Текст книги "Gallipoli"

Автор книги: Alan Moorehead

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In our time most decisive naval actions have been fought far out at sea, and often in rough weather and over a large area of water so that no one man’s eye could command the whole scene. But here the land was near, the area of action very closely confined, and from morning until dusk a brilliant sun shone down on the calm sea. An observer, whether in the fighting tops of a battleship or standing on any of the hills on either side of the straits, could have seen precisely what was going on as the struggle unfolded itself from hour to hour; and even when night fell the battlefield was still illuminated by the beams of the searchlights constantly sweeping across the water.

In another sense this struggle was unusual, for it was essentially a naval attack upon an army, or at any rate upon artillery. From first to last the Turkish and German warships never appeared, and no aircraft were employed by either side. Then too, there was no element of surprise. Every fine morning had brought the Turks and the Germans the prospect of this attack. The forces on either side were very largely known – just how many ships and guns and mines – and the object of the struggle was perfectly obvious to everybody from the youngest bluejacket to the simplest private. All hung upon that one thin strip of water scarcely a mile wide and five miles long at the Narrows: if that was lost by the Turks then everything was lost and the battle was over.

De Robeck arranged his fleet in three divisions. Line A, steaming abreast, consisted of the four most powerful British ships which were to open the attack—Queen Elizabeth, Agamemnon, Lord Nelson and Inflexible—and they were accompanied on either flank by two more battleships, Prince George and Triumph.

In Line B, following about a mile astern, was the French squadron—Gaulois, Charlemagne, Bouvet and Suffren—with two more British battleships, Majestic and Swiftsure, on either side. The other six battleships and the destroyers and minesweepers which were also committed to the engagement were to wait their turn outside the straits. It was hoped that in the course of the day the forts at the Narrows would be so battered that the minesweepers would be able to clear a channel that same evening. Then with luck the battleships might pass through into the Sea of Marmara on the following day.

The morning of March 18 broke warm and sunny, and soon after dawn de Robeck gave orders for the Fleet to clear for action. Then with the crews at action stations down below and only the commanders and the men controlling the guns on deck the ships moved off from their anchorage at Tenedos.

At 10.30 a.m., when the morning haze had lifted sufficiently for the Turkish forts to be clearly seen, the first ten battleships entered the straits, and at once came under the fire of the enemy howitzers and field guns on either side. For about an hour the Queen Elizabeth and her companions steamed steadily forward under this barrage, getting in a shot with their lighter guns where they could but making no other reply. Soon after 11 a.m. Line A reached its station, a point about eight miles downstream from the Narrows, and without anchoring remained stationary, stemming the current. At 11.25 a.m. the assault began. The Queen Elizabeth’s targets were the two fortresses on either side of the town of Chanak on the Narrows, and on these she turned her eight 15-inch guns. Almost immediately afterwards the Agamemnon, Lord Nelson and Inflexible engaged three other forts at Kilid Bahr on the opposite bank.

After their first few shots in reply the Turkish and German gunners at the Narrows realized that they were out of range, and the forts fell silent; and in silence they endured the fearful bombardment of the four British ships for the next half hour. All five forts were hit repeatedly, and at 11.50 a.m. there was a particularly heavy explosion in Chanak. The British meanwhile were entirely exposed to the Turkish howitzers and smaller guns which were nearer at hand, and these poured down a continuous barrage on the ships from either side. This fire could never be decisive against armour, but the unprotected superstructure of the battleships was hit again and again and a certain amount of minor damage was done.

A few minutes after midday de Robeck, who was in the Queen Elizabeth, judged that the time had come to engage the Narrows at closer range, and he signalled for Admiral Guépratte to bring the French squadron forward. This was a mission for which Guépratte had expressly asked on the ground that it was now the turn of the French, since it was de Robeck himself who had carried out the close-range attack on the outer defences.

Admiral Guépratte has a personality which refreshes the whole Gallipoli story. He never argues, he never hangs back: he always wishes to attack. And now he took his old battleships through the British line to a point about half a mile further on where he was well within the range of all the enemy guns and in constant danger of being hit. On reaching their station the French ships fanned out from the centre so as to give the British astern of them a clear field of fire, and there then ensued through the next three-quarters of an hour a tremendous cannonade.

