Authors: Alan Moorehead
Hamilton’s position at this time is difficult to understand, for by now he had broken nearly all the rules which were subsequently evolved by Field-Marshal Montgomery in the second world
war for operations of this kind. He had allowed his junior commanders to criticize and change his plan, and he had never conveyed to them by word of mouth exactly what he wanted them to do. Instead
of keeping the control of the battle under his own hand, his generals and brigadiers were to act on their own discretion; they were to get forward ‘if possible’. In the same way
Hamilton had failed to impress his will on Kitchener and the War Office; he had not wanted these new commanders, they were charming men of his own world, but they were old and they had a fatal lack
of experience. Nevertheless, he had accepted them. What was wanted was young commanders with seasoned troops, but at Suvla it was the other way about.
Had Hamilton but known it there existed in his Army a man of quite exceptional ability who would have been the ideal commander for the Suvla operation. This was a brigadier-general named John
Monash. Monash is something of an enigma in the first world war, for although Hamilton had noticed that he was an able officer, no one, either at Imbros or at Anzac or anywhere else, seems to have
divined his peculiar talents as a leader. He was an Australian Jew, already fifty years of age, and his attainments were extraordinary: he was a Doctor of Engineering, and had also graduated in
Arts and Law, in addition to being deeply read in music, in medicine and in German literature. Soldiering had been merely a hobby for Monash but for years he had been enthusiastic about it, and
when he had volunteered for service at the outbreak of the war he had been made a colonel. He took a brigade ashore at Anzac in the April landing, and had since done well within the limits of that
narrow front, but he had not advanced beyond the rank of brigadier.
This was the man who was soon to rise to the command of an army corps in France, and who towards the end of the war was to be considered as a possible successor to Haig as
Commander-in-Chief of all the British Armies in France.
‘Unfortunately,’ Lloyd George wrote in his memoirs, ‘the British did not bring into prominence any commander who, taking all round, was more conspicuously fitted for this post
(than Haig). No doubt Monash would, if the opportunity had been given him, have risen to the height of it, but the greatness of his abilities was not brought to the attention of the cabinet in any
of the Despatches. Professional soldiers could hardly be expected to advertise the fact that the greatest strategist in the Army was a civilian when the war began, and that they were being
surpassed by a man who had not received any of their advantages in training and teaching. . . . Monash was . . . the most resourceful general in the whole British Army.’
But in August 1915 no one had thought of Monash in such terms as these, and indeed he had never been heard of outside his own narrow circle. In the coming battle he was confined to the role of
taking one of the Anzac columns on a roundabout route up Sari Bair.
The plan itself was open to serious criticism; except for the Suvla landing it did not force the Turks to react to the British, it was the British who were reacting to the Turks. They were
proposing to direct their main attack upon Chunuk Bair, the enemy’s strongest point, and it was not to be one concentrated blow on a broad manageable front, but the most congested of battles
in which only a few men could take part at one time, and in the most difficult country where anything and everything could go wrong. The Anzac bridgehead was perfectly safe, and the Turks never had
a hope of dislodging the Allies from it. It was an ideal training ground, and the new troops coming out from the United Kingdom might very well have been put in there to hold the line while the
main attack was delivered not at Chunuk Bair but at Suvla.
The Australians and New Zealanders were by now the most
aggressive fighters in the whole peninsula. They had not been heavily engaged through June and July like the
British and the French at Cape Helles. They were eager for action, they wanted space and movement after all these claustrophobic months under the ground, and the Suvla landing, with a broad
flanking movement round Sari Bair, was precisely the sort of adventure to which they would have responded. They knew the ground—from their perches in the bridgehead they looked down on it
every day—they knew the Turks, and their commanders had all the experience of the April landing behind them.
But apparently neither Hamilton nor Birdwood ever contemplated this course, and it was left to the new soldiers who had never been to war before—who had never been abroad before—to
land on the strange dark shore against a trained enemy, without knowing clearly what they had to do. And that perhaps was asking too much.
