CHAPTER XXXII
The First World War, as everyone knows, was fought principally in the trenches of northern France and Belgium. It was not in any sense a Mediterranean war. On three occasions, however, it spilled out into the Middle Sea to concentrate on its eastern enemy, the Ottoman Empire. The first was the ill-starred campaign of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli; the second, the Allied landings at Salonica; the third took place in Palestine.
On 27 December 1914 Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, characteristically addressed to the Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, a long letter of advice. The war, he suggested, had reached an impasse. The two armies were so firmly dug in that an advance of a few hundred yards was likely to involve casualties of several thousand. What was needed was a breakout, to some completely new theatre of war. ‘Are there not other alternatives,’ he asked, ‘than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?’ It seemed to him that there were two. One idea was the invasion and seizure of Schleswig–Holstein, enabling Denmark to join the Allies and opening up the Baltic to Allied shipping; the Russians could then land an army within ninety miles of Berlin. This would certainly be his own preference.
But he also put forward another idea, still more ambitious and imaginative: an invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula, control of which would allow the Royal Navy to force a passage through the Dardanelles and into the Sea of Marmara. Anchoring at the mouth of the Golden Horn, it could then threaten a bombardment of Constantinople–a terrible threat indeed in view of the narrow streets and tumbledown wooden houses of the old city. The destruction of the Galata Bridge would cut off Pera from Stamboul; the only two munitions factories in Turkey both stood on the water’s edge, where they would be an easy target for the British guns. All this would oblige the Sultan’s government to sue for peace, after which there would be no difficulty, Churchill believed, in persuading the still neutral Greece, Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria to throw in their lot with the Allies. It was a typically Churchillian plan which, had it succeeded, would have greatly shortened the war. But it did not succeed–and for the best part of a century military historians have been trying to analyse why a plan which at first appeared so promising led to the greatest disaster of the war.
The chief problem seems to have been the lack of a concerted overall plan. Churchill had originally envisaged a combined military and naval operation; by mid-January 1915, however, he was advocating an attack by the Navy only, despite the furious opposition of the First Sea Lord, his friend–but occasionally also his bête noire–Admiral Sir John Fisher. Only a month later, less than a week before the naval bombardment of the Dardanelles began, was it decided to send troops in support. This was largely due to the fact that Churchill, who was providing all the energy and drive behind the plan, was only a cabinet minister, responsible exclusively for the navy. He had no power over the army; the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener–who did–was half-hearted, the Prime Minister still more so. Had Churchill possessed the authority that he was to enjoy twenty-five years later, the Gallipoli campaign might well have ended very differently.
Over the navy, however, he was supreme; thanks to him, the fleet assembled by the British and French was the greatest concentration of naval strength ever seen in the Mediterranean. Apart from cruisers, destroyers and lesser craft, the British had contributed fourteen battleships, including the recently completed Queen Elizabeth, whose fifteen-inch guns–possessed by no other vessel–made her probably the most powerful ship afloat. Most of the others had twelve-inch guns, but these alone easily outclassed anything the Turks could boast in the eleven fortresses–on both sides of the straits–which constituted their principal defence. To this already considerable force the French added four more battleships and their auxiliaries.
By 18 February 1915 the combined fleet was in position, and at 9.51 a.m. on the following morning the attack began. It continued throughout the day, the fleet gradually drawing nearer, bombarding the forts from ever closer range. Meanwhile, minesweepers were at work, clearing the approach to the straits. By nightfall there was as yet no conclusive result. The Allied commander, Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden, saw that nothing of importance could be achieved unless his ships could approach much closer still to their targets; unfortunately that night the weather broke, and rough seas made accurate bombardment impossible. Not until five days later did the storm blow itself out and allow the battle to continue. On the 25th Vice-Admiral John de Robeck advanced right up to the straits themselves and the defenders withdrew to the north. Over the next few days small parties of sailors and marines actually landed on both the European and Asiatic shores, destroying such Turkish equipment as they could find, but most of the territory seemed deserted. On 2 March Carden telegraphed to London that given fine weather he hoped to be at Constantinople in about a fortnight.
How wrong he was. The Dardanelles, he soon discovered, were one vast minefield; the minesweepers were prevented from doing their job by the enemy guns, and the Navy could not silence the guns until the mines had been swept. A fortnight later, instead of dropping anchor in Constantinople, Carden was on his way back to London with a nervous breakdown. He was succeeded in the command by de Robeck, who led an attack on the straits on 18 March; alas, it was a failure, owing largely to an undetected line of mines that sank one French and two British battleships. De Robeck was not to know–though he might have suspected–that the Turkish emplacements were now running seriously short of ammunition and had little immediate prospect of obtaining any more. He was aware only of his heavy losses and of the fact that Constantinople seemed as far away as ever. As for the Turks, their 60,000 men, skilfully deployed and commanded by General Liman von Sanders, had won their first victory for many years–and over the Royal Navy, which they, and much of the rest of the world, had long believed to be invincible. Constantinople had been saved from British clutches. Once again, they could walk with their heads held high.
