The Last Lion

In the last week of September 1914 a British squadron lying off Cape Helles had stopped a Turkish torpedo boat and, finding German soldiers aboard, turned it back. Learning of this, the German officer who had assumed command of the strait had mined the Dardanelles, ordered that all lighthouses be darkened, and erected signs on precipices declaring that the channel was closed. This had been a flagrant violation of an international convention guaranteeing free passage of the strait. Its sequel, the attack on the czar’s Black Sea ports by German cruisers flying the Turkish colors, had brought Turkey in as a formal belligerent. Worried about the security of Egypt, Churchill asked Fisher to investigate “the possibility & advisability of a bombardment of the sea face forts of the Dardanelles.”⁵² Fisher found the prospects excellent, and during a ten-minute shelling by British warships, a lucky shot hit the magazine of the enemy position at Sedd-el-Bahr, destroying the fort and most of its guns. The wisdom of this strike is doubtful, however. The Turks, warned, withdrew their big guns to the two ancient, crenellated fortresses guarding the channel’s Narrows at Chanak. Later in this campaign the same sin would be repeated again and again. The British would strike a heavy blow. It would be effective but indecisive. They would return to find the enemy alerted and strengthened.

In London the War Council met for the first time on November 25.^* Churchill, according to Hankey’s notes, urged “an attack on Gallipoli peninsula. This, if successful, would give us control of the Dardanelles, and we could dictate terms at Constantinople.” Fisher spoke up, asking “whether Greece might not perhaps undertake an attack on Gallipoli on behalf of the Allies.” Grey then delivered a rueful report. King Constantine, nagged by his German wife, unwilling to fight his cousin the kaiser, and worried about Bulgarian intentions, had vetoed Premier Venizelos’s troop offer. Winston, undiscouraged, pointed out that Constantine’s throne was wobbly. Surely he could be subverted. They must not give up. Before them lay a chance to execute the greatest flanking movement in history. He felt military greatness stirring within him. “I have it in me,” he had confided to a friend, “to be a successful soldier. I can visualize great movements and combinations.” In private he repeated his arguments to Asquith, pressing him to open a new front in the Balkans. On December 5 Asquith wrote Venetia, “His volatile mind is at present set on Turkey & Bulgaria, & he wants to organise a heroic adventure against Gallipoli and the Dardanelles: to wh I am altogether opposed.”⁵³

By Christmas Winston had reluctantly changed his mind. The troops were unavailable, and he assumed the strait couldn’t be taken until they held the peninsula. To be sure, the Dardanelles had been forced by ships alone in 1807, when Napoleon was advancing eastward. Seven British men-of-war under Admiral John T. Duckworth had run the gauntlet, reached the Sea of Marmara, and returned through the channel a week later without losing a single vessel. But twentieth-century fortifications were more imposing. In his early years as first sea lord, Fisher had pondered the Dardanelles problem twice and concluded that it would be “mightily hazardous.” On March 15, 1911, Winston himself had written the cabinet: “It is no longer possible to force the Dardanelles… nobody would expose a modern fleet to such perils.” Now, on December 22, 1914, he wrote Fisher: “The Baltic is the only theatre in wh naval action can appreciably shorten the war.” The old admiral continued to look eastward. “I CONSIDER THE ATTACK ON TURKEY HOLDS THE FIELD!” he replied, “but ONLY if it’s IMMEDIATE.” However, his plan called for 75,000 British soldiers now in French trenches, plus the Indian and Egyptian garrisons, none of which were available. Similarly, when Lloyd George wanted to land 100,000 men in Syria or Salonika, the men were not to be had. On December 30 Asquith noted that he had received “two very interesting memoranda” from Hankey and Churchill. Both wanted to end the senseless slaughter in the trenches. Hankey pointed out that the BEF was not advancing in France and the British were losing more men than the Germans. He proposed a broad flanking movement through the Balkans. Churchill’s minute opened with a ringing cry that the new armies Kitchener was forming ought not to be sent to “chew barbed wire.” He then renewed his proposal to storm Schleswig-Holstein via Borkum. In his diary Captain Richmond wrote: “It is quite mad…. It remains with the army, who I hope will refuse to throw away 12000 troops in this manner for the self-glorification of an ignorant and impulsive man.” Refuse they did, and the ministers’ frantic search for a better battlefield continued. On New Year’s Day the prime minister found two more propositions on his desk, from Lloyd George and, again, from Winston. He noted: “They are both keen on a new objective & theatre as soon as our troops are ready. W., of course, for Borkum and the Baltic: LG for Salonica to join in with the Serbians, and for Syria!”⁵⁴

The Russians forced their hand. They, too, had lost a million men, and had suffered crushing defeats at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. Their rifles and ammunition were in short supply. Now the Turks were threatening the Caucasus. Grand Duke Nicholas summoned the chief British observer accompanying his army and told him that if the Turkish drive continued, he would have to wheel southward to meet it, reducing his commitment to the German front. This was grave. If the Russians fell back, German troops now fighting in the east could be moved into France. The threat brought Kitchener, until now obsessed with the trenches, into the debate over grand strategy. He came to the Admiralty to suggest a naval “demonstration at the Dardanelles.” Winston replied that if any such move were to be effective, an infantry commitment would be necessary. When Kitchener returned to the War Office, his staff told him that every English soldier who could be mustered was required on the western front—another standoff. On January 4 Churchill expressed reservations about any attack on Turkey; he still favored the Baltic. The War Council met repeatedly, pondering plans to relieve the pressure on their harried Russian ally. Kitchener opened the January 8 session with a depressing report: a new German drive in France was imminent. Lloyd George interrupted to say heatedly that trench fighting would never lead to victory. Was there, he asked, no alternative theater “in which we might employ our surplus armies to produce a decisive effect?”⁵⁵

Kitchener could think of only one, and he asked the others to support him in backing it. “The Dardanelles,” he said, “appear to be the most suitable objective, as an attack here could be made in co-operation with the Fleet. If successful, it would re-establish communications with Russia; settle the Near Eastern question; draw in Greece and, perhaps, Bulgaria and Rumania; and release wheat and shipping now locked up in the Black Sea.” Hankey added that a Dardanelles victory “would give us the Danube as a line of communication for an army penetrating into the heart of Austria and bring our sea power to bear in the middle of Europe.” The first lord was skeptical. When he asked about troops, the minister for war was evasive. The attack, it seemed, would have to be by ships alone. Churchill therefore rejected it. As late as January 11 he was still pressing for action in the North Sea. The following day, however, events took a sudden, unexpected turn.⁵⁶

Napoleon had written: “Essentially the great question remains: Who will hold Constantinople?” It does not seem essential today, but before the advent of air power the lovely, decaying, sprawling, 2,600-year-old capital of Byzantium was as vital to control of the world’s trade routes as it had been in 85 B.C., when the Roman general Sulla signed a famous treaty with Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, in the ancient city of Dardanus, thereby giving the nearby strait its name. As recently as 1886, Lord Salisbury, when he was successfully negotiating free passage to Constantinople for British ships of the line, had written Winston’s father: “You are naturally sarcastic about my Dardanelles, and I hope the matter will not come up in our time…. I consider the loss of Constantinople would be the ruin of our party and a heavy blow to the country.”⁵⁷

