Gurkhas at Gallipoli - Part One - The Background
GURKHAS AT GALLIPOLI – PART ONE – THE BACKGROUND
Even as late as the summer of 1914 Turkey was not obviously aligned to any of the power blocs. In 1909 the ‘Young Turks’, a modernising group of (mainly) army officers had deposed the Sultan, Abdul Hamid – ‘Abdul the Damned’ – and had established a constitution governing as the Committee of Union and Progress, initially with great ideas of liberalism and democracy, swiftly ditched as the realities of power sank in. The Kaiser had made great efforts to persuade Turkey into the German camp, and there was a German military mission under Generalleutnant Otto Liman von Sanders modernising the Turkish army, while a British naval mission was doing the same thing to the Turkish navy. Much Turkish opinion leaned towards neutrality, as the obvious decay of the Ottoman Empire and experience in the two Balkan Wars, which had seen the Balkan territories either seize independence or be absorbed by Greece, made many wary of military involvement with the Great Powers. Many Turks would have preferred the English to the Germans, although the presence of Russia (Turkey’s traditional enemy) in the Anglo-French line-up was a problem once war broke out. In the end Germany very much wanted Turkey either as a co-belligerent or at least as a friendly neutral in the war, whereas the British did not appear to care very much, at least not in the eyes of General Ismail Enver Effendi – ‘Enver Pasha’ – the Turkish minister for war and commander-in-chief of the army, and the most influential member of the government. Enver had been a military attaché in Berlin, spoke fluent German and firmly believed that the Turkish army must be modernised along Prussian lines.
On 3 August 1914, the day before Britain declared war on Germany, Turkish preference for the British suffered a severe blow when Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, directed that two battleships being built in British yards for the Turkish navy were to be requisitioned for the Royal Navy instead. The ships had been paid for by public subscription in Turkey and although the payment was returned, the sequestration was regarded as unfair and high handed – as indeed it was (it was probably illegal too). The Germans, seeing a propaganda coup in the offing, immediately announced that they would give the Turkish navy two warships as a gift, to make up for the two ‘stolen’ by the British. The two ships were to be the SMS Goeben, a battlecruiser of 23,000 tons with ten 11” guns, and the SMS Breslau, a light cruiser. Both these ships were already in the Mediterranean and were being shadowed by ships of the Royal Navy, as the British were convinced that if and when war broke out they would steam west to attack French troopships transferring soldiers from French North Africa to Marseilles. On 4 August, with the British ultimatum to Germany due to expire at midnight, the First Sea Lord, Admiral Battenberg[*], wanted to sink both ships before nightfall, but was instructed that he must wait until the ultimatum ran out.
As it happened the German ships slipped away in the dark, heading east rather than, as the British expected, west, and received permission to enter the Dardanelles. By treaty the Dardanelles were barred to warships of belligerents when Turkey was neutral, but as soon as the Goeben and the Breslau entered the straits the German ambassador announced that they were no longer German but were now part of the Turkish navy. The British and the French protested to the Turks, but took no action. Then, on what may have been on his own initiative but was more probably on orders from Germany, the German officer on loan to the Turks and commanding the fortifications along the straits decided to close the Dardanelles, a serious breach of the international conventions governing passage to and from the Black Sea. The final straw came on 29 October 1914 when the German Admiral, also on loan to Turkey and commanding the Goeben group, took his ship and the Breslau, both still manned by German sailors but wearing Turkish fezzes, and a Turkish squadron into the Black Sea and opened fire on Russian ports and shipping. Turkey declared War on Russia on 31 October and Britain declared War on Turkey on 5 November, followed shortly by France. Nothing very much happened until December 13 when Lt Holbrook RN took his submarine through the narrows and torpedoed the Turkish battleship Messudieh. Having seen his target sink Holbrook then manoeuvred his submarine along the bottom and out into the open sea, for which he was awarded the VC.
By the end of 1914 the war of movement on the Western Front had become siege warfare with each side manning lines of trenches that ran from Newport on the Belgian coast to the Swiss frontier, and increasingly politicians were looking for ways to outflank that front and find an easier way to win the war. At the same time Grand Duke Nicholas, commanding the Russian armies, was pleading with the British ambassador in St Petersburg for action against Turkey. The Russian Black Sea ports were crammed with Russian ships loaded with cargo that could not now be exported, and neither could Russia import the arms and war materiel that she desperately needed. So was the Gallipoli campaign borne – a product of First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill’s fertile mind and while opposed by the First Sea Lord, Admiral Fisher who had replaced Battenberg, reluctantly agreed to by Lord Kitchener, the war minister, as it would be a purely naval operation and require no troops. The Cabinet direction on 13 January 1915 was vague and meaningless: ‘The navy should prepare for a naval expedition in February to bombard and take the Gallipoli peninsula with Constantinople as its objective’. One might well ask how a navy is supposed to ‘take’ a peninsula? The plan drawn up was for the Royal and French navies to destroy the forts defending the straits of the Dardanelles, after which they would steam up into the Sea of Marmora, bombard Constantinople and reopen the Dardanelles allowing sea traffic to and from the Black Sea to re-commence. The bombardment ships would be obsolete battleships with the addition of the brand new HMS Queen Elizabeth.
The Dardanelles are forty miles long from the mouth to the Sea of Marmora and four and a half miles wide at the mouth. The ‘narrows’ – the Hellespont where Xerxes lost his pontoon bridge in 480 BC and beheaded the wretched engineers who had built it – are 1600 yards wide. The Dardanelles were defended by eleven forts with guns, torpedo tubes and minefields, on both Asian and European sides. The naval operation began on 19 February 1915 and very soon a dichotomy emerged: the ships had to knock out the forts to allow the minesweeping to happen without interference, while the minefields had to be cleared to allow the ship to get close enough to knock out the forts. Eventually the outer forts were silenced and the minesweepers could enter. Unfortunately these civilian manned trawlers had a top speed of nine knots, but linked together in pairs by their sweeping gear and sailing against the current, they could move at barely more than three or four knots, making them an easy target for shore based artillery. After a month and the sinking of one French battleship and the sinking of two and the putting out of action of one British, the navy had to admit that they could not force the narrows.
[*] Public opinion forced Battenberg to resign because of his German origins. There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that he was anything other a loyal British naval officer. He anglicised his name to Mountbatten and was the father of Lord Louis Mountbatten.