Castles of Steel (85 page)

The flow of merchant shipping had been cut, but for another month, Carden and his squadron continued to patrol the mouth of the Straits in peace. Then, on October 29, without awaiting a declaration of war, Admiral Souchon took
Goeben
and
Breslau,
both flying the Turkish flag, across the Black Sea and bombarded southern Russian ports. Britain, responding to this attack on her ally, dispatched an ultimatum to Turkey demanding removal of all German personnel from
Goeben
and
Breslau
within twelve hours. The British ultimatum expired at noon on October 31, and that afternoon Turkey declared war. Although Britain’s retaliatory declaration waited until November 5, Churchill wanted an immediate demonstration of British displeasure. On November 3, Carden’s two battle cruisers and the two French battleships bombarded the outer forts, on either side of the entrance to the Dardanelles. The bombardment was not part of any well-considered plan; rather, it was simply an expression of Churchill’s belief, as he expressed it to Fisher, that “it is a good thing to give a prompt blow.”

The action lasted twenty minutes.
Indomitable
and
Indefatigable
fired from 13,000 yards at Fort Sedd el Bahr on the European side while the two French battleships attacked the Kum Kale forts on the Asian side. The European forts remained silent throughout the bombardment, as the British ships were out of range, but a large magazine explosion in one of the Sedd el Bahr bastions killed five officers and sixty-one men and produced a column of gray smoke that rose an impressive 500 feet in the air. The French had less success. Because their ships were older and their guns had shorter range, they were forced to come in closer to Kum Kale. They were fired upon, at first slowly and inaccurately, but before they withdrew, shells were falling close to the ships. Overall for Carden, the day’s lesson seemed positive. The admiral was encouraged to believe that by repeating and prolonging the bombardment, he could methodically destroy the outer forts, then move on and apply the same treatment to the intermediate and Narrows forts. And once the Turkish forts and guns had been blasted into silence, he could—if he wished and was so instructed—lead a British fleet into the Sea of Marmara.

This brief November encounter, while encouraging Carden and the Admiralty, also served to warn the Turks and Germans that the Straits’ defenses needed strengthening. No new heavy guns could be procured and installed at short notice, but the fortress batteries were linked by telephones, range finders were set up, and range buoys laid in the water for better targeting. Mobile, quick-firing howitzers were brought from Adrianople to the Dardanelles and placed in concealed positions along the European and Asian shores. The number and power of searchlights along the waterway were increased. More German artillery officers and trained gun crews arrived. And the minefield was doubled, with eleven rather than five lines of mines stretching across the waterway.

While his enemies bolstered their defenses, Admiral Carden and his squadron, following their brief November exertions, lapsed into a three-month interlude of calm.
Indomitable
and
Indefatigable
were called home to England, and
Inflexible,
returning from the Falklands, replaced her two sisters at the Dardanelles. One exception to the general apathy occurred on December 13. Carden’s officers, watching the Turks at the Narrows through field glasses from the entrance, could see Turkish ships and boats moving freely. The British submarine
B-11,
manned by two officers and eleven seamen, was dispatched to make trouble. Diving to eighty feet beneath the minefields and applying her submerged speed of 4 knots against a current in the Straits of 3 knots, the submarine proceeded laboriously up the northern shore to a point just below the Narrows. There, her raised periscope revealed a two-funneled gray warship lying at anchor. This was the 10,000-ton Turkish battleship
Messudieh,
built in 1874, rebuilt in 1902, now carrying two 9.2-inch and twelve 6-inch guns, and stationed below the Narrows to help protect the minefields. The old battleship had no chance;
B-11
fired one torpedo from 600 yards, dived, and felt the shock of the powerful explosion that meant the end of
Messudieh.
Subsequently, every member of
B-11
’s crew received a medal and her captain, Lieutenant Norman Holbrook, was awarded the Victoria Cross.

