As for the strategic consequences of the defeat, they scarcely bore thinking about. Twenty Turkish divisions were set free to attack Russia and to threaten Egypt. All contact with Russia and Rumania was lost, and the war dragged on in the Near East for another three years while another Allied army, infinitely greater in size than the one employed at Gallipoli, slowly and painfully made good the ground that had been lost. Before the Ottoman Empire fell in 1918 nearly three-quarters of a million Allied soldiers were sent to Salonika, and another 280,000 fought their way northwards across the desert from Egypt to Jerusalem and Damascus. Except for the Anzac troops none of the men who were evacuated from Gallipoli were ever employed against the Germans as General Monro had hoped they would be; they remained in the East until the end of the war.
The campaign had been a mighty destroyer of reputations. When Kitchener returned to England at the end of 1915 he was forced to reinstate the General Staff in the War Office, and he was no longer a semi-dictatorial figure in the cabinet. He was sixty-five, Gallipoli seemed to have deprived him of his old oracular powers of taking decisions, and Lloyd George, Bonar Law and others began a concerted move to get him out. At his death six months later his influence was rapidly falling away. In the years that followed it was demonstrated over and over again in many books that the sinking of the Hampshire had saved Kitchener from a sad and inevitable decline. Yet he was so revered by the public in England that for a long time people simply could not bring themselves to believe that he was dead, and there was a persistent rumour that he was a prisoner of the Germans.
And still the aura persists, his name still rises above that of any other British general in the first world war, and it is not clear that these others managed any better than he would have done had he lived and remained in office. He delayed and vacillated over Gallipoli, and in the end it was his undoing; yet he understood the campaign with a better strategical sense than most of his contemporaries, and for a time at least — that time when he persuaded the British and the French Governments to give priority to Gallipoli — he had the courage of his imagination.
It was the same with Churchill, except that in his case he lived on and had to fight his way back. It was not until 1917 that Lloyd George, the new Prime Minister, felt that he was able to bring him into the Government again as Minister of Munitions, and even then there was much opposition to it. As late as the general election of 1923 there were cries of ‘What about the Dardanelles?’ whenever he addressed a public meeting. That was the year when the Lloyd George coalition fell, and Churchill was defeated in the election — his first defeat since he had entered the House of Commons nearly a quarter of a century before. His eclipse seemed to be complete. In a study of the Gallipoli campaign an American staff officer wrote, ‘It is doubtful if even Great Britain could survive another world war and another Churchill.’ And the Australian Official History which appeared about this time contained these words: ‘So through a Churchill’s lack of imagination, a layman’s ignorance of artillery, and the fatal power of a young enthusiasm to convince older and slower brains, the tragedy of Gallipoli was born.’ Somewhere in the painful fields of memory the ghost of Fisher was still repeating, ‘Damn the Dardanelles. They will be our grave.’
Then in the nineteen-twenties the reaction began to set in. The first surprise came from the Turkish General Staff when they admitted that on March 19, 1915, nearly all their ammunition at the Narrows had been shot away, and that a renewed attack on that day might very well have been decisive. The whole conception of the naval attack was now seen, if not in a new light, in a more controversial way. Other evidence followed — evidence of the extreme political tension in Constantinople at that time, and of the fact that Turkey possessed only two arsenals which the Allied Fleet might easily have destroyed.
In its report the Turkish staff stated: ‘A naval attack executed with rapidity and vigour at the outbreak of the war might have been successful… if the Entente Fleets had appeared before Constantinople the eight divisions retained there would have been impotent to defend it.’ And so that first and much derided directive: ‘The Admiralty should prepare for a naval expedition in February to bombard and take the Gallipoli peninsula with Constantinople as its objective,’ was not so fanciful after all.
Roger Keyes, not surprisingly, needed very little persuading about the importance of these revelations. In 1925, when he was in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, he steamed through the Dardanelles and, according to Aspinall, who was with him, he could hardly speak for emotion. ‘My God,’ he said at last, ‘it would have been even easier than I thought; we simply couldn’t have failed… and because we didn’t try, another million lives were thrown away and the war went on for another three years.’
Other experts — and they were still in a majority — remained unconvinced. Yet no one could altogether ignore the admission of Liman von Sanders and the Turkish commanders that more than once the divisional generals at Cape Helles had wanted to withdraw behind Achi Baba; that on at least two occasions, at the original landing at Anzac in April and again at Suvla in August, the Allies were on the very edge of breaking through and were only prevented from doing so by the intervention of Mustafa Kemal.
Gradually too with the passing of time the great events of the war and its aftermath were falling into perspective, and the Gallipoli adventure was seen, not in isolation, but as a part of the general strategy; not as a sideshow, but as an alternative to the fearful three years of slaughter that followed in the trenches in France, to the long campaign against the Turks in Mesopotamia, and to the expedition to Salonika. It was even perhaps not too much to say that if the Allies had succeeded in penetrating the Dardanelles in 1915 or 1916 the Russians would not have signed a separate peace, and that the revolution might not have followed, not at all events so soon, or possibly so drastically.
Seen in this new light the Gallipoli campaign was no longer a blunder or a reckless gamble; it was the most imaginative conception of the war, and its potentialities were almost beyond reckoning. It might even have been regarded, as Rupert Brooke had hoped, as a turning point in history. Certainly in its strictly military aspect its influence was enormous. It was the greatest amphibious operation which mankind had known up till then, and it took place in circumstances in which nearly everything was experimentaclass="underline" in the use of submarines and aircraft, in the trial of modern naval guns against artillery on the shore, in the manœuvre of landing armies in small boats on a hostile coast, in the use of radio, of the aerial bomb, the land mine, and many other novel devices. These things led on through Dunkirk and the Mediterranean landings to the invasion of Normandy in the second world war. In 1940 there was very little the Allied commanders could learn from the long struggle against the Kaiser’s armies in the trenches in France. But Gallipoli was a mine of information about the complexities of the modern war of manœuvre, of the combined operation by land and sea and sky; and the correction of the errors made then was the basis of the victory of 1945. The next time, as Kitchener had once hoped, ‘they got it right.’
It was Churchill himself who first restored the reputation of the Gallipoli campaign with the publication in the twenties of The World Crisis, his study of the first world war. He had never really been heard before, and now, step by step, he took the story through the political and military events which led up to the campaign: the controversy with Fisher, the arguments in cabinet, the long struggle to win support for Gallipoli from Joffre and the trench-warfare generals in France, the agonizing delays that hung on Kitchener’s word, the trembling balance of politics in the Balkans, and finally the crises of the battle itself, when just for a few moments, in a vacuum of indecision, all depended upon the inspiration of a single act of faith.