Castles of Steel (99 page)

The morning of November 4 was the high-water mark for Keyes’s mission to London and for his plan to rush the Straits. The Admiralty, temporarily moved by Keyes’s enthusiasm, ordered four more old battleships,
Hibernia, Zealandia, Albemarle,
and
Russell,
plus four destroyers and twenty-four trawlers, to the Dardanelles. Balfour sent a message to de Robeck tactfully saying that the admiral probably was tired and ought to come home on leave for at least a month. That afternoon, however, the political tide began to turn. Kitchener, before leaving that night on his own visit to the Aegean, attended a meeting of the War Council where it was decided that a new naval attempt could only be authorized in support of a major new offensive by the army. As there were no fresh troops to launch such an offensive—all reinforcements for the Mediterranean were going to Salonika—the ministers decided that a naval attack by itself would be pointless. On November 7, the prime minister promised Bonar Law that the army would be evacuated. Keyes, however, was unaware of either of these decisions and returned to the Aegean believing that his plan would be approved. On November 18, however, he saw Kitchener, who by then had visited Gallipoli. “I have seen the place,” he said to Keyes. “It is an awful place and you will never get through.” Kitchener by then had made his own recommendation that Suvla and Anzac be evacuated and Cape Helles held.

Still, Keyes did not give up. On November 25, de Robeck departed on leave and Sir Rosslyn Wester Wemyss assumed command of the fleet in the Aegean. Thereafter, Wemyss joined Keyes in ceaseless advocacy of a renewed naval attack. On November 28, Wemyss proposed to the Admiralty that eight old battleships, four light cruisers, and ten destroyers make the attempt, followed by four battleships acting as supply vessels. Fitted with mine bumpers, the ships would enter the Straits at dark. Veiled from the searchlights by smoke screens, they would rush through the minefields and past the Narrows forts, then attack the forts from the rear. As soon as it was light, a second squadron of six more-modern battleships would attack the forts from below the minefields. The suddenness of this surprise attack, Wemyss argued, guaranteed success.

Monro, adamantly opposed to any further effort at the Dardanelles, vehemently objected. “I realised,” Wemyss said later, “that in him I had an opponent to our scheme who would never deviate from his attitude of hostility towards it.” Even so, for a short while, it seemed that Wemyss and Keyes might be given their chance. On December 2, Wemyss was appointed acting vice admiral, and the Admiralty asked how much time would be needed to reembark two divisions at Salonika and bring them back to Mudros. “All indications seemed pointing to fulfillment of our hopes,” Wemyss said later, “when on December 8, I received a personal telegram from the Admiralty announcing that: ‘in the face of unanimous military opinion, H.M. Government have decided to shorten the front by evacuating Anzac and Suvla.’ ” Wemyss called the decision “a disastrous mistake . . . [that] seemed to show that military opinion had prevailed and that the Western [Front] school had gained the day. . . . That naval action would have involved heavy losses is probable, but the sacrifice would have been no greater than those offered up almost daily on the Western Front with less chance of success. . . . The results of success would have been far more reaching than in any other theatre of war. Once through the Narrows: Turkey would become a negligible factor, Russia would be rejoined to the Allies, Egypt would be saved and the end of the war brought within measurable distance.” Encouraged by Keyes and believing, because the government, the Admiralty, and Kitchener had so often waffled before, that this latest decision might still be reversed, Wemyss cabled Balfour: “The Navy is prepared to force the Straits and control them for an indefinite period cutting off all Turkish supplies to peninsula.” He attacked Monro by name: “The ‘unanimous military opinion’ referred to has, I feel certain, been greatly influenced by Sir Charles Monro. . . . A few days ago General Monro remarked to me, ‘If you succeed and occupy Gallipoli and even Constantinople, what then? It would not help us in France or Flanders.’ I mention this to show that he has quite failed to realize the significance of the . . . Near East.” Wemyss’s conclusion was emphatic: “I consider evacuation disastrous, tactically and strategically. . . . I am convinced that the time is ripe for a vigorous offensive and I am confident of success.”

