The Heroic Record of the British Navy: A Short History of the Naval War, 1914-1918

by Archibald Hurd; Sir H. H. Bashford

They passed through the Dardanelles on August 10th, and, three days later, were said to have been bought by the Turkish Government, by whose officers and crews they were in future to be manned. Sir Berkeley Milne was recalled for an inquiry, the senior French officer, Admiral Boué de Lapeyrère, taking his place as Commander of the combined British and French forces, on August 30th; and, on September 20th, Rear-Admiral Troubridge also returned home. At his own request, he was court-martialled on November 5th, Admirals Sir Hedworth Meux and Sir George Callaghan conducting the inquiry, and, on November 12th, it was announced that he had been acquitted of all blame. Sir Berkeley Milne was also exonerated as the result of an Admiralty investigation.

So ended an episode in which, from the strictly naval standpoint, and though our leaders in the Mediterranean were held free from blame, it must be admitted that the honours rested with the German admiral and the perspicacity of his advisers in Berlin. Whether or no the arrival at Constantinople of the Goeben and Breslau was the determining factor in the Turkish Government's policy; how, if they had been sunk by us, that Government might have acted; and the effect on the situation that they had created of a prompter and more drastic action on our own part—these matters can never probably be accurately determined. On the other hand, it is clear that, both in material and moral effect, their presence was an enormous asset to German diplomacy; and that, indirectly at any rate, our campaign in Gallipoli, with all its consequences, derived from them. On September 27th, Turkey closed the Dardanelles; on October 31st, she declared war; and, three days later, on instructions from the Admiralty, but without reference to the War Council, certain units of the Mediterranean Fleet shelled the outer forts of the Dardanelles. In the light of after events, this was undoubtedly an error, but it was undertaken at the time with the purpose of ascertaining the effective range of the protecting Turkish guns.

Now to obtain a fair picture of the operations at Gallipoli that were afterward undertaken—operations in the first place wholly naval, but finally predominantly military—it is necessary to return for a moment to London and to study the general background against which they must be viewed. Here, after all, were the two or three brains upon which, as a whole, our strategy depended; and it is interesting to note how the mechanism through which they acted had become moulded and modified by the stress of war. For it must be remembered that, after those admirable dispositions, long considered and provided for by the Committee of Imperial Defence, had been undertaken—after not only the navy and army, but every affected department had gone, as it were, to its war-stations—an era followed that is best to be described as the era of improvisation.

No such war had been fought upon the earth's surface, and each succeeding day opened a new prospect. With every branch of both services discovering strange and imperative needs; with no section of our national life that was failing to experience some fresh dislocation—it was little wonder that, in the various higher executives, changes and experiments in change should have been found necessary. Many, perhaps most of these, were proved to be inadequate, and replaced by others as the war went on. Others were doomed from the first and should never have been embarked upon. It had been so arranged, for example, at the War Office, that most of the General Staff officers should take commands in the field; and, when Lord Kitchener became Secretary for War, the General Staff practically ceased to exist.

Accustomed to self-reliance, to centralization even in the minutest details, Lord Kitchener assumed powers so various and important, as it was impossible for any one man to wield; and, to some extent, though not to such an extreme, a similar process had set in at the Admiralty. Instead of the Board of Admiralty, consisting of the First Lord, the four Sea Lords, the two Civil Lords, the Parliamentary and Permanent Secretaries, there had come into being a War Staff Group, including the First Lord and the First Sea Lordd (but none of the other Sea Lords), the Chief of Staff, the Permanent Secretary, a Naval Secretary, and Sir Arthur Wilson—the latter, "Tug" Wilson, as he was called, although retired, being regarded as one of our greatest naval strategists. That was the composition in November, 1914, of the real directorate of the navy, Lord Fisher, who succeeded Prince Louis of Battenburg, on October 30th, being First Sea Lord.

As in the War Office and Admiralty, a similar kind of change had become observable in the Cabinet. Theoretically the direction of the war rested, of course, in the hands of this body, assisted in their deliberations by the Committee of Imperial Defense. Practically both the Cabinet and the Committee of Imperial Defense fell more and more into abeyance, the conduct of the war passing into the hands of a new and smaller body, known as the War Council. This consisted of the Prime Minister, then Mr. Asquith, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Lloyd George, the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, the Secretary of State for India, the Marquis of Crewe, the Secretary for War, Lord Kitchener, and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr. Winston Churchill. Of these, however, the main responsibility rested upon Mr. Asquith, Mr. Churchill, and Lord Kitchener. This was in practice the triumvirate then conducting the war, as far as the British Empire was concerned, and each of the three was a man of strong and outstanding personality. In Mr. Asquith the country was being served by a statesman of very typical English qualities, imperturbable, perhaps a little slow-moving, magnanimous, shrewd, and of great intellectual capacity. In Mr. Churchill the Admiralty had at its head a man of brilliant and impulsive mentality, complete physical and moral fearlessness, and a somewhat headstrong initiative. In Lord Kitchener there had come to the War Office the foremost soldier of the Empire, the man who had been recalled by an irresistible popular appeal from the governorship of Egypt, in whose name the new armies, voluntarily recruited from every social rank, had outrun equipment, ammunition, even places to be lodged in—a man who already, in his sixty-fourth year, had become an almost legendary figure, the liberator of the Sudan, Roberts' successor in South Africa, the administrator of India and Egypt, omnivorous of work, relentless, silent, and the public's beau-ideal of personal efficiency.

