Instead of diverting German resources to the south and shortening the war, it exhausted the Allies and extended it.
‘’T was better to die neath an Irish sky, than at Suvla or Sedd el Bahr.”
In that one, to me, mysterious line of an Irish nationalist ballad is a tragedy beyond all reckoning. That line was the basis on which many Irish soldiers were temporarily forgotten or written out of Irish history, fighting in a foreign war, rather than their own. But the Irish hardly made the largest sacrifice at Suvla, and they were not alone.
One hundred and ten years ago this week, a kind of stalemate settled over the Gallipoli campaign in World War I, an attempt by the Western powers to pull German focus away from the Western Front and to relieve Russia from blockade in the Black Sea. Ottomans and Entente soldiers spent days and weeks throwing gifts to each other across no-man’s-land, to relieve each other of boredom. The Ottomans sent dates and candies. The Australians and New Zealanders threw over cans of beef and cigarettes. For a brief time, the maiming and killing had stopped. But not the dying. Relieved for a few days from the hail of bullets and the insane orders of their superiors, men succumbed to mosquitoes, to dysentery, to dehydration.
The Welsh, Irish, Kiwis, Australians, and Greeks were hurled into this fruitless campaign by Winston Churchill’s defective strategic vision, but not his alone. The idea of “knocking the props” from underneath Germany by a campaign that would at once cut upward through Europe and end Turkey’s life as a major European power appealed to Britain’s traditional strategy of winning large wars with asymmetric campaigns at the periphery of the conflict, especially those leveraging her naval power. Churchill believed that “there was no other point on any of the war fronts, extending over hundreds of miles, where an equal advance would have produced an equal, or even a comparable, strategic result.” Victory would give Britain control of shipping into the Black Sea, relieve Russia, and convince others to join the Allies. It would divert German resources from the Western Front and shorten the war.
The plan depended on an entirely false, and probably racially motivated, assumption that Ottoman troops would be ill-prepared and ill-disciplined and would, at the sight of His Majesty’s warships, be driven insane with fear, swiftly to abandon their posts upon the first bombardment. It was not the last, or the most consequential, time that Churchill underestimated a non-white military force. The British Navy failed spectacularly in its campaign to break through the Dardanelles strait, losing ships to Ottoman mines. The French battleship Bouvet, along with HMS Irresistible and HMS Ocean, were sunk.
Throwing good after bad, the British committed to a land campaign, now pitting their weakness against Turkey’s true strength. The botched amphibious landing at what became ANZAC Cove had the benefit of surprise. But without adequate doctrine or training to guide the Allies, the Turks quickly recovered initiative. “I do not order you to fight, I order you to die,” Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal told his men. “In the time which passes until we die, other troops and commanders can come forward and take our places.” He would become Atatürk.
The result would be eight months of brutal trench warfare. Churchill was said by John F. Kennedy to have mobilized the English language and sent it into battle, and he did so in this campaign too, urging his men, “Take Constantinople; take it by ships if you can; take it by soldiers if you must; take it by whichever plan, military or naval, commends itself to your military experts, but take it, and take it soon, and take it while time remains.”
In retrospect, he would rue this. “Three divisions in February could have occupied the Gallipoli Peninsula with little fighting,” he reflected after the war. “Five could have captured it after March 18. Seven were insufficient at the end of April, but nine might just have done it. Eleven might have sufficed at the beginning of July. Fourteen were to prove insufficient on August 7.” That final push on August 7, the landing at Suvla, was the last failure, a desultory display of incompetence by the elderly and inexperienced General Stopford.
The disaster is poignantly memorialized in the song “Bay of Suvla” and in the observation of British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett:
I watched the flames approaching and the crawling figures disappear amidst dense clouds of black smoke. When the fire passed on little mounds of scorched khaki alone marked the spot where another mismanaged soldier of the King had returned to mother earth.
The butcher’s bill for the entire campaign tallied 250,000 Allied casualties, including 58,000 dead, and 300,000 Ottoman casualties, of whom 87,000 died. All the objectives laid out for it failed. The Dardanelles was closed. Russia therefore continued to suffer supply shortages. The Ottomans were not knocked out of the war, and the Balkans were not persuaded to join the Allies. Instead of diverting German resources to the south and shortening the war, it exhausted the Allies and extended it.
The only successful and well-executed part of the campaign was the final evacuation and abandonment of it — eerily foreshadowing the disaster at Dunkirk in the next war. Recalled Major Charles Powles of the winter retreat: “Through the silent deres they marched, and past the silent dead, over whom loving comrades had set up crosses of remembrance in those last days.”