There were in all 13 submarines engaged in the Sea of Marmara, and although 8 were destroyed the passage was made 27 times. The Turkish losses were 1 battleship (apart from the Messudieh sunk in the previous year), 1 destroyer, 5 gunboats, 11 transports, 44 steamers and 148 sailing boats. Nasmith’s bag alone was 101 vessels, and he was in the Marmara for three months, including a stay of 47 days — a record that was never surpassed in the first world war. By the end of the year all movement of enemy ships by daylight had practically ceased, and with rare exceptions only the most urgent supplies were sent by sea to the peninsula.
It is doubtful if the success of the submarines was ever fully understood by the British while the campaign was going on. At Hamilton’s and de Robeck’s headquarters the sinkings seem to have been regarded more in the nature of a delightful surprise, a bonus on the side, than as the basis for a main offensive. It never seems to have occurred to them that they might have followed up d’Oyly-Hughes’ adventure, that commandos might have been landed north of Bulair to have cut the Turkish land route to the peninsula.
Nor were the Germans any more imaginative. Five small U-boats were eventually assembled at Pola, and managed to get through to Constantinople, but apart from one or two lucky shots at transports coming out of Alexandria they made no further attempt on the Fleet at Gallipoli. By September forty-three German U-boats had been sent to the Mediterranean, but the bulk of the pack remained in the western half of the sea, and they failed to sink any of the ships bringing reinforcements out from England.
And so there was, even as early as May, some reasonable chance of the expedition gathering impetus again. If the Allies were being starved of supplies, so too were the Turks; the lost British battleships were being replaced by monitors, and with the arrival of the Lowland division Hamilton’s forces outnumbered the enemy in the peninsula.
Hamilton in any case was an optimistic man. The sinking of the battleships had been a terrible blow, and on board the Arcadian the General himself was living in the most insecure conditions, so insecure indeed that two transports were lashed to the ship’s side to act as torpedo-buffers. Dismayed but still buoyant, he wrote in his diary: ‘We are left all alone in our glory with our two captive merchantmen. The attitude is heroic but not, I think, so dangerous as it is uncomfortable. The big ocean liners lashed to port and starboard cut us off from light as well as air, and one of them is loaded with Cheddar. When Mr. Jorrocks awoke James Pigg and asked him to open the window to see what sort of a hunting morning it was, it will be remembered that the huntsman opened the cupboard by mistake and made the reply, “Hellish dark and smells of cheese.” Well, that immortal remark hits us off to a T. Never mind. Light will be vouchsafed. Amen.’
Useless now to reflect that the Triumph and the Majestic—and the Goliath too — might have gone to a better end by making a new attempt on the Narrows; or to think of how the great armada of battleships had been scattered and forced to retire into the harbour at Mudros whence it had so confidently set out a month before. The only thing to do now was to wait for news from London, to hope for reinforcements and to hold on.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DURING the months of June and July neither side made any serious attempt to attack at Anzac, and while an uneasy stalemate continued there five pitched battles were fought at Cape Helles. They were all frontal attacks, all of short duration, a day or two or even less, and none of them succeeded in altering the front line by more than half a mile.[19]
This fighting at Cape Helles was the heaviest of the campaign, and it followed the strict pattern of trench warfare: the preliminary bombardment, the charge of the infantry (sometimes as many as five men to four yards of front), the counter-attack, and then the last confused spasmodic struggles to consolidate the line. Nowhere at any time were any important objectives gained; at the end of it all the Turks were no nearer to driving the Allies into the sea and the Allies were hardly any closer to Achi Baba. Even in the killing of men neither side could claim the advantage, since it is estimated that for the period from the first landings in April to the end of July the total casualties were about the same for each: some 57,000 men.
These battles were so repetitive, so ant-like and inconclusive, that it is almost impossible to discover any meaning in them unless one remembers the tremendous hopes with which each action was begun. The generals really did think that they could get through, and so for a while did the soldiers too. Hunter-Weston, the British Corps Commander, was an extremely confident man. ‘Casualties,’ he said one day, ‘what do I care for casualties?’ The remark might not have been particularly distressing to his soldiers; they too were quite prepared for casualties provided they defeated the Turks, and in any case it was nothing remarkable that the General still believed that victories could be achieved by this kind of fighting; with very few exceptions all the other generals, German, Turkish, French and British, in France as well as Gallipoli, believed the same thing. The artillery bombardment followed by the charge of the infantry was believed to be the surgical act that would bring success in the quickest way, and nobody had yet suggested any alternative to it except, of course, poison gas. The real answer to the problem was simple enough: they needed an armoured mobile gun that would break through the enemy machine-gun fire; in other words a tank. But in 1915 the tank was a year or more and several million lives away, and it seemed to both Turkish and Allied staffs alike that they had only to intensify what they were already doing — to employ more men and more guns on narrower fronts — and the enemy would crack.
Since the rules of the game, the actual methods of the fighting, were not in question, the generals had to find other reasons to explain their failure, and on the side of the Allies it usually boiled down to a matter of ammunition. If only they had had more shells to fire all would have been well. Just a few more rounds, another few guns, and the miracle would have happened. It had already been demonstrated at Gallipoli — and it was to be demonstrated over and over again on a much larger scale in France — that artillery bombardment was not the real way out of this suicidal impasse, but the British were strictly rationed in shells at Gallipoli, and this very shortage seemed to indicate that this was where their fatal weakness lay. Through June and July, there were times when Hamilton could think of nothing else, and he sent off message after message to Kitchener pointing out how badly served he was in the matter of ammunition compared with the armies in France.
‘A purely passive defence is not possible for us,’ he wrote; ‘it implies losing ground by degrees — and we have not a yard to lose… But, to expect us to attack without giving us our fair share — on Western standards — of high explosive and howitzers shows lack of military imagination.’ He went on: ‘If only K. would come and see for himself! Failing that — if only it were possible for me to run home and put my own case.’ But he did not go. Sometimes his staff found him looking aged and tired.
Through these months a gradual change overtook the commanders at Cape Helles in the planning of their battles. They did not lose hope, they simply lowered their sights. In the beginning the Allies had envisaged an advance upon Constantinople itself and cavalry was held in reserve for that purpose. By June they were concentrating upon Achi Baba, and the more the hill remained unconquered the more important it seemed: the more it appeared to swell up physically before them on the horizon. By July they were thinking in still more restricted terms: of advances of 700 or 800 yards, of the capture of two or three lines of the enemy trenches. In the same way the Turks gradually began to give up their notions of ‘pushing the enemy into the sea’. After July they tried no more headlong assaults; they were content to contain the Allies and harass them, in their narrow foothold on the sea.
19
These engagements may be summarized:
June 4: Allied attack in the centre. Gain 250–500 yards on a one-mile front. Allies’ casualties 6,500, Turkish 9,000.
June 21 and following days: French attack on the right. Gain of about 200 yards. French casualties 2,500, Turkish 6,000.
June 28: British attack on the left. Gain of half a mile. British casualties 3,800, Turkish unknown.
July 5: Turkish attack along the whole line. Nothing gained. Casualties, Turks 16,000, Allies negligible.
July 12/13: Allied attack on a one-mile front. Gain of 400 yards. Casualties, Allies 4,000, Turks 10,000.