Exotic, vaguely sinister with its skyline of onion-domed mosques and slender minarets, its ornate Topkapi Palace housing the sultan’s seraglio, its noisome Haydarpasar stews, the luxury hotels overlooking the Bosporus, the Golden Horn separating the city from its wealthy suburbs, Constantinople had seen Saracens and Crusaders eviscerate one another, had watched red-bearded Sultan “Abdul the Damned” butcher his subjects in the streets, and seemed stained by its memories. Abdul’s successors, the Young Turks, were a small improvement on him. Their leader, Enver Pasha, was a vain, shallow, cruel megalomaniac who strutted around in a dandy’s uniform, fingering his sword hilt. He and his fellow pashas didn’t even treasure their own past; if the British approached, they planned to demolish Constantinople out of spite. Saint Sophia, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and other priceless buildings were primed with dynamite. Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador, begged them to save Saint Sophia at least, but a Young Turk told him: “There are not six men in the Committee of Union and Progress who care for anything that is old. We all like new things.”⁵⁸ They thought of themselves as modern politicians, but they were politically inept. The people mistrusted them deeply; every neutral diplomat believed that at the first sight of a British warship off the Golden Horn, the masses would rise. The Young Turks were proud of their militarism. Yet the country’s defenses were in wretched shape—obsolete, undermanned, badly led. Actually, the army’s officers included a military genius: thirty-three-year-old Mustapha Kemal. But Kemal despised the Germans. Therefore he was banished from Constantinople. As a sign of his low station he was ordered to defend remote Gallipoli.

“I loathe the Turk,” Margot Asquith wrote in her diary on November 9, “and really hope that he will be wiped out of Europe.” Young men of her class saw it rather differently. They held no brief for the country’s present rulers, but Asia Minor fascinated them. Classically educated in England’s public schools, they had an almost mystical regard for the heroes who had dominated it in its days of greatness. The city of Troy had stood not four miles from the southern entrance to the Dardanelles. Around it lay the once embattled Troad, now called the Troas Plain. And high above loomed Mount Ida, from whose 5,800-foot peak the gods were said to have witnessed the Trojan War. Upon learning that he was bound for the Bosporus, Rupert Brooke wrote: “It’s too wonderful for belief. I had not imagined Fate could be so benign…. Will Hero’s Tower crumble under the 15-inch guns? Will the sea be polyphloisbic and wine-dark and unvintageable? Shall I loot mosaics from St. Sophia, and Turkish Delight and carpets? Shall we be a Turning Point in History? Oh God! I’ve never been quite so happy in my life I think. Never quite so pervasively happy; like a stream flowing entirely to one end. I suddenly realize that the ambition of my life has been—since I was two—to go on a military expedition against Constantinople.” It was Brooke, the symbol of the idealistic generation now being fed to the guns, who had just written:⁵⁹

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.

Even Churchill, who had despised his Greek classes at Harrow, confronted the Turkish challenge with a quickening pulse; at the climax of his novel, Savrola, an admiral had led his ships past a gauntlet of blazing forts. That, however, had been fiction. To the Admiralty, Kitchener’s insistence upon a naval attack, unsupported by infantry on Gallipoli, seemed futile. Nevertheless, Churchill summoned his senior admirals and asked their opinion. As he expected, they were pessimistic. Yet he was reluctant to leave the issue there. It was crucial, and not only because of the need for Grand Duke Nicholas to keep Germany’s eastern armies tied down. Russia’s grain was wanted to feed the Allies; 350,000 tons of it were piled up in the Black Sea ports. Any action in Asia Minor would have to be confined to old battleships not needed by Jellicoe in the North Sea. England’s security could not be compromised. As it happened, old battleships were available; in his last naval estimates Winston had provided funds to keep such vessels in commission. There was another factor. “Like most people,” he testified before a commission investigating the campaign in 1916, “I had held the opinion that the days of forcing the Dardanelles were over…. But this war had brought many surprises. We had seen fortresses reputed throughout Europe to be impregnable collapsing after a few days’ attack by field armies without a regular siege.” Before he broke the bad news to Kitchener, he decided, he would send a query to Vice Admiral Sackville Carden, commanding the blockading squadron off Cape Helles. He wired him: “Do you consider the forcing of the Dardanelles by ships alone a practicable operation. It is assumed that older battleships fitted with mine-bumpers would be used preceded by colliers or other merchant craft as bumpers and sweepers. Importance of results would justify severe loss. Let me know your views.”⁶⁰

Admiral Carden’s reply reached the Admiralty on the morning of January 5, 1915, and it was electrifying. “With reference to your telegram of 3rd instant,” it began, “I do not consider that the Dardanelles can be rushed. They might be forced by extended operations with large number of ships.” He outlined four phases of action: leveling defenses at the entrance, clearing the channel up to the Narrows, reducing the Narrows forts, and the “final advance to Marmara.” As Churchill later testified, this was “the most important telegram. Here was the Admiral, who had been for weeks sitting off the Dardanelles, who presumably had been turning this thing over in his mind again and again, wondering on the possibilities of action there, who produced a plan, and a detailed plan and a novel plan.” He showed it to the sea lords, who were as startled as he was; Fisher enthusiastically volunteered to send Carden his newest superdreadnought, the Queen Elizabeth, whose fifteen-inch guns had not even been fired yet. Churchill testified: “We all felt ourselves in the presence of a ‘new fact.’ Moreover, the Queen Elizabeth came into the argument with a cumulative effect.” He replied to Carden: “Your view is agreed with by high authorities here. Please telegraph in detail what you think could be done by extended operations, what force would be needed, and how you would consider it should be used.” In his answer, which arrived in London on January 11, the admiral asked for twelve battleships, three heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, sixteen destroyers, six submarines, four seaplanes, twelve minesweepers, and a score of miscellaneous vessels. He planned to open with a long-range bombardment of the forts; then, with minesweepers leading the way, to sail close and destroy them seriatim. At the same time, the Turks would be misled by diversionary shelling on both coasts of Gallipoli. He wanted a great deal of ammunition, and once he had broken through to the Sea of Marmara, he intended to keep the Dardanelles clear by constant patrolling. “Time required for operations,” he concluded, “depends greatly on morale of enemy under bombardment; garrison largely stiffened by the Germans; also on weather conditions. Gales now frequent. Might do it all in a month about.” He proposed to start the operation on February 1 with hull-down fire from the Queen Elizabeth.⁶¹