The real impetus for the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns came from a general revulsion in Britain at the carnage taking place on the Western Front. The German march on Paris had been brought to a standstill, and by December 1914 huge armies confronted each other in trenches running from the Channel to Switzerland. No breakthrough appeared possible by either side: machine guns slaughtered infantrymen as soon as they climbed out of the trenches; by the end of November, Britain and France had lost almost a million men. This grim fact did not deter Field Marshal Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief of the BEF, who insisted that the decisive theater lay in France and that the war could be won only by continuing to hurl waves of men into enemy machine-gun fire until somewhere, someday, the German line was pierced. It was this philosophy of war that led Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated soldier, to write,

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you’ll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

Sir John French’s belief was shared by France’s government and generals and by Lord Kitchener, who, although he personally disliked Sir John French, remained generally supportive. Nevertheless, by the end of the year, a majority in the British War Council—Asquith, Churchill, Lloyd George, and Haldane—were eager for an alternative: a place where the Allies might attack the Central Powers at a weaker point with a lower cost in blood. This was a particularly British approach to war. Always in the past when fighting great continental powers, Britain had used her sea power to mount operations in secondary theaters; over time, these campaigns had drained the enemy’s power and will to fight. And the form this strategy was to take in this particular war—an attack on the Dardanelles—had a particularly personal flavor. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill had helped to create the mightiest sea weapon in the history of the world. Yet this huge armada seemed almost impotent; it could not strike a telling blow because its enemy would not fight. In a man of Churchill’s temperament, this passive role stirred bitter frustration. The first specific mention of an attack on the Dardanelles came in a War Council meeting on November 25, 1914, in connection with reports that the Turks were preparing an overland attack on Egypt and the Suez Canal. As a countermove, Churchill suggested a combined land and sea operation against the Dardanelles and the Gallipoli peninsula. Kitchener immediately declared that, although strategically the idea had merit, no troops were available. Churchill said that while a substantial military force—40,000, 50,000, 60,000 men—might be required, the soldiers need not necessarily be British. Fisher asked whether Greece could be persuaded to land an army on the Gallipoli peninsula. Grey replied that any immediate hopes of Greek participation were illusory, and the council passed to other business. But the seed of a campaign against Turkey had been planted.

By the end of December, the prospect of an interminable war of attrition on the Western Front seemed ever more likely. All the members of the War Council agreed that France was the decisive theater, but most believed that little progress could be made there unless the Central Powers were distracted and harmed in other areas. Churchill’s restlessness about the gigantic, bloodletting frontal assaults in France was barely in check. “Are there not other alternatives than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?” he demanded of Asquith on December 29. “Cannot the power of the Navy be brought more directly to bear upon the enemy? . . . We ought not to drift.” Asquith had not replied when, by extraordinary coincidence, a voice from outside—an urgent appeal from a hard-pressed ally—precipitated a dramatic change in British policy. In the early hours of January 2, the Foreign Office received a message from Grand Duke Nicholas, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army. The Turkish army was seriously threatening the Russian army in the Caucasus, the grand duke said. Was there anything the British army or navy could do to persuade the Turks to draw off some of their troops?

The grand duke’s message arrived at a moment when concern about Russia was acute in the British government. The Allies owed Russia much: the willingness of the grand duke and of Tsar Nicholas II to hurl the unprepared Russian army at East Prussia and Berlin in the opening weeks of the war had probably saved Paris, but it also had cost Russia the shattering defeats at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. Russia had lost a million men, and secret reports of gross shortages of ammunition in Russia and of 800,000 Russian soldiers waiting without rifles behind the front lines had reached the War Office. Grey sent the grand duke’s appeal to Kitchener, who, more than any other British minister, dreaded the possibility of a Russian collapse and the consequent transfer of German divisions to the Western Front. The field marshal took the telegram and walked over to the Admiralty Building to discuss with Churchill what might be done. Could Britain, for instance, make a demonstration at the Dardanelles? Kitchener asked. Churchill replied that a combined naval and military assault might be possible if Lord Kitchener could find the troops. Out of the question, Kitchener replied; not a single soldier could be spared from France. The demonstration he had in mind would be a purely naval attack. Kitchener returned to the War Office and later that day wrote in a gentler, more apologetic tone to Churchill, “I do not see that we can do anything that will very seriously help the Russians in the Caucasus. . . . We have no troops to land anywhere. . . . The only place that a demonstration might have some effect . . . would be the Dardanelles. . . . [But] we [the army] shall not be ready for anything big for some months.”

