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Gallipoli
by
Alan Moorehead

To Lionel Fielden

Introduction
By Sir Max Hastings

The innocence of young men facing the prospect of war for the first time is an unchanging theme of both history and literature. But the letter home written by that incurable romantic Rupert Brooke in March 1915, on passage to the Dardanelles, stands nonetheless among the most memorable of all time.

It’s too wonderful for belief. I had not imagined Fate could be so kind… Will Hero’s Tower crumble under the fifteen-inch guns? Will the sea be polypholoisbic and wine-dark and unvintageable? Shall I loot mosaics from St. Sophia, and Turkish Delight and carpets? Should we be a Turning Point in History? Oh God! I’ve never been quite so happy in my life. I think… I suddenly realise that the ambition of my life has been… to go on a military expedition to Constantinople.

Brooke, of course, was dead of blood poisoning by 23 April, buried on Lemnos, before the first Allied soldier landed at Gallipoli, having made his one significant contribution to the campaign by writing the lines that immortalised him: ‘If I should die, think only this of me…’.

Here begins the story of one of the great military tragedies of the twentieth century, which no writer has described better than Alan Moorehead. Having been born in Australia in 1910, and lived in Melbourne until he was twenty-seven, he perfectly understood the grip which the Dardanelles exercised upon the national psyche. It was there that the legend of the Anzacs – named after the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps – was created. Moorehead served an apprenticeship in Australian journalism, then in 1937 sailed to Britain, where he soon secured a job with the Daily Express, at the time the nation’s most brilliant newspaper. Between 1939 and 1945 he not only became the finest war correspondent of his generation but was twice mentioned in despatches and received a military OBE, having displayed extraordinary courage on the battlefield. In the postwar era, he became a hugely successful popular historian, author of such international bestsellers as The White Nile and The Blue Nile. But more than a few of us rank Gallipoli as his best book. Though it was first published half a century ago, and many other accounts have appeared in the interim, none has either challenged Moorehead’s narrative and principal conclusions or improved on his marvellously elegant narrative of one of the great catastrophes of that supreme catastrophe, the First World War.

It is a curiosity of history that while the gateway to the Black Sea, the narrow straits of the Dardanelles, have been Turkish for many centuries, they have played a large part in British legend, and especially that of 1914 to 1918. As a people, we are curiously unimpressed by the fact that we eventually won that war; that General Allenby defeated the Turks in Palestine in a brilliant 1917 to 1918 campaign which ended with his capture of Damascus and the enemy’s capitulation. The attention of British posterity instead fixes immovably upon the earlier campaign of the Dardanelles, and that ‘corner of a foreign field’ which borders them on the European side, the Gallipoli peninsula. There, the Allied cause in 1915 met defeat and failure. There, tens of thousands of men perished in vain. Yet that bungled gamble remains the object of far more popular attention, of incomparably more words and books and films, than victory in 1918.

Why? First, there is the notion that the campaign represented a great missed opportunity, a chance to break the hideous deadlock of the Western Front, win the war two or three years earlier and change the course of history. Not only was that belief widely held in 1915, it still has followers today. Second, it was among the most incompetently conducted campaigns in history, demonstrating the British genius for discovering at moments of crisis an almost inexhaustible supply of dud generals. Countless young men perished in and around these limpid waters because they were led by commanders who may not have been fools, but conducted themselves in an extraordinarily foolish fashion. And the final element in the story, also of course an eternal part of war, is the sublime courage of those who fought on both sides, seeking to redeem with their bodies and high spirit the follies of their elders and seniors.

The Dardanelles adventure was the brainchild of that human dynamo the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Spencer Churchill. He was just forty, and he had embraced the conduct of the war with a passion and imagination most of his colleagues in the Asquith Cabinet conspicuously lacked. By the winter of 1914, he saw the armies on the Western Front deadlocked in parallel trench lines that reached from Switzerland to the English Channel. The Allies desperately needed a victory somewhere, to revive the faltering spirits of their peoples. Churchill conceived the idea – of a kind such as he would promote even more vigorously in the Second World War – of breaking the stalemate by exploiting British sea power to attack the southern flank of the Central Powers, knocking Turkey out of the war and opening a supply route to Russia, Britain’s ally, through the Black Sea.

