on land. Amphibious raids and operations were foremost in his mind, and the first to be considered was the possibility of wresting control of the Baltic from Germany and making a landing on the north German coast. The Baltic Project had been nursed by Fisher since 1908 when he had visited Russia with Edward VII prior to the formation of the Triple Entente. As with most of his concepts, he had no difficulty in infecting Churchill with his enthusiasm. The project was nothing less than the transportation of an invasion fleet into the Baltic and landing large numbers of troops in a surprise side-swipe at Germany’s heart.
‘The Baltic Project’, Fisher once wrote, ‘meant victory by land and sea. It was simply history repeating itself Frederick the Great, for the only time in his life (on hearing [incorrectly] the Russians had landed), was frightened, and sent for poison. Geography has not altered since his time. The Pomeranian coast has not shifted, and a million Russian soldiers could have been landed within eighty-two miles of Berlin.’(8)
As early as 19 August 1914, Churchill sounded out the C.-in-C. of the Russian Army, the Grand-Duke Nicholas, on the possibility of a combined Baltic operation. Its success, he suggested to the Russian, would depend on either defeating the High Seas Fleet in open battle first, or blocking the Kiel Canal, which permitted the rapid transfer of this fleet from the North Sea to the Baltic. Churchill desired ‘the Russian General Staff to tell us what military use they would think it worthwhile to make of that command assuming we were able to get it’. Churchill believed that it was possible to send a British fleet through the Belts – the islands between Denmark and Sweden – ‘if the main strategic situation was satisfactory’.
With the command of the Baltic, Churchill continued, it would be possible to land a Russian army either(1) to turn the flank of the German armies holding the Danzig-Thorn line against the Russians; or(2) to attack Berlin from the north; or(3) to attack Kiel and its canal in order to force the High Seas Fleet to sea. The Russian reply was favourable – ‘We therefore gratefully accept in principle the First Ford’s offer…’(9)
After further lengthy consideration, and discussions with the C.-in-C. and officers of the Grand Fleet, and in Cabinet, Churchill elaborated the plan, and the Director of Operations (Division) (DOD) came up with schemes which were intended to cause dismay and bring out the enemy. The storming and capture of islands close to the German coastline was one, even Heligoland itself, which was bristling with artillery and surrounded by minefields. As alternatives, the DOD offered an attack on the great lock gates at the western end of the Kiel Canal, or a raid up the Elbe River, or even a raid on Hamburg harbour. Commodore Keyes wanted to carry out a submarine raid on Kiel harbour. Several other hotheads had other schemes of daring up their sleeves and now produced them.
The one Churchill liked best was an assault on Borkhum, which had been devised by a very positive admiral, Lewis Bayly, before the war. It involved racing past the island’s forts at night with trans ports lashed to the protected side of the warships, the use of smoke screens, guiding gas buoys, minesweeping, a bombardment and the landing of 10,000 troops. It was all very G. A. Henty, and that was what especially commended it to Churchill. Norwegian, Danish and Dutch islands were also considered as fair alternative game.
By the time Fisher joined him, Churchill was still as strong as ever on offensive action in the Baltic, but had reluctantly accepted that it was not feasible to send the fleet through the Belts without preliminary action elsewhere. In answer to an anxious enquiry from Fisher about the future of ‘his’ Baltic project, Churchill answered that he was wholly with him. ‘But you must close up this side first. You must take an island and block them in, à la Wilson; or you must break the Canal or the locks, or you must cripple their fleet in a general action… The Baltic is the only theatre in which naval action can appreciably shorten the war… ‘(10)
All these island-seizing proposals were listed as non-feasible by the experts who studied them. It was one thing to seize them (risky though that must be), but quite another to hold them, keep them supplied, the vessels operating from them protected, all at considerable distance from England and very short distance from the enemy. Churchill pooh-poohed all these supposed difficulties and dangers: he knew better than the experts. His first ally was Fisher. He also had Wilson – of all people – on his side, and Wilson was the strongest advocate for Heligoland. There were other fire-eaters, too, like Bayly and Keyes.
The strongest need for a side-show came from the situation on the Western Front which by December was already committed to what seemed like a hopeless and expensive war of attrition: a deadlock on land and sea. New British armies were rapidly being formed and trained. The question was asked by Churchill himself: ‘Are there not other alternatives than sending our Armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?’ The Balkans situation was critical. Lloyd George proposed using a part of these new armies for an assault on Austria from Salonika. Hankey was less specific and proposed that they be used in ‘conquests beyond the seas’. Churchill still pressed for the Baltic project in some form: Sylt was yet another island for which contingency planning went ahead. Fisher put in hand his enormous new building programme, all designed with combined operations against the German coast in mind – from his
‘large light cruisers’ to hundreds of landing craft.
