Gallipoli

CHAPTER TWO

BY their daring — perhaps even because they had to dare in order to keep in office — the Young Turks had got their country into a war which was much too big for them. They were small gamblers in a game of very high stakes, and, as it usually happens in such cases, their presence was hardly noticed by the other players for a while. They watched, they waited, they made their anxious little bids, they tried desperately to understand which way the luck was going, and they put on an air of being quite at ease which was very far from being the case.

October, November and December went by and their small army had still not been risked, nor had they cared to expose their borrowed warships in any way. Two expeditions had set out: one to the east headed by Enver himself, and the other to the south commanded by Djemal, the Minister of Marine; and their objectives were nothing less than the conquest of the Caucasus from the Russians and the ejection of the British from Egypt. But as yet nothing had been heard of either of these two enterprises, and a certain cynicism was beginning to develop in the other Balkan states which had not dared to risk their fortunes in the war. Nothing would have given greater pleasure in Greece, Bulgaria and Rumania than the humiliation of the Turks in some major battle, and they waited hopefully for the Allies to move.

There were one or two skirmishes at sea. A squadron of British and French warships was patrolling the Ægean in the hope that the Goeben would emerge, and in November the ships opened up their guns on the forts of Sedd-el-Bahr and Kum Kale on either side of the entrance to the Dardanelles. It was all over in twenty minutes, and there was no reply from the Turks. Then on Sunday, December 13, Lieutenant Norman Holbrook penetrated through to the Narrows in the submarine B 11. Entering the straits as soon as the Turkish searchlights were extinguished at dawn, he found his way through the minefields and after four hours hoisted his periscope. He saw a large two-funnelled vessel, the Turkish battleship Messudieh, at anchor in Sari Sigla Bay, and fired his torpedoes at her from 600 yards away. Waiting just long enough to see that his target was destroyed, Holbrook dived steeply and bumped along the bottom until he reached deep water and the open sea. He was awarded the Victoria Cross.

But these actions were nothing more than local raids, and no attempt was made to follow them up. In London, it is true, there was a general feeling that something ought to be done about Turkey, and the question was revived from time to time. Even before hostilities began Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, and Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, had discussed whether they might not persuade the Greeks to land an army on the Gallipoli peninsula. Once the Turkish garrison there had been defeated the fleet would sail through the straits, sink the Goeben, and then turn its guns on Constantinople. It was an intriguing project, and the Greeks on being sounded out were at first quite eager; they were to be given the island of Cyprus as a reward. Later, however, they changed their minds, and the British too soon cooled.

The vast killing match in France overwhelmed them all. By the end of November, barely three months after the fighting began, the Allies had suffered nearly a million casualties, a fantastic figure never to be eclipsed in so short a period throughout the entire war. It was so terrible that it seemed that it must soon produce some result; somehow, if only sufficient men were got to the front, if they charged just once more against the machine-gun bullets and the barbed wire, they were bound to get through.

To kill Germans — that was the thing; to go on killing them until there were no more left, and then to advance into Germany itself.

At the end of December Lieut.-Colonel Hankey, the Secretary of the War Council, produced a paper in which he pointed out that the Allies were not in fact advancing, nor were they killing Germans at a greater rate than they were being killed themselves. The trenches were now dug for 350 miles from the North Sea to the Swiss Alps, and Hankey suggested that it was time to consider whether this impasse might not be broken by making some broad flanking movement around the line — perhaps through Turkey and the Balkans.

These ideas had been canvassed already in a general way by Churchill, Lloyd George and others, and Lord Fisher, the First Sea Lord, had a scheme for breaking into the Baltic and landing a Russian army on Germany’s northern coast. But there was determined opposition from the French and British generals in France — the killing-Germans school of thought; in their view not a man could be spared from the vital theatre in the west. They argued that to divide the Allied forces, to set off on some experimental expedition in the east, would endanger the safety of their whole position in France and expose England to the risk of invasion.

Kitchener at first supported these views, but then in the last days of the year a message arrived from Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador in Petrograd, saying that the Russians were in difficulties. The Grand Duke Nicholas, the commander-in-chief of the Russian armies, had asked, Sir George said, ‘if it would be possible for Lord Kitchener to arrange for a demonstration of some kind against the Turks elsewhere, either naval or military, and to so spread reports as to cause Turks, who he says are very liable to go off at a tangent, to withdraw some of the forces now acting against the Russians in the Caucasus, and thus ease the position of the Russians.’

