by John Keegan
Mackensen’s operation order stressed the importance of a break-in rapid and deep enough to prevent the Russians bringing forward reserves to stem the flow. “The attack of Eleventh Army must, if its mission is to be fulfilled, be pushed forward fast … only through rapidity will the danger of the enemy renewing his resistance in the rearward positions be averted … Two methods are essential: deep penetration by the infantry and a rapid follow-up by the artillery.”43 These orders anticipated the tactics which would be employed with such success against the British and French in 1918. The Germans were as yet insufficiently skilled to make them work against the densely defended trench fronts in the west. Against the Russians in Poland, where barbed-wire barriers were thin, entrenched zones shallow and supporting artillery short of shell, they were to prove decisive. The preparatory bombardment, which began on the evening of 1 May, devastated the Russian front line. On the morning of May 2 the attacking German infantry stormed forward to meet little resistance. Soon waves of Russian infantrymen were stumbling rearward, casting away their weapons and equipment and abandoning not only the first but also the second and third lines of trenches. By 4 May the German Eleventh Army had reached open country and was pressing forward, while 140,000 Russian prisoners marched in long columns to the rear. As the break-in widened, so did it deepen. By 13 May the German-Austrian front had reached the outskirts of Przemysl in the south and Lodz in central Poland. On 4 August the Germans entered Warsaw and between 17 August and 4 September the four historic Russian frontier fortresses of Kovno, Novogeorgievsk, Brest-Litovsk and Grodno were surrendered to the enemy. The number of Russian prisoners taken had risen to 325,000 and 3,000 guns had also been lost.
The scale of the Austro-German victory had encouraged Ludendorff during June to press for a favourable reconsideration of his two-prong plan by Falkenhayn and the Kaiser. At a meeting, under the Kaiser’s chairmanship, with Falkenhayn, Mackensen and Conrad, at Pless on 3 June, he requested reinforcements that would enable him to mount a wide sweeping movement from the Baltic coast southwards, cutting off the Russian armies as they retreated eastward and so, he argued, bringing the war in the east to an end. Falkenhayn, concerned as ever for the security of the Western Front, disagreed, demanding a net withdrawal of divisions from Poland to France. Conrad, who was incensed by Italy’s entry into the war, wanted to send troops to the Isonzo front. Mackensen was for persisting in his demonstrably successful offensive in the centre. He, with Falkenhayn’s consent, got his way.44 As the advance continued, however, Ludendorff returned to the issue. Meeting the Kaiser and Falkenhayn again, at Posen on 30 June, he outlined an even more ambitious plan which would carry the German armies in the north from the mouth of the River Niemen on the Baltic as far as the Pripet Marshes in the centre of the Eastern Front in a manoeuvre designed to cut the Russians off from their heartland and force a capitulation. Once again he was overruled and though he was permitted to stage an offensive in the Baltic sector, it was to take a frontal form as a subsidiary effort to Mackensen’s continuing push eastward.
