675. The First World War: Slaughter at Gallipoli (Part 5)

18:48Dominic Sandbrook:Anyway, the Russians do end up getting encircled. So on the 1st of January, the Russian Supreme Commander Grand Duke Nikolai, he sends a message to britain and he says you know we're in a mess against the ottomans could you please stage a diversionary attack could you do something against the ottomans to relieve the pressure on us and this is where churchill comes back into the story because churchill has been thinking about striking east even before the ottomans entered the war and he has been looking particularly at some somewhere you've already mentioned tom which is the ottoman capital Constantinople that basically all the great powers have been eyeing very hungrily.

19:29Tom Holland:And Dominic, which it has consistently been British policy to stop the Russians getting hold of. Correct. I mean, that's another kind of mad dimension to this story, that Churchill's plan is essentially upending centuries of British ambition to stop the Russians getting it.

19:48Dominic Sandbrook:Well, it's not clear what will happen to Constantinople in Churchill's plan after the war. So it's not actually clear that the Russians will get it. But the reason that it is so coveted is that Constantinople commands the narrow strait that divides Europe from Asia. But also, this is the strait that divides the Black Sea from the Mediterranean. So the reason it's so important to the Russians is that this is their warm water sea route out of the Russian Empire into the seas of the world. And this strait, this waterway, basically the waterway that goes from the Sea of Marmara, outside Constantinople, south to the Aegean in the beginning of the Mediterranean.

20:26Dominic Sandbrook:This strait is called the Dardanelles. Now, to give people a sense, the Dardanelles are 38 miles long, but very narrow, no more than four miles wide at their widest point. So you can imagine almost like a canal, I guess. Now on the right hand side, as you look at the map, the southeastern side, the Asian side, is the coast of Anatolia, of Asia Minor, specifically the city of Chanakali. And on the left side, as you look at the map, the northwestern, the European side, that's made up of a long narrow peninsula, which is named after one of the towns on the peninsula, which is the town of Gallipoli.

21:07Dominic Sandbrook:So that is the Thracian Chersonese as was. so Churchill has been long obsessed with this strait so just a few weeks into the war he had said why don't we send a British and French fleet north through the straits and then if necessary you know if we came to war with with the Ottomans war with Turkey we could bombard and occupy Constantinople itself and his argument for doing this is if it works and that's a big if this could be a game changer in the war why number one if we held constantinople in the straits we'd have a warm water sea route so that we britain and france could supply russia we could keep you know we could send shells we could send whatever they needed to fight the war on the eastern front number two if we took the straits and we were bombarding or indeed occupying Constantinople.

22:01Dominic Sandbrook:Maybe there would be a coup within the Young Turk regime. Or maybe we could simply impose our own friendly regime that would change sides and bring the Ottoman Empire in on the Allied side. And if we took Constantinople, a show of force like that would surely persuade the other Balkan neutral countries. So Greece, Romania, maybe Bulgaria, maybe Italy. It would persuade them to join the war on our side. So basically, everybody would pile in and we'd win the war. And in fact, even after the Gallipoli operation had failed, there were people who said, yeah, Churchill's idea wasn't that mad. So for example, we mentioned Clement Attlee.

22:43Dominic Sandbrook:Attlee had a terrible time at Gallipoli, but he always said, do you know what, on paper, it was a brilliant idea and it could have worked.

22:50Tom Holland:Essentially, Churchill's plan requires sea power alone to win the war. So it's a bit like the reliance today on air power to win wars. That would be the kind of contemporary analogy.

23:02Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, I guess so. So Churchill at this point is not talking about using troops. And we'll get on to how the plan changes.

23:09Tom Holland:But the plan is that the ships sail up, they moor off Constantinople, they bombard it, and the Turks surrender. And then the Turks change sides.

23:16Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, that's magically the Turks then change sides. It seems improbable. well when you look at the plan it's very very risky so first of all just sailing up the straits there are ottoman forts on both sides there are mortars there are artillery there are underwater mines so it's going to be very difficult just to get your ships through the straits up from the and get them outside constantinople so actually british sort of contingency plans had been talking about doing this for years and they had always said you know it's much too risky it wouldn't work and in fact in 1911 Churchill himself had said it is no longer possible to force the Dardanelles and nobody should expose a modern fleet to such peril so he himself had seen how difficult it would be but now as we've already mentioned he looks at the western front he looks at the stalemate in France and Flanders and he says well anything would be better than this he says to Asquith the Prime Minister anything would be better than sending out armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders I mean, you can see the force of that argument, can't you?

