CHAPTER 23

“A Demonstration at
the Dardanelles”

For three thousand years in history and legend, the Straits of the Dardanelles, flowing for forty miles like a wide river between the hills of Europe and the plains of Asia Minor, have been a stage for courage and tragedy. Four miles from the southern entrance to the Straits stood the ancient city of Troy. At the Narrows—the classical Hellespont, where the Straits are less than a mile across—Xerxes led an army across on bridges of boats. *41 Here the mythical Leander swam the Hellespont at night to visit his lover, the virgin princess Hero, before, eventually, both were drowned. Here, in 1810, the Romantic poet Lord Byron swam the stream in emulation of the lovers. And here, in the early years of the Great War, occurred an effort to bring to fruition that war’s only truly innovative strategy: an attempt, first by sea and then by land, to pierce and break down the barriers separating Russia from her allies and in so doing possibly to shorten the war.

The Dardanelles are a water passageway from the Mediterranean Sea and the Aegean to the Sea of Marmara. The mouth of the channel at Cape Helles on the Aegean is two miles wide, but once inside the Straits, the shoreline on either side opens out to a width of four and a half miles, then gradually comes together again at the Narrows, fourteen miles upstream. Above the Narrows, the passage widens again to an average of four miles until, twenty-six miles later, it reaches the Sea of Marmara. The water in the Straits is deep, up to 300 feet at the Narrows. Steep cliffs line the northern side, the shore of the Gallipoli peninsula; across, in Asia, where the Trojan plain reaches down to the island of Tenedos, the shoreline is low and the bottom is shallow. There is no tide in the Dardanelles, but water flowing from the Black Sea rivers and from the melting snows of the Caucasus Mountains creates a permanent current of 2 to 4 knots.

Three connected bodies of water—the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosporus—together make up one of the most important water passageways in the world. Linked, they form the only entrance to and exit from the Black Sea; they are a highway for all trade coming from the Danube, the Dniester, the Dnieper, and the Don and the great ports of Constantinople, Odessa, and Sebastopol. In 1914, an endless flow of steamships carried nine-tenths of Russia’s exported grain through the Dardanelles. Control of this channel meant control of Russia’s lifeline to the sea, to the West, to her allies. Because the Dardanelles were a Turkish waterway, Germany, Turkey’s ally, meant to block them and thereby to isolate and strangle the empire of the tsars.

Since September 21, the Allied watchdog at the Aegean end of this critical waterway had been Vice Admiral Sackville Hamilton Carden, commander of the British East Mediterranean Squadron. Carden, a gray-bearded, fifty-seven-year-old, Anglo-Irish officer, had held this responsibility since the unlucky Rear Admiral Troubridge had been summoned home to face the inquiry into his role in the escape of Goeben. When this happened, Carden was occupying the position of admiral superintendent of the Malta dockyard, the final, preretirement posting of an average, undistinguished career. Certainly, Carden had never expected to command at sea again, much less be confronted with challenges of the most demanding naval and military importance. Then lightning struck, Troubridge vanished, and Carden, the only British vice admiral in the Mediterranean, found himself plucked from Malta and spirited away to command the squadron bottling up Goeben. Logically, this assignment should have gone to Rear Admiral Henry Limpus, who, as head of the British naval mission to Turkey, was thoroughly familiar with the Turkish government, its military and naval figures, and—of greatest immediate relevance—the defenses of the Dardanelles. Limpus was not appointed because of a delicately balanced calculation by the Foreign Office. By September 9, although the German admiral Wilhelm Souchon had become commander of the Ottoman navy and the German general Otto Liman von Sanders, the head of the German military mission, was virtual commander of the Turkish army, Turkey still remained neutral. Sir Edward Grey hoped that this neutrality could be preserved. At so uncertain a moment, it seemed to Grey that the sending of a British officer who knew most of Turkey’s secrets to command a squadron off the Dardanelles might sufficiently offend the Turks as to tip the scales toward war. Thus, Limpus was sent to the Malta dockyard and Carden was brought to the fleet. This minuet of admirals enraged Churchill, who called it “a chivalry which surely outstripped common sense.” Writing to Grey, he complained, “It now appears that Turkey can not only injure our whole naval position by a flagrant breach of neutrality about Goeben, but also is to have a veto over Admiralty appointments. . . . If [Sir Louis] Mallet [the British ambassador to Turkey] thinks he is dealing with a government amenable to argument, persuasion and proof of good faith, he is dreaming. . . . Nothing appeals to the Turkish government but force.” Fisher was appalled. “Who expected Carden to be in command of a big fleet?” he wrote to Jellicoe. “He was made Admiral Superintendant at Malta to shelve him.” Nevertheless, Carden was appointed and given the same belligerent instructions previously issued to Troubridge: “[Your] sole duty is to sink Goeben and Breslau, no matter what flag they fly, if they come out of the Dardanelles.”

