two thoughts on Gallipoli

I see that The Rest Is History has recently done a series on what happened at Gallipoli in 1915, which as it happens is one of my obsessions. This isn’t a post about that campaign as such, but about two related things.

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The assault on Gallipoli was, of course and infamously, Winston Churchill’s idea. Its abject failure cost him his place as First Lord of the Admiralty and probably should have ended his political career. (Though if it had….) Andrew Roberts, in his biography of Churchill, treats this episode rather curiously.

Churchill’s determination to pursue the invasion of Turkey through the Dardanelles, a plan which was based wholly — not partly, not largely, but altogether — on the assumption that when faced with the sight of British and French warships the Turks would run away, was strongly opposed by several members of the War Cabinet, but through sheer obnoxiousness Churchill finally got his way. When the invasion began to fall apart, as it did almost immediately, Churchill tried to disguise how bad things were, for instance by neglecting to inform his colleagues that a French ship had been destroyed by a Turkish mine, with over 600 sailors lost. But he did not control the flow of information, and more and more Cabinet members thought that Churchill — who was unrepentant and self-justifying, repeatedly claiming that the soldiers and sailors being killed were ones they could afford to lose — had to be sacked. The British press overwhelmingly agreed. It became increasingly clear that Prime Minister Asquith would need to form a coalition government in order to continue the war, but Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, also made it clear that the Conservatives wouldn’t serve in a government with Churchill.

Admiral “Jacky” Fisher — the most respected British sailor — found Churchill’s plans so senseless that he resigned from the Cabinet (after repeatedly threatening to do so and repeatedly being talked out of it by Asquith). Here’s how Roberts describes what happened next:

On Saturday, 15 May, Fisher did at last resign — his eighth and final attempt since rejoining the Admiralty. He disappeared and went to the Charing Cross Hotel to lie low, possibly after a period of meditation in Westminster Abbey. When No. 10 finally tracked him down, Asquith commanded him ‘in the King’s name’ to return to the Admiralty. Instead, Fisher sent the Prime Minister a long list of conditions, including the removal of HMS Queen Elizabeth from the Dardanelles and Churchill from the Admiralty, adding that the First Lord was ‘a bigger danger than the Germans’. Asquith told the King that the letter ‘showed signs of mental aberration’. Asquith was not about to be blackmailed and accepted Fisher’s resignation instead.

But this of course was not “blackmail”: Fisher was simply saying that there were certain conditions under which he could not in good conscience serve. He thought Churchill was getting a great many men killed to absolutely no purpose — and he was right. He was also right not to accept the Churchillian view that such deaths were merely business as usual. But Asquith was desperate to keep Fisher on side because if he could not keep both Fisher and Churchill there would be hell to pay in the House of Commons, where Admiral Fisher had far more support than the First Sea Lord. Asquith rightly calculated that his government had little chance of surviving the enormous fight that was coming.

In his description of Fisher’s resignation, Roberts establishes a pattern: portraying those who disagreed with Churchill as mentally or morally deficient. David Lloyd George was then the Chancellor of the Exchequer:

Lloyd George needed no persuasion to throw over his old friend and ally. The price of the Conservatives joining a national government was that Churchill should be sent to a sinecure post with no executive portfolio attached. ‘It is the Nemesis of the man who has fought for this war for years’, Lloyd George told Frances Stevenson that day. ‘When the war came he saw in it the chance of glory for himself, and has accordingly entered on a risky campaign without caring a straw for the misery and hardship it would bring to thousands, in the hope that he would be the outstanding man in this war.’ There was bitterness and jealousy in that remark, but little factual accuracy.

There was neither “bitterness” nor “jealousy” in this — Lloyd George was a figure of far greater stature than Churchill — but rather sober judgment, and a judgment shared by nearly every member of the War Cabinet. Churchill had dug his own political grave and there was nothing Lloyd George or anyone else could have done to keep him from falling into it. “Throw over his old friend and ally” indeed. Had Lloyd George acted as Roberts wants him to have acted — defending Churchill at any cost — the government would surely have collapsed, and quickly.

When Asquith told Churchill that he must go, Churchill wrote memo after memo (and got his wife Clementine to write a letter) pleading to keep his job, to all of which

Asquith merely replied, ‘You must take it as settled that you are not to remain at the Admiralty… I hope to retain your services as a member of the new Cabinet, being, as I am, sincerely grateful for the splendid work you have done both before and since the war’. Asquith could treat Churchill harshly partly because the First Lord had so few supporters.