Yet when all this is said it has to be remembered that very similar errors were committed all over again in the second world war especially in the Italian campaign, and with almost painful
fidelity at the time of the landing at Anzio, south of Rome, in 1944. At Gallipoli nothing was yet established, nothing was clear, not even the one principle that the campaign itself was already
revealing—that everything which was done by stealth and imagination was a success, while everything that was done by means of the headlong frontal attack was foredoomed to failure. Hamilton
was beset by problems that seldom became so acute in the second world war: the rub of the old Regular Army ideas against the new soldier; the preoccupation of the high command with the other front
in France; the novelty of the whole conception of an amphibious operation; the hazards of maintaining morale among the troops of so many different nationalities in that distant and difficult
place.
Yet despite the hesitations of the new commanders and the complications of the plan there were very good hopes of success as the first week of August ran out. The tired troops at Cape Helles
were very ready to try again. At Anzac the spirit of the soldiers was
high. The Fleet was more than eager; and the weather held good. Moreover, the Turks on their side were
just as prone to error as the British, just as uncertain and no better equipped. Liman at this stage had no new ideas, no clear view of how he might gain the victory. He could think of nothing but
to reinforce, to dig in and to hold on. Admiral von Usedom, the German commander of the defences of the Dardanelles, wrote to the Kaiser on July 30: ‘How long the Fifth Army can hold the
enemy is more than I can prophesy. If no ammunition comes through from Germany, it can only be a question of a short time . . . it is a matter of life and death. The opinion of the Turkish General
Headquarters appears to me to incline to a hazardous optimism.’
The German Supreme Command was seriously disturbed about Liman von Sanders at this time. On July 26 they sent a message ordering him to hand over his command to Field-Marshal von der Goltz and
to come home to Germany to report. Liman managed to stave off this decision, but he was forced to accept on his staff a certain Colonel von Lossow who was to keep an eye on his superior, and even
take a hand in the planning of operations.
But the battle itself soon swallowed up all disagreements and doubts on either side. On August 4 Samson went out on a last reconnaissance over Suvla, and reported that no Turks were on the move
there. A shell was fired into the gleaming white surface of the salt lake. This was an unauthorized act which annoyed Hamilton very much, but it did prove that men could walk and even ride a horse
on the caked and salty mud. The last intelligence appreciations of the situation were issued to commanders, and some attempt was made to provide them with an idea of the kind of country they would
encounter as they made their way inland; they would find water once they got to the hills, they were told, but their progress might be impeded by the thick six-foot high scrub that was cut only by
goat tracks.
Nasmith set off on his August cruise which a few days later was to bring its first result in the sinking of the battleship
Barbarossa Harradin.
And in the islands the invasion fleet
assembled: the black beetles, the Isle of Man paddle-steamers, the North Sea trawlers,
the yachts, the Thames tugs, the drifters, the monitors, the cruisers and
destroyers.
Only bad weather or a Turkish attack could now delay or change the plans. At zero hour de Robeck was to go to Suvla in his new flagship, the light cruiser
Chatham
, but Hamilton this time
elected to remain on shore at Imbros, where he was connected by submarine telephone to Cape Helles, ten miles, and Anzac, fifteen miles, away.
August 6 was a day of calm, hard, glaring sunshine, and in the afternoon when the soldiers were embarking at Imbros they could clearly hear the roar of the guns at Anzac and Cape Helles where
the battle had already begun. Bright little stabbing flashes sparkled in the sky. As night fell a few minutes after seven a brilliant crimson sunset expanded along the horizon. Then it was black
darkness, with no light showing in the Fleet. The island with its thousands of empty tents and its silence took on an air of terrible desolation. ‘The day before the start is the worst day
for a commander,’ Hamilton wrote. ‘The operation overhangs him as the thought of another sort of operation troubles the mind of a sick man in hospital.’ He was restless, and
walked down to the beach to see the 11th Division go off. The men, packed like herrings in the beetles and on the decks of the destroyers, were silent and listless: ‘These new men seem
subdued when I recall the blaze of enthusiasm in which the old lot started out of Mudros harbour on that April afternoon.’ For a moment he debated whether or not he should have cruised round
the invasion fleet in a motor launch, saying a few encouraging words to each unit as he went along, but he dismissed the idea when he remembered that the men did not know him by sight; and in any
case several hours were to go by before they arrived on the beaches, and that was too long an interval for his words to survive.
