A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (44 page)

The struggle began with the fact that Sir John French, though his command continued to grow, was not satisfied. His certainty that the German lines opposite the BEF had to be ripe for conquest made him urgently hungry for more men. He wanted the Twenty-ninth, wanted it without delay, and could see no reason why he should be denied. He was supported by Joffre, who agreed with French about everything except how the British forces on the Western Front should be used and who should make the decision.

Authority for the deployment of British troops lay not with French but with the war minister, Lord Kitchener. Kitchener had severely narrow ideas about what kinds of divisions should be fed into the meat-grinder of the Western Front. The so-called territorial units, which before the war had made up a kind of national guard, he regarded as third rate and parted with more or less willingly. It was the same with the colonials arriving from distant parts of the empire: Indians, Canadians, Australians, and the like. Kitchener was fiercely protective, however, of the new, still-raw divisions formed out of the men and boys who had volunteered in the first months of the conflict, and he was no less protective of the Twenty-ninth. After six months of war a division that was both intact and made up of experienced professional soldiers was a rare and precious asset. More than enough such divisions had been ravaged at Mons, Le Cateau, and Ypres, and on the Aisne.

The Twenty-ninth could become especially important if Britain opened a theater of operations somewhere other than in western Europe, and by February the search for such an opportunity was far along. It appeared, in fact, that the choice had been made: the new theater would be Salonika, the Greek port city that lay, like the Dardanelles but west of them, on the north coast of the Aegean Sea, which separates Greece from Turkey. Salonika was the recommendation of a committee that the War Council had created in January to evaluate possible new fronts. Because of its potential as a base from which to inject troops into the Balkans, thereby threatening both Turkey and Austria-Hungary, it quickly received enthusiastic support, especially from David Lloyd George. The government of Greece, though still officially neutral, was indicating that it would not be unfriendly to a landing in Salonika. Support for the project grew stronger when, early in February, an attack force of five thousand Turks led by a German lieutenant colonel crossed the Sinai Desert and reached the Suez Canal in British-controlled Egypt before being driven back. This alarming development threatened Britain’s connection to India. Taking some kind of action in response to Grand Duke Nicholas’s appeals for support in the Middle East seemed increasingly necessary. It also dovetailed nicely with the wish for a way to use Britain’s manpower more productively than in Flanders.

Early in February, when Lloyd George traveled to Paris for a meeting on financial matters, he brought the idea of a Salonika expedition to the attention of the French. Though Joffre replied, predictably, that he had no troops to spare for such an adventure, Minister of War Alexandre Millerand was more receptive. Days later, it was learned that Bulgaria, one of the neutral Balkan states that both sides were courting, had accepted a large loan from Germany and appeared likely to throw in with the Central Powers. That settled the question: the War Council approved the Salonika proposal. Kitchener, among the strongest supporters of the idea, thereupon ordered the Twenty-ninth Division to move to the Aegean island of Lemnos. The Greeks had agreed to make the island available to Britain. From there, as soon as everything was in readiness, the Twenty-ninth could be quickly transferred to Salonika.

Sir John French, when he learned of this development, declared that without the Twenty-ninth he was not going to be able to fulfill a promise made earlier to take over part of the French line near Ypres and launch an attack in support of Joffre’s next offensive. Nor was Joffre pleased. He joined French in protesting, and together the two brought so much pressure to bear on London that Kitchener called off the Twenty-ninth’s deployment. The division would, for the time being, remain in England. Green Australian and New Zealand troops being trained in Egypt were ordered to Lemnos in its stead.