Wemyss’s telegram elicited two negative replies from London: a curt, official message from the Admiralty and a gentler, personal message from the First Lord. The official telegram said that the Admiralty was not prepared to authorize the navy singlehandedly to attempt to force the Narrows and act in the Sea of Marmara, cut off from its supplies. As reasons, the Admiralty cited the opinion of “responsible generals and the great strain thrown on naval and military resources by the operations in Greece.” In any case, the Admiralty declared, “the decision of the Government to evacuate Suvla and Anzac will not be further questioned by the Admiralty.” Balfour’s personal message elaborated: “I view with deepest regret abandonment of Suvla and Anzac. But the military authorities are clear that those cannot be made tenable against an increased artillery fire while the Admiralty hold that the naval arguments against forcing the Straits are overwhelming. . . . Whilst success is most doubtful, very heavy losses are certain. . . . This would be represented as a heavy blow at our naval supremacy.” Wemyss gave up and prepared to obey orders.

The evacuation of Gallipoli—in contrast to most other aspects of the campaign—was carried out with extraordinary efficiency and success. When the government’s decision reached the Aegean, there were 83,000 men, 200 artillery pieces, and 5,000 horses and mules in the Anzac-Suvla beachhead. The evacuation began in secrecy on December 12 and continued nightly. To help keep the withdrawal a secret by creating the illusion of normality, empty supply boxes were ferried in during the day. By the afternoon of December 18, 40,000 men, half of the force at Anzac-Suvla, had quietly climbed into boats and disappeared over the sea. Another 20,000 were taken off on the single night of the eighteenth and the last 20,000 in a dense fog on the night of the nineteenth. In the darkness, so that the Turks would not realize that the lines were deserted, fixed rifles were rigged to fire automatically. Water dripping into a tin or candles burning through strings pulled the triggers of the abandoned rifles so that for half an hour after the troops left, shots were still being fired from the British trenches. By dawn on December 20, both Anzac and Suvla had been totally evacuated, with only one man wounded. The extent of this British talent for retreat was hailed by a German military correspondent writing in the
Vossische Zeitung:
“As long as war exists . . . [this evacuation] will stand in the eyes of students of the strategy of retreat as a masterpiece which up to now has never been attained.”

Thirteen miles south of Anzac and Suvla, 35,000 Allied soldiers still remained ashore at Cape Helles. The men were withdrawn, moving in darkness and complete silence along carefully prearranged march routes marked by thick lines of chalk or white flour, while more unmanned rifles fired into the night. On the afternoon of January 7, when the garrison was down to 19,000, Sanders guessed that the Allies were leaving and ordered an attack. Turkish artillery battered the Allied trenches for four hours, but when the Turkish infantry started over the top, the British saw something they had never seen before at Gallipoli: the Turkish infantry was refusing to charge. Turkish officers shouted and struck at their men, but the soldiers, who sensed that the British were departing, would not move forward. That night and the next, the remaining Allied soldiers went down to the boats and by 4:00 a.m. on the ninth, no one remained on shore. Time-fused bombs blew up abandoned ammunition dumps and caused the only Allied casualty in the entire Gallipoli evacuation: a sailor was killed when a piece of debris fell into his boat as it was leaving the beach. When daylight came and the beaches were deserted, hordes of ragged, hungry Turks who had been living on olives and bread rushed down and threw themselves onto the piles of abandoned corned beef, biscuits, cakes, and jam. One of the final victims at Gallipoli was a Turkish soldier who died from eating too much English marmalade.

During the eight and a half months of the campaign, the Allied nations had landed half a million men on Gallipoli. More than half of these became casualties; 50,000 died, the rest were wounded. The 29th Division, which had arrived on the peninsula with 17,600 men, and been fed constant replacements, had suffered 34,011 casualties of whom 9,011 were killed or miss-ing, 11,000 wounded, and 14,000 incapacitated by disease. Overall, the British, Anzac, and Indian armies endured 205,000 casualties and the French 47,000. Turkish casualties could only be estimated, even by the Turks, but the figure is between 250,000 and 350,000. Gallipoli also became a graveyard of British careers: Carden’s, Hamilton’s, Stopford’s, Fisher’s, and—so it seemed for many years—Churchill’s. Kitchener survived in office, but the aura of omniscience and omnipotence had been stripped away.