To carry out his task, Carden had his flagship, the battle cruiser Indefatigable; her sister Indomitable; two old French battleships, Suffren and Vérité; the light cruisers Dublin and Gloucester; twelve destroyers; and three British and three French submarines. For a week after the new admiral’s arrival, the squadron patrolled peacefully, watching over the stream of Russian merchant ships still passing in and out of the Straits. At German insistence, the Turks had laid mines across the Narrows, but a small channel had been left open and the ships, after taking on a special pilot, continued to steam through unmolested. Then, on September 27, Carden’s squadron stopped and boarded a Turkish destroyer coming out of the Dardanelles. German sailors were found on board, a violation of Turkish neutrality, and the ship was turned back. Immediately, without consulting the Turks, the German colonel commanding the forts at the Narrows ordered the waterway closed. All lighthouses were darkened, large signs were erected on the cliffs announcing that the Straits were sealed, and the minefields were extended across the Straits. Thereafter, despite international treaty obligations guaranteeing free passage of the Straits by all nations not at war with Turkey, the Dardanelles were closed. British military supplies could no longer reach Russia except through Archangel on the White Sea; Russian wheat, upon which the Tsar’s empire depended for most of its foreign income, could no longer be exported. Hundreds of ships from Russia, Rumania, and Bulgaria, loaded with grain, lumber, and other products, clogged the harbor at Constantinople. Unable to find docking space, they anchored, their dense forest of masts and smokestacks swinging in unison on the stream.

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 Canopuses and eight Majestics, 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.

Churchill sought the opinion of Admiral Carden. Fisher had agreed that Carden should be consulted, but the First Sea Lord was not shown the message. In the telegram, there was no mention of British troops from France, of Greek troops, or of Bulgarian troops. Instead the First Lord asked simply: “Do you consider the forcing of the Dardanelles by ships alone a practicable operation? It is assumed older battleships fitted with mine-bumpers would be used, preceded by colliers or other merchant craft as mine-bumpers and sweepers. Importance of results would justify severe loss. Let me know your views.”

Carden’s answer, when it arrived on January 5, was cautious. The admiral did not like what appeared to be the Churchillian concept of “forcing” the Dardanelles using merchant ships out in front as mine bumpers: “I do not consider Dardanelles can be rushed,” he said. “They might be forced by extended operations with large number of ships.” This answer, although guarded, was sufficient to encourage Churchill, who read it to the War Council and then took it back to the Admiralty for discussion. Fisher saw Carden’s telegram and expressed no opinion, but, Churchill wrote later, “he seemed at this time not merely to favor the enterprise, but to treat it as a matter practically decided.” Accordingly, on January 6, Churchill sent another message to Carden: “Your view is agreed with by high authorities here. Please telegraph in detail what you think could be done by extended operations, what force would be needed, and how you consider it should be used.”

The War Council met again on January 8. Kitchener warned that the Germans were about to begin a new offensive in France. Lloyd George appealed for a British countermove elsewhere; his preference was the Balkans, in order to bring aid to Serbia. Kitchener replied that Sir John French still believed that the German lines in France could be broken and insisted that no effort should be made in another theater “until the impossibility of breaking through . . . [in France] was proved.” The war secretary then seemed to take a momentary step back from the Western Front philosophy; he added that if an offensive were to be launched in a secondary theater, “the Dardanelles appeared to be the most suitable objective. A hundred and fifty thousand men,” Kitchener thought, “might be sufficient to assist the fleet in forcing the Straits and capturing Constantinople.” Having offered this observation, Kitchener then reverted to his unvarying mantra: “Unfortunately, I have no troops available.” No one on the War Council challenged the inconsistency of Kitchener’s comments; at that time, whatever the Supreme War Lord said was accepted without question. If Kitchener believed that an attack on the Straits might succeed, then so it might. And if Kitchener said that no British troops were available for such an enterprise, none were.

