The Great War at Sea: 1914-1918
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Balfour himself, however, claimed that he always favoured a naval-only attack and feared for the fate of a joint operation. ‘Nobody was so keen as myself upon forcing the Straits as long as there seemed a reasonable prospect of doing it by means of the Fleet alone, even though the operation might cost us a few antiquated battleships’, he wrote to Churchill. ‘But a military attack upon a position so inherently difficult and so carefully prepared, is a different proposition: and if it fails we shall not only suffer casualties in men and still more in prestige, but we may upset our whole diplomacy in the Near East… ’(22)
Churchill later stated to the Dardanelles Commission investigating the campaign that he would never have ordered the Navy-only assault if he had known that substantial land forces would after all be available to make the operation an amphibious one. This was a hypothesis and therefore can never be resolved. In the event, authority was given on 28 January for the naval bombardment to commence on 19 February. For this purpose, Carden had under his command numerous auxiliary craft, a swarm of minesweepers; and for the bombardment fourteen pre-dreadnoughts, including the two newest, completed after the Dreadnought herself, four old French battleships, the battle-cruiser Inflexible, and (the star of the show) the Queen Elizabeth super-dreadnought. To the fury of Jellicoe who had expected her to join the Grand Fleet shortly, Churchill had seized this brand new vessel, the largest, fastest and most heavily gunned (15-inch) battleship in the world. He also had the Navy’s only seaplane-carrier, the Ark Royal, equipped with six aircraft for spotting purposes.
The fleet base was Mudros Bay in Lemnos, fifty miles west of the Dardanelles. Carden and his Staff planned the destruction of the forts in three stages, a long-range bombardment out of range of the biggest Turkish guns (about 12,000 yards), a medium-range and much heavier bombardment using secondary armament as well as the heavy guns at about 8,000 yards, and finally ‘an overwhelming fire at decisive ranges of from 3,000 to 4,000 yards’. Two French and three British battleships, and the Inflexible (flag) were to take part in the first day’s shooting. ‘It was at 9.51 on the morning of February 19 that the first shot heralded the opening of the unparalleled operations which’, as Corbett, the official naval historian, appropriately described them, ‘were destined to attain such vast proportions, to consume so much heroism, resource and tragic effort, and to end with so glorious a failure.’(23)
The second in command of the Ark Royal, Flight Lieutenant Hugh A. Williamson, who acted as a seaplane spotting observer with one-way wireless that day, has left an account of that first bombardment. ‘It was a glorious day of brilliant sunshine, and from my seat in the nose of our seaplane, I had an ideal view of the bombardment. It was like watching a theatre scene from the front row of the dress circle. Beneath us lay the Dardanelles: on the European side one could see over the Gallipoli peninsula and as far as the Sea of Marmora; while on the Asiatic side the Plains of Troy were visible in the distance.
Immediately beneath us were the ships of the Fleet, under-way and steaming up and down and banging off at the forts. It was a rare spectacle such as few have had the opportunity of witnessing.’(24)
Unfortunately the ship to which the aircraft was assigned, HMS Cornwallis, shot so badly that Carden ordered it to cease fire. But generally the Admiral was delighted with the result of the first stage of the bombardment, and gave the order that at 2 p.m. the second and closer-range bombardment should commence. But Williamson, with his bird’s eye view, flew low over the targets, and formed a different impression. ‘After checking the condition of each fort, and finding that in no case had any damage been done to the guns, we returned to the Ark Royal.’ He took the despatch boat to give his verbal report. ‘I had an interview with the Flag Commander and the Chief-of-Staff, Commodore Keyes. I was not well received. Being annoyed over the Cornwallis episode, I made no bones about telling them that their ships had not hit a thing, which was strictly true. This made Roger Keyes very indignant, much to my amusement.’(25)
The seaplanes’ spotting, which was enterprising and novel, was not a success. The gunnery officers took little or no notice of the observers’ reports under the misapprehension that they could see better themselves. ‘Most of the gunnery officers’, wrote Captain H. C. B. Pipon, ‘thought that the airmen knew so little about gunnery that their spotting corrections were merely misleading.’(26) Also, there were many days when the sea was too choppy for the machines to get off the water. Indeed, inclement weather and poor visibility had not been taken into account. For the next five days low visibility and gales made any follow-up bombardment impractical. But when conditions allowed, Carden continued the attack. There was so much smoke, such dense clouds of dust, so much rubble evident when it cleared, that it seemed impossible that all the forts and guns had not been destroyed. Carden’s reports to the Admiralty continued on an optimistic note so that Churchill was convinced that the efforts of the Navy alone would be successful. ‘Our affairs in the Dardanelles are prospering, though we have not yet cracked the nut’, he told Jellicoe on 3 March. ‘The ship of war has proved superior to the fort’, crowed the Naval and Military Record on 3 March, and The Observer believed that ‘one of the memorable efforts of all history will be steadily carried to success’.