A War Council meeting in London on 13 January 1915 was vividly described by Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretary:

Churchill suddenly revealed his well-kept secret of a naval attack on the Dardanelles! The idea caught on at once. The whole atmosphere changed. Fatigue was forgotten. 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. The navy… was to come into the front line.

Despite the scepticism of many admirals and generals, and especially that of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Lord Fisher, by sheer force of will Churchill gained the government’s endorsement for operations by a British and French naval squadron to force a passage through the Dardanelles, then present itself off Constantinople, Turkey’s capital, to demand the surrender of its government on peril of bombardment.

On 19 February 1915, French and British battleships commanded by Admiral Sackville Carden conducted their first bombardment of the Turkish Dardanelles forts. On 12 March, Churchill ordered General Sir Ian Hamilton to leave London at once to take command of an amphibious landing force to occupy Gallipoli and drive on towards Constantinople. It is hard to describe the chaos in which the subsequent operations were prepared and carried out. The Turks, of course, had priceless time to make preparations on that barren, thankless strip of sand and rock to receive the invaders. They were commanded by the immensely able German, Liman von Sanders. The Turkish 1st Division was led by thirty-four-year-old Mustafa Kemal, who would later become world famous as Kemal Atatürk, the creator of modern Turkey. Both von Sanders and Kemal readily anticipated the most likely places for the British and French to land, and organised the defences accordingly.

The British had five divisions, all wholly untried. Two of them were ‘ANZAC’ – a word then newly coined. The Australians and New Zealanders who filled their ranks had scarcely a handful of experienced officers. But their peoples attached enormous symbolic importance to their presence. This campaign was deemed the first test of their advance to mature nationhood as self-governing dominions. Back home, almost every citizen of their societies held their breath for news of what their menfolk might accomplish. As for the Turks, they still tell a story of two New Zealanders they later took prisoner and asked where they were from. On being informed, the Turks said: ‘Never heard of New Zealand.’ Some Germans who were eavesdropping explained that this was a country in the Pacific, literally at the other end of the world. The incredulous Turks then demanded of their captives: ‘Why are you here?’ The prisoners said that they thought it would be like playing an away game of rugby. A modern Australian historian has written that his countrymen ‘tripped off to war carefree and full of dreams as a debutante going to a ball. She didn’t know what was going to happen, but it was better than sitting at home, and when the ball was over, she would be a bigger person than she had been before.’

Early on the morning of 25 April 1915, the Anzacs stormed ashore beneath sheer cliffs on the western, Aegean side of the peninsula. I am not one of those who regard all the generals of the First World War as knaves and fools. But the senior officers who presided over the Gallipoli campaign were among the most insensitive blunderers ever to lead an army in battle. From 25 April onwards, the scene was set for the ghastly months of slaughter that followed. The Turks fought with heroic determination. Liman von Sanders and Kemal showed themselves masterly commanders. British and Anzac troops ashore suffered every kind of privation as well as danger. Occupying trenches under almost continual bombardment, they were hurled again and again into attacks that gained only a few yards of barren soil, at hideous cost.

On 15 May, Lord Fisher resigned in the last of a long series of tempestuous and increasingly demented outbursts against Churchill. When the First Lord tried to conciliate him, Fisher responded with a note in impassioned capital letters liberally interspersed with exclamation marks: ‘YOU ARE BENT ON FORCING THE DARDANELLES AND NOTHING WILL TURN YOU FROM IT – NOTHING. I know you so well! You will remain and I SHALL GO.’ The combination of the setbacks at the Dardanelles, bloody stalemate in France and Fisher’s resignation obliged the tottering Liberal government to resort to a coalition with the Conservatives.

I am among those who believe that the notion the forcing of the Dardanelles could alter the course of the war was always an illusion. First, even if the Black Sea route to Russia had been opened, Britain and France lacked sufficient weapons and shells for their own armies – they had none to spare to ship to the Russians. Second, it is highly doubtful that, even if the Royal Navy had shelled Constantinople, sea power alone could have forced the Turks to capitulate. Hamilton’s army was too small to win a land campaign unless the Turks had crumbled in its path, as they never showed any likelihood of doing. Third, even knocking Turkey out of the war would do little to bring closer defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary. In the First World War as in the Second, victory could be gained only by defeating Germany on the Western Front, and Churchill was very foolish to suppose otherwise. Of course, a victory at the Dardanelles would have been very handy, and bolstered Allied morale. But it never looked like a war-winning stroke, and through the summer and autumn of 1915, it became an appalling drain on Allied manpower and resources.