On the morning of January 12, Carden’s detailed operational plan arrived in London. The admiral suggested a slow progress with the application of overwhelming force, shelling and silencing the forts one by one. First, he would attack the entrance forts at long range from outside the Straits. Once the entrance forts were destroyed, he would slowly and methodically progress up the Straits. The numerous secondary batteries of the fleet would silence the concealed guns and deal with the mobile batteries. Minesweepers would sweep a channel through which he would approach the heavy guns and forts at Chanak (Çanakkale) on the Narrows. He would demolish these and then advance into the Sea of Marmara. He would not hurry or risk taking heavy losses. “Time required for operations depends greatly on morale of enemy under bombardment; garrison largely stiffened by the Germans,” he noted. “Also on weather conditions. Gales now frequent. Might do it all in a month about. Expenditure of ammunition would be large.” The force required, he said, should be twelve battleships, three battle cruisers—two to deal with the Goeben in the Sea of Marmara—three light cruisers, sixteen destroyers, six submarines, and twelve minesweepers.

The plan was discussed the same day by the Admiralty War Group, which included Fisher, Wilson, Jackson, and Oliver. No one protested. Instead, “the plan produced a great impression upon everyone who saw it,” said Churchill later. “Both the First Sea Lord and the Chief of Staff [Oliver] seemed favourable to it. No one at any time threw the slightest doubt upon its technical soundness. . . . On the contrary, they all treated it as an extremely interesting and hopeful proposal.” Indeed, Fisher made a proposal of great significance. He suggested sending to Carden the new battleship Queen Elizabeth, the first of a class of five new dreadnoughts armed with eight 15-inch guns. The vessel, at that moment the most powerful warship afloat, had been commissioned at Portsmouth on December 22, and was scheduled to depart in February for gun calibration exercises in the calm, submarine-free waters of the Mediterranean off Gibraltar. Fisher now proposed that the dreadnought should test her huge guns against the Turkish forts at the Dardanelles rather than “firing all her ammunition uselessly into the sea at Gibraltar.” Queen Elizabeth’s guns had a range of 22,000 yards; thus she could easily stand off and fire out of range of Turkish guns. (The Admiralty placed restrictions on her use: to preserve her gun barrels from becoming worn, the dreadnought was never to fire salvos; rather she must fire slowly and deliberately, one gun, one shell at a time.) Later, Fisher went further, adding to Carden’s force the two latest of the predreadnoughts, Lord Nelson and Agamemnon, both commissioned after Dreadnought herself.

Thus, by mid-January, Churchill and the Admiralty were close to committing the fleet to steaming forty miles up a narrow waterway defended by forts equipped with heavy guns and also by numerous batteries of mobile howitzers. Traditionally, a bombardment of forts by ships was abhorred in the Royal Navy. The idea that naval guns should be used against land-based artillery had been condemned by Nelson, who had declared that “any sailor who attacked a fort was a fool.” Mahan had elaborated: “A ship can no more stand up against a fort . . . than the fort could run a race with a ship.” The primary mission of warships, these authorities declared, was to control the sea by sinking enemy warships, not to attack forts, which, no matter how many times they are hit, always refuse to sink. Ships are more vulnerable than forts: a battleship 500 feet long is a large target; any part of it can be hit, sometimes with drastic consequences for the entire vessel. A fort, on the other hand, cannot be greatly harmed except by hitting the guns themselves; usually only a direct hit will put a piece of coastal artillery out of action. On this point—the inefficacy of naval bombardment—Fisher had direct experience. The First Sea Lord had participated in the British navy’s most famous previous effort to subdue land forts. In July 1883, Fisher, as captain of Inflexible, the most powerful battleship in the world at that time, had participated in an all-day bombardment by the British Mediterranean Fleet of the Egyptian forts at Alexandria. During the day, Inflexible, anchored outside the breakwater, spasmodically belched eighty-eight 16-inch shells at the forts. By late afternoon, the fleet had fired 3,000 shells but only ten of forty-four Egyptian heavy guns had been silenced.

