THE MIDDLE EAST FRONT

THE GALLIPOLI CAMPAIGN

EVACUATION FROM THE GALLIPOLI PENINSULA: DECEMBER 1915

Acknowledgements

Small map: khl.com Map: ABC 100th Year of Anzac Hamilton: The Project Gutenberg Ebook Churchill: Wikimedia Commons Casualties: forces-war-records.co.uk. Anzacs: (detail) facebook.com Ottoman Empire: (detail) youtube.com Short Seaplane: Skytamer.com. History of British Military History (KEO 2) by John A. Shupek. Masefield: amazon.in

    As we have seen, in October 1914 the Ottoman Empire joined forces with the Central Powers. In so doing, it opened the Caucasus campaign; cut Russia’s vital supply route to the Mediterranean; threatened Egypt and the Suez Canal; and increased the likelihood of one or more Balkan states joining the German cause.

     The British decided to launch a naval attack upon Turkey, aimed at reaching the capital Constantinople via the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara, and forcing the Turks to capitulate. As noted earlier, it failed. The coastal defences on the peninsula of Gallipoli, and the minefields in the Dardanelles straits virtually closed the sea route. As a consequence, in April the Allies launched the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, tasked with seizing the Gallipoli Peninsula and clearing the way for the naval assault. It too was a total failure. Of the seven landings made on the Turkish mainland (including the August offensive) one was aborted within twenty-four hours (Y), and the remainder were confined to small bridgeheads – dangerously small in the case of the Anzacs – dependent upon trenches to hold their ground against bombardment and frequent infantry attacks.

     In October, with casualties mounting, severe winter conditions setting in (bringing blizzards and frostbite), and with little or no hope of the military situation improving, the British government decided to evacuate all troops from Gallipoli. Hamilton was dismissed, and after Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, had visited the battle region to endorse this decision, Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Monro was appointed to carry out the evacuation.

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     For the Allies, it was a sad reflection on the Gallipoli campaign that the most successful operation of the entire enterprise was, in fact, its evacuation. Such was the efficiency shown in its organization that over a period of just four nights (15th-18th December) some 36,000 troops were taken off the beaches at Suvla Bay and Z Beach without the loss of one man. The last men left at 4.10 a.m. on the 20th December. During the day, under cover of normal activities on the beach, a number of men were secreted into boats, but the greatest exodus was during the night. Hundreds of men, with only a flicker of torch light and their boots wrapped in sacking to reduce the noise, slowly descended to the beach and made their way to the waiting boats. And, in addition a large number of guns, vehicles and other military equipment was salvaged, though some animals had to be slaughtered and some equipment had to be destroyed.

     The evacuation from the beaches of Cape Helles was carried out towards the end of the year and was not fully completed, in fact, until the 9th January. This was also carried out efficiently and without loss. Because of the inevitability of this operation, it has been suggested that the Turks knew when it was taking place but took no action, anxious as they were not to add further to their own losses, already considerable. That is possible. For them, victory had been achieved. At one time, the Austrian navy, working out of Cattaro on the Adriatic coast, did make an effort to harass the Allied evacuation. They managed to sink a number of supply ships but, after losing two of their modern destroyers, kept their distance. Later, however, Austrian ships did bombard Montenegro, thereby playing a part in that country’s surrender.

     Incidentally, inxorder to hoodwink the Turks during the evacuation, a young Australian named Lance Corporal William Scurry designed a delayed-action rifle. Water from a ration tin was slowly fed into a tin below, and, when this water reached a certain weight, a lever pulled down the trigger of a rifle. It was about twenty minutes before the shot was fired, and this proved of enormous value in the closing hours of the evacuation. Scurry, commended for his valuable invention, went on to serve on the Western Front and ended the war as a major. ……

     …… Duringxthe days leading up to the evacuation many of the troops spent a deal of time tidying up the graves of their fallen comrades. Some left messages and poems at the graveside. A poem by Sergeant Alfred Guppy read:

Sleep sound, old friends, the keenest part which more than

 failure wounds the heart, is thus to leave you, thus to part.

    Failurexit certainly was. Nor could it all be blamed on the commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, General Sir Ian Hamilton (1853-1947). Some argued then, and some argue still, that he was made a scapegoat. In fact he was not given a chance to take part in the planning of the campaign, where much failure lay. This fell mostly to Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War. It is clear that he under estimated the strength and the quality of the Ottoman army, and that he had no clear understanding of the terrain over which the battle was to be fought, especially in the northern area of the peninsula. The Greek high command had warned him that in such an operation 150,000 troops would be needed, but he insisted that 70,000 would be sufficient. Later, referring to the Anzac landing, the report of the Dardanells Commission concluded that “failure was due mainly to the difficulty of the country and the strength of the enemy”. It could well be argued that, to a large extent, that applied to all the landings. And there was, too, a lamentable lack of the equipment required for such an operation. Open launches were no substitute for purpose-built landing craft, and there was a serious shortage of munitions. And when the battles were under way, there were long delays in the provision of reinforcements, both men and material. Priority was given to the Western Front, so supplies were too little and too late.

     But it might well be said that the major cause of defeat was because the landing operations, considered necessary following the failure of the naval bombardment, lacked any element of surprise – a vital ingredient in any sea invasion. As a result, the beaches had been prepared – with mines and vast stretches of barbed wire – and the Turks, with a good knowledge of the terrain, had machine gun posts on and overlooking the landing zones and, further inland, possession of the commanding heights. It is a credit to the Allied troops that they managed to land at all! Steadfastness and courage aside, this campaign was an unmitigated disaster.

