Castles of Steel by Robert K. Massie
Yours faithfully,
H. H. Asquith
The sixty-one-year career of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher of Kilverstone, the man who created the modern Royal Navy, had come to an end.
Meanwhile, Churchill was struggling to save himself. He bombarded Asquith, Bonar Law, Lloyd George, and Grey, asking, eventually begging, to be kept at the Admiralty. To Lloyd George, his closest Cabinet ally before the war, he shouted, “You don’t care what becomes of me. You don’t care whether I am trampled under foot by my enemies. You don’t care for my personal reputation.” “No,” Lloyd George replied, “I don’t care for my own at the pres-ent moment. The only thing I care about is that we win this war.” Clementine Churchill, incensed by what was happening to her husband, wrote the prime minister an angry letter: “Why do you part with Winston? . . . If you throw Winston overboard you will be committing an act of weakness and your Coalition Government will not be as formidable a war machine as your present government.” Asquith did not reply, but he told Venetia Stanley that he had received “the letter of a maniac” from her cousin Clementine Churchill. To Churchill himself—who had sent him six letters in five days—Asquith finally wrote on May 21, “My dear Winston: You must take it as settled that you are not to remain at the Admiralty.” The “horrible wound and mutilation”—in Churchill’s private secretary’s words—was confirmed. The following day, Churchill was offered and accepted a minor, essentially meaningless Cabinet post, the chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster. “I gather that you have been flung a bone on which there is very little meat,” wrote his cousin the Duke of Marlborough. The duchy, Lloyd George wrote of this post, was an office normally given “to beginners in the Cabinet or to distinguished politicians who had reached the first stages of unmistakable decrepitude. It was a cruel and unjust degradation.” May 25 was Churchill’s last day at the Admiralty, and that afternoon he received a surprise visit from Lord Kitchener. “He asked what I was going to do,” Churchill wrote. “I said I had no idea; nothing was settled. . . . As he got up to go, he turned and said, in the impressive and almost majestic manner which was natural to him, ‘Well, there is one thing at any rate they cannot take from you. The fleet was ready.’ ”
Kitchener was right: the ships built by Fisher and Churchill were at sea and the men whom Fisher and Churchill had chosen were in command. It reflects poorly on Beatty, whom Churchill had saved from early retirement and promoted over a dozen admirals to command the battle cruisers, that he wrote after Churchill’s fall, “The navy breathes freer now it is rid of the succubus Winston.” Nor was it generous of Jellicoe, to whom Churchill gave command of the Grand Fleet on the eve of war, to write to Fisher, “We owe you a debt of gratitude for having saved the navy from a continuance in office of Mr Churchill.” In the stream of newspaper articles and editorials about Churchill’s departure, most were derogatory.
[Only J. L. Garvin, writing in The Observer, looked to the future: “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.”]
At that moment, the former First Lord did not know or care what any of these men were saying. Later, Clementine Churchill would say of her husband, “When he left the Admiralty, he thought he was finished. . . . I thought he would never get over the Dardanelles: I thought he would die of grief.”
CHAPTER 27 “Some Corner of a Foreign Field”
Ultimately, Fisher’s concern about the safety of the warships at the Dardanelles had led to the reconstruction of the Admiralty and then of the government. Curiously, on May 25, just as this immense political drama was playing out and Winston Churchill was in his last hours in office, another British battleship was sunk at Gallipoli. And thirty-six hours later, when Arthur Balfour was just sitting down in Churchill’s chair at the Admiralty, still another British battleship went to the bottom. Neither loss had any political impact in London, but to the navy off Gallipoli and the thousands of soldiers on the peninsula, their significance was grim.
On May 17, Admiral de Robeck had been informed that a German submarine had been sighted on the surface passing through the Straits of Gibraltar. This was U-21, voyaging from the Ems around the coast of Europe to the Aegean. No one at the Admiralty or in the fleet doubted that the submarine’s destination was Gallipoli. On May 25, in full view of both armies on shore, the old battleship Triumph was torpedoed by U-21 off Anzac Beach. As the ship began to list, a destroyer came alongside and hundreds of men stepped from the battleship’s stern onto the deck of the smaller ship. Then Triumph turned over, floated with her keel in the air for twenty minutes, and sank, taking fifty-three men down with her. The cheers of exultant Turks, dancing in their trenches, echoed down from the hills while men in the Allied trenches watched with shock and fear. De Robeck, his fleet suddenly vulnerable, immediately ordered all large warships back to the island harbors. “I saw them in full flight, transports and battleships, the Agamemnon seeming to lead the van,” said the British writer turned officer Compton Mackenzie. “Next morning,” recorded a German officer watching from the heights, “all the ships had disappeared as if God had taken a broom and swept the sea clear.”