Churchill laid all this before Asquith and Kitchener early in the afternoon on January 12. He had been particularly pleased with Fisher’s response, writing him how glad he was that, as a result of the first sea lord’s initiative, the mighty new ship would be “firing all her ammunition at the Dardanelles forts instead of uselessly into the sea.” At noon the next day he put the War Council in the picture. Sir John French was there. After discussing the progress of plans for an amphibious attack on the German U-boat pens in Zeebrugge, Belgium, which he favored, Winston stepped up to a map and described Carden’s proposal, arguing, as Lloyd George put it, “with all the inexorable force and pertinacity, together with the mastery of detail he always commands when he is really interested in a subject.” He said the Admiralty could spare the twelve old battleships Carden wanted and add three modern dreadnoughts “without reducing our strength in the main theatre of war.” Then he said: “Once the forts are reduced, the minefields will be cleared and the Fleet will proceed up to Constantinople and destroy the Goeben.” According to Hankey’s memories, The Supreme Command, “The idea caught on at once…. The War Council turned eagerly from the dreary vista of a ‘slogging match’ on the Western Front to brighter prospects, as they seemed, in the Mediterranean.” Asquith liked it now. Lloyd George agreed, and so did Kitchener. Arthur Balfour, present as a senior statesman, thought it would be hard to imagine a more useful operation. K of K said that if the bombardment proved ineffective, they could cancel the rest of the operation. The decision was unanimous: “That the Admiralty should prepare for a naval expedition and take Gallipoli with Constantinople as its objective.”⁶²

Fisher said nothing. The sea lords made a point of never speaking up at these meetings. As he once explained: “When sailors get round a Council Board they are almost invariably mute. The politicians who are round the Board are never mute; they would never have got there if they had been mute.” Yet even when he was silent his presence was felt, and an understanding of him and the minister for war, the two professionals on the War Council, is essential to a grasp of what was happening and, more important, to what lay ahead. Both were immensely popular with the British public, so much so that the cabinet members, their nominal superiors, would go to almost any lengths to avoid antagonizing them. Erratic and peppery, the old admiral seemed the very personification of English sea traditions, a dauntless figure who ranked with Drake and Nelson. Churchill compared him to “a great castle, which has long contended with time; the mighty central mass of the donjon towered up intact and seemingly everlasting.” But the mightiest castle crumbles in time, and probably no septuagenarian could have borne the strain of serving as first sea lord in 1915. Moreover, Fisher’s temperament was ill-suited to working in harness with Churchill through an endless series of crises. Violet Asquith wrote of the admiral: “He lived by instincts, hunches, flashes, which he was unable to justify or sustain in argument. Though words poured from his lips and from his pen he was no match for Winston as a dialectician. In trying to defend his own position he trumped up reasons and pretexts of no substance which Winston easily demolished…. His personal intimacy with Winston and affection for him increased his sense of helplessness in standing up to him.”⁶³

Kitchener was underrated by the rest of the cabinet. Like Fisher, he had predicted the year of the war’s outbreak, and he had been among the first to see the possibilities of the Dardanelles. It was his tragedy, and England’s, that no one dared say no to him. As Churchill testified a year later, “His prestige and authority were immense. He was the sole mouthpiece of War Office opinion in the War Council…. He was never, to my belief, overruled by the War Council or the Cabinet, in any military matter, great or small…. Respect for the man, sympathy for his immense labours, confidence in his professional judgment, and the belief that he had plans deeper and wider than any we could see, silenced misgivings and disputes, whether in the Council or at the War Office. All-powerful, imperturbable, reserved, he dominated absolutely our counsels at this time.” Sir Osbert Sitwell thought he knew why. Six months earlier, at the time of Sarajevo, Sitwell had written that Kitchener “plainly belonged to some different order of creation from those around him… he could claim kinship to the old race of gigantic German generals, spawned by Wotan in the Prussian plains, and born with spiked helments ready on their heads… he sat there with the same suggestion of immense strength and even of latent fury.”⁶⁴

Kitchener was caught in a bloody debate between the “Westerners,” as they were called—those who believed the war could be won only in France—and the “Easterners,” who were convinced that the solution lay in Asia Minor, the Balkans, Italy, or the Baltic. Almost without exception, the Westerners were crusty, stubborn, conservative regular army officers who had been posted to France because that was where the fighting had begun, and whose professional reputations could be made only there. If France became a dead end, their sacrifice of all the lives there would have been made in vain. Haig said the key to victory was “attrition,” which, his general staff explained, meant “wearing down the Boches.” But this assumed that more Germans were dying than Englishmen. And it wasn’t true. In the struggle for Flanders, three British soldiers fell for every two Germans. In the battle of the Somme, the figures were two British to one German. Incessant shelling back and forth across no-man’s-land meant that even in the quietest sector more than a thousand Britons died every week. Sir John French admitted to the War Council that “complete success against the Germans in the Western theatre of war, though possible is not probable.” When his subordinates heard of this they turned mutinous and began to plot against him. Henry Wilson was alarmed by news of the Dardanelles preparations. He wrote Bonar Law that “the way to end this war is to kill Germans, not Turks. The place where we can kill most Germans is here, and therefore every man and every round of ammunition we have got in the world ought to come here. All history shows that operations in a secondary and ineffectual theatre have no bearing on major operations—except to weaken the force there engaged. History, no doubt, will repeat her lesson once more for our benefit.”⁶⁵

This was poppycock. The way to end a war is to win it—defeating the enemy by superior strategy, not by counting his dead, especially when, as in this case, his count is lower than yours. And history refutes Wilson. Day by day, in World War I English losses in France were triple those in World War II, when, with Churchill as prime minister, British armies were fighting all over the world. Between 1914 and 1918 Britain’s generals slaughtered the most idealistic generation of young leaders in the history of England, and all to no purpose. Never in the field of human conflict have so many suffered so much to gratify the pride of so few. And this was clear to some men at the time. Those not blinded by chauvinism were shocked and incredulous. Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated hero of the trenches, threw his medal away and wrote: “Pray God that you may never know / The hell where youth and laughter go.” “How long,” D. H. Lawrence wrote Asquith’s daughter-in-law Cynthia, “will the nations continue to empty the future?”⁶⁶

Lord Salisbury had warned the generation of parliamentarians who would succeed him: “No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe.” They hadn’t forgotten, but they were bullied by the military experts’ doctrine of attrition. Thus cowed, they writhed and protested. Lloyd George wept over the millions of youths who did “their intrepid best to obey the fatuous orders,” advancing “against the most terrible machine-gun fire directed against troops.” Churchill pointed out: “A policy of pure attrition between armies so evenly balanced cannot lead to a decision…. Unless this problem can be solved satisfactorily, we shall simply be wearing each other out on a gigantic scale and with fearful sacrifices without ever reaping the reward.”⁶⁷

These civilian ministers knew the military hierarchy didn’t have the answers. But neither did they. Like animals trapped in a maze they scurried this way and that, so confused that they wouldn’t have recognized a way out if they had stumbled upon it. In that same War Council meeting which adopted the Dardanelles plan, orders were issued to draw up plans for operations in Salonika, the Netherlands, Rumania, and the Gulf of Kotor on the Adriatic. Lloyd George wanted rolling stock built for the Salonika railroad “and perhaps barges built for the Danube.” Churchill agreed. “At the worst,” he said, “they would be a good feint.” Then he himself, who had just delivered a brilliant presentation of the flanking movement through Turkey, said: “We ought not to go South until we can do nothing in the North. Is there, for example, no possibility of action in Holland?”⁶⁸ Grey replied that there was none. Nothing could be done there until the War Office could provide at least 300,000 soldiers for an expedition. Winston said no more. Calls for troops stopped every ministerial discussion. Troops had to come from Kitchener. Kitchener would have to get them from the BEF, and there would be hell to pay in France. He would have paid if he were sure an operation would succeed. But in this new war, with its machines and gas and mines and land ships that sailed underwater, nothing could guarantee success. Inertia bound him; he sided with his brother officers across the Channel while Fisher, similarly torn, fell back on the peacetime axiom that a good naval commander doesn’t risk the vessels entrusted to him.

