Authors: Alan Moorehead
Stopford demurred. He would do his best, he said, but there was no guarantee that he could reach the hills by daylight.
Hamilton does not appear to have pressed the point; he was content, he said, to leave it to Stopford’s own discretion as to how far he got inland in the first attack. This was a drastic
watering-down of the spirit of the original plan, and it had its effect when Stopford came to pass on his instructions to his divisional commanders. The orders which General Hammersley issued to
the 11th Division contained no references to speed: the brigade commanders were merely instructed to reach the hills ‘if possible’. Hammersley, indeed, seems to have gone into action in
complete misunderstanding of his role in the battle; instead of regarding himself as a support to Birdwood’s main attack from Anzac he thought—and actually stated in his
orders—that one of the objects of the Anzac attack was to distract the Turks from Suvla Bay while the 11th Division was getting ashore.
General Hammersley was not the only man who was in ignorance of the real objects of the offensive. An extreme secrecy was maintained by G.H.Q. at Imbros up to the very last moment.
Hamilton felt very strongly about this question of security, for he had bitter memories of the indiscretions of the Egyptian Press before the April landing. He feared the exposure of his plan by
many means: by garrulous cabinet Ministers in England, by the Greek caiques that were constantly arriving in the islands from the mainland and slipping away again, by wounded officers who, on being
invalided back to Egypt, might talk too freely in hospital. There was even a danger that some soldier who knew what was on foot might be captured on Gallipoli and induced by the Turks to give the
show away.
In view of all this the plan was confined to a very small group at G.H.Q. throughout June and July, and Hamilton was even cautious in his letters to Kitchener. In the middle of July he sent a
sharp telegram to Corps Headquarters at Anzac when he heard that Birdwood had been discussing the matter with General Godley and General Walker. ‘I am sorry you have
told your divisional generals,’ he wrote. ‘I have not even informed Stopford or Bailloud (the French corps commander who had succeeded Gouraud). Please find out at once how many staff
officers each of them has told, and let me know. Now take early opportunity of telling your divisional generals that whole plan is abandoned. I leave it to you to invent the reason for this
abandonment. The operation is secret and must remain secret.’
Stopford himself knew nothing of the plan until three weeks before it was to be put into effect, and it was not until the last week of July that Hammersley was given his orders; Stopford took
him up the coast in a destroyer to survey the intended landing places from the sea. On July 30 the brigadiers were briefed at last, and on August 3—three days before the battle was to
begin—the brigadiers and their colonels were allowed a quick glimpse of the beaches from the decks of a destroyer. All other reconnaissance from the sea was forbidden lest the suspicions of
the Turks should be aroused, and when finally the 11th Division embarked for the landing on August 6 many of its officers had never seen a map of Suvla Bay.
It was an excess of caution and it was not wise. Liman von Sanders says that in any case he was warned. Early in July he began to hear rumours from the islands that another landing was imminent:
some 50,000 men and 140 ships were said to have been assembled at Lemnos. On July 22—the same day that Hamilton was breaking the secret to Stopford—Liman received a telegram from
Supreme Headquarters in Germany. ‘From reports received here,’ it ran, ‘it seems probable that at the beginning of August a strong attack will be made on the Dardanelles, perhaps
in connection with a landing on the Gulf of Saros (the Bulair area), or on the coast of Asia Minor. It will be well to economize ammunition.’
Liman himself was inclined to agree with this forecast, and he deployed his army accordingly. He now had a force of sixteen
small divisions (which was roughly equivalent
to Hamilton’s thirteen), and three of these he posted at Bulair, three opposite the Anzac bridgehead, five at Cape Helles, and the remaining three at Kum Kale on the Asiatic side of the
straits. As for the Suvla area, the British were very nearly right in their estimate of the Turkish garrison there. Liman did not consider it a danger point, and he stationed only three weak
battalions—about 1,800 men—around the bay. They had no barbed wire and no machine-guns.