24:20Dominic Sandbrook:Of course. However, you can also see the counter-arguments. You can, yes. So anyway, Churchill gets this request from Grand Duke Nikolai. He says, brilliant, well, this is the opportunity we need. He sends a telegram to the commander of the Eastern Mediterranean Fleet, who's a guy called Vice Admiral Sackville Carden. Would this work? Could we send some old ships, send them up the straits? You know, could this be done? And Churchill adds the line, importance of results would justify severe loss. In other words, we could lose loads of ships and loads of men. I don't care because the prize is worth it.

24:55Dominic Sandbrook:And so Admiral Carden says, well, I suppose it is doable. You know, first of all, we'd destroy what are called the outer forts of the southern entrance to the straits. Then in phase two, we'd go in, send some ships in. We would destroy the inner forts. We'd send minesweepers in to clear the straits of mines. and then we would send our fleet in towards Constantinople.

25:18Tom Holland:Entirely through naval operations? Yes. They're not proposing that they destroy these fleets by landing soldiers to do it. They do it with the guns from their battleships.

25:27Dominic Sandbrook:At this stage, there is absolutely no suggestion of using ground troops at all. They are just going to do this with naval power. That is all that they're interested in doing. And so on the 13th of January, 1915, Churchill goes to Britain's War Council, as it is called. Now, all the big names are there. Lots of people we've talked about in this and other Rest His History series. Herbert Henry Asquith, the Prime Minister. David Lloyd George, his Chancellor. Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary. Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War. Sir John French, the British commander on the Western Front.

26:01Tom Holland:Oh, well, I mean, if he's there, what could possibly go wrong?

26:05Dominic Sandbrook:Well, Asquith tells his girlfriend, Venetia Stanley, who is a fraction of his age, you won't often see a stranger collection of men around one table. Anyway, they sit there, they talk about the Western Front and the stalemate, and then Churchill unveils his plan. And as the civil servant, Morris Hankey, who was there, wrote afterwards, the idea caught on at once, the whole atmosphere changed. We turned eagerly from the dreary vista of a slogging match on the Western Front to brighter prospects as they seemed in the Mediterranean. And Churchill says, listen, this is going to take a few weeks, max.

26:41Dominic Sandbrook:The Turkish guns and forts, merely an inconvenience. Now, actually, Churchill is not being honest with them. His own admiralty experts have already told him, some of them have said specifically, it's not possible. It's an impossible task. But Churchill doesn't pass this on to his colleagues because he is now completely infatuated with the scheme. And so the War Council approves a plan for a naval expedition in February. We will bombard and take, and I quote, bombard and take the Gallipoli Peninsula with Constantinople as its objective. Now at this point, just to reiterate, he's not talking about doing this with any soldiers.

27:19Dominic Sandbrook:is talking about doing it with naval power alone. And as even his hagiographer, Andrew Roberts, says, this is mad because ships cannot hold territory and ships cannot occupy cities. So if they get there and they bombard Constantinople and then the Turks just don't do anything, what are they going to do? You know, this is the issue. Anyway, the question is why on earth the War Council has approved a plan that, I mean, Tom, if you and I can see that there are issues, why can they not see it now one reason we've already mentioned asquith asquith is distracted there is no question you know asquith has no greater defender in the world of podcasting than me however even i would have to concede he is not on form at this point in time to remind people asquith is 62 years old and he's absolutely besotted with his daughter's mate venetia stanley who was 27.

28:16Dominic Sandbrook:Early that morning before the meeting, in the small hours of the morning, Asquith had written her one of his huge long love letters. I give you my most intimate confidence, my unceasing devotion, my fears and hopes, my strength and weakness, my past, my present, my future. She has now written back to him. Her letters are lost, so we don't know what she wrote. Snap out of it. Focus. I don't think she did. Because during the meeting, while Churchill has been talking, Asquith has been reading her letter. And unbelievably, he's been writing back to her during the meeting as well. And he says to her, we are having a most interesting discussion, but so confidential and secret.

28:58Dominic Sandbrook:I won't put anything down on paper. I'm keen to tell you all about it and to see if it meets with your approval. It's great that Venetia Stanley will be invited.

29:06Tom Holland:What are her views on forcing the Dardanelles? We don't know because her letters are lost.

29:13Dominic Sandbrook:Who knows? It's a loss of military strategy. More seriously, I think a lot of the people around the table just do not take this seriously enough. They think it's this little naval gimmick and the sideshow. And if it doesn't work, we can just pull the plug and we won't have lost very much. And lots of historians who've written about this say this was incredibly irresponsible of them. So the historian Peter Hart wrote a great book about Gallipoli. A serious operation of war should not be undertaken in such a casual fashion. Hundreds of men's lives cast away on a whim, as if in a mere game of sport that could be abandoned at halftime.

29:46Tom Holland:Do they have soldiers in reserve at all? Or is it entirely naval at this point?

