CHAPTER 26

Gallipoli: The Landings

From the beginning, the possibility of a land campaign had lurked beneath the surface of the naval attack on the Dardanelles. A plan to employ significant land forces had not emerged in the early discussions because Kitchener had declared categorically that no troops were available; this had prompted Churchill to say that the navy could force the Straits on its own. Originally, Fisher had been in the middle, believing that a Dardanelles campaign was a good idea, but only as a combined operation involving both the army and the navy. On February 23, 1915, he made this point to Lloyd George: “The Dardanelles: futile without soldiers. Somebody will have to land at Gallipoli some time or other.” Thereafter, as it became clear that the navy was indeed going to try to force the Straits alone, Fisher lapsed into resentment and opposition.

By early February, however, it began to appear that Fisher was right. At the Admiralty, at the War Office, and in the War Council, realization was growing that at least some soldiers would be necessary to occupy the forts after the guns were silenced. Even Kitchener conceded this and modified his first emphatic position. “If the navy required assistance of land forces at a later stage, that assistance would be forthcoming,” he informed the War Council on February 9. The fact was that, despite his statement that no troops were available, Kitchener, all along, had been hoarding in England a division of veteran soldiers, the 18,000 men of the regular army’s 29th Division. On February 16, Kitchener decided to release these men and told Asquith, Churchill, and Fisher that he had assigned the division to the Aegean where it would be available “either to seize the Gallipoli peninsula after it has been evacuated [by the Turks] or to occupy Constantinople.” He had also, he said, authorized the use at Gallipoli of 30,000 Australian and New Zealand troops training in Egypt. *43

Word of the assignment of the 29th Division to the Mediterranean predictably infuriated Sir John French, the British Commander-in-Chief in France, who bombarded Kitchener with protests. Kitchener waffled and on February 20, four days after they were issued, the division’s Mediterranean sailing orders were canceled. Kitchener’s explanation to the War Council was that recent severe defeats inflicted on the Russian army might permit the Germans to transfer numerous divisions from the Eastern to the Western Front; therefore, prudence required withholding the 29th Division to shore up the Allied armies in France. Churchill, perturbed, pointed out that one division would not make the slightest difference between success and failure in France, but might have an impact in the East. He asked Asquith to overrule Kitchener and order the troops to the Aegean, but the First Lord’s argument was undermined by the fact that, only a few weeks before, he himself had enthusiastically promised that the navy could force the Dardanelles alone.

Oddly, Kitchener himself kept coming back to the question of troops for the Dardanelles. After Carden’s bombardment of the outer forts, the war lord grandly declared in the War Council on February 24 that “if the fleet cannot get through the Straits unaided, the army ought to see the business through. The effect of a defeat in the Orient would be very serious. There can be no going back.” Nevertheless, he continued to withhold the 29th Division. Meanwhile, pressure for the involvement of ground forces continued to rise. A possibile solution was the offer on March 1 by the pro-Allied government of Eleuthérios Venizélos—impressed by Carden’s destruction of the outer Dardanelles forts—to land three Greek divisions on the Gallipoli peninsula and then to advance on Constantinople. Immediately, Russia objected. The liberation of Constantinople, the restoration of the cross to the dome of the former cathedral of Santa Sophia, control of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles astride Russia’s lifeline to the world’s oceans—these had been objectives of Russian foreign policy for centuries. Much as the tsar’s government wished to expel the hated Turk, it would not permit this expulsion to be performed by Greeks. The Russian veto snatched away the possibility of a Greek army on Gallipoli.

Still, Kitchener could not leave the problem of ground troops alone. On March 1, he had sent Lieutenant General William Birdwood, the British officer commanding the Australian and New Zealand troops in Egypt, to confer with Carden about possible use of the army. While Birdwood was at Mudros, Kitchener—still vacillating—signaled him again, cautioning that there was no intention of using troops on the Gallipoli peninsula “unless the navy are convinced that they cannot silence the guns in the Straits without military cooperation on a large scale. . . . The concentration of troops at the entrance to the Dardanelles is for operations subsequently to be undertaken in the neighborhood of Constantinople.” Birdwood, responding on March 6, attempted to focus his chief on reality by saying that, on the basis of what he had seen and heard, he considered Carden’s estimate as to the rapid passage of the Straits “too sanguine . . . I doubt his ability to force the passage unaided.” Birdwood also passed along to Kitchener his confidential opinion that Carden was “very second rate—no ‘go’ in him, or ideas, or initiative.”

Kitchener had heard enough: on March 10, he reversed himself again. The 29th Division, he told the War Council, would go to the Aegean, although it would not sail until March 16 and could not arrive before the first week of April. In addition, he had arranged for a division of the French North African army to join the force and, with the Anzacs thrown in, there now would be 75,000 Allied soldiers available for the Dardanelles. To command this polyglot force, Kitchener turned to an old friend and protégé, General Sir Ian Hamilton, his Chief of Staff during the Boer War. On the morning of March 12, Hamilton was summoned to Kitchener’s office. “Opening the door,” Hamilton said, “I bade him [Kitchener] good morning and walked up to his desk where he went on writing like a graven image. After a moment, he looked up and said in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘We are sending a military force to support the fleet now at the Dardanelles and you are to have command.’ ” Kitchener said nothing else, but resumed writing while Hamilton remained standing silently in front of his desk. Eventually, Kitchener looked up and said, “Well?” Hamilton then learned that Kitchener hoped that the fleet would get through without military help and that he contemplated Hamilton landing his troops on the shores of the Bosporus to occupy Constantinople. Once the fleet got through the Dardanelles, Kitchener declared, “Constantinople could not hold out. . . . The fleet . . . with their guns would dominate the place and if necessary, burn the place to ashes. . . . There would be a revolution at the mere sight of the smoke from the funnels of our warships.” When Hamilton asked how many enemy troops were defending the Dardanelles and the names and backgrounds of the principal Turkish and German commanders, Kitchener replied that he had no idea. When Hamilton asked how many troops he himself would command, Kitchener said that the Greeks had proposed to put 150,000 men on the Gallipoli peninsula, but that in Hamilton’s case “half that number will do you handsomely; the Turks are busy elsewhere; I hope you will not have to land at all; if you do have to land, why then the powerful fleet at your back will be the prime factor in your choice of time and place.” Hamilton’s troops, Kitchener decreed, were not to fight on the Asian side of the Dardanelles, because “once we began marching about continents, situations calling for heavy reinforcements would probably be created.” If putting troops ashore on Gallipoli turned out to be necessary, Hamilton was not to attack until the full weight of his expeditionary force—including the 29th Division—could be thrown in. But the general was not to worry: “The peninsula is open to landing on very easy terms,” he was assured. “The cross fire from the fleet . . . must sweep that stretch of flat and open country so as to render it untenable by the enemy.” Hamilton was allowed one night to say good-bye to his wife and to pack his clothes. In the morning, he was back at the War Office. “I said good-bye to old K. as casually as if we were to meet again for dinner,” he wrote. “He did not even wish me luck . . . but he did say, rather unexpectedly just as I was taking up my cap from the table, ‘If the fleet gets through, Constantinople will fall of itself and you will have won, not a battle, but the war.’ ”