It was by now clear to most of the British government that the navy could not achieve a breakthrough alone. ‘Somebody,’ wrote Admiral Fisher to David Lloyd George, ‘will have to land at Gallipoli some time or other.’ By mid-March Kitchener had reluctantly agreed to send out the 29th Division from England–totalling some 17,000 men–together with the Australian and New Zealand divisions (another 30,000) that were then awaiting orders in Egypt. In addition, there was one French division of 16,000 and the Royal Naval Division of 10,000. In overall command he appointed his old friend from Boer War days, General Sir Ian Hamilton. It was agreed that the armies would assemble on the island of Lemnos, where they would receive their stores and equipment and draw up their plans for the coming campaign.
At Lemnos, however, another disappointment was in store. The transports from England had been loaded with no thought for the army that was to receive them. Horses and guns arrived on one ship, saddles, harness and ammunition on another. Landing craft had apparently been forgotten altogether. A number of heavy lorries had been loaded, despite the fact that the Gallipoli peninsula had no roads. Nor, it seemed, did the army possess any accurate maps or charts of the area over which it would be fighting. Finally, landing and other facilities on Lemnos were found to be inadequate or nonexistent, with the result that everything had to be re-embarked and carried on to Alexandria, where the whole army could be regrouped and somehow made ready for battle. There was now no chance that the combined force would be ready until mid-April at the earliest. That would give Hamilton some three weeks to prepare and plan the most ambitious amphibious operation in the history of warfare.
The navy had been more fortunate with its supplies. A new fleet of destroyer-minesweepers had arrived, together with three dummy battleships, humble vessels which had been decked out with elaborate superstructures and wooden guns to serve as decoys and, with any luck, to persuade the German fleet to come out and fight.277 The Royal Flying Corps was represented by Air Commodore Charles Samson. When his thirty aircraft were uncrated, twenty-five were found to be unserviceable; for the remainder, however, there was a number of bombs designed to be lobbed overboard by the observer. Where the aircraft really came into their own was in the field of reconnaissance. The aerial photography of the enemy emplacements, with their vast fields of barbed wire, filled Hamilton with gloom.
The long-delayed landings finally took place in the early hours of 25 April. The British disembarked at Cape Helles on the western tip of the peninsula, the Australians and New Zealanders in a small bay–henceforth to be known as Anzac Cove–some thirteen miles along the north coast. The French, meanwhile, were put ashore at Kum Kale on the southern coast. The defending Turks, though outnumbered and outgunned and subject to constant shelling from the ships, kept up a courageous resistance. The Allied troops fought equally bravely, but their task was made harder by the extraordinary preference of Hamilton and his two subordinate generals, Aylmer Hunter-Weston and Sir William Birdwood–commanding the British and the Anzacs respectively–to remain at sea throughout the vital first hours after the landings. Thus, when the signalling arrangements began to fail and there was an almost immediate breakdown of Allied communications, each individual unit was left to look after itself, with no knowledge of what was happening on the next beach to its own. By the end of the first day, after heavy casualties on both sides, the invading forces were still largely confined to the shore.
Anyone who has ever visited the Gallipoli peninsula will have been struck by the intense hostility of the terrain. Of scenic beauty there is plenty, with the plain of Troy extending beyond the Dardanelles to the south and, rising from the sea in the west, the islands of Imbros and Samothrace. But the beaches themselves, set in what is essentially a succession of small coves, are small and narrow, and they are overhung by cliffs, rising almost perpendicular only yards from the shore, slashed by precipitous ravines and so densely covered with scrub and bracken as to be in many places utterly impassable. Thus the Turks on the heights above, hidden in the thick vegetation, had a perfect field of fire on the forces trapped on the beaches below.
How, one wonders, can those who planned the operation have believed that it had the faintest chance of success? Hamilton and a few of his senior officers had done a rough reconnaissance by sailing a little way up the coast in a destroyer, and there were a few aerial photographs. But no one had a proper map, and there were some areas–notably Anzac Cove–which had never been mapped at all. Nonetheless, when the Australians and New Zealanders splashed ashore in the early hours of that Sunday morning, they fought like tigers. Some of them managed to cut a path with their bayonets through the scrub, and by 8 a.m. it seemed that in several places the Turks were on the run. At that moment, however, there arrived on the scene one of the half-dozen most remarkable men of the twentieth century.
Mustafa Kemal–he made a brief appearance in the preceding chapter–was by now, at the age of thirty-four, a divisional commander. Called out with one small battalion to engage the invaders, he first single-handedly stopped a group of his retreating countrymen and by the sheer force of his personality persuaded them to turn and fight; then, realising that the battle was far more serious and on an infinitely larger scale than he had been led to understand, he summoned–on his own responsibility–a crack Turkish regiment and one of the Arab units as well. In doing this he was blatantly exceeding his authority, but it was not until the early afternoon that he even informed his headquarters of what he had done. By this time the progress of the battle had proved him right; he returned to his unit with effective authority over the whole of the Anzac front.
