The Goliath was not an important ship — she was fifteen years old and her tonnage was less than 13,000—yet the very fact that she had been sunk and in such difficult circumstances made the presence of the U-boats seem more menacing than ever. Fisher announced that he must retire the Queen Elizabeth from the Mediterranean at once. Churchill was ready to agree to this: new monitors with anti-torpedo blisters on their sides were ready to sail, and there were other replacements which could be sent to de Robeck. But it was a very different matter with Lord Kitchener. On May 13 Churchill asked him to come to a conference at the Admiralty, and it was there that he was given the news of the withdrawal of the flagship. ‘Lord Kitchener,’ Churchill relates, ‘became extremely angry… Lord Fisher flew into an even greater fury. “The Queen Elizabeth would come home; she would come home at once; she would come home that night or he would walk out of the Admiralty then and there.” ’ Churchill did his best to mollify Kitchener by telling him of the new monitors and the other replacements, and at the breaking up of the meeting Fisher had his way. Orders were sent out recalling the Queen Elizabeth, and at the same time de Robeck was forbidden to renew his attack on the Narrows.
The meeting of the War Council on the following day, May 14, is described by Churchill as ‘sulphurous’. Of all the men who gathered at 10 Downing Street that day only Churchill and Lord Hankey, who was the secretary of the Council, survive. Yet the scene has the contemporary quality which seems to characterize all the crises of the Gallipoli expedition.
Kitchener was very bitter. He had sent an army to Turkey, he said, because he had been assured that the Navy would force the Dardanelles, and because he had been led on by Churchill insisting upon ‘the marvellous potentialities of the Queen Elizabeth’. The Navy had failed, and now the Queen Elizabeth was being taken away at the very moment when the Army was struggling for its life on the edge of the peninsula. It so happened that The Times on this day had come out with its attack upon Asquith’s Government over the shortage of the supply of shells. As he went on to deal with this matter, Kitchener became increasingly gloomy. No organization, he said, could keep pace with the expenditure of ammunition. No one could foresee what would happen. If the Russians cracked in the East it was quite possible that the Germans would bring back their armies to the West and set out upon the invasion of England.
Fisher’s only comment on all this was that he had been against the Dardanelles adventure since the beginning, and this, he said, Lord Kitchener knew perfectly well. Everyone now seems to have been in an angry and despondent mood, and they listened without much patience as Churchill argued that the success of the campaign had never depended upon the Queen Elizabeth. The only thing to do now, he said, was to reinforce Hamilton, push the campaign through to a conclusion and forget their vague fears about the invasion of England. But with his First Sea Lord openly antagonistic to him Churchill was not in a strong position, and the meeting broke up without any decision being reached.
The crisis now moved quietly, almost stealthily, to its climax. In the afternoon there was a quite amicable meeting between Fisher and Churchill on the subject of the replacements that were to be sent to de Robeck. The list of ships was agreed, and Fisher went off to bed. Late that night Churchill went through the list again and decided to add two E-class submarines to it. His minute on the subject was sent off in the usual way to Fisher’s office, so that the Admiral would see it on his desk when he arrived first thing on the following morning. Upon this the explosion erupted. Fisher appears to have reached his office about 5 a.m. on May 15, and on seeing Churchill’s minute immediately decided to resign. The two submarines were, apparently, the last straw. ‘First Lord,’ he wrote, ‘After further anxious reflection I have come to the regretted conclusion I am unable to remain any longer as your colleague. It is undesirable in the public interests to go into details — Jowett said “never explain”—but I find it increasingly difficult to adjust myself to the increasing daily requirements of the Dardanelles to meet your views — as you truly said yesterday I am in the position of continually veto-ing your proposals.
‘This is not fair to you besides being extremely distasteful to me.
‘I am off to Scotland at once to avoid all questionings.
Yours truly,
Fisher.’
Churchill received this letter from his secretary as he was walking across the Horse Guards Parade later in the morning, and he did not take a serious view of the matter since Fisher had resigned or threatened to resign so many times before. The Admiral, however, was nowhere to be found, and Churchill went across to Downing Street to discuss the matter with the Prime Minister. Asquith’s first move was to write out an order to Fisher commanding him to return to his duty in the name of the King, and secretaries were sent out to scour the town until they found him. Some went to the main railway stations, others hunted through the Admiralty. Several hours elapsed, however, before the Admiral was found in a room in the Charing Cross hotel, and for a time he refused to come out. In the end he agreed that he would at least see the Prime Minister.
Lloyd George was in the entrance lobby of 10 Downing Street when Fisher arrived for this interview. ‘A combative grimness,’ Lloyd George says, ‘had taken the place of his usual genial greeting; the lower lip of his set mouth thrust forward, and the droop at the corner was more marked than usual. His curiously oriental features were more than ever those of a graven image in an eastern temple, with a sinister frown. “I have resigned,” was his greeting, and on my inquiring the reason he replied, “I can stand it no longer.” He then informed me that he was on his way to see the Prime Minister, having made up his mind to take no further part in the Dardanelles “foolishness”, and was off to Scotland that night.’
Fisher clearly was in a rage to have done with the formalities, and neither Asquith nor Churchill could move him.
In a last message to Churchill — and one can almost see the pen trembling in the Admiral’s hand — he wrote: ‘YOU ARE BENT ON FORCING THE DARDANELLES AND NOTHING WILL TURN YOU FROM IT — NOTHING. I know you so well… You will remain and I SHALL GO — it is better so.’ There followed his defiant final ultimatum to Asquith demanding, as a condition of his return, absolute control over the Navy and the removal of Churchill and all others who, he imagined, stood in his way. It was absurd, of course, even crazy, and it meant that the old man had to be removed from the scene as quickly as possible. A curt note from Asquith accepting his resignation ended his career.
In more ordinary times Churchill perhaps might have weathered Fisher’s departure, but too much was happening too quickly. The shell crisis alone was enough to bring the Government down, or at any rate to lead to its reorganization. In some vague way it had begun to seem that the Gallipoli campaign was responsible for all their troubles, and Churchill was regarded as the original author of it. He had urged it from the beginning. He had lost the ships. He was responsible for the disasters and delays in the Army’s landing. He was the amateur who had dared to fly in the face of the expert opinion of the Admirals — even Fisher, the greatest of them all. All this was wildly unfair. ‘It (Churchill’s removal from the Admiralty) was a cruel and unjust degradation,’ Lloyd George wrote. ‘The Dardanelles failure was due not so much to Mr. Churchill’s precipitancy as to Lord Kitchener’s and Mr. Asquith’s procrastination.’