29:52Dominic Sandbrook:At this point, it's entirely naval. And one reason for that is, of course, if you do have soldiers hanging around, where do you want to send them? There is an urgent, desperate need for soldiers on the Western Front. Right. Remember, the pre-war army is effectively being destroyed, the British Expeditionary Force. Kitchener is now raising a so-called new army, a volunteer army, to replace them. The idea that you will send 150 ,000, 200 ,000 soldiers across Europe to some mad scheme, I mean, that would appall Kitchener and Sir John French and so on.

30:22Tom Holland:Because there's no way that even, say, the very best happens and they capture Constantinople. It's not going to help the war on the Western Front, is it?

30:30Dominic Sandbrook:No, no. And that's where the war is going to be won or lost. This is exactly the point, that this is a massive, massive distraction. And what is more, the great rationale for this, which is we're going to help out the Russians, has now disappeared. Because even as they are having these meetings, in mid-January, it becomes clear that actually this encirclement at Salakamish has actually worked out in the Russians' favour, not the Ottomans'. Enver has made a terrible mess of things. Of his 100 ,000 men, about 80 ,000 of them are killed. They die of frostbite or freezing to death or typhus or whatever.

31:05Dominic Sandbrook:The Russians then basically pile in to Western Armenia, Eastern Turkey. And this is the point at which Enver and the young Turk leadership say, well, it's not our fault that we lost this terrible battle. It's actually the fault of fifth columnists and traitors within the Armenians. Who've stabbed us in the back. Who stabbed us in the back. And this is what sets the stage for the Armenian genocide, which begins just a few weeks later. Now, meanwhile, in London, Churchill, of course, is oblivious to all this. He doesn't care about any of this. He is just thrilled that his pet scheme has got the go ahead.

31:39Dominic Sandbrook:And when he goes back to the Admiralty and says, it's on, let's do this. A lot of his colleagues are horrified. Most obviously, the first Sea Lord. So this is the senior naval officer, effectively, at the Admiralty. He is Admiral Lord Fisher, Jackie Fisher, a great celebrity in 1910s Britain.

32:00Tom Holland:Well, he'd launched the dreadnought, hadn't he? The first dreadnought, HMS dreadnought, the prototype for that entire class.

32:06Dominic Sandbrook:He had been the man in charge of the Navy before the war, and he'd been brought back from retirement in 1914.

32:13Tom Holland:Jan Morris is a great hero. She loved him. Always writing books about him.

32:17Dominic Sandbrook:He is a remarkable, remarkable character. So he's very short, very stocky. He's bright yellow, because he had malaria when he was young. He's extremely religious. When he was ashore, he would try to go to church two or three times a day, which seems a lot to me. Oddly, for somebody who's such a great naval hero, he's suffered from seasickness. On the other hand, he was an incredibly good and enthusiastic dancer. How did he have time with all the church? Also, dancing on board ship, if you were seasick. Sloshing all over the place. Exactly. Anyway, Fisher is a great character. Everybody loves Fisher.

32:49Dominic Sandbrook:They're very excited that he's being brought back. Rather like bringing back Kitchener to run the war office. but actually as as with kitchener jackie fisher is a bit of a loose cannon he's 73 years old he's very autocratic he's very indecisive he's very difficult he spends most of his time leaking to the tory press and saying i hate churchill churchill's useless and he really hates the dardanelles scheme fisher says this is absolutely insane the only way this could work is if you landed 200 000 it would take 200 000 men to secure the coastline so you could get your ships through the strait. And frankly, we don't have enough men to send 200 ,000 men.

33:26Dominic Sandbrook:Churchill doesn't listen to him. Fisher is more and more enraged. He goes to see Lloyd George's secretary stroke mistress, Francis Stevenson. And he says, people at the Admiralty are trying to argue with Churchill, and I quote, but he simply overrides them and talks them down. If he continues his domineering course they fear there may be a catastrophe but fisher's not good at the internal politics and churchill is so when they have meetings churchill's very excited and ebullient and tells everybody about his scheme fisher sits there sulking staring out of the window you know irritable difficult so people don't listen to him they listen to churchill instead so anyway they sign off on the scheme on the 19th of february admiral carden's fleet combined british and french fleet launches the first stage of the operation so the french have sight they've joined as well the french are involved as well exactly in much smaller numbers nobody ever talks about the french at gallipoli but there are french ships and there will in due course be french troops and they've basically

34:28Tom Holland:joined because they are they're the allies they've got ships yeah exactly so they're in the

34:34Dominic Sandbrook:mediterranean too so they start by shelling these outer forts at the entrance to the straits and they're horrified when they get there to find out that the Ottomans, whom they've assumed will be completely useless, have spent the winter laying minefields, preparing kind of howitzers, bringing up, you know, reinforcing their artillery batteries and whatnot. So basically, this is going to be tougher than they thought. Takes them a week, they finally knock out these outer forts, they clear some of the minefields. Churchill is thrilled with all this. He's sitting next to Asquith's to Violet at a dinner.

