Authors: Alan Moorehead
On the Alexandria docks lamps were set up so that the work of
unloading and repacking the ships could go on all night, and soon the harbour was filled with vessels of
every kind from Thames tugboats to requisitioned liners. There was a shortage of almost everything—of guns, of ammunition, of aircraft and of men—and Hamilton sent off a series of
messages to Kitchener asking for reinforcements. He had found a brigade of Gurkhas in the Egyptian garrison—could he have those? Where were his reserves of artillery and shells? These
requests were met either with terse refusals or no reply at all. Hamilton felt that he was hardly in a position to press the point; Kitchener had been known to be ruthless with subordinates who
nagged him, and once he had even taken troops away from an officer who had asked for reinforcements. Then too Hamilton remembered that he had promised Kitchener before he left that he would not
embarrass him with requests of this kind. Churchill of course would have helped, but the General had deliberately cut himself off from the First Lord. De Robeck also was chary about asking for too
much since his messages were bound to go directly to Fisher in the Admiralty.
‘Even more than in the Fleet,’ Hamilton wrote, ‘I find in the Air Service the profound conviction that, if they could only get into direct touch with Winston Churchill, all
would be well. Their faith in the First Lord is, in every sense,
touching
. But they can’t get the contact and they are thoroughly imbued with the idea that the Sea Lords are at the
best half-hearted; at the worst, actively antagonistic to us and the whole of our enterprise.’
Hamilton’s own divisional commanders were very far from being enthusiastic. Before drawing up his plans for the invasion the General asked them for their views, and he received a most
discouraging series of replies. Hunter-Weston, the commander of the 29th Division, thought that the difficulties were so great that the expedition ought to be abandoned altogether. Paris, the
commander of the Naval Division, wrote, ‘To land would be difficult enough if surprise were possible but hazardous in the extreme under present conditions.’ Birdwood changed his ground;
he no longer wanted to go ashore at the tip of the peninsula but at
Bulair or somewhere in the neighbourhood of Troy. The French too were all for Asia. Even the Egyptian
sultan at a ceremonial luncheon at the Abdin Palace in Cairo offered his opinion. The Turkish forts at the Dardanelles, he assured Hamilton, were absolutely impregnable.
There were other worries which were no less serious. The security position was almost entirely out of hand. Greek trading caiques were noting every preparation in the islands and carrying the
news back to enemy agents in Athens. Letters were arriving in Alexandria by the ordinary post from England marked, ‘Constantinople Force, Egypt’. And the
Egyptian Gazette
in
Cairo not only announced the arrival of each new contingent but openly discussed the chances of the expedition at the Dardanelles. Hamilton protested in vain; he was told that since Egypt was a
neutral country the British authorities could not interfere with the newspapers. The best therefore that could be hoped was that the Turks would regard all this publicity as an elaborate bluff, and
Intelligence was instructed to spread a rumour through the Near East that the actual landing would be made at Smyrna.
All this was very depressing. But Kitchener had said that the attempt must be made, and so there could be no question of turning back. In the first week of April, therefore, Hamilton and his
staff set about drawing up their plans at their headquarters in the Metropole Hotel in Alexandria. Even if they had faltered—and Hamilton seems to have been at his best during these days,
patient, optimistic and extremely energetic—there now began to grow up around him an atmosphere that made it all the more imperative for him to go on. The expedition began to develop a life
of its own. However gloomy the commanders might be, a communal will for action had spread itself through the Army. The men were eager to be off, and it was becoming perfectly clear that they would
go into the first assault with great determination. The very sight of the ships gathering in Alexandria harbour, the hammerings in the workshops, the long lines of marching men in the desert, the
heavy booming of the artillery at practice—all these things seemed to make it inevitable that they
must go forward, and that once they attacked they were bound to win.
This auto-suggestion, this mass-will towards adventure, presently began to take effect upon the generals. As the date of the assault grew nearer their earlier misgivings were swallowed up in the
practical and stimulating work of getting the Army ready to fight. D’Amade, the French commander, drops his ideas on Asia. Birdwood is now sure that he can get his Australians and New
Zealanders ashore. Paris sees chances he overlooked before. And Hunter-Weston, having studied the maps and the forces, declares that his earlier appreciation was wrong—the thing is very
possible and he particularly likes the role that he himself is to play.
