Of Kemal’s own fabulous rise to power there are of course very full accounts, but perhaps his first triumphs at the Dardanelles were as important to him as any others. When towards the end of the campaign he arrived in Constantinople ill and exhausted not even Enver’s opposition could prevent the Turkish newspapers from greeting him as ‘The Saviour of Gallipoli’.
In August 1916 a Royal Commission was set up in London to investigate the Gallipoli campaign. General Monro, who was then on his way to India to become Commander-in-Chief, was the first witness, and in the ensuing year nearly 200 others were called to give evidence: Churchill and Hamilton, de Robeck and Keyes, Stopford and Fisher, all the generals and admirals, and finally the War correspondents, Nevinson, Ashmead-Bartlett and Murdoch. Kitchener, who by then was dead,[39] was the only major figure who did not put his case. At the end of 1917 the Commission’s report came out, and it stated its general conclusions very clearly: ‘… from the outset the risks of failure attending the enterprise outweighed its chances of success.’ General Monro was congratulated upon the evacuation: it was, the Commission said, ‘a wise and courageous decision.’
Dealing with the Suvla landing, the Commissioners expressed the view that General Stopford might have kept in closer touch with his troops, but Hamilton, they thought, had only increased his difficulties by intervening on August 8. ‘We regard the intervention,’ the report stated, ‘as well-intentioned but injudicious.’ In short, the general conclusion was that the campaign was a mistake, and that even with better luck and better management, it could hardly have succeeded.
In 1917 the Dardanelles Commissioners were not ideally placed for taking an historical view of the campaign, for there was then still another year of trench warfare to be fought in France, and the Russian revolution had not yet taken its full effect; and so it may not have been altogether apparent then that there were worse things in the world than the loss of half a dozen old battleships in the Dardanelles, or the weakening of the French front by a few extra divisions which might have made all the difference at Gallipoli.
It was apparent only that the Allies had been incomparably the losers. During the 259 days that elapsed between the first landings in April 1915 and the final withdrawal in January 1916 they sent half a million men to Gallipoli, and slightly more than half of these became casualties. There is some doubt about the exact number of the Turkish losses, but they are officially computed at 251,000, which is just one thousand less than those suffered by the Allies; and this perhaps is the best indication of how closely the struggle was fought.[40]
As for the strategic consequences of the defeat, they scarcely bore thinking about. Twenty Turkish divisions were set free to attack Russia and to threaten Egypt. All contact with Russia and Rumania was lost, and the war dragged on in the Near East for another three years while another Allied army, infinitely greater in size than the one employed at Gallipoli, slowly and painfully made good the ground that had been lost. Before the Ottoman Empire fell in 1918 nearly three-quarters of a million Allied soldiers were sent to Salonika, and another 280,000 fought their way northwards across the desert from Egypt to Jerusalem and Damascus. Except for the Anzac troops none of the men who were evacuated from Gallipoli were ever employed against the Germans as General Monro had hoped they would be; they remained in the East until the end of the war.
The campaign had been a mighty destroyer of reputations. When Kitchener returned to England at the end of 1915 he was forced to reinstate the General Staff in the War Office, and he was no longer a semi-dictatorial figure in the cabinet. He was sixty-five, Gallipoli seemed to have deprived him of his old oracular powers of taking decisions, and Lloyd George, Bonar Law and others began a concerted move to get him out. At his death six months later his influence was rapidly falling away. In the years that followed it was demonstrated over and over again in many books that the sinking of the Hampshire had saved Kitchener from a sad and inevitable decline. Yet he was so revered by the public in England that for a long time people simply could not bring themselves to believe that he was dead, and there was a persistent rumour that he was a prisoner of the Germans.
And still the aura persists, his name still rises above that of any other British general in the first world war, and it is not clear that these others managed any better than he would have done had he lived and remained in office. He delayed and vacillated over Gallipoli, and in the end it was his undoing; yet he understood the campaign with a better strategical sense than most of his contemporaries, and for a time at least — that time when he persuaded the British and the French Governments to give priority to Gallipoli — he had the courage of his imagination.
It was the same with Churchill, except that in his case he lived on and had to fight his way back. It was not until 1917 that Lloyd George, the new Prime Minister, felt that he was able to bring him into the Government again as Minister of Munitions, and even then there was much opposition to it. As late as the general election of 1923 there were cries of ‘What about the Dardanelles?’ whenever he addressed a public meeting. That was the year when the Lloyd George coalition fell, and Churchill was defeated in the election — his first defeat since he had entered the House of Commons nearly a quarter of a century before. His eclipse seemed to be complete. In a study of the Gallipoli campaign an American staff officer wrote, ‘It is doubtful if even Great Britain could survive another world war and another Churchill.’ And the Australian Official History which appeared about this time contained these words: ‘So through a Churchill’s lack of imagination, a layman’s ignorance of artillery, and the fatal power of a young enthusiasm to convince older and slower brains, the tragedy of Gallipoli was born.’ Somewhere in the painful fields of memory the ghost of Fisher was still repeating, ‘Damn the Dardanelles. They will be our grave.’
Then in the nineteen-twenties the reaction began to set in. The first surprise came from the Turkish General Staff when they admitted that on March 19, 1915, nearly all their ammunition at the Narrows had been shot away, and that a renewed attack on that day might very well have been decisive. The whole conception of the naval attack was now seen, if not in a new light, in a more controversial way. Other evidence followed — evidence of the extreme political tension in Constantinople at that time, and of the fact that Turkey possessed only two arsenals which the Allied Fleet might easily have destroyed.
In its report the Turkish staff stated: ‘A naval attack executed with rapidity and vigour at the outbreak of the war might have been successful… if the Entente Fleets had appeared before Constantinople the eight divisions retained there would have been impotent to defend it.’ And so that first and much derided directive: ‘The Admiralty should prepare for a naval expedition in February to bombard and take the Gallipoli peninsula with Constantinople as its objective,’ was not so fanciful after all.
Roger Keyes, not surprisingly, needed very little persuading about the importance of these revelations. In 1925, when he was in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, he steamed through the Dardanelles and, according to Aspinall, who was with him, he could hardly speak for emotion. ‘My God,’ he said at last, ‘it would have been even easier than I thought; we simply couldn’t have failed… and because we didn’t try, another million lives were thrown away and the war went on for another three years.’
39
On June 5, 1916, he sailed in the