Outraged though Ludendorff was by what he saw as the supreme command’s timid refusal to embrace the grand solution, Falkenhayn was reading the strategic situation more accurately than he. The Russians had been hard hit at Gorlice-Tarnow and had surrendered more ground than they would have freely chosen to do. By late July, however, they had accepted that the state of their army and its shortage of weapons and ammunition left them no recourse but retreat. The Germans had the impression of breasting forward against an undefended front. The Russians knew that they were deliberately retreating, shortening their front by withdrawal from the great bulge in central Poland and consequently lengthening the enemy lines of communication as the Germans struggled to follow, across country deficient in railways and roads, particularly all-weather roads. The heavy vehicles of the German supply columns were rattled to pieces by the rutted surface of the Polish farmers’ byways, and units got forward only by requisitioning the rattle-trap panje waggons of the rural population. “Every day the Russians would retreat three miles or so, construct a new line and wait for the Germans to stumble up towards it … In time the Germans came up to primaeval forest … and the great marshes of the Pripet. The railway lines stopped on the Vistula [in the German rear]; even field-railways came only to … the Narev [river] and supplies had to be dragged forward for the next forty or fifty miles.”45
By September the Russians had, by abandoning the Polish salient, shortened their front by nearly half, from a thousand to six hundred miles, an economy in space which produced a major economy in force, releasing reserves to oppose the German advance along the Baltic coast and in the centre, and even to counter-attack in the south against the Austrians at Lutsk in September. Ludendorff achieved a final success of his own in September, when he took Vilna in Russian Lithuania; but he did so at heavy cost. As the autumn rasputitsa, the liquefying of the surface under seasonal rain, set in, the advance came to a halt on a line that ran almost perpendicularly north-south from the Gulf of Riga on the Baltic to Czernowitz in the Carpathians. Most of Russian Poland had been lost but the territory of historic Russia remained intact and so, too, did the substance of the Tsar’s army. It had suffered great losses, nearly a million dead, wounded and missing, while three-quarters of a million prisoners had been captured by the enemy. It had unwisely defended the fortresses of Novogeorgevisk west of Warsaw in late August, where huge quantities of equipment passed into German hands, and it had also lost the fortresses of Ivangorod on the Vistula, Brest-Litovsk on the Bug and Grodno and Kovno on the Niemen, all defending crossings over river lines that formed traditional lines of resistance in the otherwise featureless Polish plain. Generals had been sacked by the score, some imprisoned for dereliction of duty in the face of the enemy.46 On 1 September the Tsar had taken the grave step of assuming executive Supreme Command himself, with Alexeyev as his Chief of Staff, the Grand Duke Nicholas being transferred to the Caucasus. All these outcomes of the German advance and the Russian retreat brought disadvantage to Russia’s military situation, or threatened to do so in the future. Nevertheless, the Russian army remained undefeated. Shell output was increasing—to 220,000 rounds a month in September—and its reserves of manpower still amounted to tens of millions. Four million men would be called up in 1916–17, against the eleven million already in the ranks, or lost by death, wounds and capture, but the real reserve, reckoning 10 per cent of the population as available for military service, approached eighteen million.47 Russia would be able to fight on.
What it needed was a breathing space, while its armies reorganised and re-equipped. The Italian intervention had failed to divert significant numbers of Austrian troops from Galicia and the Carpathians and, though the quality of the Austrian army was in progressive decline, German assistance kept it in the field. Serbia, whose unexpectedly successful resistance in 1914 had disrupted the Austrian mobilisation, could help no further. French and British plans for a great offensive on the Western Front could not be realised until 1916. Throughout the travails of 1915, Russian hopes for a strategic reversal, which would deter Turkey from further offensives and perhaps destroy her as a combatant, had therefore turned on the faraway campaign in the Dardanelles where, in April, Britain and France had opened an amphibious operation designed to break through to Istanbul and seize the direct passage to the Black Sea and Russia’s southern seaports.
GALLIPOLI
The Dardanelles, which separates Europe from Asia, is a passage thirty miles long, at its narrowest less than a mile wide, leading from the Mediterranean into the landlocked Sea of Marmara. On its north-east coast Istanbul, or Constantinople (formerly the capital of Byzantium, in 1915 that of the Ottoman empire), guards the entrance to the Bosphorus, a waterway narrower than the Dardanelles, which gives on to the Black Sea. The European shore of the Dardanelles, Sea of Marmara and Bosphorus was, in 1915, a narrow strip of Turkish territory. From the Asian shore, the expanses of the Ottoman empire stretched north, east an
d south to the Caucasus, the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. The strategic location of the Dardanelles had brought armies, and navies, to it scores of times in history. At Adrianople, in its hinterland, fifteen recorded battles had been fought; at the first, in AD 378, the Emperor Valens was killed by the Goths, a disaster that caused the collapse of Rome’s empire in the west; at the most recent, in 1913, the Turks had repelled a Bulgarian attempt on Istanbul itself.
It had long been an ambition of the Tsars to complete their centuries of counter-offensive against the Ottomans by seizing Constantinople, thus recovering the seat of Orthodox Christianity from Islam and securing a permanent southward access to warm water; it stood high among Russia’s current war aims. The French were disinclined, the British even more so, to concede such a dramatic enlargement of Russian power in southern Europe. Nevertheless, in the crisis of 1914–15, they were prepared to consider opening a new front there as a means both of bringing relief to their ally and of breaking the impasse on the Western Front. An attack on the Dardanelles, by sea or land, or both, appeared to be one promising version of such an initiative and, during the spring of 1915, it gathered support.