This was a matter that could not be ignored. After the tremendous blows of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes the Russian armies were beginning to falter everywhere along the line. They were reported to have suffered over a million casualties, and their supplies of rifles and ammunition were giving out. A new German offensive in the spring might prove disastrous.

Kitchener came across to the Admiralty to discuss the message with Churchill, and the following day, January 2, 1915, in a letter to Churchill, he said: ‘The only place that a demonstration might have some effect in stopping reinforcements going east would be the Dardanelles. Particularly if, as the Grand Duke says, reports could be spread at the same time that Constantinople was being threatened.’ And the following telegram was sent off to Petrograd:

‘Please assure the Grand Duke that steps will be taken to make a demonstration against the Turks. It is, however, feared that any action we can devise and carry out will be unlikely to seriously affect numbers of enemy in the Caucasus, or cause their withdrawal.’

Gloomy as this message was, it committed the British to action, and at the Admiralty both Churchill and Fisher got down to the question of just what action it should be. Fisher was all for taking up Hankey’s plan at once. ‘I CONSIDER THE ATTACK ON TURKEY HOLDS THE FIELD!’ he wrote (in capital letters), ‘BUT ONLY IF IT’S IMMEDIATE!’ and he went on to define exactly what should be done. All the Indians and 75,000 of the British troops in France were to be embarked at Marseilles and landed, together with the Egyptian garrison, on the Asiatic side of the Dardanelles; the Greeks were to attack the Gallipoli peninsula, and the Bulgarians to march to Constantinople. At the same time a squadron of old British battleships of the Majestic and Canopus class were to force the Dardanelles.

This was all very well in its way, but Kitchener had said emphatically in the course of the discussions that he could not spare a man for any new expedition, and there was certainly no question of taking troops from France; if there was to be any demonstration at all it would have to be a naval affair. Churchill was particularly struck by Fisher’s reference to the forcing of the straits with old battleships. It was an exploit which had captivated British naval strategists for at least a century, and in fact it had once been done, and in very similar circumstances to those that now prevailed. In 1807 when Napoleon was advancing to the east, the Russians had asked for assistance against Turkey, and the British sent a naval squadron to the Dardanelles. Sir John Moore, who was second-in-command of the British garrison in Sicily, urged that troops should accompany the expedition, but was told that there were none to spare (which was not, in fact, true). ‘It would have been well,’ Sir John wrote after the ships had sailed, ‘to have sent 7,000 or 8,000 men with the fleet to Constantinople, which would have secured their passage through the Dardanelles and enabled the admiral to have destroyed the Turkish fleet and arsenal, which, from the want of such a force, he may not be able to effect.’ The expedition, however, opened very well. Admiral Duckworth with seven ships of the line ran the gauntlet of the Turkish batteries along the straits, destroyed a Turkish squadron and was within eight miles of Constantinople when the wind failed. He waited for a week, unable to bring his guns to bear on the city, and then decided to retire. The return journey proved more difficult. He lost no ship but the Turkish guns at the Narrows inflicted 150 casualties among his sailors.

Since then the problem had been studied anew on several occasions and in the light of steam navigation. Fisher himself had twice considered making the attempt in the first years of the twentieth century, but had decided that it was ‘mightily hazardous’. There were now, however, good arguments for taking up the matter again. The battleships of the Majestic and Canopus class were all due for scrap within the next fifteen months. Already they were so out of date they could not be used in the first line of battle against the German fleet, but they were perfectly adequate to deal with the Turkish batteries at the Dardanelles. The Germans in their recent advance across Belgium had given a striking demonstration of what modern guns could do against old forts — and the Turkish forts were very old indeed. The British had had their naval mission in Turkey for years, and they knew all about them, gun by gun. It was also known that there was barely a division of Turkish soldiers on the Gallipoli peninsula. These were widely scattered and very badly equipped; and presumably they were still subject to the inertia and the confusion of command which had lost Turkey all her battles in the past five years.

