Castles of Steel (89 page)

Unfortunately, the fleet had no immediate opportunity to apply this new knowledge. That night the weather changed; over the next five days, gale winds whipped up the sea and heavy rain brought lightning and thunder, changing to sleet and snow. These conditions affected available light and because Carden could not afford to waste ammunition without good visibility, the fleet retreated to Mudros. Carden signaled London on February 24, “I do not intend to commence in bad weather leaving result undecided as from experience on first day I am convinced given favorable weather conditions that the reduction of the forts at the entrance can be completed in one day.”

On February 25, the storm moved away and the bombardment of the outer forts resumed.
Queen Elizabeth, Agamemnon, Irresistible,
and
Gaulois
anchored 12,000 yards from their targets and commenced deliberate fire.
Queen Elizabeth
fired eighteen 15-inch shells, one by one, into a fort at Cape Helles; two of these scored direct hits and destroyed two guns.
Irresistible
fired thirty-five 12-inch shells into the other Helles fort and destroyed another two guns.
Agamemnon
adopted a casual attitude and was punished for it. When the ship anchored, her second in command, responsible for the vessel’s smart appearance, ordered men over the disengaged port side to paint the hull. The battleship was too close, however, and a Cape Helles fort fired fifty-six shells, hitting
Agamemnon
seven times, killing three men and wounding seven, before the ship could weigh anchor and move. At 2:00 p.m., Admiral de Robeck led the ships into the mouth of the Straits and engaged the forts at close range. The Turkish guns fell silent and, in the smoke and dense clouds of dust, it seemed the guns and forts must have been destroyed. By 4:00 p.m., they appeared to be deserted. (The Turkish and German gunners had been temporarily evacuated.) At the end of this day, the French commander, Vice Admiral Emile Guépratte, posted himself in a prominent position on the bridge of his flagship,
Suffren,
and led his squadron past
Inflexible
with the French band playing “God Save the King” and “Tipperary.” The British sailors cheered and their ships’ bands responded with the “Marseillaise.”

The following day, the twenty-sixth, the battleships put Royal Marine landing parties ashore to cover navy demolition squads—typically fifty marines covering thirty sailors—which went through the forts at Helles and Kum Kale blowing up the abandoned guns with explosive charges. In the deserted forts of Sedd el Bahr and Kum Kale, nineteen heavy guns were transformed into scrap. In nearby gun emplacements, a dozen Krupp heavy howitzers were destroyed. One group of
Irresistible
marines got as far as Krithia, a village set at the foot of a hill called Achi Baba that dominated the the lower peninsula; ironically, this was the only time in the Gallipoli campaign that British troops would get as far as Krithia, four miles north of Sedd el Bahr. The cost of these land operations was nine men killed or wounded. By March 4, however, resistance was stiffening. Turkish soldiers, returning in greater strength, drove British marines and sailors from Kum Kale and Cape Helles, killing twenty-two men and wounding twenty-seven. Nevertheless, during these landings, fifty Turkish guns of significant caliber had been destroyed.

News that a combination of naval gunfire and demolition parties had overwhelmed the old stone forts and the guns commanding the entrance to the Dardanelles pleased the Admiralty and the Cabinet. The First Lord found himself surrounded by smiling faces and impressed by “the number of persons who now were in favor of the Dardanelles operations and claimed to have contributed to their initiation.” To Jellicoe, Churchill wrote, “Our affairs in the Dardanelles are prospering, though we have not yet cracked the nut.” On March 2, Carden informed the Admiralty that, if good weather continued, he hoped to be through to the Sea of Marmara in two weeks. At its March 10 meeting, the War Council discussed what to do after the fall of Constantinople.

The fall of the outer Dardanelles forts also impressed the neutrals. Italy, thinking of joining the Entente, was encouraged to do so more quickly. The repercussions were especially significant in the Balkans. If the British fleet was about to appear before Constantinople, and the Ottoman empire was then to collapse, none of the Balkan states wished to be absent from the feast of spoils. The Bulgarians leaned toward the Allies. On March 1, the Greek government offered three divisions—and hinted at four or five—for an attack on the Gallipoli peninsula. The Turks were pessimistic. Across from Constantinople on the Asian side of the Bosporus, two special trains stood ready on an hour’s notice to carry the sultan, his harem, and his court to refuge in the depths of Asia Minor. Inside the city, the German ambassador worried that his embassy, a huge yellow building situated on a prominent hill, would become a primary target for Allied naval guns, and began depositing his personal baggage for safekeeping at the American embassy. Far away, in anticipation that Russian wheat would soon be flowing out through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the price of wheat fell on the Chicago Exchange. In Berlin, Admiral von Tirpitz noted that “the capsizing of one little state may fatally affect the whole course of the war. The forcing of the Dardanelles would be a severe blow to us. . . . We have no trumps left.”