The influential British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett travelled to London to tell every politician who would listen that the campaign was a disaster that was going nowhere. At first nobody listened, and disastrous operations continued to be carried out by disastrous generals. At the end of July, Aylmer Hunter-Weston, the butcher commanding the 29th Division who shrugged cheerfully before the landings that ‘heavy losses by bullets, mines, shells and drowning could be expected’, suffered a nervous breakdown. The August fighting cost the Allies twenty-five thousand casualties in four days. Another general wrote gloomily of one of his own formations, the 53rd Division, that it was so demoralised ‘it might bolt at any minute’. The Australian war correspondent Keith Murdoch followed Ashmead-Bartlett in reporting home that the Gallipoli campaign was futile. Loathing and contempt for British generals had become an absolute among Anzac troops.

In October, Hamilton was belatedly sacked and replaced by Sir Charles Monro, who immediately recommended that the campaign should be abandoned, the troops evacuated. Kitchener came out from London to see for himself, and endorsed Monro’s conclusion. Matters were made worse by three days of violent storms in November, which made it impossible to land supplies and worsened the privations of the eighty thousand men ashore. Some froze to death in their positions.

But the eventual withdrawal proved to be the only efficient part of the campaign. To prevent the Turks from seeing what was happening and exploiting weakness, the men in the line were progressively thinned out. On 18 December the main evacuations began, and on 8 January 1916 the last men were taken off Cape Helles. Five hundred wretched mules, the last of thousands landed to serve as pack animals, were shot on the beaches.

An Australian officer left behind a note for the Turks, asking them to preserve Anzac graves, saying he felt sure they would do this, as they had behaved ‘most honourably’ during the fighting. Another soldier messaged: ‘You didn’t push us off, Jacko, we just left.’ An Australian light horseman laid a table for four and set it with jam, bully beef, biscuits and cheese. His note said: ‘There are no booby traps in this dugout.’

The Dardanelles campaign had cost the Turks 251,309 casualties, including 87,000 dead; the French lost 10,000 killed, the Anzacs 8,709, the British 21,000. Proportionate losses were highest among the New Zealanders, in both world wars perhaps the finest of all Allied fighting soldiers. Of 8,556 who served at Gallipoli, 2,701 died, 4,752 were wounded. Compared with the slaughter on the Western Front, this toll was relatively small. The British would lose as many dead in a mere day or two on the Somme in 1916. But somehow the Dardanelles, that parade of futility played out so close to Troy, in a land and seascape steeped in classical legend, achieved a special place in the history of the war. For Australians, in the words of one of their historians, it became ‘a Homeric tale’. Ever since, they claimed it as their own in a fiercely and characteristically nationalistic fashion. Even in the twenty-first century, each year Gallipoli draws their descendants in astonishing numbers to attend commemorations. Australian folklore brands the peninsula as the place where the generals of the old ‘mother country’ grossly betrayed the young men of the dominions. This is not entirely a false image, but it is sometimes irksome to find modern Australians quite ignorant of the fact that more than twice as many British soldiers perished there as Australians.

Winston Churchill believed to his dying day that had the admirals and generals been bolder and more competent, the course of the war might have been transformed here. Few modern historians agree. The Gallipoli campaign was fundamentally flawed, as well as ineptly executed. The First Lord bore most of the bitter political recriminations for the failure. He was obliged to resign his office and accept command of a battalion in France. It was 1917 before he was again admitted to Lloyd George’s government, and some British politicians did not forgive him or forget his responsibility for the Dardanelles campaign until 1940.

Many battles in many wars seem futile to posterity, because all wars involve wasted human lives. The diaries and letters of the young men who fought and died at sea in the Dardanelles and ashore at Gallipoli are among the most profoundly moving documents of the war. To visit the battlefield is to make a pilgrimage to one of the most emotive landmarks of one of the most terrible conflicts of history, of which Alan Moorehead remains perhaps the most vivid chronicler.