As for Fisher’s other proposal — the bringing in of Greek and Bulgarian soldiers to attack Turkey — there was a good deal to be said for it. Once the fleet was in the Sea of Marmara it was quite likely that Greece and Bulgaria would abandon their neutrality in the hope of gaining still more territory from the Turks. Italy and Rumania too would be greatly influenced, and thus you might end with a grand alliance of the Balkan Christian states against Turkey. But it was the aid that would be brought to Russia that was the really vital thing. Directly the Dardanelles was forced and Constantinople taken, arms and ammunition could be sent to her across the Black Sea, and the 350,000 tons of shipping which had been bottled up would be released. Russia’s grain would once more become available to feed the Allies in the west.

With these ideas in mind Churchill sent off the following message to Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden, who was commanding the squadron outside the Dardanelles:

‘Do you consider the forcing of the Dardanelles by ships alone a practical operation?

‘It is assumed older battleships fitted with mine-bumpers would be used, preceded by colliers or other merchant craft as mine-bumpers and sweepers.

‘Importance of results would justify severe loss.

‘Let me know your views.’

Both Fisher and Sir Henry Jackson (who was attached to the Admiralty staff as an adviser on the Turkish theatre), saw this telegram before it went, and approved it. On January 5 Carden’s answer arrived: ‘With reference to your telegram of 3rd instant, I do not consider Dardanelles can be rushed. They might be forced by extended operations with large number of ships.’

Up to this point nobody, either in the Admiralty or at the War Office, had reached any definite conclusions or made any plan as to what was to be done. But here for the first time was something positive: the Admiral on the spot believed that he might get through the straits, and by a method that had not been broached before: that of a slow progress instead of a rush, a calculated shelling of the forts one by one. Having consulted Sir Henry Jackson and his Chief-of-Staff, Admiral Oliver (but not Fisher), Churchill telegraphed again to Carden:

‘Your view is agreed with by high authorities here. Please telegraph in detail what you think could be done by extended operations, what force would be needed, and how you consider it should be used.’

Admiral Carden’s plan arrived in London on January 11 and it envisaged the employment of a very large force: 12 battleships, 3 battle-cruisers, 3 light cruisers, 1 flotilla leader, 16 destroyers, 6 submarines, 4 seaplanes, 12 minesweepers and a score of other miscellaneous craft. He proposed in the first place to take on the forts at long range and by indirect fire and then, with his minesweepers in the van, to sail directly into the range of the Turkish guns and demolish them seriatim as he went along. Meanwhile a diversionary bombardment would be carried out on the Bulair Lines at the base of the Gallipoli Peninsula and on Gaba Tepe on the western coast. He would require much ammunition, he said, and once he had emerged into the Sea of Marmara he proposed to keep open the straits in his wake by patrolling them with a part of his force. He added,

‘Time required for operations depends greatly on morale of enemy under bombardment; garrison largely stiffened by the Germans; also on weather conditions. Gales now frequent. Might do it all in a month about.’

This plan was discussed and approved in detail at the Admiralty and one very important addition was made to it. The Queen Elizabeth, the first of five new battleships and one of the most powerful vessels afloat, was about to set off for the safe waters of the Mediterranean for her calibration exercises. It was now decided that, if the plan went through, she should proceed to the Dardanelles and calibrate her 15-inch guns on the Turks — a thing she could very easily do without ever coming into the range of the hostile batteries on shore.

The vital meeting of the War Council took place on January 13. Churchill had now become an ardent enthusiast for the plan, and with the aid of a map he explained it to the other members. He argued, Lloyd George says, ‘with all the inexorable force and pertinacity, together with the mastery of detail he always commands when he is really interested in a subject’.

There appears to have been very little discussion. Lord Fisher and Admiral of the Fleet Sir Arthur Wilson had come to the meeting but did not speak. ‘Lord Kitchener,’ it is recorded in the Council’s Minutes, ‘thought the plan worth trying. We could leave off the bombardment if it did not prove effective.’ And finally the decision was made without a dissenting voice: ‘That the Admiralty should prepare for a naval expedition in February to bombard and take the Gallipoli Peninsula with Constantinople as its objective.’