One can perhaps envisage something of the scene: the forts enveloped in clouds of dust and smoke, with an occasional flame spurting out of the debris, the ships slowly moving through a sea pitted with innumerable fountains of water, and sometimes disappearing altogether in the fumes and the spray, the stabs of light from the howitzers firing from the hills, and the vast earthquake rumbling of the guns. Presently Gaulois was badly holed below the waterline, the Inflexible had both her foremast on fire and a jagged hole in her starboard side, and the Agamemnon, struck twelve times in twenty-five minutes, was turning away to a better position. These hits though spectacular had scarcely touched the crews – there were less than a dozen casualties in the whole fleet – and as yet no ship was seriously affected in its fighting powers.

With the enemy at the Narrows, on the other hand, a critical situation had developed. Some of the guns were jammed and half buried in earth and debris, communications were destroyed between the fire control and the gunners, and those few batteries which managed to continue became more and more erratic in their fire. Fort 13 on the Gallipoli side had been obscured by an internal explosion, and it was clear to the British and the French that even though the forts were not yet destroyed the enemy gunners were for the moment demoralized. Their fire grew increasingly spasmodic until at 1.45 p.m., after nearly two and a half hours of continuous engagement, it had practically died away altogether.

De Robeck now decided to retire the French squadron with the rest of Line B and bring in his six battleships waiting in the rear. The movement began shortly before 2 p.m. and the Suffren, turning to starboard, led her sister ships out of the action along the shores of Eren Keui Bay on the Asiatic side. They were almost abreast of the Queen Elizabeth and the British line at 1.54 p.m. when the Bouvet, lying immediately astern of the Suffren, was observed to be shaken with an immense explosion, and a column of smoke shot up from her decks into the sky. She heeled over, still going very fast, capsized and vanished. It was all over in two minutes. According to one observer the vessel ‘just slithered down as a saucer slithers down in a bath’. At one moment she had been there, perfectly safe and sound. Now there was nothing left but a few heads bobbing about in the water. Captain Rageot and 639 men who were trapped between decks had been drowned.

It seemed to those who watched that the Bouvet had been struck by a heavy shell which had reached her magazine, and now the Turkish gunners, heartened by what they had seen, renewed their attack on the other ships. The next two hours were largely a repetition of the morning’s events. Moving in pairs, Ocean and Irresistible, Albion and Vengeance, Swiftsure and Majestic, came in and closed the range to ten thousand yards. Under this new barrage the heavy guns at the Narrows began firing wildly again, and by 4 p.m. they were practically silent once more.

Now at last it was time for the minesweepers to go in, and de Robeck called them forward from the mouth of the straits. Two pairs of trawlers led by their commander in a picket boat got out their sweeps and they appeared to be going well as they passed by Queen Elizabeth and the rest of A Line. Three mines were brought up and exploded. But then, as they drew forward to B Line and came under enemy fire, something like a panic must have occurred: all four trawlers turned about, and despite all the efforts of their commander to drive them back, ran out of the straits. Another pair of trawlers, which was supposed to take part in the operation, vanished without getting out their sweeps at all.

This fiasco was followed by something much more serious. At 4.11 p.m. the Inflexible, which had held her place in A line all this time, despite the fire in her foremast and other damage, was seen suddenly to take a heavy list to starboard. She reported that she had struck a mine not far from the spot where the Bouvet had gone down and now she left the battle line. She was observed to be down by the bows and still listing considerably as she steamed for the mouth of the straits, with the cruiser Phaeton attending her. It seemed likely that she would go down at any moment. The explosion of the mine had flooded the fore torpedo flat and besides killing the twenty-seven men stationed there had done other extensive damage. Flames and poisonous fumes began to spread; not only were the ship’s electric lights extinguished but the oil lamps, which had been lit for just such an emergency, failed as well. At the same time the ventilator fans stopped running and the heat below deck was intolerable. In these circumstances Phillimore, the captain, decided that it was not necessary to keep both steaming watches on duty, and he ordered one of the watches up to the comparative safety on deck. All, however, volunteered to stay below. They worked in darkness amid the fumes and the rising water until all the valves and watertight doors were closed. The remainder of the ship’s company stood to attention on the upper deck as they passed back through the rest of the Fleet. It seemed to those who saw them that none of these men had been defeated by the day’s events, or were shaken by the imminent prospect of drowning; and they got the ship back to Tenedos.