An attack on the Dardanelles, the seizure of the forts and the Gallipoli peninsula, was far removed geographically and strategically from the multitudinous islands off northern shores which had so far been considered. And yet in the contingency planning carried out by the CID in the years leading to war, ‘The possibility of a Joint Naval and Military Attack upon the Dardanelles’ was the subject of a memorandum prepared in 1906. Now, eight years later, Britain was at war with Turkey, which posed a threat to the eastern Mediterranean, to Egypt and the Suez Canal, as well as to the Balkans. This 1906 appreciation summarized its conclusions with the advice that a landing on Gallipoli ‘would involve a great risk, and should not be undertaken if other means of bringing pressure to bear on Turkey were available.’(11) No consideration was given to the idea of a naval attack unsupported by any landing for the excellent reason that an attack on strong forts by men o’war alone had for long been considered unproductive. ‘Any sailor who attacked a fort was a fool’, Nelson once said with feeling and with memories of a rebuff and a lost arm at Tenerife after he had boasted ‘I shall destroy Santa Cruz, and the other towns in the island, by a bombardment.’ Examples of success were few, of failure many. In 1882 a day-long bombardment at point-blank range of the forts at Alexandria by a powerful British fleet had resulted in only some 30 of 293 guns being put out of action. Twenty-two years later the Japanese had little success bombarding forts from the sea in the war against Russia.
The earlier record against the Dardanelles forts themselves was just as discouraging. In 1807 Admiral Sir John Duckworth with seven ships-of the-line forced the Dardanelles against weak defences and reached the Sea of Marmora. But when he tried to get out again, the Sultan had reinforced the guns and Duckworth sustained grievous damage. Admiral Phipps Hornby, C.-in-C. Mediterranean Fleet in 1895, sent a long reasoned report on why he should not be asked to force the Dardanelles as part of the Salisbury Government’s offensive plan during the Armenian massacres. It made convincing reading and the plan was abandoned. It would appear that there was less all-round wisdom at the Admiralty twenty years later.
There were general and there were particular reasons for the relative failure of ships’ guns against forts. A ship can never be as steady a platform as a fixed fort. As one senior gunnery expert explained: ‘The fortress gunner can easily see the ship he is firing at and a great column of water marks the position of his shot, short or over. The fortress gun, on the other hand, merges into the landscape and at long ranges only betrays itself by an occasional flash. Observation of fire is also very difficult unless a forward observer can be used. The sailor has the further disadvantage that the whole of his ship is vulnerable to attack, whereas only a direct hit puts his opponent out of action.’(12)
Churchill was under the misapprehension that modern warfare and modern artillery had changed all this. He had been at the siege of Antwerp and had noted what the German guns had done against the forts here and at Liege and Namur. He came back with graphic accounts which the Admiralty War Staff believed without making further enquiries. The fact was that the German heavy guns were howitzers, firing at easily-observed short-range targets and with the high trajectory which characterizes this breed of gun intended for this sort of work. Oliver later admitted that the success of the German fire on the Allied forts ‘influenced me to some extent’ when the Dardanelles forts were being discussed at the Admiralty. The Dardanelles bombardments had to be conducted by heavy ship-based naval guns intended for long-range action against moving targets at sea, firing with a relatively low trajectory to confirm with the maximum elevation of the 12-inch and 15-inch guns – 15 and 20 degrees respectively. And to hit a gun or its mounting, measuring a few feet, is a different proposition to hitting a ship 500 feet long.
The Dardanelles adventure first came up for discussion at a War Council meeting on 25 November 1914. With the Baltic project and associated operations still undeveloped and unauthorized, Churchill proposed a joint land and sea operation on Gallipoli. This was instantly blocked by Kitchener who declared that no troops were available. The subject of action of some sort in the east was raised again in January because of the worsening situation in Serbia and the increasing menace of Turkey, now even more strongly supported by German military authorities and matériel. It had become urgently necessary to accomplish some military success in the Balkans in order to deter Bulgaria from becoming another German ally, impressing neutral Balkan nations to take some of the German pressure off Russia, and open up communications with Russia through the Black Sea.
Gallipoli remained a dormant subject on the War Council’s agenda until 2 January 1915 when an appeal for help, ‘either military or naval’, to relieve Turkish pressure on Russian forces in the Caucasus came up for discussion. A Foreign Office telegram despatched the next day assured Grand Duke Nicholas that something would be done. On the same day, Fisher and Hankey presented to Churchill a dramatic joint plan for an attack on Gallipoli by Greek and Bulgarian forces backed by Indian troops and 75,000 seasoned troops from France – an international force indeed, on a mission which presupposed that Bulgaria and Greece, both at present still neutral, would join in and present a united front against the common enemy.
