Preparations
By Christmas 1914 the western front had developed into static trench warfare following the repulse of the initial German offensive at the battle of the Marne. The Russians, slower to mobilise than their Anglo-French allies, were in trouble following their defeats in East Prussia and the need to cope with advancing Austro-Hungarian armies in the south. The British Expeditionary Force on the western front could do no more than hold on to its positions while new armies were raised and trained in the united Kingdom as the result of Lord Kitchener’s dramatic recruiting drive for volunteers. He had been propelled into the job of War Minister as war broke out in the absence of anyone with the necessary knowledge and influence to be political chief of the British army. A long-standing national icon whose campaigning days had climaxed in his ruthless termination of the Boer War in 1902, he was unlearned as a politician and soon found himself sitting mute at meetings of the War Council. The War Office, over which he presided, was totally separate from the Admiralty across Whitehall and the absence of any Joint staffs greatly hampered preparations for the impending campaign in the eastern Mediterran.
Russia declared war on Turkey on 1
November 1914 following a surprise raid by the Turkish fleet, under
the command of the German Admiral Souchon and spearheaded by the
Goeben and Breslau on the Russian Black Sea ports. Under the terms
of their alliance with Russia, Britain and France followed suit
five days later. The Sultan proclaimed a Jehad against the western
allies, presumably in the hope that it would lead to insurrection
in India's Muslim population and mutiny in the predominantly Muslim
regiments of the Indian Army (with very few exceptions they
remained steadfast and loyal to the King Emperor throughout the
war). Moreover, the Hashemite Sharifs of Mecca and Medina also
declined to join the Holy War; they had their own agenda which was
revealed once Britain's Colonel T E Lawrence had successfully
initiated the Arab revolt against the Ottomans. 
Photograph: Grand Duke Nikolay
Nikolayevich Romanov of Russia
On 2 January 1915 the Grand Duke
Nicholas, Russian commander-in-chief, cabled a message to London
asking for no more than a 'demonstration' against the Turks as a
diversion from their offensive against the Russian army in the
Caucasus, which, rashly ordered by Enver Pasha against the advice
of Liman von Sanders and his staff, failed miserably in appalling
winter conditions. Nevertheless it afforded Churchill and those
favouring an indirect approach against the Central Powers and their
new ally Turkey the chance to open a new front in the eastern
Mediterranean and Aegean. Admiral Carden was ordered by Churchill,
despite the growing apprehensions of Fisher ('Damn the Dardanelles,
they will be our grave') to plan a full scale naval assault on the
Chanak narrows with the aim of entering the Sea of Marmara and
placing Constantinople under the guns of the allied fleet. The
first phase, starting on 19 February, consisted of the bombardment
and neutralisation of the outer forts and batteries at the mouth of
the Dardanelles where under four miles separated those at KumKale
on the Asiatic and Sedd el Bahr on the European side. Landing
parties were sent ashore against growing opposition to complete the
destruction of the major emplacements before the batteries were
eliminated. All surprise had now been lost and the allies'
intentions were clear to the defenders who set about improving the
inner defences - thickening the minefields in the approaches to the
narrows and upgrading the inner batteries and forts guarding the
mile-wide entrance to the Sea of Marmara.
Photograph:
Vice-admiral Sackville Hamilton Carden
Carden would have known that in
1911 Churchill had stated that it would be impossible to force the
Dardanelles with a fleet alone, a view with which Fisher heartily
concurred, but Churchill now pressed for a plan for this hazardous
operation. Carden informed London that the fleet would make its
attempt on 18 March. By this time he was on the verge of nervous
collapse; his doubts had communicated themselves to Whitehall and a
belated decision was made by Kitchener to assemble a scratch land
force to support the naval operations. Fisher, hitherto
non-commital, now expressed doubts over the enterprise; he had
passed through the Narrows in the 1870s when serving in a visiting
squadron and had seen for himself the strength of the batteries
even then.
Only five days before the naval
attack, General Sir Ian Hamilton, newly appointed commander in
chief, was hurriedly briefed by Kitchener and set out for the seat
of war, arriving in time to see the fleet repulsed by a combination
of well-served land batteries, mobile howitzers and mines; one
field of which, laid secretly by night from the steamer Nusret
unobserved by the allies, helped to sink three battleships on 18
March; several other capital ships were badly damaged. To Fisher's
fury Churchill had sanctioned the deployment to the eastern
Mediterranean of the new super-dreadnought Queen Elizabeth whose
15- inch guns were used effectively against the Inner Forts. The
fleet was now commanded by Vice Admiral de Robeck, Carden having
broken down under mental strain. De Robeck inherited Carden's chief
of Staff, the fiery Commodore Roger Keyes, a passionate believer in
offensive action who pressed de Robeck to resume the attack,
regardless of casualties on the following day, when it might have
succeeded as the defenders were demoralised, exhausted and
virtually out of ammunition. The admiral, however, declined to
attack.
Photograph: General Sir Ian
Hamilton.
Hamilton
had watched the naval attack from the light cruiser, HMS Phaeton,
that had carried him the length of the Mediterranean at 30 knots.
