Even after the costly losses on the 18th of
March when Admiral de Robeck’s task force failed to pass through the
Dardanelles, it was still firmly believed that Constantinople could be taken
from the sea. The overall idea hadn’t
changed- British and French ships would besiege the ancient city, forcing its
surrender. It was getting there which
was proving problematic. Ships of the
line could push through the channel with enough speed such that the Turkish
guns situated on the high ground on both sides wouldn’t be too bothersome. It was the mines, laid in the hundreds, which
were the real problem. Mine sweeping is
delicate and precise work, requiring the trawlers- mostly privately owned and
crewed by civilians- whose task it was to clear a path to do so with great care
and thus sacrificing speed for thoroughness.
This, in turn, placed them at the mercy of the Turkish gunners, working
from mobile pieces or well-fortified emplacements on the slopes reversing from
the channel side; both equally difficult to hit from the
Success or failure here would go towards a resolution
to the debate which had consumed the attention of military planners and
political minds. Since the establishment
of strong trench lines on the Western Front, two opposing points of view on how
to proceed had developed. Sir Richard
Holmes puts it succinctly that there “Were those ‘easterners’ who, in
Kitchener’s words, were inclined to regard the Western Front a ‘a fortress
which cannot be taken by assault,’ and to look elsewhere for a decision….On the
other side of the debate were those who argued that there was no alternative to
the Western Front.”[1] Much more than philosophical, attempting a
resolution in either the wet or the east would dictate where valuable and
scarce resources; most critically in manpower and munitions, would be
allocated. Precisely because they were
scarce meant that a full effort in both areas couldn’t be done concurrently. At the centre of this was the 29th
Infantry Division.
In February of 1915 “it was still in England, not
committed to any theatre of operations, and therefore available.”[2]
Formed in Warwickshire between January and March 1915, of units recalled to
England from foreign garrisons, the 29th was the last division in
the British order of battle composed of mostly regular army battalions.[3] Such as that was, “after six months of war a
division that was both intact and made up of experienced professional soldiers”[4]
made it a highly coveted asset. Field
Marshall Sir John French, in command of British forces in France and Belgium
wanted it to be placed under his command in the hopes it would be able to add
to a general offensive. Admiral Jackie
Fisher, in command of the Royal Navy had posited that the 29th could
be used to make a landing against Germany via the Baltic. There was little end
to where this division might be sent; but outside of French, other plans for
the 29th were based upon the supposition that territorial and
colonial units should be adequate to the task of holding an established line in
Europe; that the 29th could be more useful applying their expertise
in more dynamic operations. The division
departed England for Alexandria, Egypt in mid-March; ostensibly to be used in a
prospective campaign in Salonika. It
would form the core of a combined command to be known as the Mediterranean
Expeditionary Force which would include the Australian Imperial Force, the New
Zealand Expeditionary Force; which would be formed into one corps to be known
as the “Australia New Zealand Army Corps” (ANZAC) and the French Corps
Expeditionnair d’Orient.[5]
All told, the MEF had 75,000 men and was placed on the 12 of March under the
command of General Sir Ian Hamilton.[6]
Ten days after his appointment, Hamilton met with de
Robeck about the situation in the Dardanelles.
Both agreed that the naval advance could not be resumed “without the
assistance of strong landing parties.”[7] Historian Liddell Hart notes that not only the
Naval actions had put Turkey on high alert; their abrupt cessation and a
complete disregard for operational secrecy made clear the intention of the
British to begin a ground campaign[8].
Alarmed at the disposition of Turkish forces in the face of such obvious
intentions, the commander of the German Military Mission, an attaché to the
Turkish government, General Liman von Sanders lobbied for the ability to
control efforts in the threatened area.
He was given an independent command of six divisions. All he required, was enough time to place
them and make the area defensible, and estimated that given eight days, he
could have everything in place. In the
event, von Sanders had nearly four weeks, which “was just sufficient to
complete the most indispensable arrangements.”[9] The
Turkish divisions were distributed to points of prospective attack, and
unfortunately not concentrated at the places the British intended to put
ashore. General von Sanders had done the
best with what he had to hand; there was no way to cover all possible
approaches with overwhelming numbers, so he held back one division in a central
location in the upper peninsula as a general reserve and spent a great deal of
time making improvements on the road system.