In the years that followed great play was made over the wording of this resolution. ‘It is impossible,’ the Dardanelles Commissioners wrote in their report in 1917, ‘to read all the evidence, or to study the voluminous papers which have been submitted to us, without being struck by the atmosphere of vagueness and want of precision which seems to have characterized the proceedings of the War Council.’ How, it was asked, can a fleet ‘take’ a peninsula? And how could it have Constantinople as its objective? If this meant — as it apparently did mean — that the Fleet should capture and occupy the city, then it was absurd.

Yet in point of fact this is precisely what everyone at the War Council did hope; and it may not have been altogether absurd. Turkey’s position was very weak. Twice within the last five years Constantinople had been thrown into chaos by political revolution. It had the reputation of being an hysterical place, and it was known to be divided against itself. For the moment Enver and the Young Turks might have control, but anything could happen with the appearance of an Allied fleet in the Golden Horn. One had to consider the condition of the crowded streets with their tumbledown wooden houses once the guns had begun to fire — or even at the threat of the guns firing. On past occasions the mob had run loose under far less provocation than this, and Turkish governments had been known to bolt very easily. There existed only two munition factories in Turkey, and both these were on the shore, where they could have been quickly destroyed by naval gunfire along with such military objectives as the naval dockyards, the Galata bridges and the Ministry of War. Constantinople was the centre of all Turkish affairs, economic, political and industrial as well as military. There was no other city in the country to replace it, no network of roads and railways which would have enabled the Army and the government to have rapidly re-grouped in another place. The fall of Constantinople was in effect the fall of the state, even though resistance might have been maintained indefinitely in the mountains. If the arrival of one battle-cruiser, the Goeben, had been enough to bring Turkey into the war then surely it was not altogether too much to hope that the arrival of half a dozen such ships would get her out of it.

These then were the arguments which Churchill used among his colleagues, and up to the middle of January there appears to have been no dispute. Kitchener was satisfied because none of his soldiers, except a few who were to be employed as landing parties, were to be engaged. Grey, the Foreign Secretary, saw great political prospects. Arthur Balfour said it was difficult to imagine a more useful operation. The Russians on hearing of the plan spoke of the possibility of sending troops to support it, and the French offered four battleships with their auxiliaries to serve under Carden’s command.

Towards the end of the month the enterprise was fairly under way; the ammunition was assembled, the final instructions drafted, and from as far away as the China station ships were under orders to proceed to the Mediterranean. It was arranged that the whole armada should gather in the Ægean Sea in the neighbourhood of the island of Lemnos at the end of the first week in February. All that was needed was the final approval of the War Council, and the action would begin.

It was at this point that a new and wholly unexpected factor came into the scene: Fisher turned against the whole design. His motives for doing this were so unusual that one can only hope to understand them — and the famous quarrel that followed — by recalling the strange position into which they had all drifted at this time. It is as strange in some ways as any of the inner manœuvrings of the Russian Government at the present day.

On the outbreak of war a War Council had been formed, and it consisted of the Prime Minister (Asquith), the Lord Chancellor (Lord Haldane), the Secretary of State for War (Lord Kitchener), the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Lloyd George), the Foreign Minister (Sir Edward Grey), the Secretary of State for India (Lord Crewe) and the First Lord of the Admiralty (Winston Churchill). Fisher and Sir James Wolfe Murray, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, also attended the meetings to give their technical advice, Lieut.-Colonel Hankey was the secretary, and there were others who were called in from time to time. Ostensibly this body as a whole was responsible for the higher conduct of the war. In fact, it was dominated by three men — Asquith, Churchill and Kitchener — and of these three Kitchener was incomparably the most powerful. Churchill himself summed up the position when he came to give evidence to the Dardanelles Commission in 1916:

‘Lord Kitchener’s personal qualities and position,’ he said, ‘played at this time a very great part in the decision of events. His prestige and authority were immense. He was the sole mouthpiece of War Office opinion in the War Council. Everyone had the greatest admiration for his character, and everyone felt fortified, amid the terrible and incalculable events of the opening months of the war, by his commanding presence. When he gave a decision it was invariably accepted as final. He was never, to my belief, overruled by the War Council or the cabinet, in any military matter, great or small. No single unit was ever sent or withheld contrary, not merely to his agreement, but to his advice. Scarcely anyone ever ventured to argue with him in Council. Respect for the man, sympathy for him in his immense labours, confidence in his professional judgment, and the belief that he had plans deeper and wider than any we could see, silenced misgivings and disputes, whether in the Council or at the War Office. All-powerful, imperturbable, reserved, he dominated absolutely our counsels at this time.’