By April 8 Hamilton judged that the arrangements were moving forward at a sufficient pace to enable him to get away and place his plan before de Robeck and the Admirals. The
Arcadian
, a
liner which normally made pleasure cruises to the Norwegian fjords, had been fitted up as a headquarters ship, and in her he sailed for Lemnos. He arrived in Mudros Harbour on April 10, and at once
proceeded to his vital conference with the admirals aboard the
Queen Elizabeth
.
Hamilton’s plan, though complicated in its details, amounted to a simple assault upon the Gallipoli peninsula itself. The main striking force was to be his best division, the British 29th,
under Hunter-Weston. It was to go ashore on five small beaches at Cape Helles at the extreme tip of the peninsula, and it was hoped that by the end of the first day the crest of Achi Baba, six
miles inland, would be in its hands. Meanwhile Birdwood was to land with the Anzac Force about thirteen miles up the coast between Gaba Tepe and Fisherman’s Hut. Striking across the peninsula
through the Sari Bair hills he was to make for Mal Tepe—the mountain on which Xerxes is supposed to have sat while he reviewed his fleet in the Hellespont. Thus the Turks fighting
Hunter-Weston at Cape Helles would be cut off in their rear, and the hills dominating the Narrows would be overcome.
Simultaneously, two main diversions were to be carried out. The Royal Naval Division was to make a pretence at landing at the neck at Bulair, and the French were to go ashore for a large
armed raid on Kum Kale on the Asiatic side of the Straits. Later these two forces would be brought back to Cape Helles and put into the main attack. By the second or the
third day it was hoped that the lower half of the peninsula would be so overrun that the Fleet with its minesweepers could safely pass through the Narrows into the Sea of Marmara.
De Robeck, Wemyss and Keyes were delighted with this plan. They agreed with Hamilton that he was right in rejecting Bulair. It was much too dangerous, despite all its attractions. Directly the
Army advanced inland it would lose the support of the naval guns and expose itself to attack on both its flanks—one Turkish army coming down from Thrace and another coming up from Gallipoli.
There was also the possibility that Bulgaria might declare war and threaten Hamilton in his rear. The same kind of difficulties would apply if the Allies made their main assault in Asia.
On the peninsula itself no beach was large enough to allow the Army to concentrate for one hammer blow, but the Fleet would be there to cover the assault at every point, and in any case there
was a certain virtue in dispersal: Liman von Sanders would get reports of landings from half a dozen different places at once, and for the first twenty-four hours at least he would not know which
was the main one. Therefore he would hold back his reserves until the Allies were securely ashore.
There was to be one important refinement of the plan, and this was a stratagem put forward by a Commander Unwin, who seems to have been inspired by the story of the wooden horse at the siege of
Troy. He proposed to secrete 2,000 men in an innocent looking collier, the
River Clyde
, and run her aground at Cape Helles. Directly she touched, a steam hopper and two lighters were to be
brought round to her bows and lashed together to form a bridge to the shore. The men would then issue from two sallyports which were to be cut in the ship’s sides. Running along two
gangplanks to a platform at the ship’s bows, they would drop on to the bridge and make their way to the beach. It was hoped in this way to empty the ship within a few minutes.
In addition, machine guns were to be mounted behind sandbags in the bows, and these were to hold the enemy down while the disembarkation was taking place.
The Navy indeed had been extremely busy with a number of such devices and improvisations. Quite apart from Keyes’ new fleet of destroyer-minesweepers which was now ready, three dummy
battleships had arrived. These were ordinary merchantmen enlarged and disguised with wooden guns and superstructure. From a distance the silhouette they presented was exactly that of a battleship,
and it was hoped that their presence here in the Ægean might induce the German Fleet to come out and fight in the North Sea.