Many of the British leaders who supported the Salonika landing looked favorably also on the preparations being made for a naval incursion against the Dardanelles. There seemed no reason why both ventures could not be undertaken at the same time. Both were made possible by Britain’s naval superiority, which was all the more overwhelming in the Mediterranean because France’s naval forces were concentrated there as well. The two ventures would not compete for the same resources. Salonika was to be an excursion of ground troops; ships would be needed only to ferry those forces to their starting point and keep them supplied. The Dardanelles initiative, by contrast, was to be a naval operation exclusively. A fleet made up of some of the biggest warships that Britain and France had available—and the two countries had plenty—would blast its way northward to Constantinople. Churchill’s enthusiasm for the project was rooted in what the commander of the British naval squadron in the eastern Mediterranean had reported at the start of the year. With a fleet of warships and enough minesweepers to clear the way, Vice Admiral Sackville Carden said, he could reach Constantinople in thirty days. Substantial army involvement would not be required.

Little was necessary except to assemble ships that were already in the Mediterranean and send them into action. On February 19, when Carden steamed up to the entry to the strait and began shelling the forts there, he had under his command the most potent fleet ever assembled in that part of the world. It included twelve British and four French battleships (second only to dreadnoughts among the world’s biggest, most heavily armed vessels), fourteen British and six French destroyers (much smaller, unarmored vessels, built for speed and firepower), an assortment of cruisers (midway in size between battleships and destroyers), plus—rather an oddity—thirty-five fishing trawlers that had been brought from the North Sea with their civilian crews for use as minesweepers. Most of the battleships were old to the point of being obsolete, but they carried heavy guns capable of doing tremendous damage at long range. And among them was the crown jewel of the Royal Navy: His Majesty’s Ship
Queen Elizabeth,
the newest of Britain’s state-of-the-art superdreadnoughts. She had just been launched and happened to be in the Mediterranean for her sea trials when orders went out for the Dardanelles task force to be assembled.

The key to success was obvious: the fleet had to attack quickly, clearing away the mines that the Turks were known to have laid in the Dardanelles, using shellfire to destroy the artillery on the high ground on both sides of the strait, and then pushing through into the open waters of the Sea of Marmara, at the far end of which lay Constantinople. The Turks, and their German military advisers, had been expecting an attempt of this kind. Their defenses, however, were woefully thin; they had only about a hundred pieces of artillery on the heights and very few troops with which to fend off landing parties. The Germans calculated that if the invaders were prepared to lose ten ships, it would be impossible to stop them. The Turkish government was so pessimistic that it began preparations to flee Constantinople for the interior.

Naval commanders, however, are not easily persuaded to risk ships and their crews. On this first foray Carden never seriously tested the strength of the defenses. A cautious man with no experience commanding large forces, he made no effort to move his ships into or even near the two-and-a-half-mile-wide entry to the strait. Instead he stood off in the distance, shelling the forts from three miles away, and at sunset he brought the attack to an end. His second in command, Vice Admiral John de Robeck, asked permission to continue firing but was refused. Carden intended to resume the next day, but the weather turned foul and spoiled visibility. The fleet waited far offshore while the defenders, having been alerted to the fact that a major assault was imminent, hurried to fortify their positions.

The ships returned on February 25 with De Robeck commanding, possibly because Carden’s health was not good. Again they brought the forts under fire, and this time they put ashore raiding parties that encountered almost no resistance. Within twenty-four hours all the outer forts were neutralized, their garrisons either dead or in flight. Some of the big ships moved just inside the entry to the Dardanelles, but they dared not venture farther. To the north were other forts, most menacingly at a point where the channel was only a mile wide. Even worse, the strait was known to be heavily mined.

Clearing away the mines had turned into the navy’s first major headache. The civilian crews of the improvised minesweepers had refused to proceed when they came under fire. The navy crews who replaced them proved to be inexperienced in handling both the trawlers and their complicated minesweeping gear. When a miniature flotilla of seven trawlers made its most aggressive probe, moving beyond the entry to the strait after dark, the Turks turned spotlights on them, brought them under heavy fire, sank one and put the others to flight. That was not the only problem. The British and French lacked adequate aerial reconnaissance, and the Turks’ howitzers, lobbing shells from behind the ridges that lined the strait, could not be reached by the flat trajectories of the naval guns. And so De Robeck, like Carden before him, thought it imprudent to proceed. He withdrew, the days began to slip by, and the Germans and Turks continued to build their defenses. Churchill, too far away to appreciate the difficulties of the situation, sent message after message demanding that Carden
move.

