The U-boat campaign begins
No month of the war was to prove more fateful than February 1915. With stalemate on the Western Front, eyes were turning to other theatres – the Germans to the Eastern Front, the Ottomans and their German advisers towards the Suez Canal, and the British to the Dardanelles and beyond to the Black Sea.
A naval stalemate had also developed. The Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, and her standing cruiser patrols along the east coast, had neutralized the German High Seas Fleet, keeping the fruit of the Kaiser’s great pre-war naval building programme, the ‘Dreadnought Race’, bottled up the other side of the North Sea at Wilhelmshaven. The attempt in December to even the odds by luring the Royal Navy into ambush with the bombardment of Scarborough and other ports on the north-east coast had ended in failure, and Admiral Jellicoe, conscious of being, in Churchill’s memorable words, ‘the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon’, was consistently able to out-manoeuvre the Germans thanks to superior signals intelligence. On 24 January another cruiser raid was intercepted in what became known as the Battle of Dogger Bank, and although the Royal Navy was slow to follow up its success, the armoured cruiser Blücher, one of the villains of the Scarborough raid, was sunk with heavy loss of life. Her capsizing was filmed at close quarters by British destroyers, one of the earliest moving-picture records of the death of a warship. Ingenohl was promptly replaced as commander of the Hochseeflotte by Admiral Hugo von Pohl, a notably cautious officer.
While the Admiralty pondered how to tempt the Hochseeflotte into decisive battle, the Germans were determined to take the war underwater. U-boats had already sunk a number of allied merchantmen as well as warships, but had observed the so-called ‘cruiser rules’. Under these rules, laid down by the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, a submarine intending to attack an unarmed vessel was first meant to surface and allow the crew into lifeboats. Nevertheless, on 26 October U-24 had become the first submarine to attack an unarmed merchantman without warning when she torpedoed the French Admiral Ganteaume with 2,500 Belgian refugees aboard, her commander, Kapitänleutnant Rudolf Schneider, claiming that he had mistaken the Channel steamer for a troop transport. Then, on 30 January 1915, U-20, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger, torpedoed and sank the Ikaria, Tokomaru and Oriole in the English Channel without warning, and on 2 February the German chancellor agreed to the request of the navy minister, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, to launch unrestricted submarine warfare against all ships, including neutrals, bringing food or supplies to the Entente powers. That day an American diplomat at the embassy in Paris, John Coolidge, wrote in his diary: ‘Another little merchant ship has just been sunk by the Germans, just at the mouth of the Mersey, which gives us all a horrid feeling. The Germans are so angry at not getting ahead that they leave nothing undone.’
American distaste at increasing German ‘frightfulness’ solidified into something stronger when on 4 February Berlin declared that the torpedoing of neutral ships ‘cannot always be avoided’, and that ‘cruiser rules’ would not always apply. This brought a sharp response from Washington, President Woodrow Wilson declaring that it was an ‘indefensible violation of neutral rights’ and that the United States would take the ‘necessary steps’ to safeguard American lives and property.
There was some logic in Tirpitz’s thinking, which was reinforced by Germany’s own experience of the effects of the British naval blockade. For before the war there had been a widespread belief that Britain was wholly dependent on food imports from North America, the influential newspaper editor W. T. Stead declaring as early as 1901 that without them ‘we should be face to face with famine’. But compared with the cruiser, the U-boat was not well adapted to commerce raiding or blockade. Its speed both on the surface and underwater was no greater than that of many a merchant ship, and its light gun was inadequate against larger vessels, some of which were now armed. For the new strategy of blockade to have any chance of success, therefore, now that all Germany’s cruisers bar auxiliaries had been swept from the seas, the U-boat would have to exploit its trump card, the attack without warning using torpedoes, abandoning the stop-and-search rules that had hitherto safeguarded neutrals. On 19 February the Norwegian tanker Belridge was torpedoed by U-8 in the Dover Straits, the first neutral to be attacked without warning. Berlin again claimed that it had been fired on in error.
From 1 February, therefore, Berlin was almost inexorably set on a course of conflict with Washington. So too were Kapitänleutnant Schwieger and U-20: on 7 May they would sink the Cunard liner Lusitania off the south-east coast of Ireland with the loss of 1,200 passengers and crew, including 128 American citizens. And although President Wilson would be measured in his response, stating that ‘there is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right,’ his new secretary of state, Robert Lansing, would write in his memoirs that although it was another two years before the United States entered the war, after the sinking of the Lusitania he had had no doubt ‘that we would ultimately become the ally of Britain’.