10
Air Commodore Samson was now established on Tenedos, and the seaplane carrier
Ark Royal
had joined the Fleet. Samson’s difficulties had been almost crippling. When his thirty
aircraft were uncrated only five were found to be serviceable, and their equipment was not such as to inspire confidence. Bombs were either released from a primitive rack under the pilot’s
feet or simply flung overboard by the observer once the safety tabs had been removed. No machine-guns had been fitted at this stage, but instead, there was available a supply of iron spikes; these
the pilot or the observer could aim at such of the enemy who appeared below, rather in the manner of a hunter spearing a bear. Although these spikes emitted an unpleasant whirring noise as they
descended, and no doubt created a feeling of extreme insecurity among the infantry below, they seldom hit anything. For the rest, Samson’s pilots carried a revolver, binoculars and a lifebelt
or an empty petrol can to hold on to in case they fell into the sea. The observers were equipped with a rifle, charts and a watch.
On Tenedos an airfield 800 yards long had been constructed with the aid of Greek workmen who uprooted a vineyard and with oil drums filled with cement rolled the ground moderately flat. But it
was not altogether a satisfactory base. From the island
the Gallipoli peninsula could be clearly seen, but Cape Helles was seventeen and a half miles away, and Gaba Tepe,
where the Australians and New Zealanders were to land, thirty-one miles, and these were formidable distances for an aircraft in those days. Constantinople, of course was out of the question.
Despite these hazards Samson, doing a great deal of flying himself, was already beginning to produce useful results. Carrying volunteer naval officers as observers—usually light-weight
midshipmen—he got his new radio-telephone into use, and the spotting for the Fleet’s guns greatly improved. Since the radiotelephone was a one-way system the warships checked back the
messages they received with a searchlight. Several bombardments had been carried out in this way, notably the raid on Maidos on April 23.
Much the most important part of Samson’s work, however, in these last days before the attack was his photography of the enemy entrenchments. Hamilton and Keyes together made a close study
of these photographs, and were not reassured. At all but one or two places where the landings were to be made there were abundant signs of barbed-wire. This wire was becoming a nightmare in all
their minds, and Hamilton privately confided to Samson that he feared that the casualties might be as high as fifty per cent in the first landing. Had they been able to get hold of some of the
Navy’s new armoured invasion boats it might have been a different story—but these were a closely guarded secret in the Admiralty at the time, and not even Kitchener was supposed to know
anything about them.
When Hamilton had left the Dardanelles in March it had been understood that the Navy would keep harassing the Turks with a series of bombardments along the coast; but now it was found that all
such operations were impossible. The entire energies of the Fleet were consumed in the arrangements for the landing. It was decided that the bulk of the invasion force should assemble in Mudros
Harbour in the island of Lemnos, with subsidiary bases on Imbros, Tenedos and Skyros. Forty-eight hours before the landing the Fleet with the Army on board would start
to
move towards its battle stations off the Gallipoli peninsula. A mile or two from the coast the soldiers would be transferred to lighters and small boats and these, in groups of four, would be towed
by launches to the shore. The actual landing would take place in the first light of dawn, the assaulting troops carrying with them nothing more than 200 rounds of ammunition, their rifles and
trenching tools and three days’ rations.
All this required elaborate preparation: the construction of tows and wharves and barges; the training of midshipmen in piloting launches to fixed points on the strange coast in darkness; the
study of the currents and the weather; the arrangements for getting animals on shore and the piping of fresh water from the ships to the beaches; the fixing of signals and codes; the allotting of
targets to the battleships and cruisers which would support the landing; the working-out of the whole vast time-table for the movements of the Fleet. Every problem was new or at any rate unusual;
there was even a plan for evacuating the Army in case the assault miscarried either in part or altogether.
Meanwhile Hamilton’s 75,000 men had to be transported from Egypt to the islands, a distance of some 700 miles.
Astonishingly—even miraculously—these arrangements and many others went forward without any major setback. Just once the crew of a transport on its way to Lemnos was forced to
abandon ship when a Turkish destroyer appeared, but the enemy torpedoes went clean under the vessel’s keel and soon the men were scrambling back on board. Chased by British destroyers the
Turkish ship ran for the shore, and beached herself off Chios. Even the weather seemed to prove that Hamilton had been wise to delay, for there were hardly two fine days together in the first
fortnight in April. Provisionally the day for the assault was fixed on April 23, which was St. George’s Day; the moon then was due to set two hours before dawn, and thus the armada would be
able to approach the coast in the darkness. But on April 21 half a gale set in, and the attack was postponed, at first twenty-four and then forty-eight hours. Finally Sunday, April 25, was chosen
as the day.