More than thirty years after the setback of March 1915 at the Dardanelles, in a phrase which he deleted at the last moment from his Second World War memoirs, Churchill wrote, of his time at the Admiralty from 1911 to 1915, ‘It had been my golden age’. Although he remained First Lord, that ‘golden age’ was over. He was never again to be at the centre of war policy in Asquith’s Government. He remained on the War Council and spoke his mind when opportunity arose. But during the final three weeks of detailed planning for the landings on the Gallipoli Peninsula, no War Council was convened, nor did Kitchener send him any of the plans which he was evolving, either for comment or information.
As the time for the Gallipoli landings drew near, Churchill tried to assuage the doubts of others. To Balfour, who on April 8 suggested delaying the landings until the Turkish Army in Syria had been destroyed by a landing at Haifa and an advance to Damascus, Churchill wrote: ‘No other operation in this part of the world could ever cloak the defeat of abandoning the effort at the Dardanelles. I think there is nothing for it but to go through with the business, & I do not at all regret that this should be so. No one can count with certainty upon the issue of a battle. But here we have the chances in our favour, & play for vital gains with non-vital stakes.’ To his brother Jack, Churchill wrote six days before the Gallipoli landings: ‘This is the hour in the world’s history for a fine feat of arms, and the results of victory will amply justify the price. I wish I were with you. It would be easier than waiting here.’
In Conservative circles, and in Parliament, voices were being raised that Churchill had been responsible, through lack of foresight, for the failure of the naval attack on March 18. These criticisms were the start of what was to become a widespread public belief that Churchill had neglected basic safeguards, overruled his advisers and bullied the Admirals at the Dardanelles. The first specific charge was that he had failed to foresee the danger of the floating mines. On April 24, in his defence, he circulated to the Cabinet the Admiralty orders to Carden of February 5, in which a specific warning was given about these mines, and suggestions made to counter them. But throughout the Dardanelles debate, beginning during the campaign itself and continuing for more than half a century, memoranda and documents were never to have the power of rumour and malice, or of the need for a scapegoat.
On April 22 an Intelligence report reached London, originating in the Austro-Hungarian Embassy in Constantinople, that the Turks did not have enough ammunition at the Dardanelles to repulse two further naval attacks similar to that of March 18. Encouraged by this, and after consulting with Fisher, Churchill sent de Robeck a telegram suggesting that even now a renewed assault on the Narrows might well be successful. ‘Of course you are free to act as you think fit,’ Churchill assured him. ‘So I mark this telegram personal, as intention of all we say is merely to be helpful and a guide, and not a hard and fast instruction.’
De Robeck had no desire to go back on his decision of a month earlier not to try to force the Dardanelles by ships alone. He saw his sole task now as helping the Army to get ashore and to that task he was steadfastly bound. The 29th Division had at last arrived, and on April 25 the assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula began. More than 30,000 men were put ashore on the first day. Many of them, pinned down on the beaches by Turkish machine-gun fire, fought bravely to reach the cliff-tops. This they did, but were unable to push inland to their first day’s objective, the high ground overlooking the Turkish forts on the European shore. There were two sets of landings, one at Cape Helles on the southern tip of the Peninsula, the other at Gaba Tepe further north. Because of an error of navigation the Gaba Tepe force landed not at the lowest, and shortest, crossing-point of the Peninsula, where there were no cliffs to climb, but further north, below a high ridge that barred its way forward, and led only to higher obstacles further inland.
At one of the beaches at Cape Helles, Y Beach, the soldiers landing there, who were more in number than the Turkish force then in the whole Cape Helles area, after landing unopposed, reached the cliff-top above the beach without incident. There they found no Turks at all in front of them, but their message asking what to do next was never answered. Instead of moving inland, unopposed, they waited. Then, after twelve hours, Turkish troops arrived. The British drove them off, nor were the Turks able to return. But then, still without orders from their senior officers, the British soldiers panicked, fearful of the unknown, and within three hours all of them had walked back down to the beach and returned to their ship.
On the morning of April 26, readers of The Times not only read the first, highly romanticised, accounts of the battle, but also an obituary of the poet Rupert Brooke, who had died of blood poisoning while still in reserve on one of the Greek Islands in the Aegean. The obituary was written by Churchill, who had met Brooke at the time of his application to join the Royal Naval Division, then on its way to Antwerp. ‘Rupert Brooke is dead,’ the obituary began. ‘A telegram from the Admiral at Lemnos tells us that his life has closed at the moment when it seemed to have reached its springtime. A voice had become audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war, than any other—more able to express their thoughts of self-surrender, and with a power to carry comfort to those who watched them so intently from afar. The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes and the memory remain; but they will linger.’
***
After five days of muddle, confusion and often intense fighting at Gallipoli, the beachheads and cliff-tops had been secured, but little more. At Cape Helles the 29th and Royal Naval Divisions were never to reach their first day’s objective, or to overlook the Narrows. At Gaba Tepe, the Australian and New Zealand troops were likewise never to reach their first day’s objective, overlooking the Sea of Marmara. A vast army was ashore, but it was not in the positions needed to help the Navy advance through the Narrows. The Turkish forts were many miles from the men ashore, in no danger of being attacked from the rear.
The Navy, however, did not feel that it had done badly during the landings; Jack Churchill, who had watched the battle from on board ship, reported to his brother: ‘The Navy has never had such a time. They dug great chunks out of the hills with their lyddite. Things are going very well, and I hope ships will be in the Sea of Marmara in a fortnight.’ Jack added, ‘I think de Robeck will have a try to get through as soon as possible.’ He was right; de Robeck had not given up his aim of renewing the naval action. ‘The Fleet are all ready to have another attack on the Chanak defences,’ he wrote to Churchill on April 28, ‘& only await the right moment.’ Meanwhile, minesweeping was continuing.