Meanwhile the Irresistible had been struck. Not five minutes after Inflexible had left the line, she too flew a green flag on her starboard yard arm, indicating that she believed she had been torpedoed on that side. She was on the extreme right of the Fleet at the time, close to the Asiatic shore, and at once the Turkish gunners began to pour their shells into her. Unable to get any answer to his signals, de Robeck sent off the destroyer Wear to render assistance, and presently the Wear came back with some six hundred of the Irresistible’s crew, several dead and eighteen wounded among them. The senior executive officers of the Irresistible had stayed on board with ten volunteers in order to make the ship ready for towing.

It was now 5 p.m., and three battleships were out of action: the Bouvet sunk, the Inflexible limping back to Tenedos and the Irresistible drifting towards the Asiatic shore under heavy Turkish fire. There was no clear explanation of these three disasters. The area in which the ships had been operating all day had been swept for mines on a number of occasions before the operation began. On the previous day a seaplane had been over and had confirmed that the sea was clear – and some reliance could be placed on this report for it had been demonstrated in tests off Tenedos that aircraft could spot mines as deep as eighteen feet in this limpid water. What then was doing the damage? It was hardly likely to have been torpedoes. The only conclusion that remained was that the Turks were floating mines down with the current. In fact, as we shall see later, this conclusion was not correct, but it was near enough as to make no odds, and de Robeck felt he could do no other than to break off the action for the day. Keyes was instructed to go aboard the Wear and proceed to the salvage of the Irresistible with the aid of two battleships, the Ocean and Swiftsure. In addition, a division of destroyers was ordered forward into the straits and placed under Keyes’s command. The rest of the Fleet retired.

One can do no better now than follow Keyes in his own account of what happened at the end of this extraordinary day. He says that salvo after salvo was hitting the Irresistible, and he could see no sign of life in her when he came alongside at 5.20 p.m. He concluded, therefore, that the captain and the skeleton crew had already been taken off – and rightly so because the ship was in a desperate condition. She had got out of the main current sweeping down the straits and a light southerly breeze was drifting her in towards the shore. With every minute as she drew nearer to them the Turkish gunners were increasing their fire. Nevertheless, Keyes decided that he must attempt to save her and he signalled to the Ocean, ‘The Admiral directs you to take Irresistible in tow.’ The Ocean replied that there was not sufficient depth of water for her to do so.

Keyes then directed the captain of the Wear to get his torpedoes ready for action so that he could sink the helpless ship before she fell into the hands of the enemy; but first he wished to make quite certain that the water was too shallow for the Ocean to come in and take her in tow. The Wear then ran straight into the enemy fire to take soundings – she came so close to the shore that the Turkish gunners could be seen around their batteries, and at that point-blank range the flash of the guns and the arrival of the shells seemed to be simultaneous. The Wear, however, was not hit, and presently Keyes was able to signal to the Ocean that there were fifteen fathoms of water for half a mile inshore of the Irresistible; and he repeated de Robeck’s order that the ship should be taken in tow. To this he got no reply. Both the Ocean and the Swiftsure were now hotly engaged, and the Ocean in particular was steaming back and forth at great speed, blazing away with all her guns at the shore. It seemed to Keyes that she was doing no good whatever with all this activity and was needlessly exposing herself. For some time the heavy guns at the Narrows had been silent, but it was quite possible that they would open up again at any minute. He therefore signalled the Ocean once more: ‘If you do not propose to take the Irresistible in tow the Admiral wishes you to withdraw.’ With the Swiftsure Keyes could afford to be more peremptory – her captain was junior to him – and he ordered her to go at once. She was an old ship and much too lightly armoured to have undertaken the salvage in the present circumstances.