All day he kept up the pressure, and the Dominion troops who had managed to advance a short distance into the hinterland began to fall back towards the sea. By now Birdwood had discovered to his horror that he had landed his men on the wrong beach. He had expected to find a strip of coast at least a mile long; he found instead a cove little more than half that length, with only some thirty yards between the water and the cliff. Here everything had to be brought: guns, ammunition, stores of all kinds, pack animals–and, all too soon, an endless stream of stretchers bearing the dead or wounded. That night he sent a message to the Commander-in-Chief seeking permission to abandon his whole position and to re-embark his men.
But Hamilton refused. Any such re-embarkation, he pointed out, would take at least two days; meanwhile it had just been reported to him that an Australian submarine had passed through the narrows and entered the Sea of Marmara, where it had already torpedoed a Turkish gunboat. There was nothing the poor general could do but tell his men to dig themselves in.
Birdwood, busy with the Anzacs, would have been even more discouraged had he known how the European troops had fared. The French, to be sure, had done well: they had landed near the reputed tomb of Achilles, had seized and occupied the ruined fortress of Kum Kale and were now ready to join their British allies at Cape Helles. Here, however, the landings had been catastrophic. The Turks had held their fire until most of the transports had been drawn up to the beach and the men disembarked, and had then suddenly loosed a murderous hail of bullets. For the British troops there was no protection, and soon, as Air Commodore Samson reported after observing the scene from the air, ‘the calm blue sea was absolutely red with blood for fifty yards from the shore, a horrible sight to see.’ In the shallows, all the little ripples were dyed scarlet. Within three hours, nearly a thousand corpses were strewn across the beach. At the other four nearby landing places the situation had been rather better; it was known, too, that the Turks had also suffered appalling casualties. Nevertheless, Hamilton’s continued optimism remained astonishing. ‘Thanks to God who calmed the seas,’ he wrote on April 26, ‘and to the Royal Navy who rowed our fellows ashore as coolly as if at a regatta; thanks also to the dauntless spirit shown by all ranks of both Services, we have landed 29,000 upon six beaches in the face of desperate resistance.’ But as other reports filtered back to London there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the cost of the Gallipoli operation in human life alone had already been far greater than foreseen, and that its long-term prospects were in serious doubt.
After three days there was a lull, followed by what seemed a stalemate. The British and the Anzacs had somehow managed to advance a mile or two into the hills, and to dig themselves in; try as they might, the Turks could not dislodge them. For some time it looked as though the action in the trenches of the peninsula might become almost as static as in Flanders. Meanwhile, in London, all the stresses and strains within the government were mercilessly exposed. First, on 15 May, Admiral Fisher resigned–or, more accurately, walked out; for some hours he was missing, and was finally run to earth at the Charing Cross Hotel. Next, Prime Minister Asquith was obliged to form a coalition government, from which–in the most dramatic reverse of his political career to date–Winston Churchill was determinedly excluded.
For the men on the beaches of Gallipoli, and the others on the cliffs above, the summer was long indeed. As the weather grew steadily hotter, the flies became more and more insufferable: the food, the corpses in no man’s land, the countless suppurating wounds, the proximity of the latrines, all these things attracted them in their millions and made life an even greater misery than it would otherwise have been. In the wake of the flies came the dysentery. By July a thousand totally incapacitated men were being shipped off every week to Lemnos or one of the other islands. But there was good news too: in June it was agreed in London to send out five more divisions, giving Hamilton a total of some 120,000 men. De Robeck also–now that Fisher was safely out of the way–received substantial reinforcements to his fleet. In these dramatically changed conditions a new landing was clearly indicated, and the choice fell on Suvla Bay, a few miles to the north of Anzac Cove. From here it was hoped to advance quickly the four miles to the narrows, cutting off the bulk of the Turkish army on the tip of the peninsula.
Suvla Bay seemed at first full of promise. Unlike the shallow crescents of most of the other bays, it formed a perfect horseshoe; its waters thus provided an ideal anchorage for the fleet. It had no tall cliffs to dominate it and was, perhaps for that reason, only lightly defended–as it turned out, by some 1,800 men distributed around the bay, without barbed wire or machine-guns. It was, moreover, just around the headland from Anzac Cove; once its possession was assured it could accommodate many of the unhappy Dominion troops and so relieve the nightmare overcrowding which they had endured for so long. The landings began under cover of darkness on 4 August and continued until the night of the 6th, the Turks apparently suspecting nothing. It was only after all were disembarked that things began to go seriously wrong. The newly arrived troops were inexperienced and undisciplined, their commanders old and for the most part incompetent, seemingly unable to cope with the hellish conditions prevailing. The chain of command soon broke down, Hamilton remaining hopelessly out of touch: orders were countermanded at the last moment; generals and brigadiers were encouraged to act at their own discretion; seldom was it clearly explained to the soldiers what was required of them.