When a second naval attack might be possible, de Robeck did not say. Nor was the Army’s news encouraging. On April 29 de Robeck wrote to Churchill of the ‘exhausted condition of troops who have been fighting continuously since dawn on 25th’. On May 2 he reported that the Indian Brigade which had landed at Helles was ‘digging in’. A Turkish night attack at Helles was driven off, as was a second night attack on May 3. The British were on the defensive. On the night of May 4, after a panic among black French troops from Senegal caused a gap in the line, a battalion of the Royal Naval Division had been hurriedly moved forward to fill the gap.
Allied stores and landing places were still being shelled by the Turks. ‘The Turk can bring his men from Asia Minor etc.,’ Jack Churchill told his brother on May 5, ‘for nothing threatens him, and most important of all, he can release the divisions from Constantinople and send them down here to crush us.’ In an attempt to try to reach the first day’s objectives, on May 6 Hamilton launched a renewed attack. It failed to make serious headway. On the following day, when French troops had tried to advance at Helles, Jack Churchill watched in horror as the Turks ‘poured in a terrible fire of heavy guns—I suspect “Jack Johnsons” as in France—they did not spare their own men, and Turk & French were blown to bits together’. Jack added, in his letter written on May 9: ‘In this war the wounded are very prominent. As you land you have to step over stretchers on the little improvised jetty, and there seem to be blood and bandages all over the beach.’
Churchill was in France on the day Jack wrote this letter. He had gone there three days earlier to help negotiate an Anglo-Italian Naval Convention, part of the agreement whereby Italy would enter the war on the side of the Entente. On May 9 he spent the day in the battle zone, watching the massive, unsuccessful British attack at Aubers Ridge. He too was later to recall the ‘hideous spectacle’ of the wounded: ‘More than a thousand suffering from every form of horrible injury, seared, torn, pierced, choking, dying, were being sorted according to their miseries into the different parts of the convent at Merville. At the entrance, the arrival and departure of the motor ambulances, each with its four or five shattered and tortured beings, was incessant: from the back door corpses were being carried out at brief intervals to a burying party constantly at work.’ Everywhere Churchill looked was ‘blood and bloody rags. Outside in the quadrangle the drumming thunder of the cannonade proclaimed that the process of death and mutilation was still at its height’.
Churchill returned to London on May 10. Awaiting him was a telegram from de Robeck, asking whether ‘by forcing the Dardanelles’ the Navy could ‘ensure the success’ of the military operations now at a stalemate. De Robeck’s fear, however, was that on land the Army would not be able to take advantage of a naval success and reach its April 25 objectives, while at sea the Turks would be able to ‘close’ the Straits behind the Fleet.
Unwilling to endanger the Army by a naval advance beyond the Narrows, after which the Fleet would be unable to return to help the Army, Churchill decided on May 11 that all he could do was to encourage de Robeck to try to clear the minefields and then to advance as far as the Narrows, destroying the forts there. Fisher, however, refused to agree even to this limited action. Angered by Churchill’s very request, he told him that he would resign if any naval action was taken at the Dardanelles ‘until the shores have been effectively occupied’.
Fisher also gave Hankey a verbal message for Asquith, saying that he would resign if there were any action by ships alone. Asquith told Hankey that he thought it ‘a very foolish message’, but, seeking to calm him, sent a message back that no separate naval action would be taken without Fisher’s ‘concurrence’. Churchill also tried to deflect Fisher from resignation, writing to him that same day, ‘You will never receive from me any proposition to “rush” the Dardanelles,’ and appealing to him in strong and emotional language:
We are now in a very difficult position. Whether it is my fault for trying or my misfortune for not having the power to carry through is immaterial. We are now committed to one of the greatest amphibious enterprises of history. You are absolutely committed. Comradeship, resource, firmness, patience, all in the highest degree will be needed to carry the matter through to victory.
A great army hanging on by its eyelids to a rocky beach, and confronted by the armed power of the Turkish Empire under German military guidance: the whole surplus fleet of Britain—every scrap that can be spared—bound to that army and its fortunes as long as the struggle may drag out: the apparition of the long-feared submarine—our many needs and obligations—the measureless advantages, probably decisive on the whole war, to be gained by success.
Surely here is a combination & a situation which requires from us every conceivable exertion & contrivance which we can think of. I beg you to lend your whole aid & goodwill, & ultimately then success is certain.
Fisher seemed set on resignation. Meeting a senior Admiralty official in the street on May 12 he told him, ‘I have resigned and I am off.’ Churchill still tried to persuade Fisher to stay, agreeing that afternoon that the Queen Elizabeth should leave the Dardanelles at once. Churchill knew that it was the presence of this powerful battleship at the Dardanelles, although originally sent there at Fisher’s own suggestion, that most worried the Admiral, particularly in view of the possible arrival of German submarines. That evening, in Fisher’s presence, Churchill told Kitchener that the Queen Elizabeth was coming home. Kitchener was furious, losing his temper and describing the ship’s recall as ‘desertion of the army at its most critical moment’. Now Fisher erupted. Either the Queen Elizabeth would come home at once, would come home that very night, or he would walk out of the Admiralty then and there. Churchill bowed to Fisher’s threat, telegraphing to de Robeck that evening, ‘Queen Elizabeth is to sail for home at once with all despatch.’
During May 12 there had been Conservative criticism of Churchill’s most recent visit to France. He had been in Paris ‘on Admiralty business’, Asquith told the Commons. Asked to confirm that Churchill had not performed any official duties while at the Front, Asquith replied, ‘No, none,’ whereupon there were gleeful, angry cries of ‘Joy ride!’ from the Conservative benches. ‘I am sorry such a question should be asked,’ Asquith continued, and in defence of his colleague went on to say that Churchill had not been absent from the Admiralty ‘more than fourteen days during the whole of these nine months’.
On the night of May 12 a Turkish torpedo boat managed to leave Chanak stern first and, skilfully slipping down the Straits to the British naval positions off Sedd-el-Bahr, torpedoed the battleship Goliath; 570 sailors were drowned. Fisher at once insisted that orders be sent to de Robeck, deprecating any further naval initiative. But Churchill was emphatic that if de Robeck wished to advance as far as the Narrows in conjunction with the Army, he must be allowed to do so. He could not leave the Army in the lurch.