That afternoon, March 13, Hamilton left Charing Cross station on a special train, seen off by his friends Winston and Clementine Churchill, but not by Kitchener, who declared that he was too busy. The new commander was accompanied by a small staff of officers yanked the day before from behind their London desks. In their briefcases, they carried all the information the War Office could supply: an out-of-date map, a prewar Admiralty report on the Dardanelles defenses, an old handbook on the Ottoman army, and two tourist guidebooks to western Turkey. Whisked to France on a destroyer, then hurried south in another special train, they embarked in Marseilles on the new 30-knot light cruiser Phaeton. Along the way, Hamilton mused on his situation in his diary: “Only two sorts of Commanders-in-Chief could possibly find time to scribble like this on their way to take up an enterprise in many ways unprecedented—a German and a Britisher. The German because every possible contingency would have been worked out for him beforehand; the Britisher because he has nothing—literally nothing—in his portfolio except a blank check signed with those grand yet simple words ‘John Bull.’ ”

Once Phaeton reached the Aegean, Hamilton, who had been born in Corfu, relished the “thyme-scented breezes . . . the crimson in the eastern sky . . . the waves of liquid opal . . . the exquisite, exquisite air . . . the sea like an undulating carpet of blue velvet outspread for Aphrodite.” Reality intruded when, “at noon, passed a cruiser taking Admiral Carden invalided back to Malta.”

Ian Hamilton was an exemplary British soldier of the old Victorian army, a small, professional force whose gentlemen officers lived in a clubbish, colonial world, undergirded by the plucky courage of common British soldiers. Hamilton, a delicate and romantic Scot, was a man of feverish energy. He had charm and a quick smile, he knew classical and English literature, he wrote witty letters, and he had a circle of important friends reaching far beyond the army. Most of his life, however, had been spent on the imperial frontiers in India, the Sudan, and South Africa; by 1914, he was said to have seen more active service than any other senior officer in the British army. *44 He had often been wounded, his left hand was paralyzed, and three times he had been recommended for the Victoria Cross. Hamilton’s flaw as a commander was that, in the colonial wars that had taught him his trade, he had learned to rely on the competence of fellow British officers; they, being on the spot, were often better qualified to make decisions than the commander. He preferred to urge rather than to command and his inclination, even when things appeared to be going badly, was not to intervene. Now, in this new kind of warfare where the stakes were higher, the absence of ruthlessness in this military leader was to hurt him and his men. Nevertheless, at sixty-two, Ian Hamilton had been summoned by his old chief, the man whom he privately referred to in his diaries as Old K. He had been given an army and ordered to conduct the largest amphibious operation in the history of the world. If he succeeded, Old K. had said, he would win the war.

Gallipoli is a peninsula of rugged and desolate land thrusting fifty-two miles into the Aegean Sea. At its neck, the peninsula is connected to the European continent by the Bulair isthmus, three miles across. To the southwest, the peninsula broadens to twelve miles; then, continuing southwest, it tapers to a rounded tip at Cape Helles. Viewed from the sea, Gallipoli is sternly beautiful, corrugated with green and brown ridges rising to a thousand feet. To the walker or climber, the ground is rough, broken, indented with gullies, escarpments, and narrow, irregular valleys, lifting to a craggy spine of steep ridges. Six miles north of Cape Helles, the sloping hill of Achi Baba stands 590 feet above the lower peninsula; in the center of the peninsula, the crest of Chunuk Bair rises 850 feet; nearby, Sari Bair ridge, the highest point on Gallipoli, is just short of a thousand feet. The shores of the peninsula are edged by sandstone cliffs, broken here and there by ravines washed out by torrential autumn and winter rains. At the mouths of some of these gullies, narrow strips of sandy or stony beach lie along the sea. For a few weeks in April and May, Gallipoli is covered with red poppies, purple lupine, large white daisies, and other flowers. Heather and wild thyme grow everywhere along with scrub: low shrubs, thick brushwood, and small clumps of stunted pine. The soil is sandy, blowing in dry weather, sticky when wet, and generally inhospitable to agriculture, although in the small villages there are fruit trees, small olive orchards, and a few vineyards. In 1914, the roads were primitive and travelers passing from one point on the peninsula to another preferred to go by boat.

This is the ground where an Allied army was to land and a Turkish army to defend in a campaign that, perhaps more than any other in the Great War, still is vividly recalled to memory by its name alone: Gallipoli.

Carden’s destruction of the outer forts and de Robeck’s assault on the Narrows had given warning. On March 24, Enver Pasha, the Turkish minister of war, had summoned Otto Liman von Sanders, the head of the German military mission, to his office and asked him to assume command of the Turkish army at the Dardanelles. Sanders, a tall, stern Prussian cavalry general, quick to make decisions, scanty with praise, and sharp in reprimand, had been sent to Turkey by the kaiser himself and viewed his position as one of extraordinary consequence. Invited to dinner at the American embassy, the general, his uniformed chest sparkling with medals, was seated next to the ambassador’s daughter, to whom he boorishly refused to speak. Afterward, he bitterly complained that the personal representative of the German emperor belonged at the head of the table, not alongside an insignificant young woman. The Austrian ambassador, who had advised his American colleague on the seating arrangements, pointed out that Wagenheim was the German ambassador and that “it is not customary for an emperor to have two representatives at the same court.” Sanders persisted, making himself so unpopular that all other foreign ambassadors announced that if he were ever given the kind of precedence he demanded at any function they attended, they would walk out in a body.