There were then three main Turkish battle groups on the peninsula: the Bulair force in the north commanded by Feizi Bey, the force opposite Anzac in the centre commanded by Essad Pasha, and the
southern force at Cape Helles commanded by Wehib Pasha (a younger brother of Essad Pasha). Mustafa Kemal was in a somewhat dubious position at this time. Liman respected him very much as a soldier,
and would have promoted him, but he found him quarrelsome and difficult to control. A major row had developed in June when Enver, arriving on one of his periodical visits from Constantinople,
cancelled an attack which Kemal had planned to launch on Anzac. Kemal, he said, was too much given to the squandering of troops, and Kemal at once resigned. Liman managed to restore peace between
them, but when the attack turned out to be a complete disaster recriminations broke out afresh. Kemal declared that Enver’s interference had spoiled his plans, and Enver retaliated by making
an address to the soldiers in which he praised them for the way they had fought under such poor leadership. It was another and violent example of the ‘jealousy and lack of co-operation so
common among Turkish general officers’. Kemal once more resigned in a sour rage, and it was only when Enver left the peninsula that he calmed down and agreed to continue with his
division—the old 19th. He was still with it on the north of the Anzac front in August, a senior divisional commander but no more.
It seems possible that Liman was to some extent taken in by the British feint on the island of Mytilene, the ancient Lesbos, for it was very thoroughly done. In July British officers made
ostentatious inquiries among the local population of Turks and Greeks
about the water supply and sites for encampments; and a little later a brigade of troops actually
arrived. Maps of the Asiatic coast were freely distributed through the Army, and on August 3 Hamilton himself came over to the island to inspect the troops: an indication they were on the eve of
going into battle, as indeed they were, but not in Asia. These moves can hardly have failed to have been reported to the Turks, for there were many people on the island who were hostile to the
Allies, and a fantasy of espionage and counter-espionage was going on. In particular there was one family named Vassilaki of two brothers and three alleged beautiful sisters, which was the talk of
the islands. The brothers kept eluding the British intelligence officers, and it was all very enjoyable in an
opéra bouffe
kind of way.
Bird wood’s plan of deception at Anzac was of a more practical nature and very daring. There were a number of miners in the Australian forces, and these threw out an underground tunnel,
over 500 yards in length, in no-man’s-land at Lone Pine.
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From this the Australians planned to issue forth like disturbed ants at zero hour on the
afternoon of August 6. A more elaborate scheme had been worked out to pave the way for the main assault on Chunuk Bair that night. For some weeks almost every night a destroyer had posted herself
off Anzac, and with the aid of her searchlights had bombarded a line of Turkish trenches known as Post 3. This action always began precisely at 9 p.m. and continued for half an hour, and it was
calculated that the Turks, being human, would fall into a habit of retiring from the trench at 9 p.m. and of returning to it when the bombardment was over. On the night of the attack the Anzac
troops planned to creep up to the position in the deep darkness on either side of the searchlight’s beam and then leap into the empty trenches directly the barrage was lifted.
But Birdwood’s main concern was the secret disembarkment at
Anzac of his additional 25,000 men with their stores and equipment. In every valley which was not
overlooked by the enemy long terraces were dug and new caves were driven into the rocks. Here the incoming troops were to be secreted. Orders were issued that the men, on reaching the shore, were
to remain in strict hiding throughout the day, no swimming was allowed until after nightfall, and if German aircraft passed over they were not to turn their faces to the sky. No boat with the
reinforcements on board was to approach the shore in the daylight, none was to be in sight of land when dawn broke. In the darkness tens of thousands of gallons of water had to be pumped ashore,
new hospitals, ammunition dumps, guns and food stores hidden away. All horses were to be landed with full nosebags, and each man was to carry a full waterbottle and one day’s iron ration.
The movement began on August 4 and continued on three successive nights until August 6. Except that on one occasion a group of lighters was delayed until after dawn and was shelled and driven
away the operation was carried out with complete success. There were moments at Birdwood’s headquarters when they felt sure that the Turks must have heard the rattling of anchor chains in the
bay, and the shouted orders of the officers on the beach. But the enemy apparently suspected nothing. By August 6 there was scarcely standing room for another man at Anzac.
Meanwhile the last reinforcements from England were arriving in the islands, and it was already something of a victory that all five divisions were brought through the Mediterranean without the
loss of a single man. They moved into tented cities on Mytilene, Lemnos and Imbros, and there they waited, in the eyes of the veterans a pale and hesitant lot, for the moment when they were to be
re-embarked and taken to the battle.