On May 13 Fisher asked Churchill to order de Robeck not to take any independent action. Churchill refused, telling Fisher, ‘I cannot agree to send a telegram which might have the effect of paralysing necessary naval action as judged necessary by the responsible Admiral on the spot.’ He did agree, however, to telegraph to de Robeck, ‘We think the moment for an independent naval attempt to force the Narrows has passed, and will not arise again under present conditions.’ De Robeck’s task now was to support the Army already ashore by protecting the landing beaches and bombarding the Turkish defences.
Seeking to assuage Fisher’s anxieties once and for all, Churchill spent several hours with him on the evening of May 14. Together they scrutinised a list of reinforcements Churchill believed were needed by de Robeck to support the Army. Fisher made no complaint. As Churchill left the room, Fisher’s Naval Secretary heard him say to the Admiral: ‘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’ll pull the thing through together.’
Fisher went home to bed. Churchill remained at the Admiralty working. Among the telegrams from de Robeck was a request for more submarines. Five new submarines were to be ready in England by the end of the month. Churchill added two of them to the list of reinforcements on which he and Fisher had just agreed. He then sent a copy of the list to Fisher with a covering note, explaining that the list would not be sent to the Admiralty War Group before Fisher had a chance to see it again, ‘in order that if any point arises we can discuss it’. Churchill added, in conciliatory vein, ‘I hope you will agree.’
It was well past midnight. Churchill went to bed. On the following morning, May 15, he went to the Foreign Office to discuss final details of Italy’s entry into the war. As he returned across Horse Guards Parade to the Admiralty, his Private Secretary, James Masterton-Smith, rushed up to him with the words, ‘Fisher has resigned, and I think he means it this time.’ Masterton-Smith handed Churchill a letter from Fisher which began, ‘I am unable to remain any longer as your colleague.’ He would not go into details, but declared, ‘I find it increasingly difficult to adjust myself to the increasing daily requirements of the Dardanelles to meet your views.’ Though Fisher did not say so, the two submarines for de Robeck had apparently been the breaking point. His letter ended, ‘I am off to Scotland at once so as to avoid all questionings.’
Churchill could not believe that the executive head of the Navy had simply walked away from his post. Returning to the Admiralty building, he looked everywhere for him, confident that he could once again set his mind at ease about the reinforcements for de Robeck on which they had agreed the previous evening, and about the two extra submarines. But Fisher was nowhere to be found. Recrossing Horse Guards Parade, Churchill went to Downing Street to tell Asquith what had happened. The Prime Minister saw at once the political danger of Fisher’s disappearance; once known, it could lead to a Conservative call for explanations, even for resignations. Taking a sheet of Downing Street notepaper, Asquith wrote in his own hand, ‘Lord Fisher, In the King’s name, I order you at once to return to your post, H.H. Asquith, 15 May 1915.’
A search was made for Fisher, who was tracked down at the Charing Cross Hotel, five minutes’ walk from the Admiralty. He agreed to see Asquith and went to Downing Street, where he found Lloyd George also waiting for the Prime Minister, who was at a wedding. ‘I have resigned,’ was Fisher’s greeting. When Lloyd George asked him why, he replied that he would take no further part in the Dardanelles ‘foolishness’. He was off to Scotland that night. Lloyd George begged Fisher to remain at his post, at least until the next War Council meeting in two days’ time. But Fisher ‘declined to wait another hour’. At that moment Asquith arrived, but could persuade Fisher neither to withdraw his resignation nor to return to the Admiralty building. All that Fisher would agree to was not to leave London for Scotland.
A political crisis was imminent. Asquith asked Churchill to write Fisher a letter, to placate him. Churchill did so. ‘The only thing to think of now,’ he wrote, ‘is what is best for the country and for the brave men who are fighting. Anything which does injury to those interests will be very harshly judged by history on whose stage we are now.’ As to the specific cause which had led Fisher to resign, he did not understand it. ‘If I did I might cure it. When we parted last night I thought we were in agreement.’ The proposals for reinforcements for de Robeck ‘were I thought in general accord with your views; & in any case were for discussion between us’.
Fisher remained in hiding throughout May 15. When Churchill asked for a personal interview, he refused it. That same day he sent an old newspaper cutting to Bonar Law, underlining the sentence, ‘Lord Fisher was received in audience of the King and remained there about an hour.’ Fisher had not gone to see the King recently, but the hint was an obvious one; Fisher had resigned. Although there was no letter or covering note with the cutting, the envelope was addressed in Fisher’s well-known handwriting. The Conservatives had been alerted to the crisis.
During May 16, assuming that Fisher’s resignation was indeed final, Churchill asked the other members of the Admiralty Board if they would stay on. They agreed to do so, the Second Sea Lord being willing to step into Fisher’s place. Driving to Sutton Courtenay, where Asquith was spending the Sunday, Churchill told him that this time Fisher had really resigned. Churchill then told the Prime Minister, ‘My office is at your disposal if you require to make a change,’ to which Asquith replied, ‘No, I have thought of that. I do not wish it, but can you get a Board?’
Churchill assured Asquith that he already had a Board of Admiralty willing to serve, under a new First Sea Lord. But it was too late. Bonar Law had decided to exploit to the full the information which Fisher had sent him. Calling on Lloyd George at 11 Downing Street on the morning of May 17, he asked if it was true that Fisher had resigned. On being told that it was, he told Lloyd George that the Opposition could no longer adhere to the Party truce: ‘There was a growing discontent among Conservatives at this attitude of unqualified support.’
‘He was especially emphatic,’ Lloyd George later recalled, ‘as to the impossibility of allowing Mr Churchill to remain at the Admiralty if Lord Fisher persisted in his resignation.’ On this point he ‘made it clear that the Opposition meant at all hazards to force a Parliamentary challenge’. Asking Bonar Law to wait, Lloyd George went along the corridor to No. 10, where he told Asquith that in order to forestall a Conservative onslaught and the collapse of national unity, a Coalition was essential. Asquith agreed. ‘This decision,’ Lloyd George later recalled, ‘took an incredibly short time.’