35:10Dominic Sandbrook:He says, I love this war. I know it is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment, and yet I can't help it. I enjoy every second of it. So people may reflect on those words when we get into the suffering of some of the troops at Gallipoli. And he says, this operation of mine is going brilliantly. Soon the Royal Naval Division will be marching into Constantinople. That will make them sit up, the swine who snarled at the Naval Division. he's talking about the people who said they were useless at antwerp and in fact churchill is so giddy now that three days after this so the 25th of february so that's six days after the operation began he goes to the war council and he says we will be in constantinople by the end of march we will be able to capture and destroy all turkish forces in europe and this we will eliminate turkey as a military factor in the war some chicken some neck i mean absolutely insane from Churchill.

36:08Dominic Sandbrook:The next phase is scheduled for mid-March, and this is the full-scale attack on the inner forts inside the Straits. Now, at this point, one of the big flaws in Churchill's scheme has become apparent, and this is he has forgotten that there's another side in this, which is the Ottomans. And the Ottomans will see what's going on, and they will reinforce accordingly. And that is, of course, exactly what the Ottomans have done. They've made more mines, They brought up more artillery. And some of Churchill's own subordinates are now becoming extremely anxious about this. So Admiral Cardin, who was already ill two days before the operation, has a complete nervous breakdown and has to be sort of taken away.

36:48Dominic Sandbrook:And he is replaced by his vice-admiral, John de Robeck, who has always thought the whole scheme was mad. However, the whole thing goes ahead anyway. The big day is Thursday, the 18th of March. It's a lovely day. Beautiful, sunny sort of spectacle. 16 British and French ships steam towards the entrance to the narrows the straits and immediately things go wrong so one of the French ships the bouvet hits a mine and explodes and it sinks so quickly that of more than 700 men aboard this ship all but 75 of them are drowned and then two more ships British ships HMS Irresistible and HMS Inflexible they hit Turkish mines too.

37:34Dominic Sandbrook:Inflexible manages to get away, but Irresistible is totally crippled. And then they send another ship to try to rescue them, HMS Ocean, and that is hit first by a Turkish shell, then by a Turkish mine, and that sinks too. So by nightfall, when Robeck says, okay, we're calling this off, this has been an absolute shambles. They have cleared one line of mines out of nine of 176 Turkish shore guns they have knocked out precisely four and of their 16 ships three of them have been sunk and three of them have been badly damaged so this has been a terrible day I mean it's gone really badly the next day Churchill goes to the war council he reads out the telegrams reporting what's gone on and he says it's actually going fine yeah we've taken a few losses he doesn't mention the french ship and its men at all he says we've lost less than 30 british lives and two or three worthless ships so the frenchie just forgets about them it doesn't count them and then he says well now that it's going so well is this perhaps the moment to discuss partitioning the ottoman empire and admiral fisher says you are mad quote we told you to use troops as well but you wouldn't listen and churchill himself wrote after the war for the first time since the war began high words were used around the octagonal table in other words people are now saying to him you have totally led us yeah you've led us into an absolute mess this is a shambles lots of people have died what are you talking about partitioning turkey we're nowhere remotely near to conquering turkey you mad and this is the moment when they should clearly have said stop enough pull the plug and they don't and the reason they don't it's partly because there's Churchill there who's a force of nature who's basically clearly going to have a massive tantrum if they don't continue with his scheme it's partly because they've already lost lives and ships so it's that classic thing of you know pouring good money after bad you know you have to justify the initial investment the initial sacrifice and the only way to do that is to keep you know throwing resources down the sink as it were but also lord kitchener raises the point about the jihad that you mentioned earlier he says we cannot afford to lose to an asian muslim power because our the authority of our empire is based on the perception of our superiority Quote, the effect of a defeat in the Orient would be very serious.

40:11Tom Holland:I mean, there's a slight kind of Trump wanting to pull out of the Iran war.

40:16Dominic Sandbrook:A really good analogy is Vietnam. You know, a humiliation or a defeat here would be so catastrophic for America's image abroad that we just have to keep pouring and pouring men and hoping that something will change. And so the War Council makes the fateful decision that they will double down. They will send in the fleet for another go, but first they will prepare the ground. They decide, we will send a small expeditionary force to the European side of the Straits. We will land troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula, and it should be a very easy job to take the peninsula and to knock out all the Ottoman forts and batteries along that side of the coastline, and then we can send our ships through.

41:03Dominic Sandbrook:It will be dead easy and nothing could possibly go wrong. But could it? We will find out after a break. This episode is brought to you by Disclosure Day. The new movie Disclosure Day is directed by legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg.

