The Dandarnelles Disaster (34 page)

But the Bolsheviks still thought he might be useful as an instrument for stirring up unrest among the Asian Muslims, including those in Persia and British India. Enver tried to play off the anti-revolutionary White Russians against the Bolsheviks, but after breaking away from the latter he placed himself at the head of a pan-Turkic movement in Central Asia. He was killed in a suicidal cavalry charge, brandishing a sword against Bolshevik rifles and machine-guns on 4 August 1922, still aged only 40. There were rumours that he had been assassinated. He was given a rather belated state funeral in Istanbul on the seventy-fourth anniversary of his death in 1996, five years on from the collapse of the Soviet Union, after his remains had been returned from Tajikistan by descendants of his supporters there, who had buried him in a secret grave. He was interred a second time, next to Talaat on Memorial Hill.

When the CUP fell at the end of the First World War, Talaat also got to Berlin – where he was, not altogether inappropriately, shot dead in the street in 1921 by an Armenian student who had appointed himself avenger of his suffering people.

Admiral John de Robeck was created a Knight Commander of the Order of
the Bath – KCB – after his brilliantly successful evacuation of the British Army from Gallipoli without loss in January 1916. It is a military cliché that ‘evacuations do not win wars' but his feat was surpassed in British history only by Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay's evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk in 1940. De Robeck took command of the Third, and after that the Second, Battle Squadron in the Grand Fleet in December 1916. In 1917 he was promoted to substantive vice-admiral. After the war he was made baronet (a hereditary knighthood) and, in 1919, a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George (GCMG). He became commanderin-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet and High Commissioner in Constantinople (it is not known whether he appreciated the irony of this temporary appointment). He became a full admiral in 1920, and in the following year his KCB was upgraded to GCB (Grand Cross). In April 1922 he was appointed to the command of the Atlantic Fleet, the diminished successor to the Grand Fleet. On his resignation in 1924 he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Victorian Order (GCVO) by King George V and in 1925 he became an admiral of the fleet after his retirement. He died in January 1928, weighed down with so many honours that his failure at the Dardanelles cannot be seen to have held him back in any way.

His erstwhile chief of staff, Commodore Roger Keyes, who shared with Fisher a belief that war should be fought wholeheartedly and proved it by his personal drive and gallantry in trying to solve the minesweeping problem at the Dardanelles, surpassed even de Robeck in his subsequent career. He hung on to his belief that the fleet should try again to break through, and was allowed by his chief to go to London to plead, in vain, for this in May 1915 (innocently carrying a sealed letter from de Robeck to the Admiralty which undermined his case in advance). As late as November 1915, when de Robeck was on leave and Admiral Wemyss was temporarily in command, he tried again, but a sympathetic Wemyss could hardly resist the government's decision at that time to evacuate.

Keyes rose to national prominence soon after he succeeded Admiral Bacon in command of the Dover Patrol in January 1918 as a vice-admiral. He drew up a plan to neutralise the Germans' Belgian U-boat and destroyer bases at Zeebrugge and Ostend, and launched a heroic but unsuccessful attack – the Zeebrugge Raid – with old cruisers as blockships, and Royal Marines and bluejackets attempting a
coup de main
on the harbour mole during the night of 22–23 April 1918. Eight VCs were awarded and Keyes was made KCB, although the blocking effort failed and
nothing at all was achieved at Ostend, partly the result of Keyes's impatience with the minutiae of planning.

But the dashing execution of the chaotic enterprise lifted national morale in the fourth year of war. After it, Keyes was made a baronet and stayed on in the navy, serving as Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, and finally Portsmouth. He was promoted to admiral of the fleet in 1930, retiring in 1931. He was elected MP for Portsmouth North in 1934, a seat he held for nine years. He published two volumes of partisan but lively memoirs in 1934–5. After an impassioned speech in the Commons in the full uniform of an admiral of the fleet (an appointment for life) in the crisis which brought Churchill to power in May 1940, Keyes begged him for an active role in the Second World War and was appointed chief of combined operations in July 1940. As he outranked very nearly every other British officer, he antagonised the chiefs of staff with impractical operational suggestions (once again, ‘all gung ho and no staffwork'), and was replaced in October 1941 by Vice-Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was no better but was younger, royally glamorous and had friends in high places. Keyes returned to the House of Commons until 1943, when he was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Keyes of Zeebrugge and Dover. He died in 1945 aged 73.