Unknown either to Lloyd George or to Churchill, Asquith was in the midst of an intense personal crisis. Two days earlier, Venetia Stanley had told him that she was to be married. He had pleaded with her to go on writing to him, but she had refused to do so. Alone for a moment after Lloyd George had left, he wrote to her, ‘Never since the war began had I such an accumulation (no longer shared!) of anxieties,’ and he added: ‘One of the most hellish bits of these most hellish days was that you alone of all the world—to whom I have always gone in every moment of trial & trouble, & from whom I have always come back solaced, healed & inspired—were the one person who could do nothing, & from whom I could ask nothing. To my dying day, that will be the most bitter memory of my life.’
Asquith had now to decide whether or not to bring the Conservatives into his government, ending nearly a decade of Liberal dominance of British political life, and bringing about a sharing of war-making power. ‘I am on the eve of the most astounding & world-shaking decisions—such as I would never have taken without your counsel & consent,’ he told Venetia. ‘It seems so strange & empty & unnatural.’
Churchill saw no need to bow to Conservative pressure. He had a new Board of Admiralty, and had written a speech to deliver to Parliament that evening, describing and defending every aspect of his conduct of Admiralty business, at the Dardanelles and elsewhere, and explaining his relations with Fisher, and why Fisher had resigned. Hurrying to Asquith’s room in the Commons, he begged to be allowed to defend himself, and the Government, and to trounce the Opposition. Churchill then read out the names of the members of his new Board. But no sooner had he done so than Asquith told him: ‘No, this will not do. I have decided to form a National Government by a coalition with the Unionists, and a very much larger reconstruction will be required.’
Churchill was aghast, all the more so when Asquith went on to ask, ‘What are we to do for you?’ Suddenly he realised that his days as First Lord were over. Asquith was determined to avoid a Parliamentary crisis. Lloyd George was also keen to take the maximum advantage of the Conservative desire to enter the Government. There were too many issues on which the Opposition could, if it wished, make serious trouble, including a widely publicised account three days earlier of the shortage of artillery shells in France.
To avert a challenge to his Premiership, Asquith had decided to invite the Conservatives not only to join his administration but to enter the War Council. The Conservative leaders were delighted to be offered, at last, some part in the political and strategic conduct of the war. They no longer had any incentive to challenge publicly any aspect of Liberal war policy. But they did have one condition: Churchill must leave the Admiralty. A decade of Conservative hostility was about to be satisfied; the man who had trounced Brodrick in 1901, belittled Balfour in 1904, abused Milner in 1906, mocked at Lansdowne in 1910, and denounced Carson in 1914, would be forced out of his position of authority and influence.
Asquith now asked Churchill whether he would like to take some other office in the new government or would ‘prefer a command in France’. Before Churchill could answer, Lloyd George entered the room. ‘Why do you not send him to the Colonial Office?’ he asked. ‘There is great work to be done there.’ Churchill was indignant; he wanted a department which would enable him to have some say in the conduct of the war. To be offered the Colonial Office, which in peacetime was one of the great offices of State, was now both a demotion and an insult.
Churchill remained at the Admiralty for ten more days, in charge of Admiralty business. In a series of letters, first to Asquith and then to the Conservative leaders, he pleaded for some position of influence and authority. At first his tone was tough. ‘I will not take any office except a military department,’ he wrote to Asquith on May 17, ‘& if that is not convenient I hope I may be found employment in the field.’
On the morning of May 18 The Times singled out Churchill for criticism, referring to ‘his disquieting personal adventures on the Continent’. As a civilian Minister in charge of a fighting department, he had sought ‘to grasp power which should not pass into his unguided hands’. Churchill recognised the force of the warning, writing that day to Asquith, ‘If an office like the Colonies which was suggested were open to me, I should not be right to refuse it.’ For him to leave for the trenches ‘unless you wish it’ would be ‘to throw unmerited discredit upon the work I have done here’.
It was his work at the Admiralty of which Churchill was most proud, telling Asquith: ‘Above all things I should like to stay here and complete my work, the most difficult part of which is ended. Everything has been provided for and the naval situation is in every respect assured. After four years administration and nine months war I am entitled to say this.’ That night Churchill invited Max Aitken and F.E. Smith to Admiralty House. Churchill talked with his two friends into the early hours. ‘That Tuesday night,’ Aitken later recalled, ‘he was clinging to the desire of retaining the Admiralty as if the salvation of England depended upon it.’
On the following morning, unknown to Churchill, Fisher wrote to Asquith setting out six conditions under which he could ‘guarantee the successful termination of the war’. The first was that Churchill should not be in the Cabinet ‘always circumventing me’. Nor would he serve under Balfour. His main condition was that he should be given ‘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 untrammelled sole command of all sea forces whatsoever’.
‘Lord Fisher madder than ever,’ was Hankey’s comment. Asquith’s view was the same; he told the King that Fisher’s letter ‘indicates signs of mental aberration!’ There was general agreement that, as Churchill wrote to Kitchener four days later, ‘Fisher went mad.’
Churchill now tried to persuade the Conservative leaders as to the wisdom of his conduct of Admiralty business. On May 19 he sent Bonar Law the telegrams relating to two episodes from the early months of the war, writing in his covering note, ‘I have borne in silence all these anxious months the charge that I am to blame by my interference with the naval experts for the loss of the three cruisers & the faulty dispositions which led to the action off Coronel.’ Also on May 19 Churchill went to see Grey and Lloyd George, to ask them if he could publish in the Press a statement he had just written about the evolution of the Dardanelles. They dissuaded him, arguing that it would alarm the public to realise that success there was in doubt.
On May 20 the newspaper proprietor Sir George Riddell, who called to see Churchill at the Admiralty, recorded his anguished conversation in his diary:
‘I am the victim of a political intrigue. I am finished!’
‘Not finished at forty, with your remarkable powers!’
‘Yes. Finished in respect of all I care for—the waging of war; the defeat of the Germans. I have had a high place offered to me, a position which has been occupied by many distinguished men, and which carries with it a high salary. But all that goes for nothing. This is what I live for. I have prepared a statement of my case but cannot use it.’