41:20Tom Holland:And now with Disclosure Day, Spielberg is back with another movie which asks the fascinating question, what would you do if you found out that we here on planet earth were not alone see i'm i feel

41:36Dominic Sandbrook:quite good about it because i've actually been prepping for some years so i've laid up stores i've got weaponry i'm ready when the aliens attack i will be able to fight back with the arsenal at

41:47Tom Holland:my disposal so i'm excited about it but dominic you are not actually appearing in this cast because the cast is a really extraordinary one and clearly spielberg didn't need you because he's got emily Blunt. He has got Colin Firth. He's got Josh O 'Connor. He's got Coleman Domingo. And it's a completely gripping and original story. And absolutely, it demands to be seen not on TV, but on the big screen. Disclosure Day is in cinemas, Wednesday, June 10th.

42:14Dominic Sandbrook:So book your tickets now.

42:17Tom Holland:It's nearly that time, everyone. The rest is football. We'll be on Netflix every day for the world's biggest tournament. Join myself, Alan and Micah for daily debates, unfiltered takes, and the most special of guests, all from the heart of New York City. Yeah, that's right. We're excited too. See you soon. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? ZepBound Terzepatide may be able to help. ZepBound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off.

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44:12Tom Holland:Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Rest is History. Dominic, you said before the break that this scheme that Churchill has cooked up for sending land forces onto Gallipoli, that nothing could go wrong. Is his confidence justified?

44:28Dominic Sandbrook:Well, we will discover. Churchill says to them, and I quote, there should be no difficulty in effecting a landing. It doesn't occur to him that it will be at all tricky to land thousands of troops on enemy territory a long way from home, you know, what will effectively be an amphibious landing, facing modern weaponry. This is something that has never been done before.

44:49Tom Holland:So can I just ask, the nearest land bases that Britain has are what, Egypt and Cyprus?

44:55Dominic Sandbrook:Egypt, yeah. So they have troops in Egypt. And as we will see, those are the Anzacs. Who are they going to bring over? So the man who was chosen to command the operation is one of Churchill's closest friends in the army. He's a guy called Sir Ian Hamilton. Sir Ian Hamilton is often given a very bad press in books about Gallipoli. You mentioned lions led by donkeys. I mean, he's definitely not a donkey. If you were being very critical of him, you'd say he was a bit of a dilettante. And in fact, that's the criticism that people make. He fought in both Burr Wars, decorated. He's a novelist. He's a poet.

45:31Dominic Sandbrook:He is regarded as the most cerebral, the most intellectual of the British Army's senior officers. He's got a kind of quite a wry, sardonic sense of humour. I like his line after the war. He said, there is nothing certain about war except that one side won't win. And I think that suggests that he's not absurdly over-optimistic. Hamilton, however, has been dealt a very rough hand. He is being asked, as a reminder, he is being asked to carry out the first ever landing, by sea on enemy territory facing modern technology. He's been given a month to plan it. So this is not D-Day. Months and months in the planning, this is going to be much quicker.

46:18Dominic Sandbrook:But presumably even a month is giving the Ottomans time to beef up their defences. Of course. The Ottomans know what's coming. I mean, they're not idiots. And also, another contrast with, say, D-Day. And his task is made harder because the Secretary warlord Kitchener gives him a very ragtag collection of troops, many of them untested and untrained. So to give people a sense, there's the 29th Division of the British Army, and that had basically been cobbled together by loads of colonial garrisons. So people who've been serving all over Asia or whatever are now told, you're going to come back and you're going to fight and you're going to be lumped in with these other blokes.

46:57Dominic Sandbrook:Then there is Churchill's Royal Naval Division. Church is so proud of this, you know, his favorite child or whatever. They're basically a load of naval reservists and volunteers who signed up to join the Navy when the war broke out, but there was nothing for them to do. So they've been told, you know, you're going to be like a sort of little naval marine force fighting on land. Then there's the French, the Orient Expeditionary Corps, as they're called. And a lot of these people are colonial troops from Algeria and from Senegal. So they're there too. And then most famously, the ANZACs, the Australian Imperial Force and the New Zealanders Expeditionary Force.

47:36Dominic Sandbrook:And these had been made up of volunteers sent by the two dominions of Australia and New Zealand to the outbreak of war. They thought they were going to fight in Europe and they have been training in the desert outside Cairo. So that'll prepare them for the mud of Flanders. Right. So after the war, Australian writers in particular absolutely lionized these guys. And they said these were the embodiments of the Anzac spirit. They are free-spirited, manly sons of the outback and of the outdoors. What a contrast between our brave boys and the sort of sickly, pallid products of Britain's industrial cities.