Actually, Fisher was more confused than Kitchener. Later his conduct would raise questions about his sanity, but his bewilderment on January 13 is understandable. The council had decided that the Dardanelles task force should “take Gallipoli with Constantinople as its objective.” How could a fleet “take” a peninsula? How could it occupy a great city? As we know now, the occupation of Constantinople would have been unnecessary; the dissident Turkish mobs would have done the job for them. At the time, however, no one in London could have guessed that. Nevertheless, the plan pleased everyone. Grey saw neutral states lining up to join the Allies. Arthur Balfour, who had been invited to join the council, not as a member of the Opposition, but as an elder statesman, thought everything about the Dardanelles sounded splendid. The French, similarly enchanted, offered four battleships. The Russians hinted that they might send troops, which was impractical. Kitchener, who did not know that, was delighted.

Churchill now set aside all thoughts of a Baltic campaign and concentrated on the Dardanelles. He believed the battle was as good as won, always a dangerous assumption in war. By coincidence January 13 was the Russian New Year, and he had sent an extravagant holiday message to Saint Petersburg: “Our resources are within reach and inexhaustible; our minds are made up. We have only to bend forward together laying aside every hindrance, keeping nothing back, and the downfall of German ambition is sure.” For the next week he and an ad hoc Admiralty war group examined every particular detail of the coming attack, sending and receiving telegrams from Carden almost hourly. Each instruction, each technical problem, was read, endorsed, and initialed by the first sea lord with the famous scrawled green F. Yet the old admiral was seething. Like a tumor, an irrational terror was growing in him—the fear that the Aegean expedition would weaken the Home Fleet, encouraging Tirpitz to steam into Scapa Flow with a superior force, sink every British warship left there, and win the war. In that case Jellicoe would become the defeated admiral. But he did not share the first sea lord’s doubts. He kept sending him reassurances. Fisher was unconsoled. On January 19, six days after the decision, he wrote Jellicoe that the ships sailing to the eastern Mediterranean were “all urgently required at the decisive theatre at home! There is only one way out, and that is to resign! But you say ‘no,’ which simply means I am a consenting party to what I absolutely disapprove. I don’t agree with one single step taken, so it is fearfully against the grain that I remain on in deference to your wishes.” The next day he wept on Hankey’s shoulder. Hankey told Asquith, who wrote Venetia that the old man was “in a very unhappy frame of mind,” that he “likes Winston personally” but was frequently overruled (“he out-argues me”) on purely “technical naval matters.”⁶⁹

The Dardanelles assault had been approved, not by Churchill, but by the entire War Council. Fisher had participated in every step taken since then. Winston had no inkling of his anxiety until, eight days after the arrival of Carden’s plan of attack, the first sea lord urged the recall of a destroyer flotilla and an Australian submarine which had been sent to the Aegean from Scapa Flow. He himself had suggested the dispatch of the Queen Elizabeth, but on January 21, in another letter to Jellicoe, he wrote that its transfer was “a serious interference with our imperative needs in Home waters, and I’ve fought against it ‘tooth and nail.’… I just abominate the Dardanelles operation, unless a great change is made and it is settled to be a military operation, with 200,000 men in conjunction with the Fleet. I believe that Kitchener is coming now to this view of the matter.” But Kitchener wasn’t, at least not yet. Thus far the War Office had not been drawn in. Churchill would have been elated had K of K offered 200,000 men, or even a fraction of that. Lacking troops, Winston was moving forward on the strength of Carden’s professional opinion. All of them had endorsed it, including Fisher. Yet the old salt continued to have second thoughts. His blaming Churchill was a consequence of senility. Matters had to come to a head; even he recognized that, and so, on January 25, he submitted a rebellious memorandum to the first lord, with a request that it be printed and circulated among members of the War Council before their next meeting, scheduled three days hence. His paper was a flat renunciation of the entire Dardanelles plan. “We play into Germany’s hands,” he wrote, “if we risk fighting ships in any subsidiary operations such as coastal bombardments or the attack of fortified places without military co-operation, for we thereby increase the possibility that the Germans may be able to engage our Fleet with some approach to equality of strength. The sole justification of coastal bombardments… is to force a decision at sea, and so far and no further can they be justified.” Therefore, the Admiralty should be satisfied with blockading the enemy: “Being already in possession of all that a powerful fleet can give a country we should continue quietly to enjoy the advantage without dissipating our strength in operations that cannot improve the position.”⁷⁰

Churchill was stunned. He immediately drew up a table comparing the naval strengths of Britain and Germany, pointing out that England’s domination of the North Sea would be unweakened by the Dardanelles task force. Jellicoe concurred. Fisher wouldn’t budge. Asquith refused to circulate either his memorandum or Winston’s table. On the morning of the next War Council meeting Churchill found Fisher’s resignation on his desk. “I entreat you to believe,” he said in part, “that if as I think really desirable for a complete ‘unity of purpose’ in the War that I should gracefully disappear and revert to roses at Richmond (‘The heart untravelled fondly turns to home’) that there will not be in my heart the least lingering thought of anything but regard and affection and indeed much admiration towards yourself.”⁷¹

Winston hurried across the Horse Guards Parade to No. 10. Asquith, furious, summoned Fisher to his upstairs study, heard his version and Churchill’s, and told them his decision. As a sop to Fisher, the Zeebrugge operation was shelved. The Dardanelles plan would stand unchanged. The three men then descended to the Cabinet Room to join the council. Fisher remained taciturn as usual until Churchill mentioned French and Russian reactions to Carden’s coming campaign in Turkey. At that he spoke up, saying he had “understood that this question would not be raised today, and the Prime Minister is well aware of my views in regard to it.” With that, he rose, left the table, and stood at a window with his back to the others. Kitchener went to him. Fisher, tight-lipped, said he was leaving the Admiralty. Kitchener pointed out that everyone else believed in the plan, that the prime minister had issued the directive, and that it was the first sea lord’s duty to follow orders. Reluctantly the old admiral returned to his seat. As he himself said later, “Naval opinion was unanimous. Mr. Churchill had them all on his side. I was the only rebel.” Asquith told the meeting that Churchill was anxious to have everyone’s views on the importance of the coming campaign. Kitchener considered the naval attack to be “vitally important. If successful, its effect would be the equivalent of a successful campaign fought with the new armies.” Grey said it would settle the situation in the Balkans, particularly in Bulgaria. Balfour was rhapsodic. He thought it would cut Turkey in half, turn Constantinople into an Allied base, provide them with Russian wheat, and open a passage to the Danube. “It is difficult,” he said, to “imagine a more helpful operation.”⁷²