Meanwhile things had begun to improve with the Irresistible; she had lost her list and although she was down by the stern she was still no lower in the water than she had been an hour previously when the Wear first arrived. Keyes now decided to go full speed to de Robeck and suggest that trawlers might be brought back after dark to tow her into the current so that she would drift out through the straits. He was actually on his way and was drawing close to the Ocean so that he could repeat the order for her to withdraw when the next disaster occurred. A violent explosion shook the water and the Ocean took a heavy list. At the same time a shell hit her steering gear and she began to turn in circles instead of escaping down the straits. The destroyers which had been standing by for the last two hours raced in and took off her crew. Now the Turkish gunners had a second helpless target close at hand.

With this bad news Keyes returned to de Robeck in the Queen Elizabeth which was lying just outside the straits. The captains of both the Irresistible and the Ocean had already been taken off their ships and were with the Admiral when Keyes arrived. A sharp discussion ensued. Keyes said exactly what he thought about the loss of the Ocean and her failure to take the Irresistible in tow, and he asked for permission to go back and torpedo the Irresistible. The Ocean, he thought, might be salvaged. De Robeck agreed, and after a quick meal Keyes set off again in one of the Queen Elizabeth’s cutters. It was now dark and he was unable to find the Wear but fell in with the Jed instead, and in this destroyer he steamed back into the straits.

The scene in the Dardanelles now was extremely eerie. All was silent on either shore, and except for the Turkish searchlights that kept sweeping back and forth across the water there was no sign of life anywhere. For four hours the Jed cruised about hunting for the two lost battleships. She crept close in to the Asiatic shore, and with the aid of the enemy searchlights probed into every bay where the Irresistible and the Ocean might have gone aground. But there was nothing to be seen or heard: nothing but this extraordinary silence, the utter lassitude of the battlefield after the day’s fighting is done. To Keyes it was an exhilarating experience.

‘I had,’ he wrote later, ‘a most indelible impression that we were in the presence of a beaten foe. I thought he was beaten at 2 p.m. I knew he was beaten at 4 p.m. – and at midnight I knew with still greater certainty that he was absolutely beaten; and it only remained for us to organize a proper sweeping force and devise some means of dealing with the drifting mines to reap the fruits of our efforts. I felt that the guns of the forts and batteries and the concealed howitzers and mobile field guns were no longer a menace. Mines moored and drifting must, and could, be overcome.’

In the early hours of the morning Keyes, in this uplifted state of mind, steamed back to the Queen Elizabeth.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE attack on the Dardanelles could hardly have happened at a worse time for the Turks. In the five months that had elapsed since they had gone to war nothing had gone well with them. In the south Basra, at the head of the Persian Gulf, had fallen to the British, and the expedition into Egypt had ended in a miserable fiasco; a few exhausted and bewildered troops managed to reach the Suez Canal but they were easily driven off and not many of them got back to the oases of Palestine alive.

In the east things were even worse. It was Enver’s notion that Turkey should launch an offensive against Russia in the Caucasus with the Third Army stationed at Erzerum, and he decided to lead the expedition himself. Before leaving for the front he discussed his plan with Liman von Sanders, and the antagonism between the two men seems to have gathered impetus from this moment. Liman pointed out that Enver was proposing to take his troops across the mountains at Sarikamish in mid-winter, when the passes were blocked with snow, and that he had made no arrangements for his lines of supply. All this had no effect whatever upon Enver; he would proceed according to his plan, he said, and after the Russians had been defeated he would advance upon India through Afghanistan. Liman von Sanders has written a sober account of his experiences in Turkey, and he rarely permits himself an emotional expression. This last piece of information, however, undermined his calm. ‘Enver,’ he said, ‘gave utterance to fantastic ideas.’

The details of the battle of Sarikamish, on January 4, 1915, have never been fully known, for there was no one to record them and the news of what had happened was suppressed in Turkey at the time. The official figures, however, reveal that of the ninety thousand Turks who set out on the expedition only twelve thousand returned. The others were killed, captured, died of hunger or were frozen to death. Enver, a sad travesty of the Napoleon he so longed to emulate, abandoned what was left of the army in the field and came back through the winter snow across the Anatolian plain to resume his post at the Ministry of War in Constantinople. Outwardly he remained as calm as ever, and nothing was said about the disaster at Sarikamish or the subsequent outbreak of typhus in the broken army.