In London, Carden’s apparent victory strengthened the conviction of the Admiralty and the War Council that the Straits could be forced by the navy alone. If, with only trifling losses, a few hundred marines and bluejackets could take almost undisputed possession of the forts on both sides of the entrance, then Lord Kitchener’s plan seemed wise: soldiers need not be used to assist the fleet at the Dardanelles—although once the ships had broken through, the army would be needed to occupy Constantinople. On the scene, however, Admiral Carden had begun to discover more immediate ways in which ground troops could be useful. Fire control officers in ground observation stations ashore would enable the ships to direct their fire more accurately on the forts at the Narrows. The howitzer and field batteries lining both sides of the Straits could be located and more easily disposed of by attack from the ground. And, as the fleet progressed, soldiers could move in and take possession of the peninsula to prevent the Turks from returning. With these considerations in mind, Carden asked General Sir John Maxwell, commanding British forces in Egypt, to provide 10,000 men to be landed on the tip of the peninsula now that the outer forts had been destroyed. The answer to Carden came not from Maxwell but from the War Office in London, which sternly declared that ground troops at this stage were not an essential part of the naval operation. Indeed, Kitchener warned General Sir William Birdwood, commander of the Anzac forces, of the riskiness of placing a small force on the Gallipoli peninsula where the Turks were believed to have 40,000 men. The troops already in camp at Lemnos, Kitchener decreed, were to remain on that island until the fleet had battered the inner forts into submission; thereupon, the field marshal conceded, it might be necessary to put a few men ashore at the Bulair neck of Gallipoli to prevent supplies from reaching isolated Turkish troops on the peninsula. Carden could not argue. A few weeks before, he had told the Admiralty and the War Council that the Straits could be forced by the fleet alone. Now he had to do it.

Ironically, even as Carden’s success prompted men in London to self-congratulation and spurred Balkan governments to reexamine their diplomatic alignments, the naval assault on the Dardanelles was beginning to falter. The Allied fleet now was very large, totaling ninety warships with 814 guns, including a hundred guns of the heaviest caliber. Nevertheless, from March 1 onward, the progress of Admiral Carden’s attack became progressively slower. The outer forts had been silenced and ships now could freely enter the mouth of the Straits. The next stage was to proceed up the waterway, eliminating the batteries on either side, most prominently the heavy guns in the forts at the Narrows—at Chanak on the Asian side and Kilid Bahr on Gallipoli. To achieve this, Carden meant to use the tactics that had worked on the outer forts: first, long-range bombardment; then, as the Turkish guns fell silent, closer engagement to overwhelm them with shellfire. Unfortunately, local geography, which had favored Carden in his attack on the outer forts, now favored the Turks. In attacking the outer forts, the bombarding ships had been able to use a wide expanse of the Aegean Sea to maneuver while concentrating their fire on the small land area of the forts. Now the geographic advantage was reversed: the intermediate and Narrows defenses could be attacked only from inside the narrow passageway and, as the ships moved into this confined space, they could be subjected to artillery fire from every ridge and gully up and down the shores of both sides of the Straits.

On February 26, the bombardment of the inner forts began. The old battleships steamed past the silent, ruined outer forts and, firing at long range, did little damage to the Narrows forts. The forts, firing back, caused no harm to the fleet. The warships were, however, hit repeatedly by the mobile howitzer batteries positioned along both coasts. These howitzers could not hope to cripple, let alone sink, any of the battleships but a howitzer shell striking an old ship was harassing and disconcerting, and the battleships did their best to locate and eliminate these adversaries. The difficulty in this was quickly apparent: when the Turkish field batteries opened fire, the ships tried desperately to locate them, but the guns were so well concealed that they rarely succeeded. In addition, the howitzers shifted position from day to day. On those occasions when naval gunfire did become accurate, the Turkish and German gunners simply retired into their caves or shelters until the bombardment was over and then, emerging, used oxen to pull their guns to another hidden position in the scrub. A few hours later the guns reopened fire.