During these cheerful forecasts, Asquith scribbled a note to Venetia: “A personal matter which rather worries me is the growing friction between Winston and Fisher.” As the council broke for lunch, the prime minister called the old salt to his study, and, after a turbulent hour, persuaded him to support it. Fisher, indeed, seemed to have been transformed into an enthusiast. He even suggested—and the offer was accepted—that Carden be reinforced by two 1908 battleships from Scapa Flow, the Lord Nelson and the Agamemnon. “When I finally decided to come in,” he later testified, “I went the whole hog, totus porcus.” Churchill sprang a surprise during that afternoon’s session. He announced that he didn’t want troops even if Kitchener offered them. “A landing in force under fire on the Gallipoli peninsula” once the Turks were “fully awakened,” he argued, would involve “a greater stake.” A successful naval action could produce “revolutionary effects at Constantinople and throughout the Balkans.” The prospects for success were so bright that he believed it worthwhile “to try the naval plan” even though, if it failed, “a subsequent military operation” would be rendered “more difficult.” If a brigade of Tommies was available, he suggested, it should be sent to Salonika, where, he believed, the appearance of no more than 10,000 British soldiers would bring Greece’s 180,000 troops into the war. As the dinner hour approached, he conferred with Fisher and Vice Admiral Henry Oliver, chief of the Admiralty War Staff, then told the council, with Fisher’s approval, that the Admiralty was united in its determination to “make a naval attack on the Dardanelles.” Oliver said: “The first shot will be fired in about a fortnight.”⁷³

Actually, it would not be fired for over three weeks. Meanwhile, misunderstandings and disagreements, inherent in war by committee, multiplied. “No single man,” Robert Rhodes James has observed, “can, or should, bear responsibility for the series of decisions, half-decisions, and evasions of decisions that marked the initiation of the Gallipoli campaign. The manner in which the Asquith Government drifted into this vast commitment of men and resources… condemns not any individual but rather the system of war government practiced by the Administration.” Churchill, however, had become the operation’s most visible advocate and its most eloquent spokesman. As he saw the situation in early 1915, France had become an abattoir, the Russians were bogged down, the German fleet refused to come out and fight, and the world’s finest military instrument, the Royal Navy, was idle. Therefore, as Asquith noted, “Winston is for the moment as keen as mustard about his Dardanelles adventure.” It had become his Dardanelles adventure. Even the prime minister now thought of it that way. As such, it would become a cross he bore for years. Later it was seen as a monument to his genius. In Through the Fog of War, Liddell Hart wrote: “Everyone realizes that, in the words of the German official account, ‘Churchill’s bold idea was not a finespun fantasy of the brain.’ We too now know, as the Germans did in the War, how feasible was the Dardanelles project, and how vital its effect would have been.” Another writer, Edward Grigg, declared that had Churchill’s advice been followed—had he had the power of the prime minister—“not only the entire development of the First World War but also the fate of Britain, and Europe, too, would have been different.”⁷⁴

But he was not prime minister. In attempting to reshape the entire direction of the war from the Admiralty, he was headed for rocks and shoals. It was Antwerp again—in spades. As he recalled in 1949: “I was ruined for the time being over the Dardanelles, and a supreme enterprise cast away, through my trying to carry out a major and combined enterprise of war from a subordinate position.” Ian Hamilton described him as “one who has it in him to revive the part of Pitt, had he but Pitt’s place.” Lacking it, he was unable to force, not the Dardanelles, but Britain’s naval and military commanders. Moreover, being wholly competent himself, he assumed that they were, too. They weren’t. Hindenburg called the British soldiers of that war “lions led by donkeys.”⁷⁵ Some were stupid; others were devious. Haig told the War Office that the Germans being taken prisoner were in wretched condition, proof that the enemy was scraping the bottom of the barrel; when the prime minister crossed the Channel to see for himself, Haig packed a POW camp with sick, scrawny captives. Able politicians should see through such scams. They are, or ought to be, shrewd judges of men, and Churchill’s continuing misjudgment of Fisher, his failure to realize that his first sea lord was a Judas, spelled trouble ahead. So did his puzzling claim that he didn’t need troops on Gallipoli.

At first it passed unnoticed. At the next meeting of the War Council, on February 9, Churchill informed them of a dazzling coup de maître. Venizelos had been persuaded to defy his king and turn the Greek island of Lemnos over to the British as a base for operations against Turkey. It was a masterstroke, accomplished with tact and restraint—Winston had overruled Fisher’s preposterous proposal that they annex Lemnos and Lesbos—and the ministers were too elated to question this intrusion into Grey’s domain. It was four days later, when the warships detailed to shell the Dardanelles had assembled off Cape Helles, and Carden was awaiting the last minesweepers before attacking, that Hankey became the first to challenge Winston’s position on troops. He approached Asquith, who wrote Venetia that Hankey “thinks very strongly that the naval operations of which you know should be supported by landing a fairly strong military force. I have been for some time coming to the same opinion, and I think we ought to be able without denuding [Sir John] French to scrape together from Egypt, Malta & elsewhere a sufficiently large contingent.” Others were reaching the same conclusion independently. The next day Richmond sent Hankey a memorandum arguing that “the bombardment of the Dardanelles, even if all the forts are destroyed, can be nothing but a local success, which without an army to carry it on can have no further effect.” Hankey replied, “Your Memo. is absolutely A.I… I am sending it to Jacky.” Fisher wrote Richmond: “YOUR PAPER IS EXCELLENT.” That same day Admiral Sir Henry Jackson submitted a minute to the first lord: “The naval bombardment is not recommended as a sound military operation unless a strong military force is ready to assist in the operation, or, at least, follow it up immediately the forts are silenced.”⁷⁶

All this gave Churchill pause. In first broaching the subject of the Dardanelles, he had specified the need for infantry; his switch had been based on Carden’s assurance that warships could do the job alone. Now, a month later, he belatedly roused himself and cast about for sources of troops. As it happened, the very day he received Jackson’s opinion, the Greeks rejected Grey’s offer of a Salonika expedition. That meant a first-class division, the Twenty-ninth, was available for assignment elsewhere. Asquith called an emergency meeting of the War Council. Kitchener agreed that the Twenty-ninth should sail to Lemnos “at the earliest possible date.” There they would be joined by a marine brigade and the Australian and New Zealand troops now in Egypt, all of which would be available “in case of necessity to support the naval attack on the Dardanelles.” The first lord was directed to assemble sufficient transports to carry “a force of 50,000 men at any point where they might be required.” The attempt on the strait was now imminent. K of K passed Winston a note: “You get through! I will find the men.”⁷⁷

