March 28, 2013

Finest Hour 155, Summer 2012

Page 47

All Churchill’s Fault

Gallipoli, by Peter Hart. Oxford University Press, hardbound, illus., 534 pp. $34.95. Kindle $13.72. Member price $27.95.

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By Terry Reardon

Mr. Reardon is Vice-Chairman and Recording Secretary of ICS, Canada.

The author, a historian at the Imperial War Museum, eaves the reader with no confusion over his stance in the first words of his preface: “Gallipoli. It was a lunacy that never could have succeeded….Churchill pushed his luck once too often and ended up justly vilified for the dreadful consequences of his strategic incompetence. The setback would have ended the career of a lesser man; even he had to spend ten years in the political wilderness.”

What? Churchill was back in the Cabinet as Minister of Munitions within two years of Gallipoli. His true wilderness was in the 1930s, mainly the result of his opposition to the India Bill, not the Dardanelles campaign.

Hart’s book offers only a cursory examination of the reasons for the Dardanelles/Gallipoli campaign in 1915: to capture Constantinople, take pressure off the Russian army and encourage other Balkan states to join the Allies or at least not side with Germany. Churchill hoped it would open a back door to attack the Central Powers and save the troops on the Western Front who were “chewing barbed wire.”

Unlike the long drawn-out fighting in France and Flanders, the Gallipoli land campaign started on 25 April 1915, and after the decision to evacuate, it finished on 8 January 1916. Although short it was bloody, with Allied casual- ties of 141,000 and Turkish of 251,000.

Why did Gallipoli fail? Hart says the British War Council was bloated and inefficient, with Churchill and Kitchener having too much influence. While Churchill initially thought the Dardanelles straits could be forced by the Navy alone, when an army component was considered essential, Kitchener was less than forthcoming. Then there were the failures of the Navy, due mainly to floating mines, the unexpected quality of the Turkish troops, the unrealistic strategic planning, raw Allied troops expected to perform like veterans, and incompetent leaders, especially the Commander, General Sir Ian Hamilton.

The author’s main criticism is that the British War Council, including Churchill, forgot the sound principle of war, “concentrating on the main enemy on the main front.” Hart commends General Haig for later expressing “grim satisfaction” at the final evacuation, so “he could turn to full attention to the business of winning the war where he and the professional generals had always said it must be won, the Western Front.” Haig certainly turned his full attention to “chewing barbed wire” in France—for two more bloody years.

Churchill said of Hamilton’s successor, General Sir Charles Monro, who made the decision to evacuate: “He came, he saw, he capitulated.” Hart writes: “As an epigrammatic sneer it is clever; as a comment on Monro’s eminently sensible analysis it merely highlights Churchill’s lack of grip on strategic matters.” The nuances of language are lost on Mr. Hart; Churchill’s comment was a literary device, not a serious strategic analysis.

Comparing the Gallipoli landing with D-Day in the next war, Hart says Gallipoli “could have been cited as an example of how not to carry out combined operations on a hostile shore,” but “the planners of the D-Day landings had learnt in a far more organic manner which, although partly drawing on the negative lessons of 1915, was more firmly grounded in the positive experiences and lessons of the combined operations already undertaken during the Second World War.” Surely he does not mean Dieppe? (See this writer’s article on that subject, FH 154:32.)

Hart’s conclusion about D-Day is correct, but his contention that the Dardanelles/Gallipoli operation could not have succeeded with better planning and full cooperation of the Army and Navy is not proven. Clement Attlee said it was the only imaginative concept of World War I. Done right, could have shortened the war and saved lives.

I will spare the reader all the contradictory information favoring the validity of the plan (see, e.g., Geoffrey Wallin’s By Ships Alone, 1981). It is more appropriate to quote Churchill himself who, contrary to the implications of this book, took a solidly analytical approach to the problem in the second volume of his WW2 memoirs, Their Finest Hour:

“I was ruined for the time being in 1915 over the Dardanelles, and a supreme enterprise was cast away, through my trying to carry out a major and cardinal operation of war from a subordinate position. Men are ill- advised to try such ventures. This lesson had sunk into my nature.”