General Sir Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton, having been relieved of command at Gallipoli for his weak leadership in October 1915 and eventually replaced by General Birdwood, did not command troops again. A cordially hated figure in Australia and New Zealand, thanks to dramatic press exposés of the conditions and deadly confusions at Gallipoli, he became Lieutenant of the Tower of London, a sinecure, in 1918–20. On retirement from that post, he wrote his engagingly readable
Gallipoli Diary.
He died in 1947, aged 94.

The reputation of Field Marshal Horatio Herbert, Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, suffered in the wake of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli débâcle, but only among those in the know about the conduct of the war. The first sign of his waning influence was the fact that his opposition to the opening of what was effectively a new front in the Salonica region in autumn 1915 was overridden by the politicians, notably Lloyd George. He had lost his veto over military operations. On 5 June 1916 he lost his life. He was on his way with a small staff to confer with Grand Duke Nicholas, the Russian supreme commander, in the cruiser HMS
Hampshire
when the ship struck a
mine which had been laid by
U75
off Orkney and rapidly sank in a storm. Minesweeping by the Grand Fleet in the area had been lackadaisical, and help was inexplicably slow in coming: only a dozen men survived. The Cabinet may have secretly heaved a sigh of relief, but it was a profound shock to the British public and the British Army on the Western Front and elsewhere. A suitably grim stone memorial overlooks in solitary state the scene of the sinking off the Orkney Mainland. There were rumours that he had been somehow whisked to Russia to take charge of a new offensive there …

German Lieutenant-General and Turkish Marshal Otto Liman von Sanders commanded the Fifth Army in defence of the Dardanelles. After the defeat of the Allied fleet and the withdrawal of enemy troops from the peninsula, Liman joined several other German representatives in objecting to the Armenian massacres, and also failed to influence Enver in his unsuccessful campaigning in the Caucasus in 1916.

In February 1918 he took over from Falkenhayn the command of a Turco-German force in Palestine against General Allenby. Seriously outnumbered, his command was overwhelmed by British cavalry at the Battle of Megiddo in September 1918 and Liman narrowly escaped capture in his tent at Nazareth. He got back to Constantinople and oversaw the repatriation of German forces after the Armistice. He was arrested there by the British on suspicion of war crimes in February 1919 but was released without charge in August. He then went home and retired to write his memoirs. He died in Munich in 1929, aged 74.

Blame for the essentially British naval and military débâcle at the Dardanelles and Gallipoli was laid at the door of Winston Churchill, though it has surely been shown here that others must bear a share of the responsibility. It would be wrong to describe him as the scapegoat because historically he does bear the lion's share of the guilt and was fairly and not over-severely punished for his own sins rather than those of others. Such a setback would surely have ruined any other politician permanently. We need hardly point out that it did not destroy the career of Churchill, who was to become Prime Minister in May 1940 when Britain's cause in the Second World War seemed hopeless. Cometh the hour, cometh the man: he inspired the British nation and empire to stand alone for a year against the Nazis and laid the foundations of Hitler's defeat.

But all that lay far in the future when the rising tide of accusations of ‘bungling in high places' lapped at the threshold of his office in the

Admiralty Old Building. After failing to cling to his beloved naval brief in May 1915, Churchill was fobbed off with the minor Cabinet position of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, one of so many strange sinecures in the gift of a British Prime Minister. After that he served briefly in the trenches in France as a lieutenant-colonel. When David Lloyd George replaced Asquith as Prime Minister of the coalition government late in 1916, he recalled Churchill to the government as Minister of Munitions, still a sensitive post after earlier scandals over dud shells and shortages. Although he fostered the development of the tank, which would break the deadlock on the Western Front, while in that post he also helped to destroy the Royal Naval Air Service which he had built up as First Lord: the creation of the Royal Air Force on the ironic date of 1 April 1918 by amalgamating the RNAS and the RFC is widely held to be the greatest setback suffered by the Royal Navy in the twentieth century – apart from the Dardanelles, that is. As Chancellor of the Exchequer after the First World War Churchill once again holed the navy below the waterline by formulating a ‘ten-year rule' – an annually renewed assumption that there would be no major war for a decade – which stifled the defence estimates and led,
inter alia
, to a dangerous shortage of cruisers and destroyers. Having seen the RAF firmly established as the third armed service, he supported the creation of the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy in 1937, but the RAF was in immediate charge of long-range maritime operations through Coastal Command, and of aircraft development, where the navy was usually last in the queue. The result was that the British navy's aircraft-carriers fell well behind those of America and Japan, flying such antiquated aircraft as the Swordfish biplane, which none the less performed astonishingly well. Most British admirals kept faith with the ‘big gun' until 1945 even though the development of the torpedo had already sounded the death-knell of the dreadnought to those who would listen (such as Japanese and American admirals). Japanese naval aircraft crippled the US battlefleet in Pearl Harbor and sank two British dreadnoughts off Malaya with airborne torpedoes during Japan's shock opening moves in the war in the Far East: American torpedo-bombers turned the tables just six months later at the Battle of Midway. Fortunately Hitler lost no sleep over the possibilities of maritime airpower: his navy never completed an aircraft-carrier and was forced to cede control of maritime aircraft to Goering's Luftwaffe. None the less the submarine torpedo brought Germany closer to victory over Britain than any other weapon.