Gallipoli
The first proposal was French. In November 1914 Aristide Briand, the Minister of Justice, raised the idea of sending an Anglo-French expedition of 400,000 troops to the Greek port of Salonika, with the object of assisting Serbia, persuading neighbouring Romania and Bulgaria, old enemies of Turkey, to join the Allies and developing an attack through the Balkans on Austria-Hungary. Joffre, whose constitutional powers as Commander-in-Chief were paramount, refused to countenance any diminution of his effort to win the war on the Western Front. Nevertheless, Franchet d’Esperey, one of his subordinates, then took the liberty of suggesting it to President Poincaré who, with Briand and Viviani, the Prime Minister, put it again to Joffre at a meeting at the Elysée palace on 7 January 1915.48
Joffre remained adamantly opposed. Meanwhile, however, the idea was attracting attention in Britain. On 2 January, the Russian Commander-in-Chief, the Grand Duke Nicholas, had sent an appeal to London for help against the Turks’ attack in the Caucasus by the mounting of a diversion elsewhere. His telegram was discussed by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, with Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War. Later the same day, Kitchener wrote to Churchill, “We have no troops to land anywhere … The only place a demonstration might have some effect would be the Dardanelles.”49 Kitchener struck a chord. On 3 November Churchill had, in response to Turkey’s declaration of war and on his own initiative, sent the British Aegean squadron to bombard the forts at the mouth of the Dardanelles. A magazine had exploded, disabling most of the heavy guns on the European point.50 Though the ships then sailed away, without attempting to penetrate further, the success had kindled a belief in Churchill that naval power might be used against the Dardanelles with strategic rather than tactical effect.
He raised the suggestion at the first meeting of the new War Council, military sub-committee of the British cabinet, on 25 November 1914 and, though it was rejected, it was not forgotten. The consolidation of the trench line in France and Belgium, the disappearance of “flanks” around which decisive results were traditionally achieved by manoeuvre, had persuaded Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Sir Maurice Hankey, Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence and effectively the executive officer of Britain’s war government, as well as Churchill, that flanks must be found beyond the Western Front. They were supported by Kitchener, who was as depressed as they by the prospect of persisting in the frontal attacks in France favoured by Joffre and Sir John French, and they soon engaged the interest of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Fisher, who on 3 January urged a joint military and naval attack on Turkey, with the stipulation that it should be immediate and that only old battleships should be used.
The Fisher plan might have worked, for the Turks were only slowly repairing and strengthening the Dardanelles defences, had the War Council acted immediately, as he urged. It did not, instead falling into a consideration of alternative strategies. While it did so, Churchill took his own line. Having secured Fisher’s agreement to consult Admiral Carden, commanding the British Mediterranean fleet, about practicalities, he extracted from him the admission that while it would be impossible to “rush the Dardanelles … they might be forced by extended operations with large numbers of ships.”51 That was all the encouragement Churchill needed. A romantic in strategy, an enthusiast for military adventures, of which his raising of the Royal Naval Division and its commitment to the Antwerp operation had been one, he proceeded to organise the fleet of old battleships Fisher was prepared to release and to direct it against the Dardanelles in an enlarged attempt to reduce its fortifications by naval bombardment.
Fisher accepted Churchill’s forcing of the issue with “reluctant responsibility” and as an “experiment”; his heart, if there were to be adventures, was in a Baltic expedition; his head told him that there should be no diversion of attention from the confrontation in the North Sea.52 He had, nevertheless, allowed Churchill the leeway he needed to proceed with his Dardanelles project. Not only was a fleet of old battleships, French as well as British, to be assembled, the brand-new Queen Elizabeth, prototype of the super-Dreadnought class, was to be detached to the Mediterranean fleet also, to use her 15-inch guns against the Dardanelles fortifications, and a base on the Greek island of Lemnos was to be prepared for a landing force, if it was decided to commit troops ashore. Kitchener made the 29th Division, composed of regular soldiers of the imperial overseas garrison, available. Churchill had the Royal Naval Division at his disposal, and the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), awaiting onward movement from Egypt to France, was also on hand.