There were a few temporary successes. The heroic attack by the Australians at Lone Pine cost them 4,000 men, but it won them no less than seven Victoria Crosses and resulted in the capture of the Turkish front line. The New Zealanders smashed through another part of the line and found themselves to the rear of the Turkish positions. But for every success there were several failures, and on the evening of 8 April the Allies had been forced back into their own trenches, having sustained horrific casualties and with none of their main objectives achieved. At the end of August Hamilton confessed his failure to Kitchener. He could do no more, he said, without heavy reinforcements; he mentioned the figure of 95,000 men, but the Field Marshal only shrugged. The War Cabinet, it appeared, had decided to concentrate once again on the Western Front. Was Gallipoli to be written off?
In the last week of September there came a further blow. Bulgaria mobilised; it was virtually certain that within a week at the most she would enter the war on the side of Germany and Austria and would march with them against Serbia. This threatened to change the whole situation in the Balkans; the Allies therefore decided to transfer two divisions, first a French and then a British, from Gallipoli to Salonica, whence they could march north to help the Serbs. It seemed then that Hamilton must be prepared to abandon Suvla altogether. And there was another possibility, even more depressing: on 11 October Kitchener cabled Hamilton: ‘What is your estimate of the probable losses which would be entailed to your force if the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula was decided upon? No decision has been arrived at yet…but I feel I ought to have your views.’ Hamilton replied at once; 50 percent, he suggested, might be a realistic figure, adding, ‘On the other hand, with all these raw troops at Suvla and all those Senegalese at Cape Helles, we might have a veritable catastrophe.’ When this message was put before the Dardanelles Committee on 14 October, Hamilton’s fate was sealed. Two days later he received his dismissal.
Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Monro, Hamilton’s successor, had come straight from the Western Front, and from the day of his arrival made no secret of the fact that he considered the whole Gallipoli expedition misconceived. The war, he believed, would be won in France; any distraction or diversion from the main thrust was to be deplored. Since his orders were to advise on whether the peninsula should be evacuated or not, the nature of his advice seemed a foregone conclusion. Nor, on his arrival, did he see anything to make him change his mind. Although the weather was growing rapidly colder, no winter clothing had been received from London. Many units were now at half strength or less, the remaining soldiers reduced to skin and bone. The guns were rationed to two shells a day. Monro’s first sight of Suvla Bay confirmed his worst fears. ‘Like Alice in Wonderland,’ he was heard to murmur, ‘curiouser and curiouser.’ The following day he sent Kitchener his recommendation.
But all was not yet lost. Commodore Roger Keyes, Admiral de Robeck’s chief of staff, saw fit to disagree. His plan was quite simple: to gather the entire Mediterranean fleet, which had been lying all summer at various points in the Aegean, and–while keeping up a terrific bombardment of the Turkish shore batteries–to make a determined attempt on the straits. This would, he believed, take the Turks by surprise. Once in the Marmara, it would be a simple matter to block the isthmus of Bulair at the northern end of the peninsula, cutting off the twenty Turkish divisions stationed there. De Robeck was sceptical, but generously allowed Keyes to return to England to plead his case. He did–and made a considerable impact on all the principal admirals, on the First Lord of the Admiralty Arthur Balfour, and of course on Winston Churchill.
There remained Lord Kitchener, who had been appalled by the speed and tenor of Monro’s reply. It was he who had personally chosen Hamilton for the Gallipoli command, and he had not enjoyed seeing his friend humiliated. He immediately fell in with Keyes’s idea, asked him to try to get some sort of definite undertaking from the Admiralty, and then announced–to Birdwood rather than to Monro–his decision to leave personally for the Dardanelles the following day. The message ended: ‘I absolutely refuse to sign order for evacuation, which I think would be the greatest disaster and would condemn a large percentage of our men to death or imprisonment. Monro will be appointed to command the Salonica force.’ Then he set off, via Paris–where the French confirmed that they were firmly opposed to evacuation–to Marseille and thence in HMS Dartmouth to Gallipoli.
Had Keyes accompanied him–as Kitchener had asked him to, but the message was never delivered–he might have kept the Field Marshal steady, but the climate of opinion among the commanders on the spot had swung considerably since Keyes’s departure and Kitchener immediately found himself surrounded by Monro, de Robeck and Birdwood, all three now firmly in favour of evacuation. No one spoke up for Keyes and his plan. After two days of discussions the Field Marshal went off on a tour of inspection of the three principal bridgeheads, and was duly depressed by what he saw, though somewhat less so than Monro. On 22 November he cabled to London a recommendation that Suvla and Anzac Bay should be evacuated at once, Cape Helles being held ‘for the time being’. Two days later he sailed for England.