How “harshly”? This is a gentle and generous message, merely asking Churchill to bow to the inevitable, but reaffirming the P.M.’s admiration for Churchill and a desire to keep him in the Cabinet in a different role. Again, what does Roberts expect? That Asquith should allow his government to be brought down in order to protect Churchill from experiencing the consequences of his own decisions?

Then, when Churchill is forced out:

The King was delighted by the creation of a national government. ‘Only by that means can we get rid of Churchill from the Admiralty,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘He is intriguing also with French against Kitchener, he is the real danger!’ The Prince of Wales agreed, telling his father, ‘It is a great relief to know that Winston is leaving the Admiralty… one does feel that he launches the country on mad ventures which are fearfully expensive both as regards men and munitions and which don’t attain their object.’ It was for this feckless young man that Churchill would later nearly sacrifice his career.

What bizarrely petty sniping. Whether the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, was or was not a “feckless young man” is altogether irrelevant. (That said, he was. And worse than feckless.) What Edward says here is precisely what virtually everyone in the government thought and — more important — what was actually true. After losing a quarter of a million men for absolutely nothing, Churchill’s only regret was that he was not allowed to throw even more men and matériel into the breach. “Not to persevere — that was the crime,” he later wrote. And though he said privately that he had ongoing nightmares over Gallipoli, there’s no evidence that the nightmares involved any remorse for lives lost. His primary public and private stance was that he was the real victim:

Upon me more than any other person the responsibility for the Dardanelles and all that it involved has been cast. Upon me fell almost exclusively the fierce war-time censures of Press and Public. Upon me alone among the high authorities concerned was the penalty inflicted — not the loss of office, for that is a petty thing — but of interruption and deprivation of control while the fate of the enterprise was still in suspense.

When his widow Clementine told Martin Gilbert that “The Dardanelles haunted him for the rest of his life,” she added: “He always believed in it.” That is, what perpetually “haunted him” was “deprivation of control.” Lloyd George’s comment that “When the war came he saw in it the chance of glory for himself” is largely corroborated by Churchill and Clementine themselves.

Churchill would later become a great man. At this point he was not. He was a dynamic and brilliant but also erratic and egotistical man, and everybody knew it. Roberts’s relentless denunciations of those who correctly discerned Churchill’s flaws and acted accordingly are absurd. I stopped reading his biography at this point, because it was evident that he could not be trusted to make an fair assessment of any controversy surrounding Churchill — and there were many of those.

(P.S. Once the Gallipoli campaign collapsed, of course Churchill, as its prime architect, had to go. But the plan never should have been approved in the first place. Asquith and the other members of the War Cabinet had allowed Churchill’s loony enthusiasm override their considered judgment — as, in the next war, Ike would endorse an equally senseless scheme from Monty. The ultimate blame should fall on Asquith: it would have been better for all concerned if Churchill had been overruled, after which he certainly would have threatened to resign. And if he then had resigned, Asquith would have been in a better position.)

~ 2 ~

A long time ago now, I was doing research on Auden in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library when one of the librarians mentioned to me that they had a good deal of Auden-related documents that had not yet been catalogued. Would I care to take a look at some of them? Indeed I so cared.

I have forgotten much of what I saw that day, but one set of papers remains vivid in my mind, a series of letters that had been typed by Auden’s older brother John — but these were transcriptions John had made of letters written to the family by their father, George Augustus Auden. It does not appear that the originals have survived, which is a shame. Perhaps John transcribed them because they were in poor condition, which would be unsurprising, because they were written at Gallipoli in the midst of the campaign.

Dr. George Auden had enlisted in the British Army soon after the outbreak of the war, to serve as a medical officer. (He was 42 years old at enlistment.) In that capacity he accompanied soldiers to Gallipoli, where he established and oversaw a field hospital, and his letters home relate what that experience was like. They make riveting reading, and perhaps the most noticeable thing about them is his change in attitude towards the soldiers among whom he serves. At the outset he describes them with an almost anthropological detachment: he writes about what “they” do, what “they” say. But gradually he becomes more and more a part of their world. In those desperate circumstances he is not just a doctor but also a stretcher-bearer, and at one point he lifts a wounded sergeant onto his back and carries him to safety. He injures his hand digging trenches — the commanding officers having decided that they might as well do on Gallipoli what was being done in Flanders. But at need he performs other work as well, for instance, ferrying shells to artillery gunners. And by the end of his chronicle he is no longer speaking of what “they” do and say: it is what “we” do and say. We fired at the Turks, and then peered over the sandbags to see if we had hit anything — that is a typical comment.

I’ve been meaning for years to get back to the Berg and revisit those letters — they are worthy of publication, or at least of some scholarly attention. Some day, some day….