It was under a week since his briefing by Kitchener who had bidden
him farewell with the pregnant words: 'If the Fleet gets through,
Constantinople will fall of itself and you will have won not a
battle, but the war'. The newly appointed Commander in Chief had
barely half a day in which to inspect the peninsula from seaward
and select potential landing beaches for his expeditionary force,
which was still forming up. The Australian and New Zealand
Expeditionary Force, (Anzac) under Lieutenant General Sir William
Birdwood destined for France, had been held back in Egypt in the
face of the threat posed to the Suez Canal by Turkish forces in the
Sinai; the Royal Naval Division of naval reservists and Royal
Marine Light Infantry was under orders to leave the United Kingdom
for the eastern Mediterranean, and the 29th Division, regular units
brought home from far-flung garrisons world wide, was lent to
Hamilton over the protests of Sir John French and his colleagues in
France. The French land contribution was the Corps Expeditionnaire
d'Orient of colonial (mainly African) and metropolitan troops.
Hamilton also asked for the 42nd (East Lancashire) Division of
Territorials, sent to Egypt in the opening months of the war to
replace the regular garrison, and now extremely fit, acclimatised
and well trained. Maxwell, C in C Egypt, initially declined to make
it available to Hamilton for the initial landings but it was to
distinguish itself in the subsequent fighting.
The Turks, energetically
coached by Liman von Sanders and his team, had been given plenty of
warning of the inevitable allied landings. Liman overturned the
original Turkish dispositions which had spread the defenders thinly
along the coastline; instead he had concentrated his divisions at
points from which they could deploy rapidly to meet any landings
and counter attack them in strength. One of them, the 19th, was
deployed near Maidos (Eceabat) under command of one of his
personally selected younger commanders: Lt Colonel Mustafa Kemal
Pasha. Kemal prepared his three regiments with an arduous training
programme, directing progress from his headquarters in the village
of Bigali, inland from Maidos. His troops knew the land intimately
over which they would be called on to fight, were highly motivated
to defend their homeland and hard and fit enough for rapid
deployment over the hills of the peninsula. The main Turkish
strategic reserve of two divisions was deployed 40 miles distant
around Bulair at the neck of the peninsula where there were long
sandy beaches. Hamilton had observed these from the deck of his
cruiser on 18 March and had considered using them but the Navy
advised that the Gulf of Bulair was inadequately charted and that
their ships could be trapped there. Two further Turkish divisions
had been deployed further south towards Helles. Hamilton was
therefore faced by the unappetising prospect of landings on a
limited number of well defended beaches around the tip of the
peninsula. These, though held only by small garrisons, had been
carefully prepared. Underwater fields of barbed wire, further belts
of it a few yards inshore, and well sited machine guns awaited the
troops who were to be landed there. The Turks, on Liman von
Sanders' advice kept their main defending force well back from the
beaches but in positions from which they could rapidly move to deal
with major allied incursions.
Hamilton faced awesome logistic and
staffing problems. He arrived in theatre with a scratch General
Staff, followed piecemeal by the logisticians and personnel staffs
who were based in Alexandria, remote from their commander and
severely hampered by lack of effective communications. The
ammunition railhead would have to be at Marseilles, exposing the
ammunition ships to increasing U-Boat activity as the campaign
developed. Much of the administrative planning therefore fell upon
the overworked General Staff who shuttled between Mudros, the
headquarters ships, and Egypt. It soon became apparent that the
cargo ships of the Royal Naval and 29th Divisions back in England
had been loaded haphazardly on the assumption that they could be
reloaded if necessary at Mudros. When it was found that there were
no wharfs or cargo cranes there, all the ships had to relocate to
Alexandria where the chaos could be sorted out. The organisation
for evacuation of battle casualties fell mainly on the General
Staff in addition to the workload of planning the actual assault
landings, with dire results. Casualty numbers were wildly
under-estimated and there were insufficient berths on the hospital
ships allotted. As a result, hundreds of desperately wounded men
were ferried to Egypt and Malta on horse transports lacking medical
or nursing personnel, compelled to lie on fouled straw on the horse
decks. The mortality rate would be appalling.
Having selected the landing
beaches, Hamilton had delegated the detailed planning to his staff,
under Major General Braithwaite . In the weeks following the
repulse of the allied naval attack on 18 March the defenders were
given plenty of time for preparation and rehearsal. The landings
were to take place on 25 April; the Anzacs were to go ashore at
daybreak north of the promontory of Gaba Tepe whilst the 29th
Division was to storm five beaches around the tip of the peninsula,
at Cape Helles. The landings, covered by the fire of the allied
fleet, would have to be made in broad daylight from rowing boats
manned by bluejackets, towed in strings of six to within a few
hundred yards of the shore by steam pinnaces. A collier, the River
Clyde, was converted into an assault ship by the addition of ramps
and ports on her sides, down which the infantry on board, the
Hampshires and the Munster Fusiliers, could get ashore after the
ship had been run aground on 'V' beach below the ancient Sedd el
Bahr fort.
To distract the Turks from the
landings at Helles and Gaba Tepe and convince the enemy that the
main landing would take place in the Gulf of Saros at the narrowest
part of the Gallipoli isthmus part of the Royal Naval Division was
to stage a diversion in off Bulair whilst the French were
temporarily to land a force on the Asiatic shore near Kum Kale.
Hamilton had to commit virtually his entire force, without
reserves, to the assault on 25 April in the hope that the immediate
objectives, the village of Krithia and Achi Baba the high ground
dominating it, would fall by last light on 25 April, whilst the
Anzacs, whose landings were planned to be on the sandy beach a mile
north of Gaba Tepe, would seize the dominant Sari Bair ridge and
exploit their landings by marching directly across open country to
the coast at Maidos, barely five miles distant. Success would
result in the isolation of much of the Turkish force and the speedy
reduction of the inner forts guarding the Chanak Narrows.