Despite his social pretensions, Sanders was an experienced, professional soldier and Enver had made an excellent choice. Sanders accepted the request and immediately set off for the Gallipoli peninsula, where he found himself in command of 80,000 conscript soldiers. Most were Anatolian peasants so ill clad that they passed the same vermin-infested uniforms from unit to unit in order that, on inspection, the German general would find the men before him completely dressed. Sanders noticed, however, that he often saw “shoes” made of cloth tied around the foot with a piece of string; at other times, the men simply appeared barefoot. These troops were “scattered like frontier guards” along 150 miles of seacoast on both sides of the Dardanelles; thus, an enemy on landing “would have found resistance everywhere, but no forces or reserves to make a strong and effective counterattack.” Sanders corrected this deployment, pulling two divisions away from the coast and stationing them in the middle of the peninsula where they could respond to threats from several directions. He began building roads and bridges to expedite their movements. He found that the peninsula’s potential landing beaches had only rudimentary fortification and he set thousands of men to digging more trenches, setting up more gun emplacements, and stringing more barbed wire, some of it out into the water in front of the beaches. Chosen men were given special training in handling machine guns and hand grenades and in sniping. “If the English will only leave me alone for eight days,” he said on March 27. Later, he was to write: “The British allowed us four good weeks.”

Hamilton defined his own instructions in their simplest form: “I have no roving commission to conquer Asia Minor. I have not come here for any other purpose whatsoever but to help the fleet through the Dardanelles. The War Office think the Gallipoli peninsula occupation is the best way to ef-fect this purpose. So do the Admiralty and so does the admiral in executive command.” To occupy Gallipoli, Hamilton now commanded 75,000 men: Englishmen, Scots, Irishmen, Australians, New Zealanders, Gurkhas, Sikhs, French Foreign Legionnaires, Senegalese, and Zouaves. These troops were scattered around the eastern Mediterranean. Some were already at Mudros, some were in Egypt, some were still in North Africa. The 29th Division was on the high seas aboard twenty-two troopships and would not arrive until the first week of April. Then, when the transports did begin to arrive, it was discovered that the ships had been loaded so rapidly and haphazardly that it was impossible to know which ones contained what equipment; wagons were in one ship, horses in another, harnesses in a third; the same chaos applied to artillery, ammunition, machine guns, tents, and supplies of food. “The slipshod manner in which the troops have been sent out from England is something awful,” said Wemyss. The 29th Division, Hamilton decided, would have to be disembarked and the ships unloaded, sorted out, and repacked. This could not be done at Mudros, where there were neither docks nor cranes nor laborers. It was this situation that led Hamilton to tell de Robeck that he needed three weeks to reorganize his army in Egypt.

Hamilton’s new base was at Alexandria, where his staff moved first into a large old house that had once been a brothel and had neither electricity nor running water; after dark, the staff worked by candlelight. A few days later, the army leased the Hotel Metropole for its offices. Practical information about Gallipoli was scanty. No one knew the depth of water off the beaches, the location or condition of the roads, or whether the peninsula contained any wells or fresh water springs. (Later, they were to discover that numerous springs, bubbling with fresh water, were on the ridges, where they kept the Turks plentifully supplied. Water for the Allied troops on the beaches had to be brought in barges from Egypt, 700 miles away.) There were too few small boats to carry the troops ashore, so throughout the Middle East, dozens of trawlers, lighters, and caïques were purchased for cash; in one day, British officers bought forty-two large lighters and five tugs at Piraeus. Fifteen hundred donkeys were bought or rented with their keepers and drivers. As the days passed, hundreds of ships descended on Lemnos and Mudros. The island and its little town had become the forward marshaling point for a huge naval and military operation; the immense natural harbor now was filled with battleships, cruisers, destroyers, troop transports, tramp steamers, water barges, tugs, and hospital ships.

At Alexandria and Mudros, the staff examined the question of where the army should land. Kitchener had forbidden a landing on the Asian coast, and landings on the shore inside the Dardanelles were ruled out because they would come under fire from the guns of the Narrows forts and the howitzers on the Asian shore. The peninsula’s Aegean coast remained. De Robeck, trying to be helpful, suggested that Hamilton land his army at Bulair, on the peninsula’s neck, thereby cutting the road to Constantinople and isolating the Turkish army on Gallipoli. Hamilton personally reconnoitered Bulair from the bridge of a British cruiser and saw that his troops would have to come ashore into a swamp, then assault a ridge of high ground honeycombed with earthwork fortifications that 10,000 Turks had been constructing for a month. With Bulair ruled out, the possible landing sites were reduced to three: Cape Helles, on the tip of the peninsula; Ari Burny, thirteen miles up the western coast of the peninsula; and Suvla Bay, a beach about a mile north of Ari Burny. Eventually Hamilton and his officers drew up their plan: the 29th Division would land on the five small beaches at the tip of the peninsula around Cape Helles. The Anzacs would go ashore at Ari Burny and, as a temporary diversion, the 16,000 troops of the French division would land at Kum Kale on the Asian side. Hamilton’s hope was that by the evening of the first day, the 29th Division would seize the crest of Achi Baba, which dominated southern Gallipoli, and that the Anzacs would secure the heights of Sari Bair, astride the peninsula’s middle. But Hamilton’s first concern was the moment of landing itself. The troops were to be carried to Gallipoli aboard warships; a mile from the coast, the men would climb down into the ships’ boats and be towed by tugs nearer the shore; close to the beaches, the boats would cast off and be rowed the final few hundred yards. In order to put a large number of men quickly ashore, an imaginative variation was proposed: the 6,000-ton collier River Clyde would be packed with 2,000 men, then run up on the beach, whereupon the soldiers would disembark from holes—romantically designated sally ports—cut in the ship’s sides. “In my mind, the crux was to get my army ashore,” Hamilton later wrote. “Once ashore, I could hardly think that Great Britain and France would not in the long run defeat Turkey.”