Churchill then read Riddell the statement which Lloyd George and Grey had dissuaded him from issuing to the Press, to the effect, Riddell noted, ‘that every disposition of ships and the decision on every question of policy had been sanctioned by Fisher, and that the naval attempt to force the Dardanelles had been advised by Admiral Carden and confirmed by Admiral de Robeck’.
That night Churchill went to see Bonar Law to show him the same statement and plead to be allowed to stay at the Admiralty. He also gave the Conservative leader a letter in which he wrote, ‘I present to you an absolutely secure naval position; a fleet constantly and rapidly growing in strength, and abundantly supplied with munitions of every kind; an organisation working with perfect smoothness and efficiency, and the seas upon which no enemy’s flag is flown.’
Bonar Law promised to speak with his Conservative colleagues, but warned that they would not want him to remain at the Admiralty. While waiting for the final Conservative response, Asquith received a letter which spoke up for Churchill, a ‘letter of a maniac’ was how he described it in one of his own last letters to Venetia. It was from Venetia’s cousin Clementine. ‘If you throw Winston overboard,’ she wrote, ‘you will be committing an act of weakness and your Coalition Government will not be as formidable a War machine as your present Government. Winston may in your eyes & in those with whom he has to work have faults, but he has the supreme quality which I venture to say very few of your present or future Cabinet possess, the power, the imagination, the deadliness to fight Germany. If you send him to another place he will no longer be fighting. If you waste this valuable war material you will be doing an injury to this country.’
Asquith made no reply. Nor did he repeat to Churchill his offer of the Colonial Office. On May 21 Churchill made a final appeal to Asquith, to let him remain at the Admiralty: ‘Let me stand or fall by the Dardanelles—but do not take it from my hands.’ To this letter Churchill added a postscript, ‘I have not come to see you though I should like to; but it would be kind of you to send for me some time today.’ Asquith did not do so. Instead he wrote to say that Churchill must ‘take it as settled’ that he was not to remain at the Admiralty. Bonar Law also wrote that day, dashing any hopes of a Conservative softening. ‘Believe me,’ he wrote, ‘what I said to you last night is inevitable.’
Crushed and humiliated, Churchill wrote to Asquith that afternoon, ‘I will accept any office—the lowest if you like—that you care to offer me, & will continue to serve in it in this time of war until the affairs in which I am deeply concerned are settled satisfactorily, as I think they will be.’
‘Count on me absolutely—if I am of any use,’ Churchill wrote to Asquith in a second letter that day. ‘If not, some employment in the field.’ Two days later Asquith offered to make him Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a non-departmental post of an entirely ornamental nature, but retaining his seat at the War Council. Churchill accepted.
For two more days Churchill remained at the Admiralty. One of those who called on him was Kitchener; he was in sympathetic mood and spoke for a while about the work he and Churchill had done together. Then, as he got up to leave, he turned to Churchill with the words, ‘Well, there is one thing at any rate they cannot take from you. The Fleet was ready.’
***
Churchill’s days as First Lord of the Admiralty were over. Most commentators assumed that his career was likewise over. But the editor of the Observer, J.L. Garvin, wrote of him with confidence: ‘He is young. He has lion-hearted courage. No number of enemies can fight down his ability and force. His hour of triumph will come.’ Leaving Admiralty House, Churchill moved with Clementine and their three children into his brother’s home at 41 Cromwell Road, opposite the Natural History Museum. His brother was at the Dardanelles; his wife Lady Gwendeline and their two sons found room for the newcomers and made them welcome. But Churchill was devastated by the failure of the Dardanelles plan. ‘He always believed in it,’ Clementine later recalled. ‘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.’
Churchill now had plenty of time for reflection and for trying to work out what had gone wrong. ‘If I have erred,’ he wrote to Hankey that June, ‘it has been in seeking to attempt an initiative without being sure that all the means & powers to make it successful were at my disposal.’ From the Antwerp expedition to the Dardanelles, ‘nowhere has there been design & decision’. Now, at the Dardanelles, ‘without decision & design a very terrible catastrophe may ensue’.
Throughout the summer, Kitchener was making plans for a renewed land-attack on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Balfour, Churchill’s successor at the Admiralty, gave naval support for the land army as Churchill had done; one of his first acts was to agree to the despatch of two extra submarines, the specific reinforcements which had led Fisher to resign. Churchill often spoke at the War Council, now renamed the Dardanelles Committee, about his ideas for resuming the land offensive and reaching the forts, so that the Navy could then try once more to get through the Narrows. But his views had no force; he had no War Staff to examine or elaborate them; he had no great Department of State with its budget and its personnel.
Repeatedly, Churchill felt obliged to defend his past work as First Lord. Speaking at Dundee on June 5 he told his constituents: ‘The archives of the Admiralty will show in the utmost detail the part I have played in all the great transactions that have taken place. It is to them that I look for my defence.’ He also demanded ‘a greater element of leadership and design in the rulers’; he himself was so clearly an outsider now. In return for the sacrifices which all were prepared to make, the need was for action: ‘Action, not hesitation; action, not words; action, not agitation. The nation awaits its orders. The duty lies upon the Government to declare what should be done.’
In his peroration, Churchill returned to the optimism and vision which had been a noted feature of his speeches after the outbreak of war: ‘Look forward, do not look backward. Gather afresh in heart and spirit all the energies of your being, bend anew together for a supreme effort. The times are harsh, the need is dire, the agony of Europe is infinite; but the might of Britain hurled united into the conflict will be irresistible. We are the grand reserve of the Allied cause, and that grand reserve must now march forward as one man.’
Churchill’s appeal was widely praised. ‘I am now the master of myself & at peace,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘& yesterday I was conscious that I was not powerless.’ He was, however, powerless to influence the course of events at the Dardanelles, watching and fretting and warning his colleagues, but without the executive authority to act. In the second week of June he learned of heavy Royal Naval Division losses on Cape Helles during an unsuccessful attempt to seize the objective of the very first day’s landing nearly two months earlier.