By this time no one remotely involved with the operation, from the highest to the most humble, felt anything but loathing for the Gallipoli peninsula; but they had not yet seen it at its worst. On 27 November it was hit by the fiercest blizzard for at least forty years. Twenty-four hours of deluge were followed by north winds of hurricane force, bringing with them heavy snowfalls and two nights of intense frost. Torrents came sweeping down from the hills, carrying the bodies of drowned Turks. At Anzac Cove, in particular, where many of the Australians and a small Indian contingent were probably seeing snow for the first time, there was virtually no protection from the piercing cold; winter clothing still had not been issued, and the soldiers could do nothing but huddle in their soaking wet blankets, which soon froze solid. For three days and three nights the torment continued. When it was over, 200 men had been drowned or died of cold, 5,000 were suffering from severe frostbite. Many of them had in the past opposed evacuation, determined to see the operation through to the end; now, however great the inherent dangers, they could not get away fast enough.
The evacuation was clearly going to be a long and difficult job.278 In the Suvla–Anzac bridgehead alone there were 83,000 men, to say nothing of the 5,000 horses and donkeys, 2,000 motor vehicles, nearly 2,000 guns and several tons of supplies. The only hope was to withdraw silently and secretly over perhaps two or three weeks. Even then there were formidable dangers: a sustained Turkish bombardment could easily make embarkations impossible; bad weather and a rough sea could ruin the best-laid plans–and the winter solstice was fast approaching. But there was no alternative; from the second week of December nightly flotillas of barges and small boats crept into the bays, leaving before dawn weighed down to the gunwales with men, animals and arms. The sick and wounded were embarked first; fifty-six temporary hospital ships had been prepared for them, and 12,000 hospital beds were waiting in Egypt. During the day, to allay Turkish suspicions, life continued precisely as usual: the endless mule teams continued to toil up from the beaches to the front, down from the front to the beaches. The only difference was that the crates and boxes that they carried were empty. As the evacuation progressed the deception became more difficult: the same men and animals were obliged to march round and round again like a stage army. No tents were struck; thousands of extra cooking fires were lit every night.
After a week the pace quickened; by 18 December half the force–some 40,000–had been taken off. The enemy could no longer be fooled; it was agreed that the remainder of the army would leave over the next two nights. In some sectors of the front, the Allied and Turkish trenches were less than ten yards from each other (many of them can still be seen) and it must have seemed impossible to leave them without alerting the enemy; yet somehow it was done. Just before daybreak on the 21st the last boats pulled away from the beach. At Anzac Cove two men were wounded by stray shots just as they were boarding; at Suvla Bay every single man and animal was safely taken off. The last thing they did before they left was to light the fuses that had been carefully laid all over the beaches. Ten minutes later they heard with deep satisfaction the series of deafening explosions as the ammunition dumps went up.
What about the British? For their four divisions–some 35,000 men–in the Helles bridgehead, the situation looked grave indeed. The Turks had allowed the Anzacs to disappear from right under their noses; surely they would not make the same mistake again. Instead, no longer tied down at Anzac and Suvla, they would throw the whole weight of their army against them. There could no longer be any question of hanging on, and Monro, Birdwood and de Robeck–who had been briefly invalided home but who returned just before Christmas–were now all agreed. Evacuation, however problematic, must be attempted.
It began on Saturday, 1 January 1916. The French left first, and after a week the number of British troops remaining was down to 19,000. Up to this point there had been surprisingly little enemy opposition. Then, in the early afternoon of the 7th, the Turks launched their attack–in a bombardment that lasted for four and a half hours. After the guns had fallen silent there came the inevitable charge. The British in their trenches faced it with guns and rifles blazing, and were astonished to see the Turkish infantry–well-known for its discipline and courage–stopping dead in its tracks, flatly refusing to advance further. When night fell not a single Turkish soldier had penetrated the British line. For the next twenty-four hours there was no more trouble, and the evacuation continued.
Meanwhile, however, the weather was worsening. By the evening of 8 January the glass was falling fast, and soon the wind was gusting at 35 miles an hour. Two lighters broke adrift and smashed one of the makeshift piers; everything stopped while it was repaired–no easy job in the dark, with a stormy sea. The wind and the rain also slowed down the few remaining troops as they marched the three or four miles from their trenches to the beach, but at 3.45 a.m. the last man was on board, the last boat heading out to sea. Ten minutes later, as at Anzac and Suvla, the ammunition dumps exploded in a dramatic finale. The ill-starred adventure was over at last.
Nothing became it like its end. It is one of the many ironies of Gallipoli that, after the chaos and confusion that had blighted the whole operation from the beginning, the final evacuations were models of superb organisation and planning. There were scarcely any casualties; not a man was left behind. But there is, perhaps, a greater irony still: that the great expedition, failure as it may have been, was nevertheless a brilliant concept, which should–and could–have succeeded. Some years after the war, an official report on the campaign by the Turkish General Staff confessed that the naval battle of 19 March had left it virtually without ammunition; had de Robeck returned immediately to the attack he would very probably have been able to advance unhindered through the straits to Constantinople, in which case ‘the eight divisions retained there would have been unable to defend it’. With Constantinople occupied, it is doubtful whether the Russians would ever have signed a separate peace–and the Russian Revolution might never have occurred. Even after the landings victory might have been possible; the Turkish report also admitted that twice during the campaign–during the first Anzac landing in April and at Suvla Bay in August–the Allies would almost certainly have broken through had it not been for the astonishing personal magnetism of Mustafa Kemal.279 Had they managed to do so, had the campaign succeeded–as it so very nearly did–the Great War would probably have ended three years earlier, and a million lives would have been saved.