Churchill believed that the lessons of this experience, now thirty years in the past, had been modified if not invalidated by the new technology of modern warfare. He had been profoundly impressed by the success of German heavy artillery on the Western Front. The fortresses of Liège, Namur, and Antwerp had ranked among the world’s strongest, yet they had been reduced within a few days, sometimes within a few hours, by German siege howitzers. Once the bombardment began, the forts had collapsed, leaving a few dazed and blackened Belgians to crawl from the ruins and surrender. If the Belgian forts were helpless against these heavy land guns, how could the old Turkish forts on the Dardanelles withstand the enormous 12-inch and 15-inch guns of battleships? Thereupon, there formed in Churchill’s mind a glorious picture of Queen Elizabeth relentlessly blasting the Turkish defenses with tremendous shells from her monster guns.

Unfortunately, the First Lord ignored or misunderstood the differences between controlling German land artillery at close range from forward positions, and firing naval guns at targets seven or eight miles away with no means of accurately spotting the fall of shot. The German siege howitzer was a fat, short-barreled cannon that lobbed its shell high into the air so that the missile plunged down on its target. An observer close to the target observed the location of the shell’s impact and then signaled the battery to correct the range until the shell fell precisely on the desired spot. Large naval guns had an entirely different design and purpose. Shells fired from a long barrel in a low trajectory over thousands of yards were designed to strike and sink enemy warships at the greatest possible range. Spotting the fall of shot at sea was made easier for ships by the eruption of a great column of water where the shell hit. By tracking these water towers through binoculars and correcting their aim, the ship’s gunners hoped eventually to hit their enemy. When a ship is firing at a fort, on the other hand, the impact of a shell produces, not an easily discernible column of water, but a cloud of debris and dust that further obscures the target, giving the observer, thousands of yards away, little help in correcting his aim. In addition, warship shells fired in a flat trajectory would not plunge onto or near the target; more likely, they would pass overhead and hit many yards—even hundreds of yards—behind.

But all of this was still to be learned.

The meeting of the War Council on January 13, 1915, was a prolonged and exhausting session lasting all day. Not until after sunset did the council turn to the Dardanelles. Churchill explained Admiral Carden’s plan, which had arrived at the Admiralty the day before. As Hankey described the scene:

The War Council had been sitting all day. The blinds had been drawn to shut out the winter evening. The air was heavy and the table presented that rather disheveled appearance that results from a long session. . . . At this point events took a dramatic turn for Churchill suddenly revealed his well-kept secret of a naval attack on the Dardanelles! The idea caught on at once. The whole atmosphere changed. Fatigue was forgotten. The War Council turned eagerly from the dreary prospect of a “slogging match” on the Western Front to brighter prospects, as they seemed, in the Mediterranean. The navy, in whom everyone had implicit confidence and whose opportunities so far had been limited, was to come into the front line. . . . Churchill unfolded his plans with the skill that might be expected of him, lucidly, but quietly and without exaggerated optimism.

Pointing to a map, the First Lord declared that the Admiralty “believed that a plan could be made for systematically reducing all the forts within a few weeks. Once the forts were reduced, the minefields could be cleared and the fleet would proceed up to Constantinople and destroy Goeben.” Churchill declared that ships for the enterprise, including Queen Elizabeth, were available.

Churchill’s argument, Lloyd George said later, was delivered “with all the inexorable force and pertinacity, together with the mastery of detail he always commands when he is really interested in a subject.” So deep was the sense of frustration, so strong the apparent need that something be done, and so infectiously enthusiastic was Churchill’s presentation, that most of those who heard it were captured by its novelty and simplicity. There was no opposition. Churchill’s principal naval advisers, Admirals of the Fleet Fisher and Wilson, were present, but were not called upon for their opinions, nor did they offer any remarks. Their silence permitted Churchill and the other ministers to take their acquiescence for granted. Kitchener said the plan was worth trying and that “we could leave off the bombardment if it did not prove effective.” During the discussion, Asquith was seen to be writing. At length the prime minister read out the conclusion he had written: “That the Admiralty should prepare for a naval expedition in February to bombard and take the Gallipoli peninsula with Constantinople as its objective.” The War Council approved unanimously. Later, many of the ministers at the meeting differed as to whether any final decision had been made. Asquith himself understood that the council was pledged to nothing more than preparations. Eventually the Dardanelles Commission was to ask, How could a fleet “take” a peninsula? How could it occupy Constantinople? But these and other questions were not asked until two years later.