It was a strange atmosphere. Among the older soldiers on the peninsula the approaching struggle had acted as a stimulus. Fewer and fewer men reported sick, and everything which in idleness had
seemed so insupportable—the flies, the heat and the dust—became apparently much easier to bear. But for the new troops this period of suspense was a depressing experience. They were in
a half-way house; while they themselves had never been in battle they still did not have the luxury of the ignorance in which the older soldiers had set out to make the first
landing on April 25. They knew what the veterans had not known—that a landing could be a terrible thing, that the Turks were a stubborn enemy, and that all might easily end in wounds or
death. This was no jaunt to Constantinople and the harems. It so happened that the War Office had published Hamilton’s first dispatch from Gallipoli just at the time that the new drafts were
leaving England, and they had all been discussing that tragic story on the voyage out. And so they knew and did not know. Whenever they could they asked tentative questions of the older soldiers.
What was it
like
on the peninsula? Would there be guides to lead them when they got ashore, and if no guides how would they know where to go? What about the shelling? And the sniping? And
the Turks? And finally there was the question they could not ask: what was it like to kill a man and to stand up to be killed oneself?
All this was as old as war itself, but these early August days were frightfully hot, the flies and the mosquitoes leapt on to the men’s pink skins and they caught the endemic dysentery
very quickly. While they waited they gossiped, and the rumours that went about were not of the hopeful kind. By August 6 the constricting sense of endless waiting had become as bad as if not worse
than the prospect of the battle itself. They wanted to get it over.
Upon G.H.Q. at Imbros the strain was of a different kind, for it was perfectly obvious to everybody that this was a gambler’s chance, and probably their last chance. Mentally they might
have persuaded themselves that, within reason, every eventuality had been foreseen, that the plan was good, that there was no reason why it should not succeed; but when so many things had gone
wrong before it was difficult to feel an emotional enthusiasm. Hamilton was always at his best at these moments. He was courteous, patient, and apparently full of intelligent confidence; he spread
an aura of authority round him, he was very much respected. But the crust was thin, and not unnaturally there were
occasional disputes at headquarters. The French were not
entirely liked, nor were the newcomers who were arriving from England. The staff, too, was on guard against any show of superiority in officers who were serving at the front, and they were often
irritated as well by the men in the rear echelons behind them.
Despite the reinforcements, there was still a feeling that the Dardanelles was a poor relation to the French front, and an interminable telegram battle with the War Office went on. In July
Churchill had been expected to come to Gallipoli, and he was awaited with much eagerness. At the last moment, however, the visit was blocked by Churchill’s political opponents in cabinet, and
Colonel Maurice Hankey, the Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, was sent out instead. Hamilton at first found it difficult to suppress a feeling of antipathy towards this relatively
junior officer who was to report directly to the cabinet at home, and it was not until Hankey had been a week or more on Imbros that the staff realized that he was anxious only to use his
exceptional talents for their good.
Mackenzie records an odd scene when he was lunching one day with the generals at their mess at G.H.Q. ‘The one next to me,’ he says, ‘was Sir Frederick Stopford, a man of great
kindliness and personal charm, whose conversation at lunch left me at the end of the meal completely without hope of victory at Suvla. The reason for this apprehension was his inability to quash
the new General opposite, who was one of the Brigadiers in his Army Corps. This Brigadier was holding forth almost truculently about the folly of the plan of operations drawn up by the General
Staff, while Sir Frederick Stopford appeared to be trying to reassure him in a fatherly way. I looked along the table to where Aspinall and Dawnay (two of Hamilton’s general staff officers)
were sitting near General Braithwaite; but they were out of earshot and the dogmatic Brigadier continued unchallenged to enumerate the various military axioms which were being ignored by the Suvla
plan of operations. For one thing, he vowed, most certainly he was not going to advance a single yard until all the Divisional Artillery was ashore. I longed for Sir Frederick to rebuke his
disagreeable
and discouraging junior; but he was deprecating, courteous, fatherly, anything except the Commander of an Army Corps which had been entrusted with a major
operation that might change the whole course of the war in twenty-four hours.’