Long after the campaign and the war were over, frustration still gripped the men who had advocated that the navy force the Dardanelles: Wemyss, Keyes, and Churchill. Wemyss, on returning to England, saw the First Lord and found him languidly philosophical. “Mr. Balfour,” Wemyss wrote to Keyes, “was most sympathetic and assured me that he had been in sympathy with our plans from the very beginning. . . . He told me that he had been out-voted all around and ended up saying, ‘Well, it is no use crying over spilt milk.’ ” The “spilt milk,” Wemyss cried out, were “the invaluable lives and treasures squandered on this campaign. To what good were they sacrificed?” Keyes noted bitterly that the great Allied army sent to defend Salonika dug itself in and awaited an attack “which was never delivered and was probably never seriously contemplated by the enemy.” Keyes also called on Balfour, who said that “he had always felt convinced that I was right about forcing the Dardanelles. . . . He said that he was a constitutional minister and had to be guided by his Sea Lords and that they had declared that we should lose twelve ships. I could not refrain from retorting that not one of his Sea Lords had any experience at the Dardanelles or had ever seen a shot fired in war.” Winston Churchill carried the political scars of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli for twenty-five years, until, in 1940, he became prime minister. Nevertheless, looking back on the great adventure, he was to say, “Searching my heart, I cannot regret the effort. It was good to go as far as we did. Not to persevere—that was the crime.”

CHAPTER 28
The Blockade of Germany

In the year 1915, the Great War was fought on many fronts, of which the doomed campaign at the Dardanelles and Gallipoli was only one. In the North Sea, German battle cruisers fought and lost the Battle of the Dogger Bank and then were forbidden by the kaiser to come out again. On the Western Front, armies lunged at each other in bloody offensives that despite the involvement of millions of men and, for the first time, of poison gas, left the lines of barbed wire–laced trenches essentially in place. In May, Italy declared war on Austria, her former Triple Alliance partner (Italy’s declaration of war against Germany would wait until August 1916). In October, Bulgaria, emboldened by the obvious failure of the Allied armies at Gallipoli, joined the Central Powers and aided in the overrunning of Serbia. On the Eastern Front, from the Baltic to the Rumanian border, a mammoth German-Austrian offensive beginning May 1 captured Warsaw, drove the Russians out of Poland, and killed, wounded, or captured 2 million men of the Russian army. Beginning in February, German submarines began attacking merchant vessels in the waters around the British Isles. And through the year, the Allied blockade continued its silent, deadly corrosion of the German war effort.

On both sides, January of the new year had been a watershed of critical decisions. It was then that the Admiralty and the British government agreed to attack the Dardanelles. During the same weeks, the German Naval Staff, fearing the Allied blockade but forbidden to send German dreadnoughts to challenge the British fleet, proposed to employ what Admiral von Tirpitz called “the miracle weapon,” the U-boat, to turn the tables and ensure that supplies to Britain would be cut off, as the British had done to Germany. Ultimately, it was by winning on these maritime battlefields—by sustaining the blockade and defeating the U-boats—that the Allies won the Great War. But it was, in a phrase used by the Duke of Wellington in describing his victory at Waterloo, “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.”

The ability to blockade an enemy coast and choke off seaborne commerce has always been a potent derivative of superior sea power. Blockade was not a rapid method of waging war, however; during the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy blockaded the coasts of Europe for twenty years; in the American Civil War, the Union navy had blockaded the ports of the Confederacy for more than four years. Nor was a policy of blockade free of diplomatic and military risk. The efforts of a blockading fleet to control access to enemy ports ran counter to many neutral rights as well as to the more generally espoused doctrine of freedom of the seas, which in its purest form declared that vessels of neutral nations should be able to travel on the high seas untroubled by any belligerent power. So vigorously had the new American republic supported this doctrine in 1812 that when the British stopped American merchant vessels, seized their cargoes, and then began removing American seamen and impressing them into the Royal Navy, war followed. During the American Civil War, hostilities again came close when blockading Union cruisers halted British merchant vessels bringing supplies to the South and carrying cotton back to the textile mills of England. In the American South, half a century later, memories of the Union blockade remained vivid.

[During a 1915 debate in the U.S. Senate about the potential harm posed by the British blockade, Senator Williams of Tennessee declared: