Churchill's Wizards (9 page)

In August 1914, 54-year-old Major General Monro led the 2nd Division; by January 1915 he was in charge of the whole of 1st Corps, and on 15th July 1915 he was appointed to command the newly formed Third Army. This was Hesketh Prichard's chance. Monro was not only interested in new ideas about shooting, he also liked, and played, cricket. Monro appreciated what Prichard was trying to do, and secured him a roving commission with Third Army to develop the art of counter-sniping. Sniping appealed to men in the field because it was something more skilful and individual than group fire. Aubrey Herbert also found it more sporting:

Alan Lascelles visited a Yorkshire regiment in September 1915:

The counter-sniping project got under way in June 1915 when Major Hesketh Prichard went to see his old friend Captain Alfred Gathorne-Hardy, further south down the line at Neuve Chapelle with the 9th Scottish Rifles (he was killed a few months later at Loos). Together they crawled out across no-man's-land to steal some of the large protective iron plates through whose loopholes the German snipers used to shoot. Prichard took them home on leave in July to test against different rifles and ammunition. He found that big bullets (.577 or .470 Nitro Express) from a double-barrelled elephant gun, or even the
smaller but high-velocity Jeffreys .333, punched through the sheet-metal as if it were chocolate.

Hesketh Prichard approached John Buchan in London about raising money to buy more such guns. The
Spectator
ran an appeal and Buchan got Lord Haldane and other wealthy men to assist. Meanwhile, Prichard visited Willie Clarkson (the famous London costumier who had dressed Virginia Woolf for the Abyssinian Dreadnought hoax), from whom he obtained a supply of the model heads used to display wigs. In September 1915, H. P. managed to escape from GHQ escort duties and began teaching ‘Sniping, Observation and Scouting' to officers and men of Third Army. In the summer of 1916, he started an innovatory sniping school at Linghem in Belgium for First Army. By then, his mentor Charles Monro was back from Gallipoli and commanding First Army.

Prichard had to overcome inertia above and ignorance below. He started out as a lone individual with no ‘Establishment', authority or charge code. He had to step down in rank from major on the staff to infantry captain, and received no pay for eight months. Telescopic sights for rifles were in short supply, and 80 per cent of them were useless because improperly aligned and maintained, and no one knew anything about concealment or observation. But slowly, as he moved from brigade to brigade, Major Hesketh Prichard found allies and converts (‘Who is this blighter who's coming?'… ‘Plays cricket, doesn't he?') as he demonstrated old ruses and new tricks to counter German sharpshooters, helping sniper/scouts to earn their fleur-de-lys badge.

The theatrical heads from Clarkson's the costumiers could be used as decoys to help locate hidden snipers. The head, set on a stick that slid up and down a grooved board, would be pushed cautiously above the parapet like someone taking a look; if hit by a sniper's bullet, it was swiftly lowered. By inserting a rifle-cleaning rod through the bullet's entry and exit holes in the dummy head you could get the exact angle and alignment of the shooter. Or you could slide a periscope up the groove in place of the head, spot the sniper, and then get counter-snipers to fix him in their sights.

When Prichard visited the French Camouflage Works at Amiens in 1916 he fell on the
camoufleur
Henri Bouchard with joy. Here was a sculptor already making brilliantly realistic heads and shoulders of French and British soldiers out of papier mâché. They were more
readily available than Clarkson's models from London, and so well done that they were impossible to tell from the real thing at 300 yards. H.P. got Bouchard modelling Gurkha and Sikh individual heads too, to vary the target and to worry German intelligence compiling an ‘order of battle' or inventory of enemy troops. Some dummies even had a slot in the mouth for a lighted cigarette which could be puffed from below through a rubber tube. Prichard wrote: ‘It is a curious sensation to have the head through which you are smoking a cigarette suddenly shot with a Mauser bullet.'

Camoufleurs
helped snipers in the field by making realistic hides and observation posts which fitted seamlessly into no-man's-land or the trenches: shattered brickwork, a French milestone, shorn-off poplars, a swollen dead horse, even the corpse of a Prussian or a French soldier.
Camoufleurs
also painted special full-length ‘sniper's robes' in the appropriate earth and vegetation colours.

German soldiers grasped sooner than British ones that sticking out like a sore thumb was no good. Philip Gibbs describes a wooded section of the line between Vaux-sur-Somme and Curlu where a kind of warfare more like violent paintballing went on in the summer of 1915. Raiding parties of thirty to forty men stole into the thickets of no-man's-land where they met

Major Underhill of the King's Shropshire Light Infantry recreated no-man's-land for Allied trainees to crawl around in at night, on a realistic site made by blowing craters in an old cornfield and littering the zone with wire and other authentic detritus. The (dummy) corpses had German
Soldbücher
or pass-books in their pockets and other useful identification on their sleeves. While defenders fired flares, attackers had to crawl as close as possible and hammer in a peg to prove in the morning where they had got to.

Making use of cover, stalking, hiding, blending, waiting, concealment,
careful aiming: it was precisely the world of rough shooting and big-game hunting, but with quarry that could fire back. Prichard's book
Sniping in France
is like African or Indian
shikar
or hunting literature where, as in the classic stories by Jim Corbett, Colonel Patterson
et al
, the hunter has to offer himself rather than a tethered goat as the bait for a man-eater. Drawing the sniper's shots by pretending to be an overeager duffer, blazing away carelessly from a loophole, while other judiciously sited spotters on your own side pin-point through telescopes the enemy's flicker of muzzle flash or the wisp of smoke that lingered longer on chilly days, was all part of the deadly sport.

Hesketh Prichard's quest for what he called ‘the hunter spirit' in the army was what first led him to the Lovat Scouts. They contributed the ‘ghillie suit' to the art of camouflage from their deer-stalking origins. Modern British Army snipers still make ‘ghillie suits' themselves for field use: a shrubby overcoat and trousers hung with long ragged strips of frayed nylon and dyed hessian, topped with dreadlocks of greenery, a camouflage suit that makes them look like vegetating yetis or sloths when they move, but turns them into bushy undergrowth wherever they settle to kill.

Hunters understood camouflage because it was part of their regular practice. Two days after Solomon J. Solomon's letter about camouflage appeared in January 1915,
The Times
printed a response from Walter Winans, a trotting-horse fanatic and Olympic pistol-shooting champion. Born in St Petersburg in 1852, where his father was US Consul, fabulously wealthy from Baltimore railway and engineering money, domiciled in England, but with a large boar-hunting estate in his ancestral Belgium, Walter Winans indulged his sporting passions to the limit.

Uniforms and colour

Other sportsmen too saw what Hesketh Prichard was trying to do. When George A. B. Dewar, editor of the
Saturday Review
and author of several books on fishing and wildlife, came out on one of many visits to the Western Front in the summer of 1917, he wrote a piece on the sniper schools for
The Times
, extolling the virtues of hunting and shooting as preparation for war.

Lord Lovat himself visited Hesketh Prichard's school and was impressed enough to loan him his head stalker, Corporal Donald Cameron, to teach detailed observation, compass work and intelligent use of the telescope. Once, when students reported ‘soldiers in blue uniforms' at 6,000 yards, Cameron looked through the glass and was able to pronounce them Portuguese. The uniforms could have been French-style, but the shape of their British headgear marked them clearly as ‘our oldest ally', the Portuguese.

Often a subtler, more deductive kind of intelligence was required to make sense of the information that came from close observation. Thinking about why a tortoiseshell cat should be strolling or sunning itself regularly unmolested on one particular section of the rat-haunted trenches led to the identification of a German officers' front-line mess by photoreconnaissance, and its eventual destruction by shelling.

Chlorine gas at Ypres had no impact on the agreeably privileged life of Duff Cooper at the Foreign Office in late April 1915. He was more upset at being hit in the mouth by the beautiful Lady Diana Manners in a weekend tiff at the Cavendish Hotel. (They later married.) What really shocked him in Monday's newspaper was seeing that the ‘good poet' and ‘beautiful man' Rupert Brooke had died ‘from sun-stroke' (in fact an infected mosquito-bite on his lip) on a Greek island in the Mediterranean, on his way to fight the Turks. Brooke's obituary tribute in
The Times
was written by Winston Churchill, for the poet had been serving in the Royal Naval Division that Churchill had founded, and died at the beginning of the strategic Dardanelles Campaign which Churchill had inspired.

If you unrolled a map centred on the Mediterranean Sea in 1915, you would have seen only three entrances for ships. Two of them, Gibraltar and Suez, were controlled by the British, but the third was held by the Ottoman Turks, then an enemy in alliance with the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. In the north-east corner of the map, the narrow passage called the Dardanelles runs out of the Aegean Sea, past the peninsula of Gallipoli (Gelibolu in Turkish) to the Sea of Marmara and then the Black Sea. The importance of the Dardanelles for the Entente Allies in WW1 was as a lifeline to Imperial Russia, the only sea route from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea ports of Odessa and Sebastopol. After Ottoman Turkey joined forces with the Central Powers, Russia's way out from the Black Sea was blocked. Northern ports were frozen in winter so the Ukraine grain harvest could not be exported, nor military supplies imported. While fending off Germany in the west, Russia was also being attacked by Turkish troops in the Caucasus. The Tsar appealed to his allies, Britain and France, for a demonstration of force to draw off the Ottoman Turks.

From the very start of 1915, Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, wanted to support the Russians by attacking the Dardanelles. Lord Kitchener and Jackie Fisher, the First Sea Lord, seemed to support him. But the idea grew in Churchill's mind from a diversion to a grand vision: a daring thrust through the Dardanelles in order to take Constantinople, which the Turks called Istanbul, and to knock Ottoman Turkey out of the war. Larger hopes (or what Sir Ian Hamilton called ‘a bagful of hallucinations') also rode upon this coup: Germany would thus be cut off from meddling in the East, Greece sustained, Serbia saved, Egypt and the Persian Gulf protected, the Balkans rallied, the mouth of the Danube seized, Russia rescued and her granaries freed, and the Central Powers enclosed in the Allies' ring of iron. There was also a non-secular vision, something like the one in Ernest Raymond's 1922 best-selling novel,
Tell England
: ‘It's the Cross against the Crescent again, my lads. By Jove, it's splendid, perfectly splendid! And an English cross too!'

The British and French navies tried to force a passage through the Dardanelles on 18 March 1915 with ten battleships (mostly expendable old ones destined for the scrapyard). First they bombarded the shore forts and the Turkish guns sited along a dozen miles of both the Gallipoli peninsula and the Asiatic mainland. The kite-balloon ship HMS
Manica
sent spotters aloft to report how shells were falling up to seven miles away. The newest Dreadnought battleship
Queen
Elizabeth
also tested her 15-inch guns with tremendous sound and fury, signifying effectively nothing. Assuming the Turkish guns had been silenced, the civilian trawlers were then supposed to clear a 900-yard passage through the minefields. But after a string of twenty Turkish sea mines, spotted neither by seaplanes nor picket boats, managed to sink the French battleship
Bouvet
and two British battleships,
Irresistible
and
Ocean
, with over 600 (mainly French) dead, naval operations were halted by Rear Admiral John de Robeck.

On the actual day of the Allied attack, Churchill was visiting French trenches among the sand dunes of the Belgian coast where barbed wire ran right down into the North Sea, snagging corpses covered in seaweed and washed to and fro by the tides. He says he tried not to think about what was happening in the Dardanelles, though he knew that if they succeeded there, this stagnant deadlock in France and Flanders could be broken. Back in London the next day, the politicians
and top brass seemed intent on persevering. Fisher said the Navy could safely lose a dozen battleships.

But by 23 March, Rear Admiral de Robeck had lost his nerve and sent Churchill a cable saying that the Dardanelles could not be taken by the navy without the army first destroying the artillery on shore. Some Turkish guns were mobile, others hidden; they could not be spotted from the sea or from the air by the
Ark Royal
's weedy Sopwith seaplanes. This telegram filled Churchill with consternation. Delays only gave the enemy time to reinforce. Because Captain Hall's Room 40 had decrypted messages between Berlin and the German commander of the Ottoman Navy, Churchill composed a telegram to send to de Robeck:

But the three senior admirals in London backed the judgement of de Robeck as the man on the spot; Churchill's cable was written but never sent, and the purely naval attack never resumed. Churchill bowed to the sea lords' decision ‘with regret and anxiety'.

This was a crux of history. What might have happened had the Allied ships kept pressing on through the Dardanelles in the third week of March 1915? Believers, like the daring attacking submariner Commodore Roger Keyes, tried to revive Churchill's idea of the naval-only assault through the straits to seize Constantinople, but were overruled. Ten years afterwards, commanding the Mediterranean fleet, Keyes steamed through the Narrows and was overcome with emotion. ‘My God,' he said at last, ‘it would have been even easier than I thought; we simply couldn't have failed … and because we didn't try, another million lives were thrown away and the war went on for another three years.'

For the rest of his life, Winston Churchill would have the dead of the Dardanelles and the disasters of Gallipoli laid at his charge. What he hoped would be ‘one of the great events in the history of the world' did not happen. The truth is that the amphibious landing on the peninsula in April 1915 was neither Churchill's plan nor his original concept: he had put his faith in the ships alone forcing their way through the straits to capture Constantinople.

When Earl Kitchener of Khartoum pronounced that the army would carry through the operations, it was easier said than done. The ‘Incomparable' 29th Division of British infantry who joined the Expeditionary Force had been sent more as garrison troops than as an amphibious invasion force. The organisation required for each of the two roles was quite different. The ‘Constantinople Expeditionary Force' planning was ad hoc, because not they but the Royal Navy was meant to force the Dardanelles. Ships had been loaded haphazardly, with units separated from their equipment, guns from their ammunition, and not much thought given to what was going to be needed first. There were too few engineers, and no provision for building piers, jetties and cranes at the beachhead. There were not enough smaller boats to ferry supplies and people ashore. Medical stores and personnel were inadequate. No one had thought about the water supply. There wasn't even a big base where all this could be sorted out, because the nearest Greek islands, Imbros and Lemnos (where there was a big harbour at Mudros) did not have enough water. So the ships had to go 800 miles to Alexandria in Egypt. ‘There are three islands here,' soldiers said, ‘Lemnos, Imbros and Chaos.'

All this gave General Liman von Sanders of the German Military Mission four weeks to organise the Fifth Turkish Army to defend the Dardanelles. There was no secret about the British intentions, but von Sanders did not know exactly where they would land and so split his forces into three equal parts of 20,000 men, to cover the northern neck of the peninsula at Bulair, the southern foot of Gallipoli and the Asiatic side. Obvious landing-beaches in the south of the peninsula were mined, wired and lightly garrisoned, with forces held in reserve to move where needed. Commanding the 10,000 men of the Turkish 19th Division in reserve at Bigali down south in the peninsula was a lieutenant colonel called Mustafa Kemal, the future Atatürk, founder of the Turkish republic and president of Turkey from 1923 to 1938.

A fleet of 200 ships carried the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force from Lemnos across the wine-dark sea towards the coast where the city of Troy had once stood. General Sir Ian Hamilton deployed six divisions. The two French ones landed at Kum Kale, on the Asiatic side of the straits, but this was merely a feint, as was the diversion by the Royal Naval Division at Bulair at the neck of the peninsula in the north. The main attack was on the southern peninsula, by 30,000 men
of the British 29th Division and the two divisions of Anzacs (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps).

It was planned that the British would land at five beaches around Cape Helles to take the high ground at Achi Baba; the Anzacs were to land a dozen miles away at Gaba Tepe to seize the Sari Bair ridge. From there they would advance together on the Pasha Dagh plateau that dominated the ‘Narrows' section of the Dardanelles. They had maps but as yet no photoreconnaissance. Kitchener, thinking that the Turks would run away, said there was no need for aeroplanes.