The bond between Churchill and Kitchener was vital to the campaign, and at this very unfortunate moment it was cut. The origins of the dispute are unclear. Apparently Winston, on one of his visits to France, had told Sir John French that he might be in a position to lend him some Admiralty troops and equipment. It had been an informal remark. It was also ill-advised. K of K was sensitive about his prerogatives. When French sent the War Office a written request for the men and matériel Churchill had so unwisely dangled before him, the war minister went straight to the prime minister. Asquith wrote Winston: “Kitchener has just been to see me in a state of some perturbation. He has just received two official letters from French, in which he announces that you have offered him a Brigade of the Naval Division, and 2 squadrons of armoured cars. Kitchener is strongly of the opinion that French has no need of either. But, apart from that, he feels (& I think rightly) that he ought to have been told of, & consulted about, the offer before it was made.” That evening Margot Asquith wrote in her diary: “Of course Winston is intolerable. It is all vanity—he is devoured by vanity…. It’s most trying as K and he had got a modus vivendi.” Churchill explained that it was all a misunderstanding, but in the morning Asquith wrote Venetia: “I am rather vexed with Winston who has been tactless enough to offer Sir John F (behind K’s back & without his knowledge) a brigade of his Naval Division, and 2 squadrons of his famous Armoured Cars which are being hawked about from pillar to post.”⁷⁸

On such petty quarrels did the fate of millions hang. Winston wrote Kitchener on February 19, attempting a reconciliation. It wasn’t enough. The war minister’s rage was still glowing when the War Council met that afternoon to confirm its decision, made three days earlier, to send the Twenty-ninth Division to Lemnos. K of K bluntly told the dismayed ministers that he had changed his mind. He had decided to withhold, not only the nineteen thousand trained men of the Twenty-ninth Division, but also the thirty thousand Australians and New Zealanders in Egypt. Asquith, Churchill, and Lloyd George protested—Lloyd George thought even these wouldn’t be enough; he wanted to reinforce them with the ten-thousand-man Royal Naval Division, fifteen thousand Frenchmen, and ten thousand Russians. Grey’s support was tepid; Lemnos rankled, after all. Kitchener said he would think it over. But four days later when Winston repeated his request for men—it was “not a question of sending them immediately to the Dardanelles,” he explained, “but merely of having them within reach”—K of K replied that the Twenty-ninth still could not be spared. The Russian front was fluid, he had said; if disaster struck there, the men of the Twenty-ninth were “the only troops we have available as a reserve to send over to France.” It was his impression that the Dardanelles had been conceived as a naval attack; did Churchill plan to lead an army, too? Not at all, said Winston. He could, however, imagine a situation in which victory was within reach “but where a military force would just make the difference between success and failure.” One senses his frustration when Lloyd George, his strongest supporter in the last discussion, now warned against using troops “to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the Navy,” suggesting that if the Dardanelles miscarried, “we ought to be immediately ready to try something else” in the Middle East—presumably Syria, his pet idea. Kitchener was immovable. He doubted the Turks would try to defend Gallipoli. Churchill said they might have forty thousand men there already. If so, Kitchener predicted, they would evacuate the peninsula after the bombardment.⁷⁹

The War Council voted to postpone further discussion of the division’s destiny until the next meeting. Winston, appalled and angry, demanded that his objection be entered in the council’s minutes, and so it was: “MR CHURCHILL said that the XXIX Division would not make the difference between failure and success in France, but might well make the difference in the East. He wished it to be placed on record that he dissented altogether from the retention of the XXIX Division in this country. If a disaster occurred in Turkey owing to the insufficiency of troops, he must disclaim all responsibility.” That evening he wrote his brother that this “was vy vexatious to me, & hard to bear…. The capacity to run risks is at famine prices. All play for safety. The war is certainly settling on to a grim basis, & it is evident that long vistas of pain & struggle lie ahead. The limited fund of life & energy wh I possess is not much use in trying to influence these tremendous moments. I toil away.”⁸⁰

Asquith shared his chagrin, but such was Kitchener’s power to intimidate that even the prime minister wasn’t prepared to risk offending him. Of this pivotal meeting he wrote Venetia: “We are all agreed (except K) that the naval adventure in the Dardanelles shd be backed up by a strong military force.” Kitchener was being “very sticky,” he thought, because “he wants to have something in hand, in case the Germans are so far successful against Russia for the moment, as to be able to despatch Westwards a huge army—perhaps of a million—to try & force Joffre & French’s lines.” Asquith himself felt that “one must take a lot of risks in war, & I am strongly of the opinion that the chance of forcing the Dardanelles, & occupying Constantinople… presents such a unique opportunity that we ought to hazard a lot elsewhere rather than forgo it. If K can be convinced, well & good: but to discard his advice & overrule his judgment on a military question is to take a great responsibility. So I am rather anxious.”⁸¹

Churchill at any rate could send the Royal Naval Division, survivors of Antwerp. For the first time in his life he joined a royal entourage; he and the prime minister accompanied George V to Blandford, where the King reviewed the men before they shipped out. Oc Asquith was there, and Rupert Brooke. Margot wrote in her diary: “The whole 9,000 men were drawn up on the glorious downs and Winston walked round and inspected them before the King arrived. I felt quite a thrill when I saw Oc and Rupert with walking sticks standing in front of their men looking quite wonderful! Rupert is a beautiful young man and we get on well, he has so much intellectual temperament and nature about him. He told Oc he was quite certain he would never come back but would be killed—it didn’t depress him at all but he was just convinced—I shall be curious to see if this turns out to be a true instinct…. They marched past perfectly. I saw the silver band (given to the Hood Division by Winston’s constituents) coming up the hill and the bayonets flashing—I saw the uneven ground and the straight backs—“Eyesssssss RIGHT!”—and the darling boy had passed. The King was pleased and told me they all marched wonderfully.” Brooke wrote:⁸²

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

And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping.

His instinct turned out to be true. In two months he was dead. He had been twenty-seven years old. Winston wrote his obituary in The Times: “This 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.”⁸³

It wasn’t much. His father, a housemaster at Rugby, where Rupert had been so popular, drew small comfort from it. His dons at King’s College, Cambridge, wondered instead what he would have become. Oc grieved for a year. Then he himself, having survived the Dardanelles, was killed in France.

Sackville Hamilton Carden was not the ideal commander for the Aegean squadron. Approaching sixty, he had been superintendent of the Malta dockyards until the outbreak of the war and lacked the temperament of a fighter. Churchill’s candidate for the appointment had been Sir Arthur Limpus, a younger, more aggressive admiral who had studied the Dardanelles for years, but in early September, when Turkey had still been neutral, Grey had felt that naming Limpus would provoke the Turks. Carden was an able strategist. His plan to rush the Dardanelles was sound. But he was a worrier. He worried about the heavy concentration of enemy guns on the banks of the strait and was uncomforted by assurances that they were small, obsolete, and poorly sited. Driftage in the channel troubled him; although there was no tide in the strait, tributaries and melting snows produced a five-knot current, and chunks of floating ice could be expected at this time of year. Vessels which could navigate the Orkney Islands, however, would have no problems here. The danger of minefields preyed on his mind. This was a real hazard, but the Admiralty had judged the risk acceptable and provided him with sufficient minesweepers. None of these objections mattered in themselves. Carden’s weakness was that, faced with an operation requiring exceptional daring, he was unsure of himself. It was a disease among military leaders in that war, and it was catching. Confronted by so many martial innovations, most senior officers had by 1915 become excessively cautious and easily discouraged. Bravery had nothing to do with it. Carden’s second in command, Vice Admiral John de Robeck, was brave in battle, but faced with crucial decisions, he would prove to be of the same stripe.