There, despite fears of a Russian collapse, the grand duke’s appeal might have died but for Winston Churchill’s presence at the Admiralty. The First Lord, however, was reluctant to reject a challenge and, on the morning of January 3, he summoned the Admiralty War Group and told them of the Russian appeal and Kitchener’s statement. Only the Royal Navy remained. What would be the prospects for a purely naval attack? The admirals were not optimistic, but a consensus was reached that some kind of effort—perhaps a renewal of the bombardment of the Dardanelles forts—could be made. Accordingly that same day, the grand duke was told that a demonstration would be carried out, although it was hardly likely to lead to a significant withdrawal of Turkish troops from the Caucasus.

This telegram pledged Britain and the Admiralty to action of some kind; now Churchill and Fisher faced the question of what that action should be. Fisher, ignoring Kitchener’s declaration, advocated an immediate, powerful, joint naval and military assault: “I CONSIDER THAT THE ATTACK ON TURKEY HOLDS THE FIELD,” he wrote that same day to Churchill. “But ONLY if it’s IMMEDIATE. However, it won’t be.” He proposed taking 75,000 British troops and 25,000 Indian troops from France, embarking them at Marseilles, and landing them on the southern, or Asian, side of the Dardanelles. Simultaneously, the Greeks were to land on the northern side of the Dardanelles, which was the Gallipoli peninsula, while the Bulgarians would march on Adrianople and Constantinople. As for the navy, Fisher proposed that Admiral Sturdee take a fleet of British predreadnought battleships and ram this force through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara. Reading Fisher’s memorandum, Churchill saw immediately that the first three of the four ingredients of the First Sea Lord’s plan were illusory: neither Kitchener nor Sir John French would permit the taking of 100,000 troops from France; the Greeks were far from ready to land in Gallipoli; the Bulgarians were still waiting to determine which side was most likely to win the war. The one element of Fisher’s plan that fell within the Admiralty’s possible power to effect was the First Sea Lord’s suggestion that the old battleships force the Straits, if necessary on their own. To this proposal, Churchill was instantly attentive.

Unfortunately, Fisher’s memorandum and Churchill’s early reaction to it also represented the beginning of a misunderstanding that would grow and fester until it led to career disaster for both men. Fisher, writing the memorandum in his customary florid language, never mentioned and never imagined a naval offensive that would attempt to force the Dardanelles by ships alone. But Churchill, even as he dismissed the unrealistic elements of Fisher’s letter, seized on the old admiral’s reference to forcing the Straits with old battleships. Eight
Canopus
es and eight
Majestic
s, all in the category of “His Majesty’s less valuable ships,” were due for scrapping in 1915. A purely naval assault using them would not need the permission of Lord Kitchener, or the assistance of the Greeks or the Bulgarians. The Dardanelles forts, it was believed, were armed mainly with old guns, which could be outranged by heavy naval guns; the bombarding ships need not come in close and would therefore be untouched. Once the fleet had overcome the decrepit Turkish forts, the minefields could be rapidly cleared and the battleships could sail through to the Sea of Marmara. From this vantage point, a broad and glittering strategic vista opened to the First Lord’s imagination.
Goeben
would be sunk and nothing would stand between the Allied battleships and Constantinople. So wobbly was the Ottoman empire that even a threat to its capital would topple the state. And if the state did not surrender, the battleships would wreak havoc on the city: the Turkish capital was built largely of wood and the guns of the fleet could create an inferno. Turkey’s only munitions factory and its principal gun and rifle factories were on the Sea of Marmara, within the range of naval gunfire; the railway lines to Europe and, on the Asian shore, into Anatolia, lay along the coast. The example of
Goeben
was also, in a way, encouraging. If the appearance before Constantinople of a single battle cruiser carrying ten 11-inch guns had been instrumental in pushing Turkey into war, surely the arrival of twelve battleships carrying forty-eight 12-inch guns should suffice to push her out. With Turkey out of the war, the sea route to Russia would be reopened, Western munitions would flow to the Russian army, and Russian wheat would come out to the West. The wavering neutral states of the Balkans—Greece, Rumania, and Bulgaria—would know which side Victory had favored and would rush to join the Allied cause. And all of this—the delivery of a masterstroke to shorten the war—would have been achieved by the great weapon Churchill held in his hand, the Royal Navy.