As the landings approached, a sense of exhilaration swept through the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. It was assumed that the enemy was utterly inferior. Men in the ranks looked forward to “bashing Abdul” and “shoving it to Johnny Turk” while young officers, including the poet Rupert Brooke and the prime minister’s son, Arthur Asquith, steeped in the classics taught in England’s public schools, carried copies of the Iliad. “It’s too wonderful for belief,” Brooke wrote to Asquith’s daughter, Violet. “I had not imagined Fate could be so benign. . . . Will Hero’s Tower crumble under the 15-inch guns? Will the sea . . . be wine-dark? . . . Shall we be a Turning Point in History? Oh God! I’ve never been quite so happy in my life, I think.” In England, everyone, including his friends the Asquiths, the Churchills, Bernard Shaw, and Henry James, was reading the poet’s war sonnets:

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,

And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping . . .

and

If I should die, think only this of me;

     That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. . . .

On the eve of the landings, the force suffered its most famous loss when Brooke, only twenty-seven, died on a hospital ship from blood poisoning. “He died at 4.46 [in the afternoon],” wrote one of his friends, “with the sun shining all round his cabin and the cool sea breeze blowing through the door and shaded windows. No one could have wished a quieter or calmer end than in that lovely bay, shielded by the mountains and fragrant with sage and thyme.” His friends buried him that night on the top of a hill in a grove of olive trees.

A few hours later, the invasion fleet was off Cape Helles. Other young men would remember the moment: “Nature was so peaceful, a dead flat calm, an oily sea, a silent, beautiful rock-crowned island . . . no sound or movement in the water or air, no sign of the prodigious eruption of metal which was to greet the dawn.” “On deck it is hardly light and the weather is cool. . . . There are ships everywhere . . . a whole fleet surrounds the peninsula. A light mist covers everything and white flaky clouds cling to the valleys. . . . We are now at the last lap, waiting our turn . . . not a breath of air, not a sign of movement. It is still a sheer impossibility to believe that we are at war.”

Then came the opening thunderclap of the naval bombardment. The landings began at 5:30 a.m. and the men came ashore onto beaches tangled with barbed wire, swept by machine guns, and blasted by howitzers. Under a tempest of fire, boats were shattered and sank; others, filled with dead and dying, drifted away. Men clambered out of the boats, floundered up to their shoulders in the water, and were cut down, screaming. Others stepped into water too deep for them and, weighed down by their equipment, drowned unnoticed. Bodies floated out to sea or lay a few feet from shore, lapped by the wavelets. Before the sun was high, a wide crimson stain spread for a hundred feet out from the beach across the blue-green water. The River Clyde, with its cargo of 2,000 men packed tightly in the hold, ran in toward the beach until its propellers churned the sand near the ruined Sedd el Bahr fortress. Three hundred Turkish soldiers with machine guns waited behind a small ridge, holding their fire. The “sally ports” opened, the British infantry rushed forward, the machine guns chattered, and the gangways became choked with dead and dying men. On other beaches there was less resistance and, by nightfall, 33,000 British and Australian and 3,000 French troops were ashore. Five thousand men had been killed or wounded.

The landings failed to achieve even their first day objectives. At Cape Helles, Hamilton had hoped to seize the crown of Achi Baba before nightfall; from these heights, his artillery could range over the entire lower peninsula. From Anzac Beach, he had expected the Australians and New Zealanders to storm the crests of Chunuk Bair and Sari Bair; from these summits, they could then move down to seize the town of Maidos on the Straits and cut the peninsula in half. Instead, the British assault forces scarcely penetrated beyond the beaches. During May, three major attacks were launched on the village of Krithia, near Achi Baba, but the front advanced only a few hundred yards. When Hamilton suggested to Major General Aylmer Hunter-Weston, commander of the 29th Division, that he attack at night to cut down on casualties, Hunter-Weston replied, “Casualties? What do I care for casualties?” Hamilton, true to his nature, did not overrule his subordinate. When ground was taken, the Turks immediately counterattacked. On May 19, a mass of 30,000 Turks charged the Anzac lines; 10,000 Turks fell; the Anzacs lost 600.

The front was stalemated. The Allies could not seize the ridges; the Turks could not hurl their enemies back into the sea; and the killing ground of the Western Front was reproduced at Gallipoli. The weapons were the same: the rifle, the grenade, the machine gun, and the spade. At Anzac Beach, where the entire beachhead covered only 400 acres—less than half the size of New York City’s Central Park—a labyrinth of trenches fronted by barbed wire was cut into the steep hillsides. Fire steps for snipers were set into the trench walls, with periscopes peeping over the top. To make it impossible for Allied warships to fire at the Turks without endangering their own men, Sanders ordered his soldiers to dig their trenches as close to the Allied trenches as possible; sometimes, the Allied and Turkish trenches were no more than fifteen feet apart. From the Allied front lines, hundreds of little paths ran down to the beach, worn smooth by men and animals bringing water and supplies; at one point Hamilton noted that he was unable to take the offensive because half of his men were carrying water and the other half were digging.

Hamilton soon realized that the War Office’s prediction that the Turks would fiercely oppose the landings, but that once the troops were ashore, opposition would crumble, had come from a world of fantasy. Equally, he had seen that Kitchener’s statement that “the cross fire from the fleet . . . must sweep that stretch of flat and open country so as to render it untenable by the enemy” bore no relation to reality at Gallipoli. As the painful and dangerous position of the army became more obvious, many men in the fleet offshore, watching with their own eyes, felt frustrated and humiliated. Keyes in particular was ashamed of the navy’s inactivity. The Allied fleet now was immensely more powerful than it had been on March 18. Thirty-eight new minesweepers had been added, crewed by volunteers from the lost ships, and twenty-four destroyers had been converted for minesweeping. When de Robeck, Wemyss, and Keyes met on Queen Elizabeth on May 9, Keyes urged resumption of a full-scale naval attack on the Narrows. De Robeck agreed to put the suggestion before the Admiralty, but his signal to London was unenthusiastic: “From the vigour of the enemy’s resistance, it is improbable that the passage of the fleet into the Marmara will be decisive, and therefore it is equally probable that the Straits will be closed behind the fleet,” he wrote. “The temper of the Turkish army in the peninsula indicates that the forcing of the Dardanelles and subsequent appearance of the fleet off Constantinople would not of itself prove decisive.” Keyes saw the message before it went, but, knowing the First Lord better than the admiral did, he believed that, even with the cold water thrown on it by de Robeck, this proposal would inspire Churchill to push a new attack through the Admiralty and the War Council. What Keyes did not know was the growing precariousness of the First Lord’s position in London, and the strength of the forces gathering for his overthrow.