The Greek attitude towards the landing of troops in Salonica was ambiguous and uncertain. The Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, secretly welcomed the plan, though for form’s sake he registered a formal protest. King Constantine, on the other hand–who had succeeded his father George two years before and was married to the Kaiser’s sister–was violently opposed, on the grounds that until the Bulgarian army actually crossed the frontier, the presence of foreign troops on Greek soil would be a violation of Greek neutrality. As for the Greeks themselves, they were overwhelmingly on the side of the King. They had no desire for an Allied presence, feeling that they were being forced against their will into the war. The result was what came to be known as the National Schism, and Venizelos was forced to resign.
It is always a mistake for constitutional monarchs to meddle in foreign policy; this time it was calamitous. The King now opened secret talks with the Germans, and on 23 May 1916, on his orders, the Greek army surrendered the frontier castle of Roupel, allowing German and Bulgarian troops to overrun eastern Macedonia. Kavalla too was ordered to surrender, its Greek garrison being carted off to Germany as prisoners of war. ‘Where,’ shouted Venizelos in parliament, ‘where at least are your thirty pieces of silver?’ It was not perhaps the most diplomatic preface to a last appeal to the King to join the Allies before it was too late. Predictably, Constantine turned a deaf ear.
For the expeditionary force, the situation was becoming more and more impossible. From the day of its arrival it had found itself extremely unwelcome, being obliged to camp several miles outside the city while the consuls of the enemy remained at liberty within. That winter the Serbs had been driven back to the Adriatic and Serbia had been occupied. What, the Allies asked themselves, were they meant to be doing? It was then that the French commander in Salonica, General Maurice Serrail, had taken the law into his own hands, putting all the enemy consuls and agents under arrest and imprisoning them in the castle while simultaneously taking possession of another fortress guarding the entrance to the bay. Now the gloves were off: the Allied powers officially demanded the demobilisation of the Greek army, the dissolution of parliament and the dismissal of the government. In September 1916 Venizelos slipped away to his native Crete, where he raised a revolt against the King. He then returned to Greece and established a provisional government in Thessalonica, which the Allies recognised a month later.
In December the British and French, their demands still unfulfilled, landed troops at Piraeus in an attempt to force the King to surrender his armaments and munitions. This, however, proved a mistake: the Greeks fought back and the royal palace was bombarded by the French fleet. Venizelos, understandably but quite unjustifiably, was blamed, and on 26 December was solemnly excommunicated by the Archbishop of Athens. The Allies then put southern Greece under a blockade and in June 1917 demanded the abdication of the King–the French reinforcing the demand by landing troops at Corinth. Constantine refused to abdicate, but left with his eldest son for Switzerland.
Now, overnight, the whole situation changed. Constantine was succeeded in Athens–now starving owing to the continuing blockade and virtually under French occupation–by his second son, Alexander. A few days later Venizelos returned from Salonica with his government, received a warm welcome and became the new King’s Prime Minister–celebrating his reappointment with a nine-hour speech to parliament. Now it was the royalists who suffered; indeed they were purged–government, civil service, army, even the Church. Greek society was torn in two, and was to remain so for at least a generation. At last, and not a moment too soon, Greece entered the war on the Allied side. Her army, conscripted and largely untrained, fought magnificently in Macedonia. With the British they invaded and defeated Bulgaria; with the French and Serbs, they drove the Germans out of Serbia. As a final triumph, Greek troops entered Constantinople for the first time since 1453. For Eleftherios Venizelos, it was his finest hour.
The initial excitement and subsequent despair over Gallipoli completely overshadowed yet another theatre of war: that of the Middle East. This too formed part of the Ottoman Empire, and saw the Turkish army under constant pressure from the Allies, both in Mesopotamia and in Palestine.
The Palestinian campaign was, once again, an attempt to boost the morale of an increasingly war-weary Britain: to give its people something to think about other than the continuing holocaust in the trenches of Flanders, while at the same time landing a telling blow on the enemy at his weakest point. Its principal instigator, however, was not Winston Churchill–still out of the government thanks to the Gallipoli debacle–but the Prime Minister, Asquith’s successor David Lloyd George. His objective could be summarised in just three words, ‘Jerusalem before Christmas’, and the man he chose to achieve it was General Sir Edmund Allenby. Allenby was not universally popular in the army, where his immense height, commanding presence, furious temper and frequently hectoring manner had earned him the nickname of the Bull;280 in fact, his aggression concealed a genuine passion for nature and a deep love of music, literature and philosophy.281 A soldier through and through, he had been desolated when ordered to leave the trenches for Palestine; he little knew that the unwelcome transfer was to make his name and fame, securing him a field marshal’s baton, a viscountcy and the gift from a grateful nation of £50,000.