Sir Max Hastings

September 2013

Maps

The Dardanelles and Gallipoli, 1975

Gallipoli: The Landings, April 25th

The Suvla Landings

Note

I SHOULD like to record my particular thanks to General Lüfti Güvenc, of the Historical Branch of the Turkish General Staff, who gave me the fullest access to official archives in Ankara, and to Colonel Sükrü Sirer, who prepared many maps and accompanied me over the battlefield itself: to Major T. R. Molloy of the British Embassy in Ankara, who translated Mustafa Kemal’s war diaries for me: to Brigadier-General Cecil Aspinall-Oglander and Captain Basil Liddell Hart, who, in reading through the text, have saved me from much error: to General Hamilton’s literary executor, Mrs. Mary Shield, who has allowed me to make use of the General’s private papers: and to my wife, who has worked with me on the book in all its stages.

Among the many others who have most kindly helped me with their reminiscences and their advice are Sir Harold Nicolson, Lord Hankey, Field-Marshal Sir John Harding, Field-Marshal Sir William Slim, Lady Violet Bonham-Carter, Mr. H. A. J. Lamb, Mrs. Helen Hugo, Lieut.-General Lord Freyberg, V.C., and Major Tasman Millington. I am also most grateful for the help I have received from the Admiralty, the War Office, the Imperial War Museum, the staffs of the London Library, and the British Embassy in Ankara.

A large library exists on the subject of the Gallipoli campaign, and while I cannot pretend to have read it all I must acknowledge here my especial indebtedness to Brigadier-General Aspinall-Oglander’s official history, Sir Winston Churchill’s World Crisis, Sir Ian Hamilton’s Gallipoli Diary, and the memoirs of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Keyes.

The spelling of Turkish names has presented difficulties which I have been unable to resolve. Gallipoli, for example, is to the Turks Gelibolu, and Chanak is more correctly spelt Çanak. Other places have changed their names since the campaign, notably Constantinople which is now Istanbul. However, since this book is written in English, it seemed best to adopt the names which are most familiar to English-speaking readers, and so in general I have followed the spelling used in the British military maps of the time.

Alan Moorehead

CHAPTER ONE

‘Essentially the great question remains: Who will hold Constantinople?

– Napoleon

EVEN as late as August 1914 it was by no means certain that Turkey would come into the first world war on the German side. There was no need for her to go to war, nobody seriously threatened her, and in fact at that time it was the policy of the Allies and the Central Powers alike to keep her neutral if they could. Certainly the country was in no condition to fight. In the five years that had elapsed since the Young Turks had first come to power the Ottoman Empire had very largely disintegrated: Bulgaria was independent, Salonika, Crete and the Ægean islands had gone to Greece, Italy had seized Tripoli and the Dodecanese, and Britain had formally proclaimed the protectorate of Egypt and the annexation of Cyprus.

Since the previous year the German Military Mission had made great improvements in the Turkish army, but the long series of defeats in the Balkan wars had done enormous harm. At many places the soldiers had gone unpaid for months, and morale had sunk almost to the point of mutiny. Except in a few corps d’élite they were ragged, hungry and short of nearly every kind of weapon required for a modern war. The fleet too was hopelessly out of date, and the garrison at the Dardanelles was far too weak, its guns too obsolete, to stand a chance against a determined attack from any one of the great powers.

Politically the situation was chaotic. The Young Turks with their Committee of Union and Progress had begun well enough when they had deposed the Sultan in 1909, and their democratic ideas had had the support of all liberal-minded and progressive people everywhere. But five years of wars and internal troubles had been too much for them. The ramshackle government of the empire had run down too far to be revived in another and a better way, and inevitably the energies of the Young Turks had become swallowed up in the simple and desperate struggle for their own political survival. Now there was no longer any talk of democratic elections and the freedom and equality of all races and creeds under the Crescent. The bloom had long since worn off the Committee: it was revealed as a ruthless party machine which was almost as sinister and a good deal more reckless than anything Abdul the Damned had contrived. Financially the Government was bankrupt. Morally it had reverted to the old system of force and corruption; there were Committee cells in every sizeable town in what was left of the empire in Asia, and no political appointment could be obtained without their support. Local government at the outlying centres like Baghdad and Damascus was in an appalling state, and Constantinople had so little hold over them that it was always possible that some local chieftain might set himself up in yet another independent state.