Churchill, looking into the imminent future, wrote to Grey on 28 February, ‘Should we get through Dardanelles as is now likely, we cannot be content with anything less than the surrender of everything Turkish in Europe. I shall tell the Admiral after destroying the Turco-German fleet to push in at once to attack Bosphorus, and thus cut off the retreat of the army. Their capitulation is then only a matter of time. The terms of an armistice might be… ‘(27) And he proceeded to list them as if the Dardanelles operation was virtually afait accompli. His confidence, as so often, spread to the War Council, which at its meeting on 10 March planned what to do after the fall of Constantinople.
The outer forts had been silenced, and the results of the Queen Elizabeth’s firing with her 15-inch guns were awe-inspiring. The troubles began when the ships tackled the next stage, the intermediate defences, which could only be fired at from inside the narrow straits. Churchill, when fully informed after the excitement had cooled, put the Navy’s problem in a nutshell. Minefields were the major stumbling block.
‘The defences with which our Fleet was confronted after the fall of the Outer Forts… consisted of four factors – forts, mobile howitzers, minefield batteries and minefields – all well combined but all mutually dependent. The minefields blocked the passage of the Straits and kept the Fleet beyond their limits. The minefield batteries prvented the sweeping of the minefields. The forts protected the minefield batteries by keeping battleships at a distance with their long guns. The mobile howitzers kept the battleships on the move and increased the difficulty of overcoming the forts.’(28)
But other reasons for the impasse were, first, the conduct of Carden, who remained barren of ideas and drive from the beginning and until he belatedly resigned, and, second, the poor standard of shooting. One officer thought this was because the gunnery officers ‘were not thinkers; they were used to shooting at floating targets and could not adapt themselves to shooting at targets on shore’. Nor, it seemed, could they adapt themselves to ‘blind’ firing with another ship spotting. This occurred when the Irresistible inside the straits was spotting for the Queen Elizabeth firing over the peninsula. ‘Q.E. fired one round (15-inch) which landed about 3,000 yards beyond the target (a fort); Irresistible signalled ‘3,000 over’; presently Q.E. fired again; again the shot landed about 3,000 yards beyond the target. The same thing happened to every one of the many rounds fired by Q.E. (except one); no attention was paid to Irresistible’s corrections and all the rounds missed the target by the same amount.’(29)
On the same day when the War Council met to consider the Turkish surrender terms, Carden was drawing up his first pessimistic report. ‘We are for the present checked by absence of efficient air reconnaissance,’ he began shamelessly, ‘the n
ecessity of clearing the minefield, and the presence of a large number of movable howitzers on both sides of the Straits, whose positions up to the present we have not been able to locate. Meanwhile, every effort will be made to clear the minefields by night with two battleships in support… Our experience shows that gunfire alone will not render the forts innocuous…’(30) The truth was at last being driven home.
The minesweepers were adapted North Sea trawlers manned by their regular peacetime crews turned almost overnight into reservist ratings. They were as intrepid and stalwart as fishermen anywhere but they had had no disciplinary training and no experience of being under fire. Seven of these vessels were ordered out on the night of 10 March to steam against the strong (4-knot) current to a point above the main minefield and sweep back again, supported by the gunfire of the Canopus, now withdrawn from the mud of the distant Falklands, a light cruiser, and destroyers. It was a fiasco. It was found impossible to shoot out the Turkish searchlights, which spotlit the trawlers and subjected them to an intolerable hail of fire from mobile howitzers. One was sunk, the others hastily retired.
Carden tried the next night, using stealth, with the trawlers going in alone. ‘To put it briefly,’ wrote Keyes, ‘the sweepers turned tail and fled directly they were fired upon.’(31) When Churchill heard he sent a sharply worded telegram to Carden telling him that caution must be thrown to the winds and casualties and losses expected. He then detailed how the forts in the Narrows must be overwhelmed ‘at decisive range’ while ‘landing parties might destroy the guns of the forts’. Commenting on this, a captain wrote, ‘It is one of those peculiarly objectionable messages, in which the man on the spot is not only urged to attack but told how to do it… In its easy and superficial reference to very difficult or impracticable tasks, it bears the unmistakable impress of the First Ford’s hand.’(32)
Further efforts by the trawler crews, now strengthened by a number of regular ratings, were equally futile. If the minesweepers’ gear was not shot to pieces first, it was virtually impossible to get it out under the intense fire. The courage of the men was sublime. Churchill believed they were lacking in spirit. Carden resigned on 16 March, ill, sick at heart, and close to a nervous breakdown. He was replaced by Admiral John De Robeck, ‘worth a dozen of Carden’ judged General William Birdwood, commander of the Australian and New Zealand Corps (Anzacs) newly arrived in Egypt.
Intent on silencing the guns, and the armchair critics in London, in one supreme effort on 18 March, De Robeck sent his four most powerful ships, the Queen Elizabeth, Inflexible, Ford Nelson, and Agamemnon six miles up the Straits to silence the Narrows forts. Two battleships engaged the intermediate defence batteries, while six more bombarded the Narrows batteries at point-blank range. The plan was to send in the minesweepers as soon as all the batteries had been silenced.