Under the command of an officer who, though capable had been sidelined
because of his political opposition to the current government of Turkey, Lt Col
Mustapha Kemal, this division would be able to provide support to the most
threatened area once the British attack developed.[10]
With 84,000 men, von Sanders’ force had a slight
numerical advantage, but his uncertainty in placing them dissipated this. On balance, the MEF didn’t have ample time to
plan what is one of the most complex types of operations. Seaborne assaults require an immense amount
of coordination between services and intricate tactical and logistical
arrangements. The troops would be
required to secure a beachhead for subsequent landings, and then, when in
enough numbers, move up steep and rocky defiles to engage the defenders. Odds were massively stacked against them. Hamilton had planned to land the 29th
Division on four beaches, “Y”, “X”, “W” and “S” around the southern tip of the
upper peninsula at Cape Helles and Sedd El Bahr, the ANZAS would land at “Z”
beach, on the northern side, with the Royal Naval Division and the French
forces making feint landings in other locations. “In retrospect,” says Sir John Keegan, “it is
possible to see that Hamilton’s plan could not work, nor could any other have
done with the size of the force available to him.”[11] Keegan allows for the possibility of success
at Gallipoli, providing a much larger allotment of troops had been made
available; while conceding that such numbers did not exist, and most of all
that a “large commitment of troops was, in any case, outside the spirit of the
enterprise, which was designed to achieve large results without dissipating the
force engaged on the Western Front.”[12] Nevertheless,
the operation would be the largest military landing in history to that point.[13]
Taking Hamilton’s 75,000 men into action were “two hundred transport
ships…accompanied by eighteen battleships, a dozen cruisers, twenty-nine
destroyers and eight submarines.”[14]
Where they were going to land by and large were in places that von Sanders
hadn’t adequately prepared. Despite
Keegan’s hindsight, it could have been possible for things to have turned out
more in favour for the British than they did.
Part of the problem was that Hamilton had to act
quickly, and this expedience had a dreadful effect. The other was due to the
ground itself. “The geography of the region and the limited size of supporting
forces available prevented the Allied troops from advancing beyond those
positions they originally commanded.[15]
Most of the beaches, unprepared and under defended were taken quite easily, and
the heights made with little effort and light casualties. “At first in the dim
light nothing could be seen but the great wall of the bluffs close on to 200
feet high. …the apparently vertical cliffs modified into steep slopes or red
clay, thickly covered with scrub.”[16]
Lack of clear and contingent instruction, of a comprehensive coordinated
effort, and an absence of initiative on the part of commanders in
areas where landings had been successful meant that there was no forward thinking
beyond just getting ashore. Which also
meant that some units would remain idle when perhaps they could have been best
used to support others who weren’t experiencing the same level of success. Nowhere was this more evident than at “V”
Beach, where a daring plan to get men inland had not worked well at all.
An old collier, the River Clyde had been repurposed into a latter-day Trojan
First to disembark was to be the First Battalion,
Royal Munster Fusiliers, a regular army unit from recruiting districts in
Ireland. Things had not gone to design
at all. The River Clyde had grounded further out than had been hoped, the two
lighters which had come forward were struggled into position to provide the
bridge point, their crews under intense fire from above the whole time. By the time all was set for the Munsters to
go, the entire landing area was enfiladed by machine gun and light artillery,
the men were cut down, almost before they could move from ship to shore. The slaughter was appalling, wounded and dead
were now blocking the gangways, making egress of the still fit difficult. One
of the lighters broke its mooring, stranding men trying to move forward, and
allowing the Turks to pick them off as they stood helpless. Others jumped clear of the bridge but were
weighed down by equipment and drowned, or caught up in barbed wire which had
been laid in the shallow edges, and shot down there. In the midst of this, a sailor named Williams
jumped into the water from the lighter he was crewing. “When
he had first volunteered to join the specially selected crew he had been told
by Commander Unwin that he was full up and that he ‘did not want any more petty
officers’. Williams had protested, offering to give up his rate if it would
ensure his inclusion with the salty retort, ’I’ll chuck my hook if you’ll let
me come.’ Unwin commented many years later, ‘I did, to his cost but everlasting
glory.’”[18] So, as of that morning, now Able Seaman
Williams was in water to his chest, wresting the tow line of the lighter so
that it would come about to be close to a spit of land from where the men could
make ground. The line wasn’t long enough
to be brought in and tied off, so Williams stood, exposed to fire, holding fast
his line for an hour, allowing the soldiers to pass to the beach. He might have stayed longer had he not been
terribly wounded by
Thus started the first day
of a campaign which would last a further eight months, and fail to accomplish
what it had been set to do.
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