Week by week, Fisher’s irritation with Churchill’s methods of administering the Admiralty had continued to grow. He had never liked the stream of imperious memoranda that flowed from the First Lord, or Churchill’s habit of sending operational messages to admirals and captains, which Fisher considered lay solely within his jurisdiction as First Sea Lord. But the greatest source of Fisher’s mounting resentment was his apprehension about the Dardanelles. He feared that the Dardanelles were draining away the strength of the Grand Fleet and that he could do nothing to stop this. “The more I consider the Dardanelles the less I like it!” he wrote to Churchill on March 4. “No matter what happens it is impossible to send out anything more, not even a dinghy!” After the failure of the naval attack of March 18, Fisher, although relieved that the primary burden had been assumed by the army, still fought every suggestion and begrudged every instance of additional naval aid. “We cannot send another rope yarn to de Robeck,” he wrote to Churchill on April 2. “We have gone TO THE VERY LIMIT!!! And so they must be distinctly and most emphatically told that no further reinforcements of the fleet can be looked for! A failure or check in the Dardanelles would be nothing. A failure in the North Sea would be ruin.” Churchill attempted to set aside Fisher’s complaints with good humor: “Seriously, my friend, are you not a little unfair in trying to spite this operation by side winds and small points when you have accepted it in principle?” Later, however, the First Lord would write that during these weeks, “every officer, every man, every ship, every round of ammunition required for the Dardanelles became a cause of friction and had to be fought for by me, not only with the First Sea Lord but to a certain extent with his naval colleagues.” *45

Meanwhile, the Conservative opposition was becoming aware of the increasing antagonism between the political and professional leaders of the navy. Most Conservatives disliked Winston Churchill. They remembered his famous walk across the aisle in 1904, and the label of “turncoat” had never been removed. Many Conservatives—and not a few Liberals—saw in Churchill’s adventure in Antwerp, his frequent visits to France, evidence of the First Lord’s immaturity and unwillingness to restrict himself to his proper sphere. Some found him personally abrasive. In particular, there no love lost between the First Lord and Andrew Bonar Law, the Canadian-born former Glasgow businessman who had replaced Balfour as leader of the Conservative party in 1911. Bonar Law believed that Churchill was too filled with quixotic, dangerous schemes, too quick to resent criticism, too obstinate to admit fallibility—in short, too irresponsible—to hold high office. Churchill, for his part, underrated Law as a fourth-rate politician and made little attempt to conceal his contempt.

De Robeck’s May 9 telegram precipitated the Admiralty crisis that had long been simmering. Churchill wanted to renew at least a limited attack on the Narrows forts to cover clearance of the Kephez minefield. Fisher stood fast; here was another attempt by the First Lord to hurl more men and ships into the bottomless pit of the Dardanelles. On May 11, he wrote to Churchill, “Although I have acquiesced in each stage of the operations up to the pres-ent . . . I have clearly expressed my opinion that I did not consider the original attempt to force the Dardanelles with the fleet alone was a practicable operation. . . . I cannot under any circumstances be a party to any order to Admiral de Robeck to make any attempt to pass the Dardanelles until the shores have been effectively occupied.” Two days later, Fisher, attempting to buttress his position, wrote directly to the prime minister: “I honestly feel that I cannot remain where I am much longer as there is an inevitable and never-ceasing drain daily (almost hourly) on our resources in the decisive theatre of war. . . . We are all diverted to the Dardanelles and the unceasing activities of the First Lord, both by day and night, are engaged in ceaseless prodding of everyone in every department afloat and shore in the interests of the Dardanelles fleet.” The strain between the two leaders of the Admiralty, therefore, was already acute. On May 13, it was further aggravated by the loss of another battleship at Gallipoli.

From the day of the landings, the sea around the Gallipoli peninsula had been unchallengeably British and French. The waters had been crowded with Allied ships: battleships, cruisers, and destroyers pounding the Turkish lines; transports, supply ships, hospital ships, and trawlers anchored off the beaches or gliding about their nautical business. This scene, which had provided the embattled soldiers with a powerful sense of security at their backs, had been taken for granted. Then came the sinking of Goliath.

Hugging the cliffs on the dark, moonless night of May 12, the Turkish destroyer Muavenet, commanded by a skillful German, crept down the European side of the Straits. Not more than a hundred yards offshore in Morto Bay lay the old battleship Goliath, anchored and awaiting the new bombardment assignments, which would come with morning. The destroyer, approaching the battleship through the mist, was seen and hailed—too late—by an officer on Goliath’s bridge. Muavenet surged forward and fired three torpedoes. The battleship rolled over onto her side, turned turtle, floated a few minutes upside down, then plunged to the bottom. The battleship Majestic, anchored nearby, switched on her searchlights. “The sea for an area of half an acre was a mass of struggling, drowning people, all drifting down towards us with the current,” said a Majestic officer. Because the current that night was running at 4 or 5 knots, not a single man, even those in life jackets, was able to swim the short distance to shore. Five hundred and seventy men were drowned and 180 were saved. In human terms, this was the greatest loss suffered by the British navy in the Dardanelles campaign. For Turkey, it was a triumph. Every man in the destroyer’s crew received a gold watch and an embroidered purse filled with gold from the sultan.

When the news reached London that afternoon, Fisher’s concern about the vulnerability of Queen Elizabeth was violently stimulated. To calm the First Sea Lord, Churchill immediately agreed to bring the superdreadnought home and to replace her at the Dardanelles with new monitors carrying 14-inch guns. Fisher “was very much relieved at this and was grateful,” the First Lord later recalled. Unfortunately, that evening the argument was rekindled. When Kitchener appeared at the Admiralty to discuss another matter, Churchill showed him the telegram he and Fisher had drafted but not yet sent regarding Queen Elizabeth. Kitchener, surprised, became extremely angry. He protested vehemently that the withdrawal of the principal warship at Gallipoli meant that the navy was deserting the army—and this, after the army had come to the navy’s assistance when the fleet had failed to force a passage of the Dardanelles. Fisher, witnessing the field marshal’s anger and listening as Churchill attempted to reassure Kitchener, flew into a rage himself: “The Queen Elizabeth would come home; she would come home at once; she would come home that night or he [Fisher] would walk out of the Admiralty, then and there.” Kitchener rushed back to the War Office and scribbled a note to Asquith, complaining that Fisher “could not stand the fear of losing the ship. I may say that I have had to face the loss of some 15,000 men in the operations to help the navy.” If the dreadnought departed, the field marshal warned, “we may have to consider . . . whether the troops had better be pulled back to Alexandria.”