The ear-splitting and sustained thunder of the guns continued almost without a pause from 11.25 a.m. until 4 p.m., and the peninsula and adjoining mainland was covered by a vast pall of smoke and dust. Shortly before 2 p.m. a single explosion of even greater volume caused eyes to turn towards the French battleship Bouvet. She had struck a mine, her magazine had blown up and she sank in a few minutes with almost all her crew of 640 men.
The trawlers then went in once more and were met with undiminished fire from the howitzers. All six of them were forced to retire. That was not an end to De Robeck’s catastrophes. At 4.11 the Inflexible struck a mine, leaving her out of action for six weeks. Then the Irresistible struck another mine, drifted towards the Asiatic shore and foundered during the night. The same fate befell the Ocean when she went to the battleship’s aid. At this point the C.-in-C. withdrew and cancelled the operation.
One man was credited with causing these casualties, and with saving Constantinople, for the forts were down to their last few rounds when De Robeck withdrew. Lieutenant-Colonel Geehl was a Turkish mine expert. ‘He had observed warships manoeuvring just inside the slack water parallel to the Asiatic shore, and thought it worth trying to lay mines there.’ Flight-Lieutenant Williamson continues: ‘On the night of March 8th from a small steamer, the Nousret, he laid a line of 20 mines in this position. It was these mines that did all the damage. It was a perfect modern version of the David and Goliath story; with the British Fleet as Goliath, and Geehl as David, with the Nousret as his sling, and the mines as his pebbles.’(33)
The minefields were intact, missing only those which had served their purpose. And, as was learned later, the sum total of that gigantic bombardment was the loss to Turkey of two 14-inch guns and a few smaller ones. The Dardanelles was as impenetrable as ever. And it was not learned until later that the dire Russian crisis in the Caucasus against the Turkish Army, the raison d’être of the Dardanelles operation, had been resolved by a resounding Turkish defeat at Sarikamish in Armenia before a gun had been fired at Gallipoli. But the Russians told their allies nothing.
Sometime before this expensive and memorable repulse and even before the first bombardment, the use of supporting troops was being considered, in spite of Churchill’s belief that the Navy could do it alone. Inside the Admiralty, Jackson made the firm statement that a naval bombardment made sense only if ‘a strong military force is ready to assist in the operation, or, at least, follow it up immediately the forts are silenced’.(34) Fisher agreed with Richmond when he declared that ‘the bombardment of the Dardanelles, even if all the forts are destroyed, can be nothing but a local success’.(35)
Army opinion, at home and on the spot, was that there would have to be a landing. General Sir William Birdwood was despatched by Kitchener to give his judgement and returned with the same verdict. From a diplomatic point of view, it was thought essential that an army should be ready to land if the Navy failed in order to prevent a severe loss of Allied prestige. Kitchener told the War Council on 24 February that he ‘felt that if the Fleet would not get through the Straits unaided, the Army ought to sec the business through’.(36)
At an informal meeting of the War Council on 16 February, decisions were made that were to change the course of the war, lead to ruined reputations and the deaths of more than 1000,000 men. Hankey recounted what occurred in a ‘most secret and strictly personal’ letter to Balfour the following day: ‘Yesterday decisions of the very first importance were arrived at… I was not present, but I have received a full account of what happened from Mr Lloyd George, Ford Fisher and the Prime Minister, who asked me to communicate the following decisions to you:-
1. The XXIXth Division, now forming part of Sir John French’s army [in France] to be despatched to Lemnos at the earliest possible date. It is hoped that it may be able to sail within 9 or 10 days.
2. Arrangements to be made for a force to be despatched from England, if required.
3. The above forces. in conjunction with the 4 batallions of Royal Marines already despatched, to be available in case of necessity to support the naval attack on the Dardanelles.
4. Horse boats to be taken out with the XXIXth Division, and the Admiralty to make arrangements to collect small craft and lighters in the Levant.
The Naval Attack on the Dardanelles forts begins on Friday morning, and it is agreed by all naval officers that sooner or later troops will be required… I am immensely relieved by this decision, though I fear it has been made rather late, and I should like more men. This is a decisive operation against the decisive front of the Turkish Empire, and, if undertaken at all we ought to throw in every man we have… ’(37)
Three days later, Kitchener made the decision not to release the XXIXth Division after all, citing as the excuse that recent Russian defeats might lead to Germany transferring troops from her eastern to western fronts. Churchill testified to the Dardanelles Commission later that, although he had every confidence that the Navy could break through on its own, he wanted troops ‘to reap the fruits or to help the Navy through if we were checked’. Now his voice was loudest in protest at Kitchener’s decision, which was not reversed until 10 March.
If the decisions of 16 February had been implemented with speed and efficiency, there is little doubt that the single weak Turkish Division could have been overwhelmed with relatively few casualties. Instead, the operation was conducted without any sense of urgency, procrastination governed every step before the fatal landings were made, and blunders abounded at all command levels during the subsequent fighting. On the credit side, the Dardanelles campaign showed up so many weaknesses in planning and execution, and scarred its main conceiver so badly, that when Churchill faced the giant amphibious task of invading the Continent thirty years later, he created a whole new amphibious command with priority powers to prepare for it.