Up to mid-January, operational planning at the Admiralty seemed to be proceeding smoothly. The French government promised to place a squadron of four battleships under Carden’s command. Nevertheless, even as plans for the naval attack were taking form around him, Fisher’s enthusiasm was fading. As early as January 19, the First Sea Lord was complaining to Jellicoe, who he knew would provide a sympathetic ear: “The Cabinet have decided on taking the Dardanelles solely with the navy using fifteen battleships and 32 other vessels, and keeping out there three battle cruisers and a flotilla of destroyers all urgently required at the decisive theater at home. There is only one way out and that is to resign. But you say ‘No!’ which simply means I am a consenting party to what I absolutely disapprove. I don’t agree with one single step taken. . . . The way the war is conducted both ashore and afloat is chaotic! We have a new plan every week.” Two days later, Fisher wrote again to Jellicoe, “I just abominate the Dardanelles operation, unless a great change is made and it is settled to be a military operation with 200,000 men in conjunction with the fleet. I believe Kitchener is coming now to this sane view of the matter.”

Fisher was not opposed to all amphibious operations; indeed, he had always believed that the British army “is a projectile to be fired by the navy.” It was the navy’s job to carry soldiers from here to there, but not to fight a land campaign. He was quite prepared for a combined navy-army operation but he would have liked it somewhere other than at the Dardanelles. His own strong preference was for a large-scale Russian landing on the German Baltic coast, followed by a march to Berlin. With this in mind, his great building program, initiated within a week of his return to the Admiralty in November, had called for a large number of armor-plated landing barges capable of carrying 500 men each and equipped with ramps for rapid disembarkation. The first of these craft were now approaching completion. But now, apparently, they were to go, not to the Baltic, but to the Dardanelles.

Underlying the specific reasons Fisher gave for opposing Churchill lay deeper reasons based on personality. His motives for turning against the Dardanelles operation stemmed at least in part from the strange administrative position into which they all had drifted. In November 1914, Asquith had formed the War Council as a select committee of the Cabinet, including Asquith, Haldane, Kitchener, Lloyd George, and Grey, along with some others like Arthur Balfour, the Conservative former prime minister. There was already an imbalance at the top: the secretary of state for war was an eminent soldier and a national hero, while the First Lord of the Admiralty was a civilian with no naval and only early military experience. Churchill was keenly aware of this inequity: “I had not the same weight or authority as those two ministers [Asquith and Kitchener] nor the same power, and if they said ‘This is to be done, or not be done’ that settled it,” said Churchill. This modest statement is not entirely convincing. Churchill possessed unparalleled powers of persuasion and argued with incomparable virtuosity. But in the first year of war Kitchener’s prestige and authority were overwhelming. “All powerful, imperturbable, reserved, he dominated absolutely our counsels at this time,” Churchill said of him. On specific matters of strategy and prosecution of the war, Asquith, an urbane political and parliamentary compromiser, and Churchill, a brilliantly imaginative and articulate forty-year-old, simply could not challenge this colossus.

Below this level of supreme authority stood the generals and admirals present in War Council meetings to advise if called upon. Here, a misconception had hardened into permanence. Ministers assumed that the service chiefs would freely speak their minds, without being invited to do so, but these experts did not consider that they should break in to express opinions or dissent. Asquith, who always presided, never invited the attending service chiefs to speak but rather allowed himself to be wholly guided on military and naval matters by the secretary of state for war and the First Lord of the Admiralty. Fisher rarely spoke and never protested. “I made it a rule that I would not at the War Council kick Winston Churchill’s shins,” he said. “He [Churchill] was my chief and it was silence or resignation.” Thus, whether they agreed with the First Lord or not, the admirals sat silent; unfortunately, this silence was taken as assent. The War Council took it for granted that when Churchill spoke, he had first settled things within his department and was speaking for the entire Admiralty.

There was another imbalance that grated on Fisher. His position was entirely different from Kitchener’s. Unlike Kitchener, he was not a minister; he was only a technical adviser. He could not make policy or vote, even on matters that affected the navy. Yet to the British public Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher of Kilverstone was something more than the incumbent First Sea Lord: he was the Royal Navy. His reputation was as overwhelming as the dreadnoughts he had built, and he spoke with the blast effect of their massive guns. To Fisher, sitting and listening day after day while Kitchener dominated the War Council with his opinions, it seemed that the imperial war lord was showing an inappropriate disregard—even disrespect—for what in Britain had always been the senior service.