Whether the troops would be committed depended on the success of the naval bombardment. At the outset it was expected that the ships would prevail. The Turkish defences were antiquated, those at Cape Helles, on the European point, at Kum Kale on the Asian shore opposite and at Gallipoli, guarding the Narrows, medieval or older. There were known to be batteries of mobile howitzers present and the Turks had also laid minefields in the channel of the Dardanelles itself. It was believed, nevertheless, that a systematic advance of the battleships, working up-channel with minesweepers clearing a way ahead, would overcome the Turkish guns, open the Narrows and drive a way through to the Sea of Marmara and Istanbul.
The naval operation began on 19 February, with sensational political, if not military, effect. Greece offered troops to join the campaign, the Bulgarians broke off negotiations with Germany, the Russians indicated an intention to attack Istanbul from the Bosphorus, the Italians, not yet in the war, suddenly seemed readier to join the Allied side. All those who believed that an initiative against Turkey would alter the situation in southern Europe to the Allies’ advantage seemed proved right in their judgement. In practice, the bombardment had done little damage and landings by Royal Marines at the end of February, though scarcely opposed by the Turks, were equally ineffective. On 25 February, Admiral Carden had renewed the bombardment but got no further than the Dardanelles’ mouth. By 4 March, when a party of Royal Marines attacking the old fort at Kum Kale suffered heavy casualties, it had become obvious that the enthusiasts’ early optimism had been misplaced. The Turkish garrison was more determined than had been thought, its guns either too well-protected or too mobile to be easily knocked out and the minefields too dense to be swept by the haphazard efforts of the fleet of hastily assembled trawlers. “Forcing the Narrows” would require a carefully co-ordinated advance of all the ships available, with the trawlers working under the protection of the guns of big ships, which would suppress the fire from the shore as they moved forward.
The grand advance began on 18 March, with sixteen battleships, twelve British, four French, mostly pre-Dreadnoughts, but including the battlecruiser Inflexible and the almost irreplaceable super-Dreadnought Queen Elizabeth, arrayed in three lines abreast. They were preceded by a swarm
of minesweepers and accompanied by flotillas of cruisers and destroyers. Even in the long naval history of the Dardanelles, such an armada had never been seen there before. At first the armada made apparently irresistible progress. Between 11:30 in the morning and two in the afternoon it advanced nearly a mile, overcoming each fixed and mobile battery as it moved forward. “By 2 p.m. the situation had become very critical,” the Turkish General Staff account reports. “All telephone wires were cut … some of the guns were knocked out, others were left buried … in consequence the fire of the defence had slackened considerably.”53 Then, suddenly, at two o’clock, the balance of the battle swung the other way. The old French battleship Bouvet, falling back to allow the minesweepers to go forward, suddenly suffered an internal explosion and sank with all hands. A torpedo fired from a fixed tube ashore seemed to the worried fleet commander, Admiral de Robeck, to be the cause.54 Later it became known that, on the night of 7 March, a line of mines had been laid by a small Turkish steamer parallel to the shore and had remained undetected. In the confusion that followed, the minesweepers, manned by civilian crews, began to fall back through the fleet and, as it manoeuvred, the old battleship Irresistible was damaged also and fell out of the line. Next Ocean, another old battleship, also suffered an internal explosion and soon afterwards the French pre-Dreadnought Suffren was severely damaged by a plunging shell. As Gaulois and Inflexible, the modern battlecruiser, had been damaged earlier, de Robeck now found himself with a third of his battle fleet out of action. By the end of the day, Ocean and Irresistible had, like Bouvet, sunk. Inflexible, Suffren and Gaulois were out of action and Albion, Agamemnon, Lord Nelson and Charlemagne had suffered damage. As darkness fell, de Robeck drew his fleet away. The ten lines of mines laid across the Narrows, numbering 373 in all, remained unswept and most of the shore batteries, though they had shot off all their heavy shell, preserved their guns.55