Queen Elizabeth,
prohibited by the Admiralty from entering the Straits, tried something different. On March 5, the dreadnought anchored off the Aegean coast of Gallipoli and fired her heavy guns over the peninsula at the Narrows forts. The arrival of 15-inch shells from this unexpected angle confused the Turks, as their protection was designed against fire from vessels coming up the Straits. But, without accurate spotting, the shells hit nothing significant. At the same time, the anchored battleship was hit seventeen times by one small field gun; one shell wrecked the ship’s bakery. Next day,
Queen Elizabeth
returned to continue her bombardment, but the Turks had brought up a heavy, mobile 6-inch howitzer, which proceeded to hit the dreadnought three times on the hull below the waterline, though without penetrating her armor. The ship changed position again, but it was obvious that
Queen Elizabeth
would not hit anything unless she entered the Straits and subjected the forts to direct fire. Already, some in the fleet were beginning to doubt that naval gunfire would work in any form. “We could not go on expending ammunition on these futile bombardments,” said Keyes. “We had also to consider the wear and tear on the guns which had only a limited life.”

Carden, meanwhile, was beginning to grapple with the acute problem that would determine the success or failure of the whole naval offensive: how to deal with the Turkish minefields. The lower half of the fourteen-mile passage up to the Narrows was free of mines; Carden’s minesweepers had established this. Beyond that point, however, eight big minefields, skillfully laid and commanded by many guns, stretched across the navigable waterway. No reasonable admiral would take valuable ships through these waters until a channel through the minefields had been swept.

The Admiralty had been aware that the Turks had mined the Dardanelles and had provided Carden with a force of makeshift minesweepers. This flotilla consisted of twenty-one small North Sea fishing trawlers, newly equipped with minesweeping gear, protected by steel plating against rifle bullets and splinters, and manned by their regular peacetime crews of fishermen, now designated as naval reserve ratings. The vessels were so underpowered that, operating at a sweeping speed of 4 to 6 knots, they could make no more than 2 or 3 knots going upstream against the current in the Straits. The draft of the trawlers was greater than the depth of the mines from the surface; thus if the trawlers passed over the minefields, they stood a chance of being blown up. This knowledge had depressed the morale of the crews, but they had accepted the danger and were ready to go ahead and sweep—until the first time they came under intense artillery fire from the shore.

The howitzer fire, which could be disconcerting for the battleships, was a far more serious matter for the slow, unarmed minesweepers. Before they began their work, the trawler crews expected that the fleet would have located and silenced the mobile howitzers. But the invisible guns hidden in the gullies were impossible to find. British admirals now found themselves in a new and difficult position; their advance was being delayed by the clever interlocking of a mutually supportive system of defense. The forts, the mobile howitzers, and the minefields all depended on one another: the minefields blocked the passage of the Straits; the mobile howitzers prevented the sweeping of the minefields; the forts and their larger guns protected the mobile howitzers by keeping the battleships at a distance. The result was a stalemate. As early as March 3, Rear Admiral de Robeck, commanding the forward assault forces, stated his opinion that the Straits could not be forced unless one shore or another was occupied by Allied troops.

To lessen the danger to his minesweepers, Carden decided to send the trawlers in to work at night when darkness might hide them from the Turkish artillerymen on shore. But the Turks and their German advisers had thought of this, and five powerful searchlight batteries had been established to cover the minefields. When the first attempt to sweep was made on the night of March 1, seven trawlers went in escorted by the light cruiser
Amethyst
and four destroyers. The sweepers extended their sweeps and began moving upstream against the current. They had reached a point a mile and a half below the minefields when the small vessels were suddenly illuminated by four searchlights and subjected to the concentrated fire of ten gun batteries, six on the northern shore and four on the southern. The trawlers quickly retreated and the light cruiser and destroyers exchanged fire with the batteries for forty-five minutes. Trying to hit the guns, the destroyers had nothing to aim at except the black gaps between the blinding searchlights. They had little chance of hitting anything and eventually gave up. None of the sweepers was hit.