Twenty-five years were to elapse before such a figure, in Winston Churchill himself, was to reappear in England; and it is even doubtful if Churchill in the nineteen-forties enjoyed quite the same prestige, the air of almost infallible right and might, which Kitchener possessed during these winter months in 1915 when the country had still not recovered from the first shock of the war. Kitchener was not only thought to be as resolute as Churchill later became in the Battle of Britain; he really knew, people felt, precisely how he was going to win the war. The famous poster of the Field Marshal with the pointing finger and the legend ‘Your country needs YOU’ was, possibly, the most effective recruiting propaganda ever devised. All over the country, on the hoardings and the railway stations, in the shops and the buses, the commanding eyes never left one’s face, and the pointing finger followed everywhere. This was Big Brother, protective and all-wise, the face of Mars himself, but there was no evil in him, only strength and the stern sense of duty.

Inside Whitehall, at close range, the effects were just as remarkable. Asquith, the most urbane of men, came under the influence, and Churchill, an extremely youthful First Lord of forty, was in no position to challenge the colossus, even if he had wanted to. Certainly at this stage Lloyd George had not begun to murmur that Kitchener’s handling of affairs was less than perfect.

The point was of course that while the others were civilians, and unused to taking decisions in the awful physical presence of war, Kitchener, the professional soldier, was presumably in his very element. He knew the mysteries of war and they did not. Inside the War Office his power was absolute, for by now the ablest generals and the best of the regular soldiers had been sent to France, and the General Staff had been virtually disbanded. Under the new system there was the Minister who decided everything, and a group of secretaries who supplied him with information and saw to it that his orders were carried out. There was no discussion, no pooling of brains and experience to make a plan, and more often than not his subordinates did not have the vaguest idea of what was passing through his mind until he announced his decisions. Then the scurry began to catch up with the Minister’s mind, to arrange the details which were necessary for his broad designs. Sir James Wolfe Murray, the general who had recently and hastily been put into the position of Chief of the General Staff, was in no different case from the others; although he attended the meetings of the War Council he did not speak, and indeed he often heard there from Kitchener’s lips the first news of some new military plan that was to be carried out.

This system was all the more complicated by the fact that Kitchener had an oddly feminine way of thinking. Most of his big decisions appeared to be based upon a kind of flair, a queer mixture of technical experience and instinctive divination; in other words, the calculated hunch. When all the world was saying that the war would be over in six months he would suddenly come out with the announcement that they must prepare for three years at least. These oracles, which were often proved right, and if wrong became confused and forgotten in other events, added immensely to his reputation.

Fisher’s position was entirely different. He was not a minister and he had no power to decide on policy. Yet to the public and even inside Whitehall he was something more than the First Sea Lord: he was the expression of the Navy itself. With his curiously gnarled face, which gave him almost an oriental appearance, his irreverence and drive, his tremendous knowledge of the Navy, he answered every requirement in the conception of what a great British sailor ought to be. In the past the Admiral’s pugnacity had caused serious disputes inside the Navy, but all that was done with now. He was as solid and tried as one of his own dreadnoughts, and if his authority was not as great as Kitchener’s he had one thing the Field Marshal lacked, a shrewd, fresh, humorous mind that enabled him to come to the heart of a problem in language that everyone could enjoy and understand. Kitchener was respected, but Fisher one really liked.

It was Churchill who brought Fisher back from his retirement to the Admiralty at the age of seventy-four, shortly before the war began, and an intimate relationship had grown up between the old Admiral and the young Minister. Together they were a formidable team. A new wind blew through the Navy. Fisher had but to produce a plan and Churchill promptly put it through the cabinet and the House of Commons for him. In this way together they had got Jellicoe the command of the Grand Fleet, they had secured the Navy’s supply of oil by inducing the government to finance the Persian wells, and they had embarked on a shipbuilding programme which made Britain the strongest maritime power in the world.

Churchill liked to work late at night, Fisher in the early morning. Thus there was a continuous control at the Admiralty; a stream of minutes, notes and letters passed between the two, and no move of any consequence was made by one man without the other having given his agreement. Fisher, coming to work at four or five in the morning, would find the fruits of Churchill’s labour of the previous night on his desk; and Churchill, arriving at his office later in the day, was sure to have a letter waiting for him with the famous green F scrawled on the bottom.