48:20Dominic Sandbrook:It's like a kind of Australian ashes preview. you exactly exactly now actually this is slightly misleading a quarter of the australian imperial force had actually been born in britain so these are people who were british but have emigrated to australia and now have decided that they will sign up and actually a lot of the others were not sons of the outback at all they came from cities themselves cities like sydney and melbourne and as Australian historians have actually done lots of work in showing they're not always the most admirable adverts for Australian virtues you know Tom I like Australia a lot we've been there on tour I'm a big fan of Australia and Australians and indeed the New Zealanders but actually in Cairo these blokes don't bring great credit on the Cairo yeah it's Cairo But they don't bring great credit on the Australian flag.

49:14Dominic Sandbrook:There's a lot of fighting. There's a lot of drunkenness. There's a lot of looting. There's a lot of sexual misbehavior. There's allegations of rape. Two out of ten of these blokes at some point get venereal disease. And, in fact, there is a thing that's apparently very well known in Australia called the Battle of the Wazzer. What's that? This is when they run amok on Good Friday, because they've all got VD from the ladies of the night, Egyptian ladies of the night. And they run amok through the brothels of Cairo, trying to locate the women who they think have given them the clap, basically. And there's a huge, there's a massive riot, basically, as they run amok.

49:54Dominic Sandbrook:Anyway.

49:54Tom Holland:But I suppose it helps to build up elite mateship. Do you think so? Elite mateship? Elite mateship is what the Anzac spirit is all about.

50:02Dominic Sandbrook:It's all about mateship. Yeah. So they could not be in a better condition. They're ready to have a crack at the Turk. Take on the Turk. Exactly. Anyway, so basically this is Hamilton's force. They haven't trained together. A lot of them are barely trained at all. They don't have enough guns. Their officers have no experience with this kind of operation. Basically, because nobody has any experience with this kind of operation. It hasn't really been done before. I mean, it's just the more you go on, the madder the whole scheme seems. But the rationale for it, obviously, is they say, yeah, but all that doesn't matter because it's only the Turks.

50:36Dominic Sandbrook:So as soon as we get ashore, the Turks will undoubtedly run away. Because they are just hanging around smoking hookahs and drinking very thick coffee. Well, this brings us to Johnny Turk, as the Tommies and the Anzacs called him. So there's obviously a massive sense of racial superiority that underlies all this. I mean, the Turks, the Ottomans, are not a joke at all. They are battle-hardened. They have just fought two Balkan wars, and they fought the Italians in Libya. This time, they will be fighting very clearly in defense of their native land, for their native soil. The idea that they're just going to run away is laughable.

51:17Dominic Sandbrook:And they have been very busy. So this German guy, Otto Lehmann von Sanders, he has been modernizing the Ottoman army. and he has now been moved specifically to the Dardanelles and told, take charge of the 5th Army. The Ottoman 5th Army is going to defend the Straits from these blokes. And Lehman has been given 200 ,000 men and he thinks, well, you know, he's not an idiot. He can see what's happened on the Western Front and whatnot. And he says, right, well, obviously what we're going to do is we're just going to wait for them to land and then we'll just kill them all. We'll let them approach us.

51:52Dominic Sandbrook:We'll establish trenches. We'll establish our barbed wire. We will lay mines. We will have supply roads ready to bring up more ammunition. We will prepare our positions on the high ground. When the Allies land, you know, we will basically just drive them into the sea or side them down with our machine guns. So we now get to mid-April. On the 10th of April, Sir Ian Hamilton and his senior officers arrive on the island of Lemnos in the northern Aegean. And two days later, they're joined there by the Anzacs from Egypt. and then by the 29th division of the British Army and also by the French. Meanwhile, Churchill's Royal Naval Division have been training on the island of Skiros, which is to the south of Lemnos.

52:36Dominic Sandbrook:And one of the men on the island is the Cambridge-educated poet Rupert Brooke. And Rupert Brooke is 27 years old. He was described by W.B. Yates as the handsomest man in England. I always find that kind of ludicrous. Has Yates seen every other man in England? No, he hasn't.

52:56Tom Holland:I mean, he is in an absolute lather of excitement about all the classical and the historical associations, isn't he? Yeah. I mean, Troy is just up the Dardanelles and he dreams of fighting there on the plain of Troy. And he comes up with this amazing phrase, which I think speaks for so many of us. He wrote, I suddenly realised that the ambition of my life has been since I was two to go on a military expedition against Constantinople. I mean, his dream will come true, or will it?

53:28Dominic Sandbrook:Well, will it? Brook has already imagined his own death, of course, very famously, some of the most famous lines written in the First World War. If I should die, think only this of me, that there is some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.

53:39Tom Holland:Yeah, and he wants to die, if he has to die, like Achilles, bravely in the heat of battle on the plain of Troy.

53:45Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, he will lead his men over the plain of Troy under beating sunshine. In a chariot.