It was this very helplessness both abroad and at home that made Turkey turn to the outside world for allies, and in effect it came down to a choice between Germany and Britain. The German alliance was, tactically, the obvious one, since the Kaiser was eager for it and was in a position to put the Turkish army back on its feet. But the Germans were not liked. Lewis Einstein, the special minister at the American Embassy in Constantinople, was probably right when he said that the Turks preferred the English to all other foreigners – and this despite the fact that the British officials in Turkey tended to regard as ‘good’ Turks only those who prayed five times a day and turned to the English for advice. England had the money, she had command of the seas, and she had France and Russia on her side. The presence of Russia in the alliance was, of course, an embarrassment, since Russia was the traditional enemy of Turkey, yet even this might not have been too much for the Young Turks to have accepted had the English been enthusiastic. But they were not. They did not think at all highly of this government of young revolutionaries, and suspected that it might be put out of office at any moment. When the Young Turks came to London with a proposal for an Anglo-Turkish alliance they were politely turned aside.

And so by August 1914 things had drifted into a compromise that was rather weighted on the German side. The British Naval Mission continued to serve at Constantinople, but it was counterbalanced – perhaps over-balanced – by the German Military Mission which was actively filtrating through the Turkish army; and while the British and the French continued to give their tacit support to the older more conservative politicians in Constantinople, the Kaiser firmly nobbled the younger and more aggressive leaders of the Committee. It was, then, very largely a question of which side had backed the right horse: if the Young Turks were turned out the Allies could count on a friendly neutral government in Constantinople and the end of the German threat in the Near East. If on the other hand the Young Turks remained in office then the British and the French would be in the uncomfortable position of having to switch, of being obliged to try and get their money on the winner before the race was over.

It was a situation which had extreme attractions for the oriental mind, and the Young Turks made the most of it. Moreover the setting could hardly have been better for the complicated intrigues that now began: the foreign ambassadors, installed like robber barons in their enormous embassies along the Bosphorus, the Young Turks in the Yilditch Palace and the Sublime Porte, and everywhere through the sprawling decaying beautiful capital itself that hushed and conspiratorial air which seems to overtake all neutral cities on the edge of war. It was the atmosphere of the high table in the gambling casino very late at night when every move takes on a kind of fated self-importance, when everyone, the players and the watchers together, is engrossed, and when for the moment the whole world seems to hang on some chance caprice, some special act of daring, the turning of a card. In Constantinople this false and artificial excitement was all the more intense since no one really knew the rules of the game, and in the uncertain jigsaw of ideas which is created by any meeting between the East and the West no one could ever look more than a move or two ahead.

But it was the personalities of the protagonists that counted, above all the personalities of the Young Turks. Even in a place with so lurid a reputation as Constantinople it would be hard to imagine a stranger group of men. There is a dramatic quality about the Young Turks, a wild and dated theatricality, which is familiar and yet quite unreal. One tends to see them in the terms of a gangster movie, half documentary and half extravagant make-believe, and it would be very easy to dismiss them to that convenient limbo that envelops most political adventurers had they not, just for this instant, had such power over so many millions of men.

Sir Harold Nicolson, who was then a junior secretary in the British Embassy, remembers them all coming to dinner at his house one day. ‘There was Enver,’ he wrote, ‘in his neat little uniform, his hands resting patiently upon his sword-hilt, his little hairdresser face perked patiently above his Prussian collar. There was Djemal, his white teeth flashing tigerish against his black beard: there was Talaat with his large gypsy eyes and his russet gypsy cheeks: there was little Djavid who spoke French fluently, and who hopped about, being polite.’

The odd thing, of course, was that they should have been there at all, that power should ever have reached them in a world which still knew nothing of Nazis and Fascists in uniform, of communist officials at a banquet.