Their long-awaited attack opened at 9:51 on the blustery morning of Friday, February 19, 1915. The Allied task force—eight British battleships, four French—approached the mouth of the strait and opened fire on the Turkish forts guarding its lips, Kum Kale and Cape Helles. It was no contest. The range of the defensive batteries was so short that their shells couldn’t even reach the ships. At two o’clock that afternoon the warships closed to six thousand yards; at 4:45 P.M. de Robeck led Vengeance, Cornwallis, and Suffren closer still. Most of the blockhouses, shrouded in smoke, appeared deserted. Then night fell. High seas, snow, and sleet prevented further action until the following Thursday. But in the interim Carden, encouraged by the one-sided duel, telegraphed the Admiralty: “I do not intend to commence in bad weather leaving result undecided as from experience on first day I am convinced given favourable weather conditions that the reduction of the forts at the entrance can be completed in one day.”⁸⁴ When the weather cleared, de Robeck carried the assault up to the very muzzles of the blockhouses. The remaining Turkish and German gunners fled northward. Royal Marines landed on Gallipoli, spiking guns and destroying searchlights. Another party went ashore at Kum Kale. Minesweepers penetrated the strait six miles upstream, to within three thousand yards of Kephez Point, without meeting significant resistance. Carden wired London that he expected to reach Constantinople in two weeks.

The War Council was ecstatic. Fisher wanted to hurry to the Aegean and lead the next assault, on the Narrows. The export of Russian wheat seemed imminent; in Chicago the price of grain fell sharply. Churchill, meanwhile, was counting all his unhatched chickens. At the end of February he cabled Grand Duke Nicholas: “The progress of an attack on Dlles is encouraging & good & we think the Russian Black Sea Fleet shd now get ready at Sebastopol to come to the entrance of the Bosporus at the right moment, of wh we will send notice.” Asquith wrote Venetia: “Winston is breast high about the Dardanelles.” That same evening the political climate in Athens went through yet another transformation. King Constantine was having second thoughts. Like the rest of the Balkan rulers, he wanted to be on the winning side. Violet Asquith was “sitting with Clemmie at the Admiralty when Winston came in in a state of wild excitement and joy. He showed us, under many pledges of secrecy, a telegram from Venizelos promising help from the Greeks…. Our joy knew no bounds.” Violet asked if Constantine knew of this. “Yes,” said Churchill, “our Minister said Venizelos had already approached the King and he was in favour of war.” Moreover, he went on, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Italy were all “waiting—ready to pounce—all determined to play a part in the fall of Constantinople.” Violet recrossed the Horse Guards “treading on air. Turkey, encircled by a host of enemies, was doomed, the German flank was turned, the Balkans for once united and on our side, the war shortened perhaps by years, and Winston’s vision and persistence vindicated.”⁸⁵

He was already contemplating peace terms. To Grey he wrote two days later: “We must not disinterest ourselves in the final settlement of this region…. I am having an Admy paper prepared abt the effect of a Russian control of the Straits and Cple. I hope you will not settle anything further until you can read it. English history will not end with this war.” Others were also looking to the future. Fisher wrote Winston: “Moral:—Carden to press on! and Kitchener to occupy the deserted Forts at extremity of Gallipoli and mount howitzers there!… Invite Bulgaria by telegram (direct from Sir E. Grey) to take Kavalla and Salonica provided she at once attacks Turkey and tell Greece ‘Too late’! and seize the Greek Fleet by a ‘coup’ later on. They wd probably join us now if bribed! All the kings are against all the peoples! Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania! What an opportunity for Democracy!” Asquith told Venetia that one of his ministers had written “an almost dithyrambic memorandum urging that in the carving up of the Turks’ Asiatic dominions, we should take Palestine, into which the scattered Jews cd in time swarm back from all the quarters of the globe, and in due course obtain Home Rule. (What an attractive community!)” Hankey had prepared a seven-page paper: “After the Dardanelles: The Next Steps.” He advocated a broad drive by British, Serbian, Greek, Rumanian, and Russian troops, targeted on the Carpathian Mountains between what are now Czechoslovakia and Poland. Others wanted to follow the Danube from the Black Sea through Austria-Hungary, into Germany’s Black Forest. Churchill, to whom the War Council now listened with great respect, disagreed. “We ought not to make the main lines of advance up the Danube,” he said on March 3. “We ought not to employ more troops in this theatre of war than are absolutely essential in order to induce the Balkan states to march.” He still believed that the proper strategy was an “advance in the north through Holland and the Baltic.”⁸⁶

During this euphoric interlude, Kitchener’s Twenty-ninth Division shrank in significance. Churchill told the War Council that in exploiting Constantinople’s capitulation they could count on 140,000 men: the British troops in Egypt, the Royal Naval Division now at sea, 2,000 Royal Marines already on Lemnos, a French division, the three Greek divisions Venizelos had promised, and a Russian corps preparing to embark at Batum, the Black Sea port near the Russo-Turkish border. He hadn’t even counted the Rumanians, Bulgarians, and Italians waiting in the wings. Greece’s 60,000 troops alone could seize and fortify Gallipoli. But speed, as Fisher had noted, was essential. On March 4 Winston wrote Grey: “Mr Venizelos shd be told now that the Admiralty believe it in their power to force the Dardanelles without military assistance, destroying all the forts as they go. If so, Gallipoli Peninsula cannot be held by Turks, who wd be cut off & reduced at leisure. By the 20th inst 40,000 British Infantry will be available to go to C’nople, if the Straits have been forced, either by crossing the Bulair Isthmus, or going up the Dardanelles. A French Divn will be on the spot at the same time. M. Venizelos shd consider Greek military movements in relation to these facts.”⁸⁷

It was at this point that what he later called “the terrible Ifs” began to accumulate. If Greece had entered the war then, everything would not have hinged on Carden’s conquest of the Narrows. The forts there could have been taken from the rear, by land. Churchill warned Grey two days later: “If you don’t back up this Greece—the Greece of Venizelos—you will have another wh will cleave to Germany.”⁸⁸ Precisely that happened. It wasn’t Grey’s fault. The blame lay in Saint Petersburg. Both London and Paris agreed that King Constantine should receive Constantinople’s surrender. The czar, who more than anyone else needed a victory on this front—whose very life depended upon it—refused even to discuss the idea. The Bosporus was his, he told the incredulous British ambassador on March 3; once Constantine entered it in triumph he would never leave. When word of this reached Athens three days later, the Venizelos government fell and was replaced by German sympathizers led by M. Zaimis, who held that Greece must remain neutral because it was threatened by an invasion of Bulgarians. The first domino had failed to topple. The others awaited events in the Dardanelles.