The first man on the peninsula was one of the last men out, nine months later, and his initial job was deception. Lieutenant Commander Bernard Freyberg of the Royal Naval Division was born in London but raised in New Zealand. He had been with Pancho Villa's revolutionary forces in Mexico at the outbreak of war, made his way to England and got into the Royal Naval Division by badgering Churchill on Horse Guards Parade. Not twenty-four hours after burying his brother officer, the poet Rupert Brooke, in a moonlit olive grove on the island of Skyros, he swam two miles to the beach below Bulair. It was Saturday night, 24 April 1915, and he was semi-naked, thickly oiled with engine-room grease, with only the whites of his eyes visible in a mask of brown. He was towing a bag of seven flares to set off on shore to make the Turks think a landing was already underway there, a long way north of the real landing-sites. This action won Freyberg the first of his four DSOs.

The Sunday was a serenely beautiful spring day, with the blue Aegean calm and smooth, ideal sea conditions for a landing just before dawn. At Gaba Tepe in the north, the first of 15,000 Anzac troops were landed under cliffs, over a mile north of beach ‘Z', where they should have been. It was not disastrous, just another muddle. John Buchan describes the Australians dropping their packs to scramble a hundred feet up through myrtle scrub and a yellowy rock-garden of spring flowers, purple cistus, grape hyacinth, anemone, asphodel and amaryllis, to entrench under fire at the top of the cliffs, staring straight into the rising sun.

‘Now you have only to dig, dig, dig until you are safe,' General Hamilton told the Anzacs. This is where the Australians started earning the nickname ‘Diggers', only putting down their spades to resist counter-attacks with their bayonets. In months to come Anzac
Cove would resemble a mad mining camp, quarried from apricot-coloured rock and dirt by half-naked, sun-bronzed men.

At ‘S', ‘Y' and ‘X' beaches around Cape Helles, other landings were relatively easy or unopposed to begin with, but the invaders did little with them. Troops from ‘Y' wandered to within yards of Krithia village, which was deserted, then returned to the beach. At that moment, they outnumbered all the Turkish defenders of Cape Helles. No Allied soldier ever got that close to Krithia again.

At ‘W' beach the thundering naval bombardment stopped. The 1st Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers were still packed tight in two dozen clinkered ship's boats with their tow-ropes cast, each being rowed ashore by four naval ratings, when accurate Mauser rifle fire from the Turkish redoubts started hitting them. Commander Charles Samson of the RNAS flew overhead in a Maurice Farman. ‘I saw Hell let loose,' he wrote. ‘The sea was literally whipped into foam by the hail of bullets and small shells.' Only two boats got to shore. Tipped overboard from boats which could not land, weighed down with up to 70 pounds of kit, pith-helmeted men struggled in four feet of water to get towards the barbed wire and mines on the beach. If wet sand jammed their rifles, bayonets were their only weapon. Over 500 were killed and wounded; the dead included 63 of the 80 naval ratings. ‘Why are they resting?' said people looking through ship's binoculars at the still bodies on the beach.

The plan at ‘V' beach was to run a kind of Trojan horse of a ship ashore into the crescent between a Turkish fort and a crenellated castle, and then to disembark troops through the square sally ports cut in her port and starboard bow, over gangways and across a pontoon of lighters towed into place by a steam hopper. SS
River Clyde
was a 4,000-ton collier or coal transport ship which bore mottled sandy-yellow and black camouflage and the soldiers' nickname ‘the Dun Cow'. The
River Clyde
, with 2,000 soldiers aboard and a dozen machine guns sandbagged in the bow, was accompanied by open cutters full of ‘Bluecaps', 1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers, towed by steam pinnaces. From above at Seddülbahir the Turkish soldiery opened withering fire from rifles and machine guns, plus shrapnel from two ‘pom-poms' or quick-firing cannons. This massacred the Dublins in their boats together with the first companies of 2nd Hampshires and 1st Royal Munster Fusiliers, who raced out of the
Clyde
, falling over
each other across the lighter barges. When the shore pontoon drifted away, soldiers jumped into the water and drowned, dragged down by their kit. The naval airman Samson who flew over reported fifty yards of sea ‘absolutely red with blood'.