Talaat was an extraordinary man: yet there is a certain earthiness about him that makes him rather easier to understand than any of the others. He is the party boss, gross, hard and good-tempered, who has his tendrils everywhere, and in place of faith possesses an instinctive understanding of the weaknesses of human nature. He began life as a post office telegraphist, and he never really made much of an outward show of being anything more. Even now when he was Minister of the Interior, a post for which he might have been designed by nature, and virtually controller of the Committee machine, he still had his telegraphist’s keyboard on his desk, and, with his enormous wrists on the table, he liked to tap out messages to his colleagues on it. Long after the others, with their uniforms and their bodyguards, had moved into splendid villas along the Bosphorus, Talaat continued to live in a rickety three-storied wooden house in one of the poorer districts of Constantinople. Henry Morgenthau, the American Ambassador, called upon him there unexpectedly one afternoon, and found him in thick grey pyjamas with a fez on his head. He was surrounded by cheap furniture, bright prints on the walls, worn rugs on the floor; and his Turkish wife kept peeping nervously at the two men through a latticed window while they talked.

Most of those foreigners who knew Talaat during this summer regarded him highly and even with some liking. Morgenthau always found it possible to make him laugh, and then the animal craftiness would subside, the dark gypsy face would relax, and he would talk with great frankness and intelligence. He had, Aubrey Herbert says, ‘strength, hardness and an almost brutal bonhomie, and a light in his eyes rarely seen in men, but sometimes in animals at dusk’. Yet Talaat with all his sagacity and his powers of unemotional concentration seems to have felt the need of men of action like Enver.

Enver was the prodigy of the group, the terrible child who shocked and bewildered them all. He was distinguished by the kind of dark and composed good looks that never seem to age or reveal the mind beneath; and indeed, if Talaat is represented by Wallace Beery of the silent films, then Enver most certainly, for all his pertness, is Rudolph Valentino.

He was born at Adano on the Black Sea coast, the son of a Turkish father who was a bridge-keeper and an Albanian mother who followed one of the lowest occupations of the country – that of laying out the dead. It is possible that the boy’s exceptional good looks descended to him from a Circassian grandmother, but his other qualities seem to have been peculiarly his own, and were in a state of remarkable balance with each other. He was extremely vain, but it was a special kind of vanity which was overlaid by an air of shyness and modesty, and his reckless bravery in action was offset by an appearance so cool, so calm and unhurried, that one might have thought him half asleep. In office he exhibited this same quiet distinction of manner, so that no disaster ever appeared to flurry him, and no decision, however important, caused him more than a few moments’ hesitation. Even his ambition was disguised by a certain ease with which he moved among people who belonged to a much more cultivated society than his own. With this fluency and this charm it was no wonder that he was made so much of by the hostesses of the time; here was the young beau sabreur in real life, an unassuming young hero. All this was a most effective cover for the innate cruelty, the shallowness and the squalor of the megalomania that lay beneath.

From the age of twenty-five or so, when he had graduated from the military staff college in Constantinople, Enver’s career had been tumultuous. His speciality was the overturning of governments by physical violence, the sudden armed raid on cabinet offices. In later wars he would have made an admirable commando leader. In 1908 he was one of the small band of revolutionaries who marched on Constantinople and forced Abdul Hamid to restore the constitution, and a year later when Abdul had defaulted in his promises, Enver was back again in the capital, storming the barricades in a torn uniform, with a four days’ growth of beard and a bullet wound on his cheek; and this time Enver and his friends disposed of Abdul forever.

Then in the following years, when half the countries of Eastern Europe were demohshing the carcase of the Ottoman Empire, there was no front, however remote, at which Enver did not appear, dramatically and suddenly, to lead the counter-attack. From his post of military attaché in Berlin he rushed to the Libyan desert to fight the Italians outside Benghazi. Then in 1912 he was back on the Continent again holding the Bulgars off Constantinople. Nothing dismayed him, no defeat exhausted his endless energy. At the end of the first Balkan war in 1913, when everything was lost and Constantinople itself in danger of falling, Enver was the one man who would not accept an armistice. He led a band of two hundred followers into the capital, burst in upon the peace-making cabinet at their deliberations, shot dead the Minister for War, and then, having established a new government which was more to his liking, he returned to the front again. Finally he emerged gloriously at the end of the second Balkan war leading the tattered Turkish battalions back into Adrianople.