Until mid-January, Fisher did not openly complain about the Dardanelles plan; indeed, it was he who had proposed adding Queen Elizabeth. But following the January 13 meeting, Fisher had deeper misgivings. He tried to fix his forebodings about the Dardanelles adventure into some logical argument that would establish his general sense of uneasiness and that he could present to Churchill, whom he enormously liked and admired. But when he tried, Churchill had no difficulty, either privately or publicly, in proving him wrong. Not only did Fisher’s own cherished scheme, a naval campaign in the Baltic, now obviously have no chance—but also, as he saw it, the Grand Fleet, the central pillar of British naval supremacy and war strategy, was now being nibbled away by the devouring demands of the Dardanelles. Fisher, after all, was the First Sea Lord who, ten years earlier, had brought the British navy home and concentrated it against the growing threat from Imperial Germany. Now, returned to office, he insisted that nothing be done to permit the loss of this hard-won supremacy.

Fisher himself precipitated a crisis on January 25 when sent his views in writing to the prime minister with a copy to Churchill. “First Lord,” he wrote in a cover note, “I have no desire to continue a useless resistance in the War Council to plans I cannot concur in, but I would ask that the enclosed may be printed and circulated to members [of the War Council] before the next meeting.” The memorandum pointed to the folly of the whole Dardanelles scheme. “We play into Germany’s hands,” Fisher wrote, “if we risk fighting ships in any subsidiary operations such as coastal bombardments or the attack of fortified places without military cooperation, for we thereby increase the possibility that the Germans may be able to engage our fleet with some approach to equality of strength. . . . Even the older ships should not be risked, for they cannot be lost without losing men and they form the only reserve behind our Grand Fleet. . . . The sole justification of coastal bombardments and attacks by the fleet on fortified places, such as the contemplated bombardment of the Dardanelles forts . . . , is to force a decision at sea, and so far and no farther can they be justified.” Britain, Fisher argued, should be content with maintaining the North Sea blockade of Germany. “Being already in possession of all that a powerful fleet can give a country, we should continue quietly to enjoy the advantage without dissipating our strength in operations that cannot improve the position.” Although Fisher asked that this document be circulated to the War Council, Asquith, on Churchill’s recommendation, refused to do so.

Instead, Churchill replied on January 27, declaring that the central argument in Fisher’s paper was indisputable: the primary responsibility of the Admiralty was to maintain the Grand Fleet at a strength sufficient to ensure defeat of the German High Seas Fleet in battle. This responsibility, the First Lord argued, was being faithfully discharged. Once again, as he had in November and December, the First Lord provided a comparative list of the numerical strength of the two fleets. In addition to everything necessary to ensure victory in a climactic North Sea battle, Churchill pointed out, Britain also had twenty-one old battleships, heavily armed and armored, completely manned and supplied with their own ammunition, lying idle since they were unfit to meet modern German ships. “Not to use them where necessary because of some fear that there would be an outcry if a ship is lost would be wrong,” Churchill insisted.

Meanwhile, planning for the operation continued. By the last week of January, supplies were assembled and ships were under orders. All that was needed was the final approval of the War Council. This was to be given at a meeting scheduled for 11:30 on the morning of January 28. That morning, Churchill found Fisher’s resignation on his desk: “I entreat you to believe that if as I think really desirable for a complete unity of purpose in the war that I should gracefully disappear and revert to roses at Richmond,” Fisher had written. “There will not be in my heart the least lingering thought of anything but regard and affection and indeed much admiration towards yourself.” Knowing that Asquith had refused to circulate his memorandum and that War Council members would be unaware of his views, Fisher also wrote to the prime minister, saying that he did not wish to attend the War Council meeting that day: “I am not in accord with the First Lord and do not think it would be seemly to say so before the Council. . . . I say that the . . . Dardanelles bombardments can only be justified on naval grounds by military cooperation which would compensate for the loss in ships and irreplaceable officers and men. As purely naval operations they are unjustifiable. . . . I am very reluctant to leave the First Lord. I have a great personal affection and admiration for him, but I see no possibility of a union of ideas, and unity is essential in war so I refrain from any desire of remaining as a stumbling block. The British Empire ceases if our Grand Fleet ceases. No risks can be taken.”

The withdrawal of Fisher’s support on the very day that the War Council was scheduled to approve the enterprise was awkward for both Asquith and Churchill. Struggling to keep the old admiral in line, the First Lord insisted that Fisher talk to the prime minister. Arriving with Churchill in Asquith’s Downing Street study a few minutes before the council meeting began, Fisher described to the prime minister his objections to a Dardanelles operation. Churchill urged that it be allowed to continue. Asquith, forced to choose, decided that the attack should go forward. Fisher received this decision in silence and both the prime minister and the First Lord assumed that he had accepted it. Together, the three men then went downstairs to the meeting of the War Council in the Cabinet Room.

