A hundred years ago on Saturday, tens of thousands of allied troops, led by Australians and New Zealanders, landed on the Gallipoli peninsula, on the northern bank of the Dardanelles in Turkey. The plan, devised by Winston Churchill, was to capture Istanbul and give Russia, an ally in the First World War as in the Second, protected access to the Mediterranean.
On 25 April, named Anzac Day after the first action by the new joint Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, wreaths will be laid, and songs sung, in memory of the large number of casualties in a military disaster blamed squarely on British commanders.
The assumption was that the Turks would quickly succumb to a naval bombardment. Instead, British and French warships succumbed to bombardment by Turkish guns, to mines, and bad weather. By the end of the year, as the oppressive heat turned to bitter cold, the allies evacuated, at a cost in lives of almost 9,000 Australians, almost 3,000 New Zealanders, 35,000 British and 10,000 French. More than double these numbers were wounded. Though an estimated 60,000 Turks were also killed, it was a late morale-booster for leaders of the decaying Ottoman Empire.
It encouraged them, a year later, to besiege British troops in Kut in Mesopotamia, now in Iraq, not far from where ill-prepared British soldiers were ambushed and caught up in fierce gunfights nearly 90 years later.
Thirty-eight thousand British and Indian troops died in Kut in 1916, condemned by their commander, wrote Norman Dixon in his book, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, “to months of agony and death”. Kut, like Gallipoli, was ill-conceived, badly prepared from poor intelligence, executed by weak, indecisive, leaders in charge of troops supplied with inadequate equipment.
Sir Maurice Hankey, secretary to the War Council in London, called the Gallipoli campaign a “gamble”, based on the assumption that the Turks would be an inferior force. The War Council remained divided until late 1915 when it decided to withdraw from the Dardanelles.
Consequences of poor planning
It was a decision hastened by a letter written by an Australian journalist, Keith Murdoch, Rupert’s father, provoked by damning criticisms from Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, a British journalist whose attacks on the conduct of the conflict were censored. The Murdoch letter was passed to Lloyd George, an opponent of the Gallipoli campaign.
Back in London, Ashmead-Bartlett also wrote a letter to the prime minister Herbert Asquith. General Sir Ian Hamilton, the British commander at Gallipoli, was sacked, and Lord Fisher, the First Sea Lord, resigned over the government’s earlier refusal to abandon Gallipoli. Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, resigned, and joined the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front — with his political career only momentarily damaged.
In 1916, the government set up an inquiry, the Dardanelles Commission. It completed its work three years later, in 1919, concluding that the expedition had been poorly planned and executed, and that the difficulties had been underestimated.
Many of the conclusions of the Dardanelles inquiry are likely to be echoed in the Chilcot inquiry into the 2003 invasion of Iraq, now not expected to be published until next year, seven long years after it was set up.
The hold-up was originally the result of heated disputes with successive cabinet secretaries over what documents could be published. It is now the result of objections from those who have been sent draft passages in which they are criticised by Chilcot.
Blame is always contentious — though it was dealt with pretty speedily by the Dardanelles inquiry. “Lessons learnt” — the other main theme of the Chilcot inquiry — should have been much easier to cope with. Chilcot might have pointed to the experience of Gallipoli 100 years ago. And in 2006, military commanders could have pointed to the disastrous Anglo-Afghan wars of the 19th century before agreeing to deploy thousands of British troops to Afghanistan from an army that had yet to recover from the mistakes of Iraq.
Maybe, British ministers and their military advisers will never learn. Or maybe it is because military chiefs simply find it too difficult to admit to their political masters they are not invincible, whatever the circumstances.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