They quarrelled at times — as when Fisher in an outburst of rage against the Zeppelin raids wanted to take reprisals among the Germans interned in England — but these commotions were soon over, and at the beginning of 1915 Fisher was still ending his letters to his friend, ‘Yours to a cinder’, ‘Yours till hell freezes over’.

One wonders, naturally, how far Churchill’s very forceful personality may have pushed Fisher and the other admirals beyond the point where they themselves really wanted to go. In the Navy especially men were trained since boyhood to believe in the established system and to obey orders; one did not argue, the senior officer knew best. Discipline and loyalty — those were the two imperative things. Fisher and his brother admirals considered it their duty never to express any open disagreement with their Minister in a cabinet or War Council meeting. No matter whether they agreed with him or not they sat silent: and this silence was accepted as assent. Inside the Admiralty the admirals were of course free to state their views, but it may not always have been easy to do this. Churchill was young while they were older, he made the pace hot and the very brilliance and energy of his mind may not have encouraged his colleagues to express those half-formed ideas, those vague inconsequential questionings which sometimes contain the beginnings of an understanding of the real truth, the truth that is not always revealed by logic.

This, at any rate, is the real core of the mistrust of Churchill over the Dardanelles — that he bamboozled the admirals — and no matter how much he proves that he was right and they were wrong there will always be an instinctive feeling among some people that somehow or other he upset the established practices of the Navy at this time, and not in the Nelson manner, but as a politician. It is the old story of the conflict between the experimenter and the civil servant, the man of action and the administrator, the ancient dilemma of the crisis where, for the moment, the trained expert is dumbfounded and only the determined amateur seems to know the way ahead.

Churchill himself, in The World Crisis, makes it clear that he was perfectly well aware of this issue. He says, ‘The popular view inculcated in thousands of newspaper articles and recorded in many so-called histories is simple. Mr. Churchill, having seen the German heavy howitzers smash the Antwerp forts, being ignorant of the distinction between a howitzer and a gun, and overlooking the difference between firing ashore and afloat, thought that the naval guns would simply smash the Dardanelles forts. Although the highly competent Admiralty experts pointed out these obvious facts, this politician so bewitched them that they were reduced to supine or servile acquiescence in a scheme which they knew was based upon a series of monstrous technical fallacies.’

‘These broad effects,’ he adds pleasantly, ‘are however capable of refinement.’

Refine them he does, and with devastating force. Yet still, against all logic, the doubt remains: somewhere, one feels, there was a break in the flow of ideas between the young Minister and the sailors.

Up to the middle of January the admirals certainly had nothing to complain of. They had been consulted about the Dardanelles plan at every step of the way. They never liked the idea of going ahead without the backing of the Army, yet they gave their consent. But now, all at once, after the January 13 meeting, Fisher is beset with the deep empirical misgivings of old age. He cannot explain precisely what it is that causes this change of mind, but he is not Kitchener, he cannot just bluntly say, ‘No, I have decided not to go ahead with the matter’; he must give reasons. Moreover, he must give them to Churchill whom he likes and with whom he is on terms of almost emotional intimacy and to whom he must be loyal. There can be no half-measures between them: they must go into the thing wholeheartedly together or they must part.

And so, within the narrow room of his own conscience, caught as he is between his respect and friendship for Churchill and his loyalty to his own ideas, the old Admiral suffers a considerable strain. He chops and changes. He tries to fix his vague forebodings about the Dardanelles adventure on some logical argument, on any convenient pretext which will establish his general sense of danger and uneasiness. And Churchill, naturally, has no difficulty in proving him wrong.

The argument began over the strength of the Grand Fleet in the North Sea. Fisher’s point was that it was being so seriously weakened by the demands of the Dardanelles that it was losing its superiority over the German Fleet, and might find itself exposed to an attack under disadvantageous conditions. Churchill was able to reply that, far from this being the case, the Grand Fleet had been so strengthened since the outbreak of the war that its superiority over the Germans had been actually increased; and this would continue to be so after all the requirements of the Dardanelles had been met.