Nevertheless, for the moment, Fisher had won: the superdreadnought sailed for Malta and home and all thought of another naval offensive at the Dardanelles was suspended. “We think that the moment for an independent naval attempt to force the Narrows has passed,” the Admiralty told de Robeck on May 14. “The army is now landed, large reinforcements are being sent. . . . Your role is therefore to support the army in its costly but sure advance and to reserve your strength to deal with the situation which will arise when the army has succeeded.”

On the same day, the War Council held its first meeting since April 6. The atmosphere around the table at 10 Downing Street was, in Churchill’s word, “sulphurous.” The Times that morning had published allegations that the British army on the Western Front was scandalously short of artillery shells. Kitchener, defensive about these charges and still bitter about the withdrawal of Queen Elizabeth, complained that the Admiralty had let him and the army down. Fisher, unwilling to listen to charges of bad faith and near treachery directed at the navy, uncharacteristically spoke up. He had been “against the Dardanelles operations from the beginning,” and “the Prime Minister and Lord Kitchener knew this fact well,” he informed the council. “This remarkable interruption,” Churchill said, “was received in silence.” Fisher now saw himself surrounded at the War Council by his enemies and the navy’s enemies. Despite the fact that de Robeck had just been told that no new naval attack was under consideration, the First Sea Lord sensed that additional diversions of ships to the Dardanelles were in the offing. His own plans were wholly ignored. “I could see that the great projects in Northern water [that is, the Baltic], which I had in view in laying down the Armada of new vessels were at an end,” he told the Dardanelles Commission two years later. “If the huge commitment at the Dardanelles was to be continued, it was clearly better, in the very interests of the Dardanelles operations themselves . . . that they should be henceforth directed on the naval side by somebody who believed in them.”

After the council meeting, Churchill, annoyed by Fisher’s public outburst, attempted to set it in context in a letter to Asquith: “I must ask you to take note of Fisher’s statement today that he was against the Dardanelles and had been all along. . . . The First Sea Lord has agreed in writing to every executive telegram on which the operation has been conducted. . . . I am attached to the old boy and it is a great pleasure to me to work with him. I think he reciprocates these feelings . . . [but] I cannot undertake to be paralyzed by the veto of a friend who, whatever the result, will certainly say ‘I was always against the Dardanelles.’ Someone has to take the responsibility. I will do so—provided that my decision is the one that rules.” Churchill then attempted to heal the breach with Fisher. Early in the evening, he went to Fisher’s office and for several hours the two men discussed the Dardanelles and what further reinforcements might be needed and could be spared. Fisher agreed to sending more monitors, which would permit bringing home more battleships. When they parted, Churchill said, “Well, good night, Fisher. We have settled everything and you must go home and have a good night’s rest. Things will look brighter in the morning and we will pull the thing through together.” Before leaving the Admiralty, Fisher told his secretary that the discussion had been amicable. “But,” he added, “I suppose he’ll soon be at me again.” After Fisher’s departure, Churchill remained working in his office. Going back over the list of ships to be sent to the Dardanelles, he added two new E-class submarines requested by de Robeck—two of the five to be completed in England that month. Churchill later said that he considered these additions a proposal, not an order, and he attached a covering note to Fisher: “I send this to you . . . in order that if any point arises we can discuss it. I hope you will agree.”

At 5:00 on the following morning, Saturday, May 15, Fisher returned to the Admiralty. On his desk, he discovered the papers showing that Churchill wished to add two submarines to the list agreed on the night before. Something snapped inside Lord Fisher. At midmorning, the First Lord, hurrying toward the Admiralty across the Horse Guards Parade, was intercepted by his secretary. “Fisher has resigned and I think he means it this time,” the secretary blurted. He handed Churchill a letter:

First Lord:

After further anxious reflection, I have come to the regretted conclusion that I am unable to remain any longer as your colleague. It is undesirable in the public interest to go in to details . . . but I find it increasingly difficult to adjust myself to the increasing daily requirements of the Dardanelles to meet your views. As you truly said yesterday, I am in the position of continually vetoing your proposals.

This is not fair to you besides being extremely distasteful to me.

I am off to Scotland at once, so as to avoid all questioning.

Yours truly,

Fisher

Regarding this letter of resignation as no more serious than those Fisher had written before, Churchill returned to the Admiralty to straighten things out. But the First Sea Lord was not in his office, nor in the building, nor in his living quarters. Churchill hurried back across the Horse Guards Parade to 10 Downing Street and showed Fisher’s letter to Asquith. The prime minister immediately wrote to the admiral: “In the King’s name, I order you to return to your post.” It took several hours to locate Fisher, but eventually he was discovered at the Charing Cross Hotel. He read the prime minister’s peremptory message and came to Downing Street. There, while waiting to see Asquith, he encountered Lloyd George. “A combative grimness had taken the place of his usually genial greeting,” said Lloyd George. “The lower lip of his set mouth was thrust forward, and the droop at the corner was more marked than usual. His curiously Oriental features were more than ever those of a graven image in an Eastern temple with a sinister frown. ‘I have resigned!’ was his greeting. ‘I can stand it no longer.’ ” Lloyd George and Asquith both urged Fisher to return to the Admiralty. Fisher refused. Asquith then asked him to remain in London and Fisher agreed. The following evening, Maurice Hankey found him at the Athenaeum Club trying “to escape from Winston.”