There followed in Constantinople a ludicrous attempt to proclaim a Jehad – a Holy War – against all Christians in the Near East (Germans and Austrians excepted), and German missions were sent as far off as Afghanistan to intrigue against the British. But nothing now could disguise the fact that Turkey’s war effort had come to a standstill. The Treasury was empty, the Army’s requisitions of private property were becoming more and more severe, and among civilians there was apathy everywhere. According to Lewis Einstein, the American Minister, the Germans were in some considerable anxiety that at the next blow the Turks might start negotiating in secret for a separate peace.

It was in these low circumstances that the news of the bombardment of the Dardanelles arrived.

In a time of crisis the morale of the civilians in a city which has not yet been touched by war is seldom as high as it is among the soldiers in the frontline; but in March Constantinople excelled itself. In the absence of any reliable information from the Dardanelles rumours began to spread, and they gathered an astonishing virulence as they went along. Forty thousand British soldiers were about to land on the Golden Horn. The women would be raped. The whole city was about to go up in flames.

‘It seems so strange now,’ Henry Morgenthau wrote later on, ‘this conviction in the minds of everybody then – that the success of the Allied Fleets against the Dardanelles was inevitable, and that the capture of Constantinople was a matter of only a few days.’

For two centuries the British Fleet had gone on from one victory to another, it was the one wholly unshakeable power in the world; what hope was there that a handful of old guns on the Dardanelles could hold it back?

In early March the exodus from Constantinople began. The state archives and the gold in the banks were sent to Eski-Shehr, and some attempt was made to bury the more valuable art treasures underground. The first of two special trains, one for the Sultan and his suite, the other for the foreign diplomats, stood ready at Haidar Pasha on the Asiatic shore, and the more well-to-do Turks began to send their wives and families into the interior, by every means they could find.

They were hardly to blame for these precautions, for Talaat himself was utterly despondent. As early as January he had called a conference of Liman von Sanders, Admiral Usedom, the German who was in command of the coastal defences, and Bronsart, the German chief-of-staff of the Army. All had agreed that when the Allied Fleet attacked it would get through. Now in March, Talaat had requisitioned a powerful Mercedes car from the Belgian Legation, and it was packed and equipped with extra petrol tanks, ready for his departure. Since the distance from Gallipoli to Constantinople was only 150 miles it was judged that the first British warships would appear off the Golden Horn within twelve hours of their arrival in the Sea of Marmara.

Among the diplomats too there was much apprehension. The German Embassy, a huge yellow pile of stone, stood on a particularly exposed point at the head of the Bosphorus, and Wangenheim, all his earlier courage gone, was convinced that it would be shelled. He had already deposited some of his baggage with Morgenthau for safe keeping on neutral American ground. ‘Let them dare to destroy that Embassy,’ he exclaimed to Morgenthau one day. ‘I’ll get even with them. If they fire a single shot at it we’ll blow up the French and the British Embassies. Go tell the British Admiral that, won’t you? Tell him also that we have the dynamite ready to do it.’

Wangenheim was in an awkward position. If he retired with the Sultan into the interior of Asia Minor and the Turks signed a peace with the Allies he would be cut off from Germany and the West. For a time he had tried to persuade Talaat to move the government to Adrianople, whence he would have an opportunity of escaping across the Bulgarian border; but Talaat had refused on the grounds that it was more than likely that Bulgaria would attack Turkey once Constantinople fell.

Next Bedri, the Chief of Police, came to Morgenthau to arrange for the departure of the American Embassy. Morgenthau told him that he was not going to move, and suggested instead that they should draw up a map of the city showing the areas which were likely to be bombarded. It was agreed that the two ammunition factories, the powder mills, the offices of War and Marine, the telegraph office, the railway stations and a number of other public buildings were all legitimate targets. These were marked off, and Morgenthau telegraphed the State Department in Washington with a request that the British and French should be approached and asked to spare the other purely residential districts.