He looked for Stopford and Reed, hoping that they might have done something to enthuse their soldiers, but they were nowhere to be seen; and he returned to his hut. Nothing to do but to
wait.
Stopford had been lying on his valise spread out on the floor of his tent, and Colonel Aspinall found him there. The General had
slipped and sprained his knee that morning
and was not feeling very well. ‘I want you to tell Sir Ian Hamilton,’ he said, ‘that I am going to do my best, and that I hope to be successful. But he must realize that if the
enemy proves to be holding a strong line of continuous entrenchments I shall be unable to dislodge him till more guns are landed.’ Glumly he went on to quote his chief-of-staff: ‘All
the teaching of the campaign in France,’ he said, ‘proves that continuous trenches cannot be attacked without the assistance of large numbers of howitzers.’
He rose soon afterwards, and getting aboard the
Jonquil
with Rear-Admiral Christian, steamed away.
In the darkness Hamilton strolled down to the beach again and saw the ships moving, ghostlike and silent, to the boom across the mouth of the harbour. ‘This empty harbour frightens
me,’ he wrote later. ‘Nothing in legend is stranger or more terrible than the silent departure of this silent Army.’
Then he went back to his tent to keep a vigil with his telephones through the night.
M
USTAFA
K
EMAL
kept a record of his own activities during the campaign, and it is quite unlike anything else that has been
written about Gallipoli. It is a kind of day book, half pamphlet and half military history, a mixture of the intensely egoistical and the very practical. Long arid passages about the movements of
regiments are followed by outbursts of almost childish jingoism (the equivalent of the Allies’ ‘One of our men is worth half a dozen Turks’). At times he breaks off to moralize:
‘What a fine mirror history is. . . . In great events which pass to the bosom of history how clearly do the conduct and acts of those who take an active part in these events show their moral
character.’ There is a strong suggestion throughout that the other commanders are wrong while he is right, and his approach to all but a few of his superior officers is at once obsequious and
contemptuous. Yet he argues very closely, he always sees the battle from a fresh point of view, and he is very precise about such things as dates and place-names and the movements of troops.
There is no reason to think that this document has been edited or changed by others with an eye to the General’s later career as the dictator of Turkey; the original notebook is preserved
by the Historical Branch of the Turkish General Staff at Ankara, and most of it is filled with Kemal’s own handwriting in the fine arabic script which he later abolished in Turkey in favour
of the more practical and much less beautiful Latin alphabet. The rest of the notebook has been dictated to an assistant either on the battlefield itself or shortly afterwards.
There is one very interesting passage dealing with the period immediately before the Suvla landing. As so often happened, Kemal was involved in a dispute with his commanding officer—in
this case Essad Pasha, the Corps Commander opposite Anzac. It had been decided to extend Kemal’s divisional front in the north
of the Anzac bridgehead so as to take in
part of a ravine known as Sazlidere. Kemal at once protested that this was too much responsibility for him to undertake. He went on and on about it, writing letter after letter (which he quotes) to
Corps Headquarters. Essad took the line that this was all very unimportant, but, since Kemal wished it, he would remove the area from the 19th divisional front and take it under his own command.
This did not suit Kemal at all. He replied that the Sazlidere area was so important that it must be put under a strong independent command; did they not realize that it was quite possible for the
enemy to advance by day up to the very foot of Sari Bair under the cover of this deep ravine? Essad answered that he was in feet establishing an independent command from Suvla to the north of
Anzac, and a German officer was coming out to take charge of it. The dividing line between his and Kemal’s command would be the Sazlidere ravine—or at any rate the upper part of it,
since the mouth was already occupied by the enemy.