Fisher still persisted; he suggested that a flotilla of destroyers should be brought back from the Dardanelles, a move which in Churchill’s opinion would have crippled the venture at the outset. Then there was the question of the Zeebrugge Canal. For some time past there had been under discussion a plan for the Navy to sail in and block the canal to German shipping. Fisher began to express his doubts about this operation as well. He was indeed, he now revealed, against aggressive action of any kind, until the German Fleet had been defeated.

Matters came to a head on January 25, when Fisher put down his views in writing and sent them to Churchill with this note: ‘First Lord: I have no desire to continue a useless resistance in the War Council to plans I cannot concur in, but I would ask that the enclosed may be printed and circulated to members before the next meeting. F.’

The document expressed complete opposition to the whole Dardanelles scheme. In it Fisher wrote, ‘We play into Germany’s hands if we risk fighting ships in any subsidiary operations such as coastal bombardments or the attack of fortified places without military co-operation, for we thereby increase the possibility that the Germans may be able to engage our Fleet with some approach to equality of strength. The sole justification of coastal bombardments and attacks by the Fleet on fortified places, such as the contemplated prolonged bombardment of the Dardanelles Forts by our Fleet, is to force a decision at sea, and so far and no further can they be justified.’

The fact that it was intended only to use semi-obsolete battleships to force the Dardanelles, he went on, was no reassurance; if they were sunk the crews would be lost and these were the very men who were needed to man the new vessels coming out of the dockyards.

So then, Fisher argued, Britain should revert to the blockade of Germany and be content with that. ‘Being already,’ he concluded, ‘in possession of all that a powerful fleet can give a country we should continue quietly to enjoy the advantage without dissipating our strength in operations that cannot improve the position.’

Here then was a fundamental difference on policy, a reversal, it seemed to Churchill, of the whole spirit in which they had planned the Dardanelles operation together.

One does not know how far Fisher had consulted the other members of the Admiralty Board before he committed himself to these views. Fisher himself denied that he had any such support. He said later, ‘Naval opinion was unanimous. Mr. Churchill had them all on his side. I was the only rebel.’ Churchill, however, felt that without Fisher’s support he was in an impossible position, and he persuaded the Admiral to come with him to the Prime Minister twenty minutes before the Council meeting began on the morning of January 28, so that they could have the matter out. The discussion went off very quietly at 10 Downing Street. Fisher stated his objections to both the Dardanelles and the Zeebrugge operations, and Churchill answered that he was prepared at any rate to give up Zeebrugge. Asquith, being left to decide, fell in with Churchill’s proposal: Zeebrugge should be stopped but the Dardanelles was to go forward. Fisher said no more and the three men went into the War Council together.

It appeared to Churchill that Fisher had accepted the decision, but here he was quite wrong, for the Admiral, in silence and rage, was preparing his protest. Directly Churchill had finished explaining to the Council the latest position of the Dardanelles plan, Fisher said that he had understood that this matter would not be raised that day: the Prime Minister knew his views.

To this Asquith replied that in view of the steps which had already been taken, the question could not very well be left in abeyance.

Fisher at once got up from the table, leaving the others to carry on the discussion, and Kitchener followed him over to the window to ask him what he was going to do. Fisher replied that he would not go back to the table: he intended to resign. Kitchener’s answer to this was to point out to Fisher that he was the only one in disagreement; the Prime Minister had taken the decision and it was his duty to abide by it. After some further discussion he eventually persuaded the Admiral to come back to the table again.

Churchill had noticed this incident, and as soon as the Council rose he invited Fisher to come to his room at the Admiralty in the afternoon. There is no record of the conversation that then took place, but it appears, in Churchill’s phrase, to have been ‘long and very friendly’, and at the end of it Fisher consented to undertake the operation.

‘When I finally decided to go in,’ Fisher said later, ‘I went the whole hog, totus porcus.’ Nothing, not even this extremity of his affairs, could quite upset that robust spirit; he even added two powerful battleships, the Lord Nelson and the Agamemnon, to the Dardanelles Fleet.

Returning with the Admiral to the afternoon meeting of the Council, Churchill was able to announce that all at the Admiralty were now in agreement, and that the plan would be set into motion. From this point onwards there could be no turning back. Turkey, the small gambler, was in the thick of the big game at last.