That same day Carden began to encounter difficulties—nothing serious, but enough to exasperate him and temper the enthusiasm at home. Turkish riflemen reappeared at Cape Helles and Kum Kale and drove off the British landing parties. Gales and another storm developed on March 8, and when the sky cleared the admiral’s battleship captains, ordered to silence the land batteries between Kephez Point and Chanak, reported that they couldn’t get within range of them. Minefields barred the way. It was then that the admiral discovered his Achilles’ heel. By tradition, British trawlers used for minesweepers were manned by civilians, fishermen recruited in England’s commercial ports. The Turkish guns couldn’t reach the warships, but they were raking the trawlers, which backed away. One trawler officer told Commodore Roger Keyes, Carden’s chief of staff, that his men “recognize sweeping risks and don’t mind getting blown up, but they hate the gunfire, and point out that they aren’t supposed to sweep under fire, they didn’t join for that.”⁸⁹

Keyes, the ablest officer in the operation, called for volunteers from his Royal Navy tars. Meanwhile, he offered the fishermen bonuses. That night the trawlers tried again. The enemy surprised them with huge searchlights from Germany, uncrated that very afternoon. Blinded by their glare, the sweeper crews turned tail. Keyes pointed out that the enemy fire, though deafening, was wild. He persuaded them to try again the following night. Again they fled. As he wrote afterward: “I was furious and told the officers in charge that they had had their opportunity…. It did not matter if we lost all seven sweepers, there were twenty-eight more, and the mines had got to be swept up. How could they talk of being stopped by heavy fire if they were not hit? The Admiralty were prepared for losses, but we had chucked our hand in and started squealing before we had any.”⁹⁰

In London, Churchill agreed. That same day—March 11—he wired Carden: “Your original instructions laid stress on caution and deliberate methods, and we approve highly the skill and patience with which you have advanced hitherto without loss. The results to be gained are, however, great enough to justify loss of ships and men…. We do not wish to hurry you or urge you beyond your judgment, but we recognise clearly that at a certain period in your operations you will have to press hard for a decision, and we desire to know whether you consider that point has now been reached.” There was no reply—Winston terrified Carden—but in forty-eight hours the bluejacket volunteers were ready, and despite the arrival of new German searchlights and more accurate fire, the sweepers persevered. In the morning shoals of mines, cut adrift by the trawlers’ kites, floated southward with the current. In four or five days, Carden’s staff believed, they would be ready to assault the Narrows. But Churchill was impatient. And his query was still unanswered. He telegraphed again: “I do not understand why minesweeping should be interfered with by firing which causes no casualties. Two or three hundred casualties would be a moderate price to pay for sweeping up as far as the Narrows…. This work has to be done whatever the loss of life and small craft and the sooner it is done the better. Secondly, we have information that the Turkish forts are short of ammunition, that German officers have made desponding reports and have appealed to Germany for more. Every conceivable effort is being made to supply ammunition. It is being seriously considered to send a German or Austrian submarine, but apparently they have not started yet. Above is absolutely secret. All this makes it clear that the operations should now be pressed forward methodically and resolutely by night and day. The unavoidable losses must be accepted. The enemy is harassed and anxious now. The time is precious as the interference of submarines would be a very serious complication.”⁹¹

The first lord’s information about the enemy’s ammunition shortage was accurate. German messages had been intercepted and decoded. As he testified the following year, it was this intelligence coup “that led Lord Fisher and me, with the assent of those whom we were consulting over it, to change the methodical advance and the step-by-step bombardment… into a more decided and vehement attempt to quell and smash up the fortresses at the Narrows and force them to use their ammunition.” At the time, however, security precautions prevented him from revealing his source to Carden. The strain and suspense were too much for the admiral. He replied that he expected to lunge at the Narrows on March 17, but he was exhausted. On the morning of March 15, after two sleepless nights, he told Keyes that he could not survive more pressure from Churchill. He had decided to resign his commission. His staff tried to argue him out of it, but a Harley Street neurologist serving with the fleet examined him and said the admiral was near collapse; his nerves were shot; he must be sent home immediately. Thus, less than two days before the critical attempt on the Narrows, the command devolved on de Robeck. The Admiralty telegraphed him: “Personal and Secret from First Lord. In entrusting to you with great confidence the command of the Mediterranean Detached Fleet I presume… that you consider, after separate and independent judgment, that the immediate operations proposed are wise and practicable. If not, do not hesitate to say so. If so, execute them without delay and without further reference at the first favourable opportunity…. All good fortune attend you.”⁹²

The date was Wednesday, March 17, 1915. De Robeck replied that he would attack in the morning.

It was a day out of season: pleasant, warm, with bright sunshine and a flawless overarching sky. De Robeck’s attacking fleet, the mightiest ever seen in the Mediterranean, was spearheaded by four dreadnoughts, flanked by two battleships. A mile behind them came the four French men-of-war, also flanked by British battleships. Six more battleships, surrounded by destroyers and trawlers, were held in reserve; they were to clear away the last obstacles, sail through the Narrows, and enter the Sea of Marmara the following morning. Twelve hours later the Union Jack and the French tricolor would fly over Constantinople.

A morning fog rose at 10:30, revealing the enemy forts, and the first six warships, taking the bone in their teeth, sailed toward them. After twenty-five minutes of maneuvering, each captain picked his target, half of them facing the Chanak, or Asian, side of the Narrows, and the other half facing the Kilid Bahr, or European, side. Once more the warships were beyond the range of the frustrated Turkish and German gunners. Howitzers on the cliffs downstream could hit the ships, but their shells bounced harmlessly off the thick steel armor. Meanwhile, the forts were being systematically demolished. Ten minutes before noon a British gunner hit the magazine of a key Chanak blockhouse; it erupted in a single sheet of flame. It was the turn of the French. At eight bells, noon, de Robeck signaled Admiral Emile-Paul-Aimable Guépratte to come forward. The Suffren, Bouvet, Charlemagne, and Gaulois fanned out and continued the terrific bombardment for another forty-five minutes. Both banks now resembled a tortured Dantean vision: billowing clouds of dense, roiling smoke, stabbing spurts of flame from the howitzers; roars of bursting shells; debris that heaved and shifted with each hit, dismembered corpses flying upward and into the channel, where ineffectual little fountains of water marked the failure of the fortress guns still in action to reach the towering warships. Occasionally a howitzer shell struck a French or British superstructure, but fewer than a dozen seamen had been wounded. The enemy was approaching extremity. Fort 13 on the European shore had also blown up. The forts’ fire-control communications had been destroyed. Batteries were covered with rubble and the dead. Breechblocks were jammed. De Robeck was now ready to sweep up the last mines and pass his fleet through to the Sea of Marmara. At 1:30 he ordered the French to move aside and signaled the last six battleships and their escorts to move forward past the defeated enemy, and it was then, at 1:45 in the afternoon, a hairbreadth from victory, that the trouble began. Bouvet, pivoting in Suffren’s wake close to the strait’s Asian bank, was rocked by a tremendous explosion. In less than two minutes she heeled over and sank, taking with her the captain and 639 seamen.