The Egyptian Expeditionary Force (as it was called) was manned largely by Australians. It existed primarily to protect the Suez Canal–but it was also expected to fight the Turks. The Canal was safe enough; against the Turks, however, though superior both in numbers and equipment to the ramshackle army facing it beyond the Sinai Peninsula, the EEF had achieved remarkably little. ‘In Palestine and Mesopotamia,’ Lloyd George had written, ‘nothing and nobody could have saved the Turk from complete collapse in 1915 and 1916 except our General Staff.’ The spring of 1917 showed no sign of improvement. There had been two half-hearted attempts to take Gaza; both had ended in defeat. Allenby’s first task, therefore, when he arrived in Cairo on 28 June, was to breathe new life into this sadly demoralised army–and within a few weeks he had done so. His predecessor, General Archibald Murray, had preferred to maintain his headquarters at the Savoy Hotel in Cairo; Allenby moved it forward to a sweltering, fly-blown camp of tents and huts just behind the front line at Gaza and immediately embarked on a round of all the advanced units, establishing direct personal contact with his officers and men. It was the height of summer, the noonday temperature often hit 120 degrees, sandstorms were frequent and asphyxiating–but nothing seemed to stop the enormous general in full uniform, sitting bolt upright in an old Ford truck beside a diminutive Australian driver in vest and shorts, bouncing over the desert, investigating defence works and water supplies, barking out orders and quick to express his dissatisfaction in no uncertain terms. Wherever he went, morale soared.
Allenby’s first task had been to gain a clear idea of the forces at his command; his next was to draw up a plan of campaign. This required substantial reinforcements: two further divisions to supplement the seven already in Palestine. To plead his case with the War Office he sent to London a young liaison officer, Lieutenant-Colonel A. P. Wavell (the future field marshal of the Second World War and subsequently Viceroy of India). It was largely thanks to Wavell’s persuasive powers and already growing reputation that he got what he wanted, together with extra artillery and further units of the Royal Flying Corps; soon afterwards, it was Wavell who explained Allenby’s plan to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff and the War Cabinet. Briefly, this consisted of a main thrust to the plentiful wells at Beersheba, some thirty miles inland from Gaza, to be protected by a feint attack on Gaza itself. As always, Allenby’s preparations were thorough: 30,000 camels were assembled to carry water to the advance troops; new roads were built and new maps prepared, far more accurate–thanks to recent aerial reconnaissance–than their predecessors, which had been prepared by ‘H. H. Kitchener, Lt.’ in the 1870s. Meanwhile, he read everything on the area that he could get his hands on, from Herodotus and Strabo to histories of the Crusades and the latest papers of the Royal Geographical Society.
It was during this period of preparation, in the late summer of 1917, that Allenby met for the first time the one British officer whose fame in the area was to surpass even his own: the twenty-nine-year-old Captain T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence, second of the five illegitimate sons of an Anglo-Irish baronet, had had his first experience of the Arab world in 1908, when he had toured Syria and Lebanon recording their still little-known Crusader castles. Later, as an archaeologist, he had worked on the British Museum’s excavations at Carchemish in Syria until the outbreak of war, when he had found himself in Cairo as a subaltern in the military intelligence department of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. There he might well have remained, but for the Arab Revolt.
This had begun on 10 June 1916, when Sherif Hussein of Mecca and the Hejaz had led an uprising against the Turks. Three months later, however, the insurgents had run out of steam. They had failed, after repeated efforts, to dislodge the Turks from Medina and their morale was flagging. Lawrence had met the leaders, and had been particularly impressed by Hussein’s second son Feisal, with whom he had evolved a plan to capture Aqaba, the principal Ottoman port at the northern end of the Red Sea. Two British naval expeditions there had failed; Lawrence believed, however, that Aqaba could be taken from the land. At the beginning of July, after nearly a month’s march across some 800 miles of desert and with a scratch force of local Arabs largely recruited en route, he took the surrender of the Turkish garrison. His name was made.
One would like to have been present on the day Lawrence, distinctly undersized and–as always by now–in full Arab fig, strode into the office of the huge and immaculately uniformed Allenby. Many a commanding officer would have dismissed him with orders to come back when he had got out of his fancy dress; Allenby simply glared–but listened, while Lawrence explained how he would spread the revolt northwards via Aqaba against Damascus, making constant attacks on the single-track Hejaz railway which was virtually the only link between there and Medina. His manner–vanity combined with arrogance–may have been insufferable, but his arguments were persuasive. The General promoted him on the spot, making him–and Feisal’s force–responsible directly to himself and promising him all the help he could give.