     Hamilton clearly had his faults. He was unrealistically optimistic throughout the campaign – doubtless fearing the loss of both his own and British prestige – and this clouded his judgement. And he probably did lack the ability too inspire his men (though this did not seem to affect their fighting spirit or ability). But, under the circumstances, it is hard to imagine that any commander, be he of the highest calibre, could have achieved the aims expected from this expeditionary force. It was asking too much of too little.

     The originalxplan, the idea of a naval bombardment of the Ottoman capital, Constantinople, to knock the Turks out of the war, emanated from the Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill (1874-1965). He saw the Ottoman Empire as the “sick man of Europe”. And when this somewhat ambitious plan failed, he suggested that sea power and a good army of 50,000 would “put an end to the Turkish menace”. But his idea of a “second front” ended in complete failure and the ignominy of a hasty evacuation. In May he was demoted to a minor cabinet post – the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster – and then in November chose to resign from the government and become an infantry officer on the Western Front, serving with the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He did return to the government in 1917, but was appointed the munitions minister, a department not directly involved in military strategy! At the time, Churchill saw the failure of the Gallipoli campaign as the end of his political career. That, of course, was not the case (he was to become Britain’s outstanding leader in the Second World War), but this episode, and the part he played in it, haunted him for decades. He later came to regard it as a lesson learned. It was an expensive lesson …..

     By the end of the campaign more than 130,000 men had died (a large proportion by diseases such as typhoid and dysentery), and over 260,000 wounded. The Ottoman loses were particularly high, but this was because the Turks made constant attacks upon the Allied beach-heads. These overall figures are of little significance in comparison with those suffered on the Western Front, but it was a comprehensive and humiliating defeat for the Entente powers in general and the British Empire in particular. The campaign met none of the goals set. The only consolation was that, for a time, it did attract a large force away from the Russian front in the Caucasus. The battlefields are now part of the Gallipoli Peninsula Historical National Park (or Peace Park), established in 1973.

    Thexcampaign was of particular significance to the British Dominions, Australia and New Zealand. The part they played, a very gallant part, did much to establish their national identity. Both countries had fought for the mother country before, of course, (troops from New Zealand had taken part in the defence of the Suez Canal as recently as February), but on Gallipoli they both fought as national armies, and this brought both countries closer together. Since 1916, “Anzac Day” has marked the anniversary of the day – 25th April 1915 – when they stormed the beaches at Ari Burnu. Following the evacuation, the Anzacs regrouped in Egypt. After a period of rest, some stayed on to support the Sinai and Palestine campaigns, and the remainder were deployed on the Western Front.

     A further word needs to be said about the involvement of submarines in the battle for Gallipoli. As noted earlier, they played quite a significant role. A number of Allied submarines succeeded in reaching the waters around Constantinople, and nine British and four French submarines carried out a series of successful attacks. For the loss of eight of their number, they sank a battleship, a destroyer, five gunboats, eleven troop carriers, and forty-four supply ships. One British submarine, commanded by Martin Nasmith, is reported to have destroyed more than eighty craft. Likewise the Germans took their toll on Allied shipping, including one U-boat that sank two British battleships.

    War in the air was more limited, mainly because of poor weather conditions. However, both sides made quite a large number of reconnaissance missions. The Turks, after a slow start, were particularly interested in watching the Dardanelles and the movement of shipping around the beach heads. The Allied aircraft, assisted by aerial cameras, kept constant track of Turkish troop movements. They were also used to locate mines in the Straits, but many went unnoticed and the naval task force suffered badly as a consequence. At the start of the fighting, the Turks only had four aircraft, but the Germans quickly added to that number, and this enabled the Turks to go on the attack. Apart from dropping hand-held bombs on a variety of targets, they shot down a French aircraft in late November. The Allies tended to target enemy gun posts and their major airfields. Andxit was in the Sea of Marmora, on the 17th August 1915, that Flight Commander Charles Edmonds, flying a Short Seaplane Type 184 (illustrated), became the first ever pilot to attack and sink a ship (a Turkish transport vessel), using an air launched torpedo.

    Incidentally, the Englishxpoet John Masefield, who spent some time in Gallipoli, working with an ambulance unit, wrote a book about what he called “the great human history”. No army, he argued, had made a more heroic attack, and no army had ever been set such a task. ……

     …… Onxthe 22nd May, 1915, a train crash at Quitinshill, just north of Gretna Green in Dumfriesshire Scotland, killed 210 and injured 224 soldiers of the 7th Battalion Royal Scots, on their way to Gallipoli. This accident remains the worst rail disaster in the UK.

    For the Ottoman Empire, the victory at Gallipoli did much to rekindle a fighting spirit. Indeed, it marked the beginning of a national revival. As we shall see, the Turks put up a spirited fight following the outbreak of the Sinai-Palestine Campaign in January 1916, and in April of that year they had further success in the battle raging in Mesopotamia. The conclusion of the war did, indeed, mark the end of the Ottoman Empire (beginning with the Armistice of Mudros in October 1918), but, as we shall see, the Turkish rejection of the Treaty of Sèvres in August 1920, and a defiant resort to arms, also saw the founding of the Turkish Republic via the Lausanne Treaty of 1923. In the long history of the Ottomans, the victory at Gallipoli in defence of their homeland – rejuvenating as it did the fervour of an ailing nation – could well be seen as the Empire’s finest hour.