The following day, May 26, the twenty-one-year-old Majestic, the oldest battleship in the Royal Navy, returned, anchored off Sedd el Bahr, spread her torpedo nets, and awaited bombardment assignments. At 6:40 on the morning of the twenty-seventh, a seaman on watch called an officer’s attention to the periscope and conning tower of a submarine not far away. The officer looked and said, “Yes, and here comes the torpedo.” “There was a great, muffled roar and the old ship quivered and shook in a terrible way. The masts and yards swayed as if they were coming down on top of us. . . . A huge volume of water shot up two hundred feet in the air on the port side. . . . There was only one thing to do and that was to swim for it. . . . The water was gloriously warm.” The battleship rolled over and sank in shallow water, leaving her green keel protruding from the surface. There she remained for months, in full view of both armies.
Fisher and Churchill were gone, and three more old battleships had been sunk, but Kitchener and the new coalition War Council were not ready to give up on Gallipoli. In July, three divisions of Kitchener’s New Army arrived from England on board the huge, transatlantic liners Aquitania, Mauretania, and Olympic, swelling Hamilton’s force to 120,000 men. It was midsummer and the newcomers entered a landscape of Saharan desolation. Under an intense blue sky, the land and sea were covered by a suffocating haze of heat; the trenches were ovens; hot wind blew sand and white dust into eyes and mouths. For sixteen hours a day, the sun beat down so mercilessly that tinned rations of corned beef cooked in their containers. The sea, Hamilton wrote, was “like melted glass, blue-green with a dull red glow in it; the air seemed to have been boiled.” To cool off, men bathed naked off the beaches, hundreds at a time, oblivious to artillery and sniper fire. (Once, a shell exploding in the water near a swimmer tore off his arm; retrieving the floating limb, the victim carried it ashore.) The flies became a plague; the ground and the walls of tents were dark with them; they swarmed in the latrines; three or four flies accompanied every forkful of food into the mouth. No one at Gallipoli escaped the torture of lice. Dysentery now affected half the army, and every day a thousand men with the disease were being evacuated from the peninsula as unfit for duty. Rank gave no immunity; both Hamilton and Wemyss were afflicted. The disease, Hamilton wrote in his diary, “fills me with a desperate longing to lie down and do nothing but rest. . . . This, I think, must be the reason the Greeks were ten long years taking Troy.” Over the peninsula hung the sickening smell of death. Men who died between the two lines of trenches lay where they fell, the flies settled to feast, and the stench from corpses putrefying in the heat reached for miles out to sea.
As the months went by, both British and German officers developed great respect for the hardiness of the average Turkish soldier. Accustomed to sleeping on the ground, untroubled at being clothed in rags,
Hamilton did what he could with what he had. In mid-July, he asked Kitchener for two experienced generals to take over two of his commands. He was told that they were in France and “unavailable”; instead, elderly former officers, plucked from retirement, were sent out. He asked for a guaranteed supply of 400,000 shells a month for his artillery; the War Office replied, “It will be quite impossible to send you ammunition at this rate without stopping all operations in France. This, of course, is out of the question.” Nevertheless, on August 6, Hamilton launched his final offensive. Two fresh divisions of Kitchener’s New Army, just arrived from England with no experience in war, were put ashore on Suvla Beach, three miles north of Anzac Beach. To distract the Turks while the British landed, the veteran Australians and New Zealanders stormed up Lone Pine Ridge and Sari Bair from Anzac Beach. The casualties were shocking: one Australian brigade lost more than 1,700 men out of 2,900 involved; another battalion suffered 74 percent casualties; within two days, the Anzacs won six Victoria Crosses; but they failed to take the summit. Meanwhile, another column of Anzacs, British, and Gurkhas was assaulting the dominating ridge of Chunuk Bair. At dawn, the 6th Gurkha Battalion reached the top. “We bit, fisted and used rifles and pistols as clubs, blood was flying about like spray . . . and then the Turks turned and fled,” said the British major commanding the Gurkhas. “I felt a very proud man: the key of the whole peninsula was ours. . . . Below I saw the Straits . . . [and] the roads leading to Achi Baba. We dashed down [pursuing the Turks] towards Maidos [on the Straits] but had only got about a hundred feet down when suddenly our own navy put six 12-inch shells into us . . . confusion . . . disaster . . . the place was a mass of blood and limbs and screams. . . . We lost about a hundred and fifty men and the regiment was withdrawn.”
All of this bravery went for nought. Sir “Freddy” Stopford, commanding the troops landed at Suvla, was an amiable, doddering lieutenant general who had retired seven years earlier to battle chronic ill health. His presence at Gallipoli—indeed, in the army at all—was due to the fact that his country, beginning the war with only a small professional army, had no deep cadre of men qualified to command an army corps or even a division. Stopford, called back into service, had been given this key assignment by Kitchener even though Hamilton had named at least three other generals he thought better qualified. In any case, Stopford’s landing had taken the Turks by surprise, but because his men seemed tired and thirsty, he did not push them to occupy the surrounding ridges. When Hamilton arrived a few hours later, he found 20,000 men “spread around the beaches . . . smoking and cooking, others bathing by hundreds in the bright blue bay.” He discovered Stopford placidly presiding over this scene from an offshore yacht, enormously pleased that he had met so little resistance. Hamilton insisted that Stopford’s men hurry to occupy the heights before the enemy arrived. “We might have the hills at the cost of walking up them today,” he said. “The Lord only knows what the price of them will be tomorrow.” Stopford did not disagree, but cordially excused himself from going ashore because “he had not been very fit, his knee was sore from a fall and he wanted to give it a chance to recover.” The British troops remained in place and by the next morning, thousands of Turks were massed on the heights. Eventually, Stopford was relieved of command, but the opportunity, now missed, never returned. By August 21, the Suvla offensive was stalemated and Hamilton had suffered another 40,000 casualties. He told Kitchener that to attack again he would need a further reinforcement of 95,000 men.