Meanwhile, at the urging of Churchill at the Admiralty, plans were under way to force the Dardanelles (the old Hellespont), the narrow (in places less than a mile) 40-mile waterway linking the Aegean with the Sea of Marmora and thence Constantinople, thereby opening up communications with Russia. Pre-war studies had concluded that this operation would be extremely hazardous, and both the Admiralty and the War Office had discounted it as an option, but stalemate in the west and increasingly urgent calls from the Tsar to take action to relieve the Turkish pressure on his southern flank had led to a reappraisal. The war cabinet, not least the war minister, Lord Kitchener, now had high hopes that seizing Constantinople would also have profound diplomatic advantages, encouraging Bulgaria and Romania to join the allies. However, the first sea lord, Admiral Fisher, remained sceptical, which did nothing to energize Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden, the commander charged with forcing the Dardanelles with a flotilla of elderly battleships. In fact, Carden himself had begun to doubt his original assessment that the straits might be taken by a methodical advance and systematic bombardment of the shore batteries, which Churchill had used to urge the war cabinet to approve the operation. On 16 February, therefore, the war cabinet decided to mount in addition a land operation to clear the shore batteries, and a substantial force under General Sir Ian Hamilton, one of the most highly regarded officers in the army, began assembling in Egypt for the task. It included both British regulars and reservists, two French brigades, Indian Army troops, and those of Australia and New Zealand on their way to France.
On 19 February Carden began the naval operation with the bombardment of the defences at Sedd-el-Bahr on the Gallipoli peninsula and Kum Kale on the Asiatic side of the straits. This was not successful, in part because of bad weather, and was quickly broken off before being resumed on 25 February at closer range. A party of Royal Marines landed the next day, along with a naval demolition party led by Lieutenant Eric Robinson. Turkish troops put up stiff opposition, but Robinson, alone and in his tropical whites, strolled up the Achilles Mound, the supposed tomb of the Greek hero of the Trojan war, and under heavy fire proceeded calmly to blow up the two guns. For this and later acts of courage he was awarded the VC, the first of the Gallipoli campaign. Bad weather returned, however, and little progress was made subsequently, despite a more concerted effort in mid-March.
Worse still, surprise had now been lost, and the initiative no longer lay with the allies. A further month would elapse before Hamilton’s Mediterranean Expeditionary Force landed at Gallipoli, with great loss of life and to no effect but to draw Turkish troops from the Caucasus, though by that time the Russians had been able to stabilize their southern front. The campaign would be one of the great lost opportunities of the war, and would have serious political and diplomatic repercussions.
Success was to come the allies’ way in Egypt, however, doubly welcome after near-catastrophic losses by the Russians in Polish Masuria. The Suez Canal was the lifeline through which troops from the Empire passed to France, and in late January an Ottoman force of some 23,000, in large part Syrians but including a regular Turkish division, under the direction of Colonel Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, mounted an offensive to block it. They crossed 130 miles of the Sinai desert with 5,000 camels as water carriers, using wells dug in advance by German engineers, but aircraft of the RFC and Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) observed their advance throughout. On 3 February determined attempts to cross the canal at Kantara and Ismailia were decisively repulsed by Indian and Egyptian troops with the aid of naval gunfire.
Reassuringly, contrary to the hopes of the Ottoman high command and German efforts at incitement, the Muslim troops of the Egyptian and Indian armies showed no inclination to rise up against the British in support of a Turkish ‘holy war’. Indeed, one officer of the 5th Battery Egyptian Artillery, Mulazzim Awaal Effendi Helmi, was killed in a particularly gallant stand at his gun during hand-to-hand fighting, and according to the despatch in the London Gazette would have been recommended for an award had he lived.
The repulse was not immediately followed up because the GOC of the Canal Defence Forces, Major-General Alexander Wilson, believed his troops were ill-trained for the task; but although it would be nearly three years before imperial forces cleared Gaza and entered Jerusalem, the defeat on the Suez Canal was the beginning of the end for Ottoman power in Palestine.