At the tail of this proposal, almost as a postscript, came the suggestion that the Navy should force the Dardanelles with old pre-dreadnought battleships. In typical Fisher style, there was exhortation and threat, too: ‘But as the Great Napoleon said, “CELERITY" – without it, “FAILURE".’(13)
Churchill, dismissing all the Army considerations which were thick with hindrances and complications, seized upon the last item: a bombardment followed by a purely naval assault, up the Narrows, into the Sea of Marmora, onward to Constantinople! Here was the panacea, here was glory! A naval ‘splash’, a naval offensive which they had all been seeking.
The C.-in-C. on the spot was Vice-Admiral Sackville Hamilton Carden, aged fifty-seven, of an old Anglo-Irish family, who had commanded the Eastern Mediterranean Squadrons since the Goeben fiasco. His brief had been to ‘watch’ Turkey and counter any moves against Egypt. On the day Churchill received the Fisher-Hankey plan, he telegraphed Carden, ‘Do you think it is a practicable operation to force the Dardanelles by the use of ships alone? It is assumed older battleships would be employed… The importance of the results would justify severe loss.’(14)
Carden, not one of the Navy’s greatest ‘brains’ and also suffering from an ulcer, but a fair all-rounder, replied that he did not think the Dardanelles could be rushed ‘but they might be forced by extended operations with a large number of ships’.(15) He followed up with ‘more detailed proposals’, declaring that he would bombard first the entrance forts, then the inner forts, reducing them in turn; then he would destroy the defences in the Narrows, clear the minefields, and steam into the Sea of Marmora. Churchill presented this plan which, he claimed, ‘made a great impression’. It was, he said, ‘an entirely novel proposition’. What happened after that no one knew or enquired about.
So deep was the sense of frustration, so strong the apparent need to do something, and so infectiously enthusiastic Churchill’s presentation, that a great number of those who heard it for the first time – including Fisher – fell for its novelty, conciseness, and simplicity. Hankey described later the occasion when Churchill spoke of the plan for the first time at the War Council on 13 January: ‘At this point, events took a dramatic turn, for Churchill suddenly revealed his well-kept secret of a naval attack on the Dardanelles! The idea caught on at once. The whole atmosphere changed. Fatigue was forgotten. The War Council turned eagerly from the dreary vista of a ‘slogging match’ on the Western Front to brighter prospects, as they seemed, in the Mediterranean. The Navy, in whom everyone had implicit confidence and whose opportunities had so far been few and far between, was to come into the front line… ’(16)
The immediate excitement and relief are understandable. The Turkish forts were, it was b
elieved, armed mainly with old guns, which would easily be outranged by heavy naval guns, and the ships, therefore, would be secure from their fire. With the forts reduced, the minefields would rapidly be cleared, the battleships would sail up in line ahead to Constantinople, sinking the Goeben and putting Turkey out of the war. As Jellicoe was to write later, ‘Has anyone who wants to push battleships through the Dardanelles said what they propose they should do when through and how their communications are to be maintained and from what base they are to work?’(17) Nonetheless, the War Council enthusiastically gave its approval.
The unqualified enthusiasm was as short-lived as that of children who, told of a treat, soon realize that there is some penalty attached to it. Fisher was among the first to awake to the realities of the prospect, writing to Jellicoe in near despair on 19 January: ‘And now the Cabinet have decided on taking the Dardanelles solely with the Navy, using 15 battleships and 32 other vessels, and keeping out there three battle cruisers and a flotilla of destroyers – all urgently required at the decisive theatre at home!… I don’t agree with one single step taken… The way the war is conducted both ashore and afloat is chaotic! We have a new plan every week!… ‘(18)
Fisher had earlier agreed with several steps taken, but how reluctantly it is impossible to judge. At the time it seemed that few people were immune to Churchill’s persuasiveness. Lloyd George once wrote that when Churchill had ‘a scheme agitating his powerful mind… he is indefatigable in pressing it upon the acceptance of everyone who matters in the decision’.(19) Blunt, prescient Richmond was an exception. ‘Winston, very, very ignorant,’ he confided to his diary, ‘believes he can capture the Dardanelles without troops… ‘(20) The next day (10 February) Hankey wrote to Balfour that he was still in favour of an attack on the Dardanelles, ‘the only extraneous operation worth trying’, but, ‘from Lord Fisher downwards every naval officer in the Admiralty who is in the secret believes that the Navy cannot take the Dardanelles position without troops. The First Lord still professes to believe that they can do it with ships, but I have warned the Prime Minister that we cannot trust to this. I understand, though, that there are only 12,000 reserve Turkish troops in the Gallipoli peninsula, and less than 3 Army Corps, mostly reservists, in this part of Turkey. A relatively small force therefore will suffice.’(21)