Briefly, it seemed that he might get them. On September 2, the French made a surprise proposal to land four new divisions on the Asian side of the Dardanelles. “From bankrupt to millionaire in 24 hours! We are saved! Constantinople is doomed!” was Hamilton’s gleeful reaction. But this French operation was canceled when, on October 14, Bulgaria, having observed the defeat at Suvla Bay and concluding that the Allies would never take the Dardanelles, joined the Austrian-German assault on her old foe, Serbia. A Serb defeat cleared the way for an enemy advance on Salonika, which Britain and France did not wish to lose. Accordingly, instead of gaining four new divisions, Hamilton lost two: one British and one French, taken from him and sent to defend Salonika. “We can’t feed Russia with munitions through Salonika, nor can we bring back Russian wheat through Salonika,” Hamilton noted bitterly.
By mid-October, the sands of the Gallipoli adventure were running out. Bulgaria’s entry into the war meant the opening of a direct rail link between Germany and Constantinople with the likelihood that Turkish artillery on Gallipoli soon would have large supplies of ammunition. Already, on October 11, Kitchener had asked Hamilton for an assessment of the losses that might be incurred if Allied troops evacuated Gallipoli. Unwilling to concede defeat, Hamilton gloomily had estimated that he might lose half of his men. The reaction from London was swift: on October 16, Hamilton was relieved of command.
[There was another factor in Hamilton’s dismissal. On September 2, an Australian journalist, Keith Arthur Murdoch, arrived at British headquarters and gave Hamilton “an elaborate explanation of why his duty to Australia could be better done with a pen than a rifle.” Murdoch was permitted to visit Suvla and Anzac Beaches for a few hours; then, in breach of a signed agreement pertaining to the behavior of all war correspondents, Murdoch wrote directly to Andrew Fisher, prime minister of Australia, who passed the letter along to Asquith. In his letter, Murdoch praised the physical health, spirit, and bravery of the Australian forces and then spoke with contempt of the British troops: “You would refuse to believe that these men were really British soldiers. . . . The British physique is very much below that of the Turks. . . . They are merely a lot of child-like youths, without strength to endure or brains to improve their conditions.” This was opinion, but Murdoch’s worst accusation was flagrantly untrue: “The fact is that after the first day at Suvla an order had to be issued to [British] officers to shoot without mercy any [British] soldier who lagged behind or loitered in advance.” Hamilton later described Murdoch’s allegation as “an irresponsible statement by an ignorant man,” but Asquith, inexplicably, had it reprinted on official British government stationery and circulated it to the War Council and the Committee on Imperial Defence. Neither Hamilton nor Kitchener was ever given an opportunity to respond.
Some Australians have never forgiven Britain and the British army for the loss of young Anzac lives at Gallipoli. The 1981 film Gallipoli also celebrated the manly beauty and heroism of the Australian soldiery, especially that of the 10th Light Horse Regiment from Western Australia. The film depicts this regiment ordered to attack again and again, repeate
Interestingly, Keith Murdoch’s son, Rupert, was one of the film’s principal financial backers.]
His replacement was a general straight from the Western Front, Sir Charles Monro, described by Hankey as “a cheery old fellow with an odd trick of slapping you on the arm and ejaculating ‘Ja!’ ” Monro had always believed that the Dardanelles was a foolish, hopeless “side-show” thatdiverted troops from France, the only theater of war where an ultimate decision could be achieved. On a single day, October 31, Monro visited the beaches at Helles, Suvla, and Anzac and then—as everyone in London knew he would—recommended immediate evacuation of the entire peninsula. He estimated that the withdrawal would cost 40,000 British casualties. Churchill’s comment was bitter: “General Monro was an officer of swift decision. He came, he saw, he capitulated.” On November 3, however, Kitchener rejected Monro’s advice, refused to order an evacuation, and announced that he himself would go out to Gallipoli. Kitchener reached Mudros on November 9 and spent the next three days inspecting troops and positions on the peninsula. After talking with Birdwell and plodding up and down the hillsides, walking in trenches within twenty yards of the Turks, he concluded that Monro had been right: further effort was useless. He telegraphed the War Council his recommendation that Suvla and Anzac should be immediately evacuated and Helles temporarily retained. Back in London on Novem-ber 30, he went straight to Downing Street and offered his resignation to the prime minister. Asquith refused to accept it.