When Churchill was ousted from the Admiralty in May 1915, various admirals fell over themselves to condemn him in terms such as a ‘succubus' (Beatty) or a ‘danger to the Empire'. Having spent the last years of peace in a political wilderness, constantly warning of the menace of Nazi Germany, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain could hardly avoid giving him a Cabinet post when his own peace efforts collapsed and war with Germany was once again declared on 3 September 1939. So the now elderly but still very energetic
enfant terrible
(he was 65) was sent back to the Admiralty. Two messages went round the fleet on that date: one said ‘total Germany' (i.e. commence hostilities); the other said, joyously, ‘Winston is back!' To international astonishment he was heavily defeated in the British general election of July 1945, but returned in 1951 for a second faltering term as Prime Minister. He died in 1965, aged 91, an occasion which prompted a magnificent state funeral in which sailors hauled the gun-carriage carrying his coffin. There was a national outpouring of grief – mixed with nostalgia for Britain's (and his own) ‘finest hour'. He was unquestionably a great man, a great writer too, whose triumphs were counterbalanced, and so nearly outweighed, by error. Fortunately his great error over the Dardanelles was more than outweighed by his decision to send the fleet north in time for the outbreak of war in 1914.

Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who took the sobriquet Atatürk, father of the Turks, when as president he imposed surnames on his people in 1934, was the creator of the secular republic of Turkey. He looms over its history just as Lenin, another man who changed his name, did over the Soviet Union's – and he has outlasted the Russian as a national icon. To this day Atatürk's image is to be seen everywhere in Turkey, and places with even the most fleeting connection with his life and career retain the status of shrines, almost always embellished with an outsize Turkish flag, red with a white crescent and star. The surname is reserved by law for him alone in perpetuity. His words too are to be found in many places in bronze or stone, especially in Ankara, the post-Ottoman capital, Istanbul, the former Constantinople and perpetual metropolis, and of course on the Gallipoli peninsula.

His posting as attaché to Sofia had ended in January 1915 and he returned home to be given the task of raising a new division, the 19th, still in the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He was promoted to full colonel when he prevented the ANZACs from advancing inland in April and went on to win three more victories against the Allies at Gallipoli in August 1915. Kemal, having on several occasions intervened decisively in the struggle
for the peninsula, emerged a national hero when the Allies gave up. He was transferred to the Edirne area in European Turkey as a corps commander and rose to lieutenant-general in 1916, whereupon he won several engagements with the Russians. He returned to Constantinople in 1917 and was posted to Syria as commander of the Seventh Army, but resigned when Falkenhayn arrived to lead the fight against Allenby – because he would not now be dictated to by a foreign general. He resumed command however when his replacement fell ill. The Seventh ‘Army' had a total strength of 7,000, enough in better times for half an infantry division, divided into four ‘divisions' in two ‘corps'. It was one of three such ‘armies' later commanded by Liman von Sanders to face Allenby's northward advance through Palestine towards Syria; even after surrendering whole divisions to the needs of the Western Front in countering the great German spring offensive, Allenby's forces outnumbered the Turks by two to one or more and eventually carried all before them despite difficulties of supply and terrain, until an armistice with Turkey was concluded at the end of October 1918. Kemal relieved Liman von Sanders in command of all remaining Turkish forces in the region on 1 November, officially in order to disband them; within two weeks he was back in Constantinople working in the War Ministry, helping to ‘clear up' after the comprehensive defeat of the Ottoman Empire.