But, while of these three, it was little wonder that, politics apart, Lord Kitchener predominated, another figure, scarcely less powerful, and hardly second as a national idol, stood, as it were, at the elbow of this inner triumvirate in the person of Lord Fisher. The maker of the modern navy, and, in an even more vital sphere, as authoritative an influence as Lord Kitchener, at the age of seventy he had returned to the Admiralty with an almost equal popular approval. He had not, however, as had Lord Kitchener, an actual place in the War Council; and he was not, of course, present at many of its meetings.

This was the position at home, then, when, at a gathering of the War Council, held on November 25th, it was suggested by Mr. Churchill that the best way to defend Egypt was to attack some part of Turkey's Asiatic coast, and that an occupation of the Gallipoli Peninsula would give us the control of the Dardanelles and put Constantinople at our mercy—the idea in Mr. Churchill's mind being evidently that of a combined naval and military movement on a big scale. That some such attack on the Turkish lines of communication might eventually become desirable Lord Kitchener agreed. He did not consider, however, that the time had arrived for it; and when, a few days later, Mr. Churchill suggested to the War Office the advisability of collecting enough transport for 40,000 men—such transport to be assembled in Egypt—Lord Kitchener again replied that he did not think this was yet necessary, and that he would give the Admiralty full notice. The precaution was taken, however, in spite of this, to send horse-boats to Egypt whenever convenient, in view of the possible occasion of some such expedition as had already now become adumbrated.

Meanwhile the navy was playing its part in various operations already necessitated by the war with Turkey. Thus, on November 2nd, the Minerva, a sixteen-year-old protected cruiser, had shelled the forts and barracks of Akaba in the Red Sea; and, on November 8th, the town of Fao, at the head of the Persian Gulf, had been bombarded to cover the landing of troops from India, whence they captured Basra on November 21st. Simultaneously, of course, between Russia and Turkey, the struggle for the mastery of the Black Sea had been progressing. On November 10th, the Russians had sunk four Turkish transports; and, on November 18th, the Goeben, had been materially damaged in an engagement off Sebastopol. Two days later, the Turkish Hamidieh had bombarded Tuapse. On December 10th, the Goeben having been repaired, with the Berk-i-Satvet, shelled Batum; and, on December 12th, the Hamidieh was damaged by a mine in the Bosphorus. The first notable Turkish loss, however, was in the torpedoing of the battleship Messudiyeh in the Dardanelles, on December 13th, by the British submarine B11, under circumstances that will be referred to later. On December 17th, the Russian cruiser Askold sank a couple of Turkish steamers off Beyrout, and, on December 26th, the Goeben was again damaged, this time, like the Hamidieh, by a mine in the Bosphorus. Later, having been once more repaired, she was again to figure in desultory raiding actions on Black Sea ports; but, by the end of the year, it may be said that the Russian Navy was practically in unchallenged command of the Black Sea.

Russia's position in the land campaign against Turkey was not, however, quite so satisfactory, and it was on January 2nd that there was received in London a telegram from Sir George Buchanan, our ambassador in Petrograd, destined to have a profound effect upon our Near East policy. In this it was stated that the Russian armies were being rather severely pressed in the Caucasus, and that the Russian Government hoped it might be found possible for a demonstration to be made against Turkey elsewhere. On this same day, Lord Kitchener wrote to Mr. Churchill that he did not think we could do anything that would seriously help the Russians in the Caucasus; that we had no troops to land anywhere; that the only place where a demonstration might check the sending eastward of Turkey's reinforcements was the Dardanelles; but that we should not be ready for anything big for some months. A telegram was, however, sent to Russia the next day that some demonstration would be made, although it was unlikely, it was feared, that it would have any great effect in withdrawing enemy troops from the Caucasus. To an ally in a strait that was the only reply possible. But to the British Government it meant this—that by January 3d it had definitely pledged itself to make a demonstration against the Turks, and that the Dardanelles had again been mentioned as a possible arena of attack.