With more than six hundred men having been killed, two of the five battalions had to be disbanded. ‘Poor Naval Division,’ Churchill wrote to his brother on June 12. ‘Alas the slaughter has been cruel. All are gone whom I knew. It makes me wish to be with you. But for the present my duty is here where I can influence the course of events.’ It was a vain hope. Churchill’s influence was virtually non-existent, his warnings to his colleagues seldom heeded. Again and again he spoke at the Dardanelles Committee against attacking the Turks with insufficient troops. Better by far the offensives should be postponed until superiority had been attained. ‘I have been having a hard battle all these weeks,’ he told his brother on June 19, ‘& have been fighting every inch of the road.’ A new offensive was being planned for early August. ‘My anxiety is lest you have not enough men to carry it through.’
Churchill had a deeper anxiety still, telling his brother that ‘the certainty’ that the war would not end that year ‘fills my mind with melancholy thoughts. The youth of Europe—almost a whole generation—will be shorn away.’
***
As a weekend retreat, Churchill had found a house in the country: Hoe Farm near Godalming, a converted Tudor farmhouse in a secluded hollow. ‘It really is a delightful valley,’ he wrote to his brother, ‘and the garden gleams with summer jewellery. We live very simply—but with all the essentials of life well understood & well provided for—hot baths, cold champagne, new peas, & old brandy’. One weekend, his sister-in-law Lady Gwendeline set up her easel at Hoe Farm. He was intrigued, and she, seeing him watching her, wondered if it might be possible to lessen his gloom by encouraging him to take up painting. She suggested that he use her young sons’ watercolour paints and showed him the first steps. As he concentrated on the canvas his cares seemed to evaporate. He had found a release for his tension and depression.
A week later Churchill invited Hazel Lavery to Hoe Farm. The wife of the painter Sir John Lavery, she was a painter in her own right and an enthusiast. When she arrived that day Churchill was already at his easel; he had bought it that week together with oil paints, palette, turpentine and brushes. He was intending to paint the scene in front of the house: the drive, the pond, the bushes beyond, the trees and the sky. Later he recalled how his visitor stepped from her car and exclaimed, as she saw him at his easel, ‘Painting! But what are you hesitating about. Let me have a brush—the big one.’ Then, Churchill recalled, ‘Splash into the turpentine, wallop into the blue and white, frantic flourish on the palette—clean no longer—then several large, fierce strokes and slashes of blue on the absolutely cowering canvas. Anyone could see that it could not hit back. No evil fate avenged the jaunty violence.’
Lady Lavery had done her work well. ‘The canvas grinned in helplessness before me,’ Churchill wrote. ‘The spell was broken. The sickly inhibitions rolled away. I seized the largest brush and fell upon my victim with berserk fury. I have never felt in awe of a canvas since.’
Edward Marsh, who was still with Churchill at the Duchy of Lancaster as he had been since their Colonial Office days almost a decade earlier, was present during these first experiments in painting. The ‘new enthusiasm’, he later wrote, ‘was a distraction and a sedative that brought a measure of ease to his frustrated spirit’. The Treasury had given Churchill a room at 19 Abingdon Street, opposite the House of Lords; he had been allowed to retain Marsh’s services and also those of his Admiralty shorthand-writer, Harry Beckenham. But his frustration was acute, accentuated at the beginning of July, when he asked Asquith if he could accompany the Prime Minister to the forthcoming Ministerial discussion on inter-Allied strategy at Calais. Asquith said no.
A week later there seemed an upsurge in Churchill’s fortunes; Kitchener asked him if he would visit the Dardanelles, to give a Ministerial opinion on conditions and prospects before the coming August offensive. Both Asquith and Balfour gave their approval. In making preparations for the journey, Churchill promised his insurance broker that he would not take an ‘active part in the fighting’. But he was aware that ‘my mission may in certain circumstances be extended, and that I may have to visit the Balkan States.’ Realising that he would be at risk from Turkish shell-fire while on the Gallipoli Peninsula, Churchill wrote out a letter to be given to Clementine ‘in the event of his death’. After explaining that his insurance policies would protect her financially, and that his stocks and shares would pay his bills and overdraft, he wrote in the letter: ‘I am anxious that you should get hold of all my papers, especially those which refer to my Admiralty administration.’ He had appointed her his literary executor. Masterton-Smith would help her ‘to secure all that is necessary for a complete record’. His letter continued:
There is no hurry; but some day I should like the truth to be known. Randolph will carry on the lamp.
Do not grieve for me too much. I am a spirit confident of my rights. Death is only an incident, & not the most important which happens to us in this state of being. On the whole, especially since I met you, my darling one, I have been happy, & you have taught me how noble a woman’s heart can be.
If there is anywhere else, I shall be on the look out for you. Meanwhile look forward, feel free, rejoice in life, cherish the children, guard my memory. God bless you.
Churchill spent Sunday June 18 at Hoe Farm, saying goodbye to his family. On the following day at Downing Street he stayed for a few minutes in the Cabinet Room after the Cabinet had ended, to say goodbye to Asquith, Kitchener and Grey. As they were shaking his hand and wishing him luck, Curzon, one of the new Conservative Ministers, unexpectedly returned. Where, he asked, was Churchill going, that he needed to be wished good luck?
Curzon was told; he gave the visit his blessing and hurried away to tell his fellow Conservative Ministers about it. They were aghast. Bonar Law, whose veto had effectively driven Churchill from the Admiralty two months earlier, at once informed Asquith that he and his friends feared a political crisis if Churchill were sent on such a mission. Knowing the strength of Conservative hostility, Churchill at once wrote to Asquith to say that he would not go. ‘I am extremely sorry,’ Asquith replied, ‘believing, as I do, that you would have been able to render a very real service to the Government & the country.’
In the following weeks Churchill asked several times at the Dardanelles Committee about munition supplies at Gallipoli and the long-term aim of the August attack. He received no replies, and was at no time brought into the military or naval discussions. An appeal to Balfour to consider using British air power to bomb munition factories at Constantinople received no answer. Nor did anything come of Churchill’s hope that summer that he might be appointed Minister of a special Air Department, independent of the Army and Navy. Such a ‘British Air Service’, he told Asquith, could by the end of the year be made ‘indisputably the largest, most efficient and most enterprising of any belligerent power’.