Certainly, this was the way for Allenby to achieve his primary purpose, the destruction of the Ottoman Empire; it was also, as he well knew, a guarantee of trouble in the future. In the spring of the previous year Britain had entered into an agreement with France and Russia, whereby French pretensions with regard to Syria might be reconciled with British pledges and promises to the Arabs. Russia had earmarked Constantinople, with a few miles of hinterland on both sides of the Bosphorus, together with a good deal of eastern Anatolia running to the Caucasus; France laid claim to most of Syria and the Lebanon, much of southern Anatolia and the Mosul district of Iraq; Britain’s share consisted of the rest of modern Iraq–including both Baghdad and Basra–and a strip of Palestine which included the ports of Haifa and Acre. If Lawrence’s plan for a northward thrust were successful, it was unlikely–to say the least–that the victorious Arab armies would countenance such an arrangement. But there would be time enough to deal with problems such as these.
The main advance against Gaza and Beersheba was launched towards the end of October 1917. Despite heavy fortification of the line by the German commander General Kress von Kressenstein, Beersheba fell on the last day of the month, Gaza a week later. Allenby, determined to maintain the momentum, spared neither himself nor his troops, to whom he allowed no rest; in some regiments the horses were watered only once in seventy-two hours as they pressed on relentlessly to the north, stretching the lines of communication and supply to the utmost limit. Jaffa fell on 16 November, and the exhausted, thirsty army assembled in the Judaean hills for the final attack on Jerusalem. Allenby’s determination that there should be no fighting in the Holy City itself involved a long and complicated encircling manoeuvre. To make matters worse the weather had at last broken, the thermometer plunging; the horses were either sinking to the fetlocks in mud or slithering hopelessly over the slippery rocks. Yet the advance continued, and in the first week of December the Turkish governor informed Damascus of the evacuation of the city before personally smashing his telegraph equipment with a hammer. The city itself surrendered on 9 December, and two days later Allenby made his official entry into Jerusalem. With him was Colonel Wavell and Major Lawrence, in a borrowed army uniform. Nineteen years before, Kaiser Wilhelm had ridden in on his charger; Allenby, it was everywhere noted, entered on foot. After 730 years, Jerusalem had passed once again into Christian hands, but on his orders no official flag was flown. He merely issued a short proclamation. It ended as follows:
Since your city is regarded with affection by the adherents of three of the great religions of mankind, and its soil has been consecrated by the prayers or pilgrimages of multitudes of devout people of these three religions for many centuries, therefore I make it known to you that every sacred building, monument, holy spot, shrine, traditional site, endowment, pious bequest or customary place of prayer of whatsoever form of the three religions will be maintained and protected according to the existing customs and beliefs of those to whose faiths they are sacred.
After the taking of Jerusalem, there was a pause of almost a year before the continuation of the campaign. Allenby knew that if he was to advance on Aleppo he would need a substantially larger force than he had commanded up to now, and he refused to move until that force had been provided. In fact, his army was completely reorganised; some units returned to Europe, others were brought in from India and elsewhere until he had at his disposal troops from a dozen or more countries and colonies, including Singapore and Hong Kong, South Africa, Egypt and the West Indies. There was even a detachment from Rarotonga in the South Pacific. The three battalions of Jews sent as a result of the Balfour Declaration282 included David Ben-Gurion, later to be the first Prime Minister of the state of Israel.
Thus it was not until 19 September 1918 that Allenby launched his large but heterogeneous force of 12,000 cavalry, 57,000 infantry and 540 guns against eleven Turkish divisions–numbering respectively 4,000, 40,000 and 430–holding a front from Jaffa east to the river Jordan and down its eastern bank to the Dead Sea. Only twelve days later, after one of the war’s most spectacular campaigns, his advance units entered Damascus. Beirut fell on 8 October, Tripoli on the 18th and Aleppo on the 25th. In just six weeks he had pushed forward some 350 miles, utterly destroyed the Turkish army in Syria, taken 75,000 prisoners, all 430 guns and huge quantities of arms, ammunition and supplies. British casualties numbered 5,666. ‘Making all allowances for the British superiority in strength,’ wrote the military historian Liddell Hart, ‘[the campaign] must rank as one of the masterpieces of military history, as perfect in execution as in design.’
The Ottoman Empire, which was to have been Germany’s path to the Persian Gulf and central Asia, was now in ruins. Its Arab territories were lost, not only in Palestine and Syria but in Mesopotamia too, along with the Arabian peninsula. The collapse of Bulgaria in September had opened up the western approaches to Constantinople, while British and Indian forces were advancing from the south and east. Beyond the Black Sea towards the Caucasus, former subjects of the Sultan–Georgians and Armenians, Azerbaijanis and Kurds–were struggling to form their own new nation-states. On 30 October, on board HMS Agamemnon–a not inappropriate name in the circumstances–off the Aegean island of Mudros, the empire’s representatives sued for peace.