There is something revealing about Fisher’s refusal to see Churchill in these crucial days. Fisher—fierce, cunning, autocratic, and articulate within the navy—was nearly powerless against Churchill. The result was that he acquiesced in decisions that he believed to be wrong and that rose up to haunt him. In Churchill’s presence, however, his confidence shriveled and he found himself unable to withstand the younger man’s brimming enthusiasm and relentless logic. Part of the difficulty was that Fisher genuinely liked and admired Churchill. Aware of this, Churchill routinely exploited it, employing a combination of deference, charm, and relentless argument to overwhelm the old man’s defenses. That day, for example, after seeing Asquith, the First Lord set himself to charm, wheedle, and bludgeon Fisher back into harness:

My dear Fisher,

The only thing to think of now is what is best for the country and for the brave men who are fighting. . . . I do not understand what is the specific cause which has led you to resign. If I did I might cure it. When we parted last night I thought we were in agreement. The proposals I made to you by minute were I thought in general accord with your views and in any case were for discussion between us. . . . In every way I have tried to work in the closest sympathy with you. The men you wanted in the places you wanted them, the ships you designed—every proposal you have formally made . . . I have agreed to. In order to bring you back to the Admiralty, I took my political life in my hands with the King and the Prime Minister—as you know well. You then promised to stand by me and see me through. . . . It will be a very great grief to me to part from you; and our rupture will be profoundly injurious to every public interest.

Fisher’s reply reminded Churchill that his opposition to the Dardanelles campaign dated from January and that, since then, the drain on Britain’s naval resources had been constant. The additional reinforcements—the two submarines—added by Churchill overnight were only the last straw. “YOU ARE BENT ON FORCING THE DARDANELLES AND NOTHING WILL TURN YOU FROM IT—NOTHING. I know you so well,” Fisher wrote. “I could give no better proof of my desire to stand by you than my having remained by you in the Dardanelles business to this last moment against the strongest conviction of my life. . . . You will remain and I SHALL GO. It is better so. Your splendid stand on my behalf with the King and Prime Minister I can NEVER forget . . . but here is a question beyond all personal obligations.” On receiving this letter, Churchill wrote one last time, claiming “in the name of friendship and in the name of duty, a personal interview.” Fisher refused, saying, “Dear Winston: As usual your letter is most persuasive, but I really have considered everything. Please don’t wish to see me. I could say nothing. . . . I know I am doing right.”

Up to this point, Fisher’s resignation had been a matter primarily for Admiralty concern: a policy disagreement, which would break the professional ties between two colleagues and old friends. But the news eddied down corridors into official chambers and then out into private drawing rooms, and within hours the admiral became a focus of popular attention. “Stick to your post like Nelson,” Queen Alexandra wrote to Fisher. “The nation and we all have such full confidence in you and they will not suffer you to go. You are the nation’s hope.” Messages poured in from the fleet. “I would far sooner lose some ships than see you leave the Admiralty,” telegraphed Jellicoe. Beatty added that Fisher’s departure “would be a worse calamity than a defeat at sea. . . . Please God it is NOT possible.” The press had the story: “Lord Fisher Must Not Go,” blared a headline in the Globe. Unfortunately for himself, Fisher had not waited for this groundswell to take effect. Caught up in his first feverish indignation, he had on the day of his resignation also sent an anonymous message to Bonar Law, hinting at what he had done. Early Monday morning, May 17, Bonar Law called on Lloyd George to ask him whether, in fact, the First Sea Lord had resigned. When Lloyd George said yes, Bonar Law said, “Then the situation is impossible.” He meant that once Conservative MPs learned that Lord Fisher was leaving the Admiralty and that Winston Churchill was staying, they would revolt. The unofficial party truce would end and the Conservative party would initiate a series of parliamentary debates attacking numerous aspects of the government’s war policy.

Asquith quailed at this prospect. If his premiership was to survive, Bonar Law’s support was critical. When Lloyd George proposed as a solution that the Liberal Cabinet that had governed Great Britain since 1906 step down in favor of a new coalition government, which would include the Conservatives, the prime minister surrendered immediately. Bonar Law’s key condition for joining the government was that Winston Churchill be replaced as First Lord of the Admiralty. Asquith agreed to this. Bonar Law also demanded the sacrifice of Haldane, the Lord Chancellor, Asquith’s oldest friend in politics, and Asquith agreed to this, too.

The news that he was to be replaced took Churchill by brutal surprise. The previous day, Sunday the sixteenth, the First Lord had offered Asquith his resignation, but the prime minister had said, “No, I have thought of that. I do not wish it”—and then had invited Churchill to stay for dinner. On this basis, Churchill had asked Sir Arthur Wilson to become First Sea Lord. Wilson had accepted, and the other Sea Lords had agreed to stay on. With a new Admiralty board in place, Churchill began preparing a speech for Monday afternoon in which he would report Fisher’s resignation to Parliament and name Wilson as the new First Sea Lord. But events were moving too quickly. Already by Monday morning, Asquith had agreed to Bonar Law’s conditions for forming a coalition. When Churchill arrived at Westminster that afternoon, assuming that he had Asquith’s support, he reported to the prime minister that he had successfully reconstructed the leadership of the Admiralty. Asquith listened and then said, “No, this will not do. I have decided to form a national Government by a coalition . . . and a very much larger reconstruction will be required. . . . What are we to do for you?” At that moment, Churchill understood that he was no longer to be First Lord.

Ironically, from the beginning of the war, Churchill had urged the formation of a coalition government. The Conservative statesman to whom Churchill was closest was the erudite, aristocratic former prime minister Arthur Balfour. As an unofficial member of the War Council, Balfour had meshed smoothly into the meetings of that body. Churchill liked and trusted the elegant, articulate Balfour; he disliked, ignored, and, when contact was necessary, patronized the stolid, plain-spoken Bonar Law. Now Churchill learned that it was Bonar Law who was the arbiter of his fate and that his own removal from the Admiralty had been the sine qua non in discussions between Asquith and Bonar Law about the formation of a coalition government.

Over the next few days, as the crisis played out, both Fisher and Churchill displayed their worst qualities. Fisher’s antipathy toward Churchill reached a peak in a letter to Bonar Law on the seventeenth: “W.C. MUST go at all costs! AT ONCE . . . because a very great disaster is very near us in the Dardanelles. . . . W.C. is a bigger danger than the Germans by a long way.” At some point, this frantic assault gave birth in Fisher to a larger, extraordinarily grandiose project. He decided that he did not actually want to retreat to Scotland. His country needed him and he would serve by returning to the Admiralty as an entirely new kind of First Sea Lord, an admiralissimo, who would assume absolute control of the navy.