On July 15 Churchill confided to a young Liberal friend, Sir Archibald Sinclair, with whom before the war he had shared an enthusiasm for flying, and who was now serving as an infantry officer on the Western Front, ‘I do not want office, but only war direction.’ But he did not see that he would ever get it. ‘Everything else—not that. At least so I feel in my evil moments,’ and he went on to tell Sinclair: ‘I am profoundly unsettled: & cannot use my gift. Of that last I have no doubts. I do not feel that my judgments have been falsified, or that the determined pursuance of my policy through all the necessary risks was wrong. I would do it all again if the circumstances were repeated. But I am faced with the problem of living through days of twenty-four hours each day: & averting my mind from the intricate business which I had in my hand—which was my life.’
New military landings and a renewed offensive on the Gallipoli Peninsula were planned for August 6. Three days earlier Churchill wrote to his brother: ‘There are so many “able men” in this Cabinet that it is very difficult to get anything settled. The parties hold each other in equipoise. The tendency to the negative is very pronounced. Never mind. They are in the Dardanelles up to their necks now, & you have only to go forward.’ He was ‘soberly hopeful’ that the new attack would succeed, but had no illusions as to the cost. ‘The losses will no doubt be cruel: but better there, where victory will be fruitful, than in the profitless slaughter pit of Ypres.’
The new Gallipoli landings took place at Suvla Bay. ‘Now is the moment I would have loved you to be here,’ Hamilton wrote to Churchill on the eve of the attack. ‘I am sure you would have done everyone good going down the trenches and cheering up the men.’ To Kenneth Dundas, with whom he had gone big-game hunting in East Africa in 1908, and who was to take part in the new assault with the Royal Naval Division, Churchill wrote on August 6, ‘I trust and earnestly hope that by the time this letter reaches you the situation will have altered materially in our favour.’ His letter was later returned to him, its envelope marked with the additional word ‘Killed’. Dundas had died in action on August 7, leaving a four-year-old son.
The objectives of August 6 were never reached. Despite almost no Turkish opposition at Suvla Bay on the day of the landings, the British officers hesitated to lead their men forward. Chunuk Bair, the ridge they had been sent to capture, was not yet manned by the Turks, but while the British troops halted in the wide plain, the ridge was quickly manned, and then tenaciously defended. After four days of fierce hand-to-hand fighting, all hope of pressing beyond it to the Narrows, and of enabling the Fleet at long last to push through into the Sea of Marmara, had come to nothing.
Churchill received a full account of the battle from his brother. On the plain at Suvla, Jack had come across the General in command of one of the two divisions specially sent out for the new landings. ‘He seemed apathetic. I understood that the Brigadiers had said that they could not do any more and so on. Everybody seemed to have “turned it down”. The apathy of the senior officers had spread to the men.’ As to those men, Jack told his brother: ‘From reading all the stories of the war they have learned to regard an advance of 100 yards as a matter of the greatest importance. They landed and advanced a mile & thought they had done something wonderful. They had no standard to go by—no other troops were there to show them what was right. They seemed not to know what they should do.’
Churchill pressed for one further military effort at Gallipoli, but not, he insisted, before at least 20,000 fresh troops had been brought to the Peninsula from Egypt. At the same time he warned against any attempt to renew the offensive on the Western Front, where the German defences had been ‘continually strengthened’ but where heavy guns and ammunition had not been ‘correspondingly accumulated by the Allies’. His views were ignored. On August 21, at Gallipoli, using as Kitchener wished only those troops who had taken part in the earlier attack, Hamilton launched a further assault towards the summit of Chunuk Bair. It was a failure. Churchill now proposed a renewed naval attack, but Balfour turned the idea down. He also declined a request by Churchill to circulate to the Cabinet a note of the provisions that should be made to deal with coming winter weather at the Dardanelles.
Early in September, Sir John French suggested that Churchill might take command of a brigade on the Western Front. Churchill was relieved, asking Asquith if he could leave the Government and go to France. Aware of the extent to which Churchill’s counsel now went unheeded, Asquith was sympathetic. Kitchener, however, vetoed the plan. He had not minded Churchill taking temporary charge at Antwerp, or going on a brief mission to the Dardanelles, but he did not want him in permanent command. Disappointed, Churchill wrote to Asquith, ‘I was too much influenced by French who is always so kind to me; & I saw—for a moment—an escape from a situation which on various grounds, public & private, I dislike increasingly as the days pass by.’
Since his removal from the Admiralty, Churchill had been tormented by verbal and newspaper attacks. It was as if all the errors of the naval war from August 1914 until May 1915, as well as the military campaign on the Gallipoli Peninsula, should be ascribed to him. Two days after learning that he could not take a military command in France, he asked Asquith to give Parliament the documents relating to each of the controversial episodes. ‘I am repeatedly made the object of very serious charges in all these matters,’ he wrote, ‘which have never been contradicted, & seem in some way to be confirmed by my leaving the Admiralty.’ Sometimes the charges appeared in print, ‘but much more are they kept alive by conversation, or by constant references in newspaper articles; & there is no doubt whatever that the belief is widespread that I personally acted in these events wrongfully & foolishly.’
Asquith declined to present the facts to Parliament. Churchill then decided to circulate to his Cabinet colleagues three bulky sets of telegrams relating to those episodes, including Coronel, Antwerp and the Dardanelles, ‘with regard to which misconception exists’. Churchill had faith in the ability of documents to convince his critics. Later these same documents were to form the basis of the first two volumes of his memoirs of the First World War. But already he was being taunted at public meetings by the cry ‘What about the Dardanelles?’ No amount of historical documentation, however accurate, detailed or convincing, was to make that cry go away, or end the suspicions that lay behind it.