This plan, however, was hardly more than a straw in the wind, for the more ruthless of the Young Turks had already made their own arrangements for destroying the city rather than let the Allies have it. If they themselves had to go then all should go. They cared nothing for the Christian relics of Byzantium, and regarded patriotism as a higher thing than the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people who lived in the tumbledown wooden houses in Galata and Stamboul and along the Golden Horn. If one did not remember the burning of Moscow by the Russians after Borodino, and Hitler’s last days in Berlin, it would be difficult to credit the arrangements that were now made. Petrol and other inflammable material were stored in the police stations. St. Sophia and other public buildings were made ready for dynamiting.

Morgenthau pleaded for St. Sophia at least, but Talaat answered 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.’

The truth was that by March the Young Turks had something to fear which was even worse than the approach of the Allied Fleet. Placards had begun to appear in the streets denouncing their government. With every day that went by it became more evident that a great part of the population – and not only the Greeks and the Armenians – looked upon the arrival of the Allied warships, not as a defeat but as a liberation. Bedri was able to do something to check this increasing unrest by deporting a number of men whom he judged to be dangerous, but it was perfectly clear that rioting would break out directly the British and French ships appeared.

For the rest, all was concealed muddle and a silent confusion. Outwardly the city was quiet and normal, inwardly it was possessed by a coma of suspense. The shops were open, the government departments at work; but everyone, with divided hopes and different fears, had fixed his attention on the Dardanelles, and even the great mass of minor people who aspire to nothing but their own safety and who submerge their imaginations in the routine of their daily lives were eager for the latest rumour, the least scrap of information from the front.

It was that ominous quietness that precedes a riot. Everywhere in Constantinople soldiers were marching about or standing at the street corners, and they had that curious appearance of aimlessness, of menace that has not yet quite decided upon its target, that seems to overtake armed forces in a city when the officers have no orders, when nothing certain is known and each new rumour cancels out the last. The Goeben made ready to steam out into the Black Sea before the Queen Elizabeth arrived.

‘These precautions,’ Liman remarks dryly, ‘were justified.’ Turkish General Headquarters, he says, were convinced that the Fleet would break through, and meanwhile the orders issued by Enver for the disposition of the troops along the Dardanelles were such that a successful defence against an Allied landing there would have been impossible. ‘Had these orders been carried out,’ Liman goes on, ‘the course of the world war would have been given sucha turn in the spring of 1915 that Germany and Austria would have had to continue the struggle without Turkey.’

Meanwhile at the Narrows in the Dardanelles, the last obstacle between the Fleet and the Sea of Marmara, the Turkish and German gunners were reaching the end of their resources. Up to March 18 they had been able to hold their own, and in the excitement of the struggle they had come to regard with almost a casual air the slim dark silhouettes of the battleships which appeared each day so clearly before them at the southern approaches to the straits. Soon they knew all the names: ‘There’s the Agamemnon; there’s the Elizabeth,’ and they longed only for the ships to come within range so that they could begin to shoot. But each day drained away a little more of their energy and their ability to fight. The massed attack of March 18 had been a devastating thing. By midnight, just as Keyes had guessed, they had reached a point of crisis.

Their courage had not gone – it had been a tremendous thing to see the enemy battleships go down, and in all the day’s fighting they had suffered only 118 casualties – but half their ammunition had been fired away, and there was no possibility of getting any more. In particular the heavy guns had been left with less than thirty armour-piercing shells, which alone had power to destroy the battleships. When these were gone it was simply a question of how long the lighter guns and howitzers could keep the minesweepers off the minefields; some thought one day, others two. The mines themselves offered no particular difficulty once the guns were dominated; there were 324 of them arranged in ten lines, but they were spaced ninety yards apart, many of them were old, and after six months in the water had broken from their moorings and drifted away.[4]4
  The Turks in fact were so short of mines that they had been collecting those the Russians had been floating down the Bosphorus from the Black Sea in the hope of destroying the Goeben and the Breslau. In Constantinople these mines had been picked up, transhipped to the Dardanelles, and put into the minefields there.


[Закрыть] Apart from another thirty-six mines which had not yet been put into the water there was no other reserve, and it was now quite possible for the British to sweep a channel through to the Sea of Marmara in a matter of hours. Beyond the Narrows there were no other defences of any kind to impede the battleships, except a few old guns which were aimed the wrong way.