An interesting sidelight, considering that the campaign had been undertaken largely to help the Russians, is Russia’s noninvolvement. Russia had substantial forces not a great distance to the north (including warships in the Black Sea), and the campaign’s ultimate target was the city, Constantinople, that the tsars had been coveting for centuries. Sergei Sazonov, foreign minister at the St. Petersburg court, was unenthusiastic about the naval assault for much the same reason that, the previous August, he had spurned an offer of alliance from Turkey. With Turkey as her ally, Russia would have been barred from seizing Constantinople and other pieces of the Ottoman Empire. Similarly, it was improbable that Britain and France, having taken possession of Constantinople, would then hand it over to their ally. If the city could not be captured by Russia alone, it should not be captured at all. “I intensely disliked the thought that the Straits and Constantinople might be taken by our Allies,” Sazonov said later. “When the Gallipoli expedition was finally decided upon by our Allies…I had difficulty in concealing from them how painfully the news had affected me.”

Russian nonparticipation was not the worst of it. On March 1, in what should have been a triumphant achievement for the Entente, the same Greek government that was encouraging Britain and France to send troops to Salonika and Lemnos offered three divisions of infantry for use at the Dardanelles—thereby proposing to end its neutrality. Italy, Bulgaria, Romania—all might be influenced to follow Greece’s lead to get their share of the booty as Austria-Hungary and Turkey went down to defeat. The possible benefits of landing troops at the Dardanelles were brought into high relief: by clearing out the Turkish forts, they could reduce the dangers to the naval force to the vanishing point. And Joffre and Sir John French would have no reason to object.

But Samsonov was unwilling to allow Greek involvement. A British-French move on Constantinople was deplorable enough; involvement by Greece, a potential challenger to Russia’s postwar dominance of the Balkans, was out of the question. And so the Russian government said no. In a message to Athens, Sazonov declared that “in no circumstances can we allow Greek forces to participate in the Allied attack on Constantinople.” Sir Edward Grey intervened in an effort to save the situation, promising the Russians that at war’s end they could have Constantinople and territories around it. He was too late. News of the Greek offer and Russia’s rejection, when it became widely known, threw Athens into turmoil. The Greeks amended their offer, making it contingent upon Bulgaria too joining the Dardanelles operation. The Greeks feared, the Balkans being the Balkans, that if they sent a substantial part of their army to the other side of the Aegean, the Bulgarians would attack them. There was no possibility of drawing Bulgaria in, and so the negotiations limped to a sorry end.

The consequences were far-reaching. Three Greek divisions could have been invaluable at a time when (as the Turkish army’s history of the Dardanelles campaign would state) “it would have been possible to effect a landing successfully at any point on the peninsula, and the capture of the straits by land forces would have been comparatively easy.” Instead, the Greek government fell. It was replaced by a government friendly to the Germans, which did not displease the King of Greece, whose wife was Kaiser Wilhelm’s sister.

As the political complexities multiplied and Admiral Carden waited for the strait to be cleared of mines, fissures appeared among the leadership in London. Churchill, emerging as the principal advocate of the Dardanelles incursion, demanded that Carden and De Robeck proceed. Admiral John Fisher, as lofty a symbol of the Royal Navy as Kitchener was of the army and a close ally of Churchill’s since the latter had brought him out of retirement at the start of the war, was skeptical. He continued to favor what was undoubtedly the riskiest idea that anyone had come up with thus far, the landing of troops on Germany’s Baltic coast. He saw the Dardanelles as a threat to that venture and insisted that an attack there could not succeed without the landing of as many as a hundred thousand troops. He and Churchill began to draw apart.