On September 21, as the first Ministerial discussions began about withdrawing troops from the Dardanelles, Churchill wrote to a friend, ‘It is odious to me to remain here watching sloth & folly, with full knowledge & no occupation.’ That day, he proposed landing sufficient troops on the Asiatic shore of the Straits, in order to make ‘a dash on Chanak’. Nine days later, on learning of the terrible losses incurred on the Western Front during the renewed offensive which he had earlier opposed, he told a friend, ‘With one quarter of the military effort which has been needed to take the village of Loos, we should have been able to get through the Narrows.’ A day later Churchill wrote to Lloyd George, ‘The same effort and expenditure which had given us the village of Loos would have given us Constantinople and command of the Eastern world.’
Among those killed at Loos was Captain William Sheridan, the husband of Churchill’s cousin Clare; their son had been born five days before his father’s death.
Throughout October the Dardanelles Committee discussed whether or not to evacuate the Gallipoli Peninsula. The failure to reach a decision angered Churchill considerably. ‘The soldiers who are ordered to their deaths have a right to a plan, as well as to a cause,’ he wrote in a memorandum which, in the end, he decided not to circulate. On October 20 he sent his colleagues a proposal to use mustard gas in a final attempt to break through the Turkish defences. Given the massacre of Armenians by Turks, as well as the killing of many British soldiers after they had tried to surrender, he hoped ‘that the unreasonable prejudice against the use by us of gas upon the Turks will cease’. Large installations of gas should be sent to Gallipoli ‘without delay’. The winter season at the Dardanelles was frequently marked by south-westerly gales ‘which would afford a perfect opportunity for the employment of gas by us’.
Churchill’s suggestion was ignored. So too were his call for compulsory military service and his suggestion, made privately to Asquith, that, in order to secure a more effective prosecution of the war, Kitchener should be replaced at the War Office by Lloyd George. At the end of October, amid public criticisms of Government inefficiency of the sort Churchill had repeatedly voiced in the secrecy of the Cabinet, Asquith announced that he would replace the Dardanelles Committee by a small policy-making body of three; himself, Kitchener and Balfour. Without a Government department to lead, Churchill would have no secret forum in which even to offer his counsel. Hankey suggested to Asquith that he be sent on a mission to Russia, ‘to buck up communications of Archangel & Vladivostok for importation of rifles and munitions’ but nothing came of this. Later that week Churchill again raised the possibility of a department involving aerial warfare. This too came to nothing, and on October 30 he offered his resignation, telling Asquith that the change in the system of war direction ‘deprives me of rendering useful service’.
Hoping that Asquith would defend his part in the Dardanelles operation when he made a statement about the history of the operation to the Commons on November 2, Churchill provided him with a dossier of documentary material. But while defending the operation in general terms, Asquith neither used the materials Churchill had provided nor defended him from the main charge levelled against him, of overruling his naval advisers.
Churchill had become the scapegoat for the failure at the Dardanelles, even for the period after his departure from the Admiralty, during which he was no longer responsible for the Navy, and even for the land war which was Kitchener’s domain. He no longer wished to remain in England. On November 6 he asked Asquith to make him Governor-General of British East Africa, and Commander-in-Chief of the forces there. Surprisingly, Bonar Law supported Churchill’s request, telling Asquith that ‘we are suffering from the want of brains in the higher commands’. But Asquith declined. On November 11 a new inner Cabinet was created. It would have five members, not three, but Churchill was not to be included. That day he sent Asquith a second and final letter of resignation. He did not feel able in times like these ‘to remain in well-paid inactivity’. He had a clear conscience which enabled him to bear his responsibility for past events with composure. ‘Time will vindicate my administration of the Admiralty, and assign my due share in the vast series of preparations and operations which have secured us the command of the seas.’
After nearly ten years of Ministerial responsibility Churchill was without a place in the Government. A decade of life centred upon Whitehall and Downing Street, spent in Cabinet meetings and with civil servants, was over. He was still a Member of Parliament, but knew how ineffectual Parliament had become in time of war. In a personal statement on November 15, he told the House of his desire that all the documents of his naval administration should be published, and said, in connection with the Dardanelles, that if Fisher had not approved the operation ‘it was his duty to refuse consent’. He had not received from Fisher ‘either the clear guidance before the event, or the firm support after, which I was entitled to expect’.
Throughout the past year, Churchill said, ‘I have offered the same counsel to the Government—undertake no operation in the West which is more costly to us in life than to the enemy; in the East, take Constantinople; take it by ships if you can; take it by soldiers if you must; take it by whatever plan, military or naval, commends itself to your military experts, but take it, and take it soon, and take it while time remains.’ Churchill was confident about the eventual outcome of the war: ‘We are passing through a bad time now and it will probably be worse before it is better, but that it will be better—if only we endure and persevere—I have no doubt whatever.’
The fall of Churchill, for such it was, led Bonar Law to tell the Commons, ‘He has the defects of his qualities, and as his qualities are large, the shadow which they throw is fairly large also; but I say deliberately, in my judgment, in mental power and vital force he is one of the foremost men in our country.’
***
Churchill had decided to join his regiment in France. Before going he gave a small farewell luncheon party at 41 Cromwell Road. Asquith’s daughter Violet, who was among those present, later recalled, ‘Clemmie was admirably calm and brave, poor Eddie blinking back his tears, the rest of us trying to “play up” and hide our leaden hearts. Winston alone was at his gayest and his best.’
On the morning of November 18, in the uniform of a Major in the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, Churchill left London for the Western Front. Clementine had given him a little pillow to make his nights more comfortable. That evening Masterton-Smith wrote to her from the Admiralty, ‘With those of us who shared his life here he has left an inspiring memory of high courage and tireless industry, and he carries with him to Flanders all that we have to give him—our good wishes.’
‘I did not go because I wished to disinterest myself in the great situation,’ Churchill wrote to Curzon three weeks later, having learned of the decision to evacuate the Dardanelles, ‘or because I feared the burden or the blow: but because I was and am sure that for the time being my usefulness was exhausted & that I could only recover it by a definite & perhaps prolonged withdrawal. Had I seen the slightest prospect of being able to govern the event I would have stayed.’