Fisher attended this meeting in the belief that in their just completed conversation, Asquith had said that a final decision on the Dardanelles was not to be taken that day. The mood at the council meeting was cheerfully optimistic; Churchill’s continuing enthusiasm had colored the views of his colleagues. The First Lord reported that preparations for the attack on the Dardanelles were well advanced, but that the council must understand that the expedition “undoubtedly involves risks.” As soon as Churchill finished, Fisher intervened to say that “he had understood that this question would not be raised at this meeting and that the prime minister knew his views on the subject.” To this, Asquith replied that “in view of the steps which already had been taken, the question could not be well left in abeyance.” Fisher thereupon stood up and made for the door. Kitchener saw this and, jumping to his feet, succeeded in reaching the door first. Steering Fisher to a window, he quietly asked the admiral what he was going to do. Fisher replied that he would not go back to the table and that he intended to resign as First Sea Lord. Kitchener pointed out that Fisher was the only man present who disagreed with the proposed operation; that the prime minister had made a decision and that it was the First Sea Lord’s duty to his country to accept it and continue in office. Reluctantly, Fisher went back to the table where ministers were competing in optimistic predictions. Kitchener now declared that a naval attack was vitally important; the great merit of this form of offensive action, he said, was that “if satisfactory progress could not be made, the attack could be broken off.” Balfour said that “it was difficult to imagine a more hopeful operation.” Grey said that “the Turks would be paralyzed with fear when they heard that the forts were being destroyed one by one”; that the neutral Balkan powers, all anxious to be on the winning side, would watch the progress of this effort, and that he hoped that success would finally settle the attitude of Bulgaria. Through all of this, Asquith noticed, Fisher maintained “an obstinate and ominous silence.”

The meeting adjourned at 2:00 p.m. to resume in the late afternoon. During this interval, Churchill, who had seen Kitchener talking privately to Fisher, spoke to the old admiral in his room at the Admiralty. The conversation was “long and very friendly,” in Churchill’s phrase, “I am in no way concealing the great and continuous pressure which I put upon the old admiral,” Churchill admitted later, and Fisher often complained to friends about his inability to withstand these tactics. “He always out-argues me,” he said to one. And to another: “I am sure I am right, I am sure I am right, but he is always convincing me against my will. I hear him talk and he seems to make the difficulties vanish and when he is gone I sit down and write him a letter and say I agree. Then I go to bed and can’t sleep, and his talk passes away and I know I am right. So I get up and write him another letter and say I don’t agree, and so it goes on.” Something of this kind happened on the afternoon of January 28. By the end of his talk with Churchill, Fisher had consented to support the Dardanelles operation.

When the War Council reconvened in the late afternoon, Churchill—accompanied by Fisher—was able to announce that everyone at the Admiralty agreed that the navy would undertake the operation. Fisher’s conversion seemed, for the moment, to be complete. “When I finally decided to go in,” Fisher said later, “I went the whole hog, totus porcus.” Indeed, Churchill had been so successful that Fisher added Lord Nelson and Agamemnon as well as Queen Elizabeth to the operation. “This I took as the point of final decision,” Churchill wrote. “After it, I never looked back. We had left the region of discussion and consultation, of balancing and misgivings. The matter had passed into the domain of action.”

Fisher, momentarily defeated, remained unconvinced. In his own mind, his position was clear: he had favored a joint attack but he fiercely opposed a purely naval attack. He had made this view clear to the First Lord, to the prime minister, and to his colleagues at the Admiralty. Under pressure, he had been persuaded to support the attack. “When the operation was undertaken, my duty from that time on was to see that the government plan was carried out as successfully as possible with the available means. I did everything I could to secure its success. I put my whole heart into it and worked like a Trojan.” But in private, he never stopped expressing his personal opinion. “The more I consider the Dardanelles the less I like it,” he wrote to Churchill on March 4. At the end of March, he wrote, “A failure or check in the Dardanelles would be nothing. A failure in the North Sea would be ruin.” On April 5, he wrote to Churchill again, “You are just simply eaten up with the Dardanelles and cannot think of anything else. Damn the Dardanelles! They will be our grave!”