53:52Tom Holland:Yes. You know, everyone cheering. Yeah, the most handsome man in England in burning armour. How does he die, Dominic? He's bitten on the lip by a mosquito.

54:03Dominic Sandbrook:The mosquito bite becomes infected and he dies of blood poisoning on the 23rd of April. So he hasn't even seen an Ottoman defender. He hasn't set foot on the soil of Asia. He hasn't even got to the Gallipoli Peninsula. He's dead before he's set off. And, you know, this is reported in the newspapers. The Asquith family knew him very well. They were devastated by this. Churchill knew him, was devastated. Wrote an absolutely sort of tear-stained, syrupy obituary for him, I think, in the Times. And you might say this is quite a bad omen, that this bloke who was going to lead the kind of attack on Troy.

54:46Dominic Sandbrook:I just think generally attacking Troy is not sensible. Yeah.

54:50Tom Holland:It's going to go on for 10 years at least.

54:51Dominic Sandbrook:There's a slight sign at this point, I think, that Churchill is beginning to wobble himself. Lloyd George said he was looking worried and looking ill. The former Tory Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, asked Churchill, how's it going to go, this business at Gallipoli? You know, you must be absolutely, I bet you can't wait. And Churchill then said, I think there's nothing for it but to go through with the business. No one can count with certainty on the issue of a battle, which suggests that he is beginning to wobble. And then he says, but we have the chances in our favor and we play for vital gains with non-vital stakes.

55:25Dominic Sandbrook:And I think the tens and tens of thousands of men who died at Gallipoli would be probably quite offended to be referred to as non-vital stakes. Anyway, the landings were initially set for the 23rd of April, the day that Brooke died. But they are postponed by two days because of bad weather. Another bad omen, possibly? We shall see. the plan calls for two distractions to kind of confuse the turks so the french will land at cum cala in asia they'll get off their ships then they'll get back on again and come back the other side this is to trick the turks what a wheeze and then a brilliant wheeze actually the royal naval division will pretend to land at a place called bolea which is in the north of the peninsula and actually they get New Zealand's greatest war hero, Bernard Freyberg.

56:16He swims ashore and lights flares on the beach

56:21Dominic Sandbrook:to distract the defenders and then he swims back again. And this is an incredible feat of New Zealand plot. There's not as much New Zealand action in this story as there should be.

56:31Tom Holland:Well, New Zealanders are generally more retiring, aren't they, I think, than Australians. Unless it comes to rugby. Yeah, I guess.

56:38Dominic Sandbrook:They're putting all their energies into rugby and not enough into boasting about their martial feats. Is that true? Yeah, or swimming ashore and lighting flares. Exactly, which I think is very impressive. So these are the distractions, and then there'll be two landings. Landing number one is the two Anzac divisions led by the 3rd Australian Infantry Brigade. They all land on the western side of the Gallipoli Peninsula, at this sort of crescent bay, sandy bay, which ends up being called Anzac Cove. And meanwhile, the British, the 29th Division, will land at the very southern tip of the peninsula, which is called Cape Hellys.

57:14Dominic Sandbrook:And there are five beaches, S, V, W, X, and Y, around this tip, and they will land at these five beaches.

57:22Tom Holland:Can I just ask, are there more British than Anzacs? Yes. Because that's not the sense you get, is it, generally? Are you dissing Australians, Tom? No, I'm not dissing. I mean, my sense is that Gallipoli was entirely fought by Anzacs. I think that's the kind of the vague sense you have. Yeah. And that there are British generals lurking in the background being sinister and posh and like Douglas Jardine. Yeah, drinking tea.

57:46Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. They're drinking tea and swimming, the British on the beach, while Australian, plucky Australian boys who've come with cork hats from the outback are being mown down by cruel Turkish gunners. Loads of British are being mown down as well. Well, we will see. Yeah, loads of British are being mown down. Yeah. So the plan is you will land, you'll establish your beachhead, and then you will push inland. The terrain is not ideal. It's these kind of scrub lands, these hills, these deep ravines. But the planners say, don't worry, the Turks will crumble as soon as our lads get ashore. Well, we'll find out.

58:19Dominic Sandbrook:We'll start with the Anzac, 16 ,000 of them. Remember, these are untrained soldiers, untested, and they're attempting something very difficult, to landing at sea at night against machine guns and barbed wire. I mean, has this ever happened before? No.

58:35Tom Holland:No one has ever done this before. I mean, that's a massive ask. It's huge. But you've come all the way from Australia. You've had, what, six months of training. You've got to do something that no one in military history has done.