Unfortunately for Fisher, events were working against him. On Monday, May 17, even as Asquith was asking Churchill, “What are we to do for you?” Room 40 was decoding an intercepted German wireless message indicating that the High Seas Fleet was coming out. The First Lord hurried from the House of Commons back to the Admiralty to send the Grand Fleet to sea. At 8:00 that evening, he telegraphed Jellicoe, “It is not impossible that tomorrow may be The Day.” By dawn, however, hope for a battle was fading, and by 10:00 a.m. it was clear that the German fleet was returning to its harbors. Through these alarms, the all-night vigil, and the subsequent disappointment, the First Sea Lord—still formally in office, because Asquith had not yet accepted his resignation—was absent from the Admiralty. The other Sea Lords were shocked; Churchill told the prime minister that they took “a serious view of Lord Fisher’s desertion of his post in time of war for what has now amounted to six days during which serious operations have been in progress.” The king, a former naval officer who did not share his mother’s warm admiration of Fisher, grew red in the face when this incident was mentioned. “He should have been hanged at the yardarm for desertion of his post in the face of the enemy,” George V declared. “It really was a most scandalous thing which ought to be punished with dismissal from the service and degradation.”

Fisher, still rampaging around London, but never setting foot in the Admiralty, did not realize that the wind had changed. Knowing by May 19 that Churchill was doomed, he persuaded himself that this was his moment of triumph; that he was the man the government must turn to. Thus deluded, he sent Asquith a set of conditions under which he would agree to return to the Admiralty and “guarantee the successful termination of the war.” Churchill must be completely excluded from the Cabinet. Balfour (who had angered him by supporting the naval attack on the Dardanelles) must not replace Churchill as First Lord. Whoever became First Lord must be restricted solely to political policy and parliamentary procedure. Sir Arthur Wilson must quit the Admiralty and a new set of Sea Lords be installed. Turning to the role he himself proposed to play, Fisher slid into megalomania: “I shall have complete professional charge of the war at sea, together with the absolute sole disposition of the fleet and the appointment of all officers of all ranks whatsoever, and absolutely untrammeled sole command of all the sea forces whatsoever. . . . I should have the sole absolute authority for all new construction and all dockyard work of whatever sort, and complete control of the whole of the Civil Establishment of the navy. These six conditions,” Fisher concluded, “must be published verbatim so that the fleet may know my position.” The only excuse for the breadth and tone of Fisher’s demands can be that he was attempting to elevate himself to the same level of untrammeled authority already occupied by Kitchener at the War Office. But no one else saw it that way. “I am afraid that Jacky is really a little mad,” said Arthur Balfour. Asquith’s reaction was that the memorandum indicated “a fit of megalomania.” He informed the king that “Fisher’s mind is somewhat unhinged, otherwise his conduct is almost traitorous!” Privately, to Hankey, the prime minister wrote “that Fisher, strictly speaking, ought to be shot for leaving his post.”

Fisher’s role in the drama was over. On the afternoon of May 22, one week after he had read Churchill’s proposal to send two more submarines to the Dardanelles, he boarded an afternoon train for Scotland to hide himself away at the estate of his close friend the Duchess of Hamilton. During the train’s stopover at Crewe, a messenger approached and handed him an envelope. He opened it and read:

Dear Lord Fisher,

I am commanded by the king to accept your tendered resignation of the Office of First Sea Lord of the Admiralty.

Yours faithfully,

H. H. Asquith

The sixty-one-year career of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher of Kilverstone, the man who created the modern Royal Navy, had come to an end.

Meanwhile, Churchill was struggling to save himself. He bombarded Asquith, Bonar Law, Lloyd George, and Grey, asking, eventually begging, to be kept at the Admiralty. To Lloyd George, his closest Cabinet ally before the war, he shouted, “You don’t care what becomes of me. You don’t care whether I am trampled under foot by my enemies. You don’t care for my personal reputation.” “No,” Lloyd George replied, “I don’t care for my own at the pres-ent moment. The only thing I care about is that we win this war.” Clementine Churchill, incensed by what was happening to her husband, wrote the prime minister an angry letter: “Why do you part with Winston? . . . If you throw Winston overboard you will be committing an act of weakness and your Coalition Government will not be as formidable a war machine as your present government.” Asquith did not reply, but he told Venetia Stanley that he had received “the letter of a maniac” from her cousin Clementine Churchill. To Churchill himself—who had sent him six letters in five days—Asquith finally wrote on May 21, “My dear Winston: You must take it as settled that you are not to remain at the Admiralty.” The “horrible wound and mutilation”—in Churchill’s private secretary’s words—was confirmed. The following day, Churchill was offered and accepted a minor, essentially meaningless Cabinet post, the chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster. “I gather that you have been flung a bone on which there is very little meat,” wrote his cousin the Duke of Marlborough. The duchy, Lloyd George wrote of this post, was an office normally given “to beginners in the Cabinet or to distinguished politicians who had reached the first stages of unmistakable decrepitude. It was a cruel and unjust degradation.” May 25 was Churchill’s last day at the Admiralty, and that afternoon he received a surprise visit from Lord Kitchener. “He asked what I was going to do,” Churchill wrote. “I said I had no idea; nothing was settled. . . . As he got up to go, he turned and said, in the impressive and almost majestic manner which was natural to him, ‘Well, there is one thing at any rate they cannot take from you. The fleet was ready.’ ”

Kitchener was right: the ships built by Fisher and Churchill were at sea and the men whom Fisher and Churchill had chosen were in command. It reflects poorly on Beatty, whom Churchill had saved from early retirement and promoted over a dozen admirals to command the battle cruisers, that he wrote after Churchill’s fall, “The navy breathes freer now it is rid of the succubus Winston.” Nor was it generous of Jellicoe, to whom Churchill gave command of the Grand Fleet on the eve of war, to write to Fisher, “We owe you a debt of gratitude for having saved the navy from a continuance in office of Mr Churchill.” In the stream of newspaper articles and editorials about Churchill’s departure, most were derogatory. *46 At that moment, the former First Lord did not know or care what any of these men were saying. Later, Clementine Churchill would say of her husband, “When he left the Admiralty, he thought he was finished. . . . I thought he would never get over the Dardanelles: I thought he would die of grief.”