58:47Dominic Sandbrook:It's insane. And this is why D-Day, and this is arguably why D-Day is so remarkable. Well, it's partly because they had the lesson of Gallipoli. I mean, Gallipoli is at the back of their minds all through D-Day. because it was such a shambles. So to go back to the Anzacs, they've been given a very narrow window of time between three o 'clock in the morning and four o 'clock in the morning. So this is the time between, you know, the moon will vanish at three, the sun will come up at four, this is your time. The assumption is it will be very straightforward and it doesn't turn out that way. So this is Private Walter Steigles of the 3rd Australian Battalion.

59:20Dominic Sandbrook:He was part of the second wave that went ashore. I'll read what he said. It was pitch dark, then all of a sudden the coast a dim outline of the coast loomed up as we got closer we were all beginning to get tensed up nervous wondering what was going to happen as everything was so quiet then a single shot rang out and a yellowish light flared up in the sky and from then on the turks let loose machine gun and rifle fire at the boats as soon as the boats grounded it was every man for himself and it's very saving private ryan so an army surgeon australian surgeon wrote in his diary that he watched the men going ashore under all this Turkish fire.

59:57Dominic Sandbrook:Several fell as they ran, and on the beach I saw even more men lying untidily, some quite still, others making an occasional movement. Then I jumped over into two feet of water and waded heavily ashore. The lapping edge was already pink and frothy with fallen men.

1:00:12Tom Holland:Oh, God.

1:00:13Dominic Sandbrook:So it takes them about four hours to get their men ashore the Anzacs. It's amazing they do get ashore, really. It is. It's very impressive. I mean, that opening reading, I mean, they do perform very, very bravely. Yeah. They start to push up the hill, up inland, but it is clear that their guiding assumption was wrong. The Turks have not cut and run, quite the reverse. So this is another guy, Eric Moorhead from Victoria. He says, basically, they went up the hill. They're expecting to see the enemy there. We were now in a scrub-covered plain fairly in the open. No Turks would have been seen, but the air was literally full of bullets and the sound was deafening.

1:00:50Dominic Sandbrook:the point-blank explosion of rifles and the concealed snipers firing on us at close quarters our bayonet charge had failed the men became disorganized some ran about distractedly poking the bushes for turks others fell on their faces nerve-wracked by the terrible fire so what has happened is this the ottoman troops have let them come in inland and then at the point where the turks might have panicked under the australian onslaught they have rallied and this is thanks to somebody we've already mentioned in this episode, their frontline commander, Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal. So up to this point, as we said, he's an obscure sort of nationalist army officer, born in Salonika.

1:01:32Dominic Sandbrook:He's a big drinker. He's very intense, very driven. But people haven't heard of him. And this is the moment where particularly within the army, he becomes a national hero. Because at 10 o 'clock that morning, Mustafa Kemal is heading towards the front line, and he sees some of the Turkish troops retreating and he says why are you running away sir the enemy where over there and they point to this place that the Australians end up calling battleship hill about two miles inland which is where the Australians have got to and Mustafa Kemal comes out with this line that becomes you know part of Turkish nationalist mythology he says to his troops I don't order you to attack I order you to die by the time we're dead other troops and other commanders will be ready to take our places and amazingly I mean I would find that terrifying and I probably would continue running away but the Turks are made of sterner stuff than I am and they turn round and they run back into the fray and they drive the Australians back down towards the beach I mean the Australians do love a beach Australians do love a beach But you wouldn't associate Australians with going backwards, would you?

1:02:41Dominic Sandbrook:No, you wouldn't. But that is precisely what they are doing by mid-afternoon. Far from going forwards and pushing inland, they're being driven back towards the sea. Their officers are being scythed down by Turkish machine guns, and they're absolutely shattered. Of course, I mean, imagine how exhausted they must be after making this landing. So this is Private Herbert Filders of the 12th Battalion. Four of us lie under shrapnel, machine gun and rifle fire, not daring to lift our heads the whole while. If we'd budged, we'd have been killed dozens of times over. The bullets were streaming so thick over our heads.

1:03:13Dominic Sandbrook:Our officer said he'd never seen anything like it, and he's an old soldier. I was jolly tired, too. As a matter of fact, I went to sleep twice. That's impressive.

1:03:23Tom Holland:That's so impressive. I mean, is this worse than fighting on the Western Front? It is, really, isn't it? Yeah, I think in the grand scheme of things. I mean, you're kind of in the open, aren't you? You don't know what you're doing. you're blundering around all these your mad landscape yeah it's really hot so we'll see

1:03:41Dominic Sandbrook:particularly in our next episode um in thursday's episode i think the conditions of gallipoli are just unbelievably hellish yeah and they're definitely worse than the western front and a lot of people who served on both said you know the western front wasn't brilliant but the one thing it had in its favor was it wasn't gallipoli which was so much worse yeah it sounds awful so So anyway, this bloke who fell asleep, he was hit three times in the legs, but he still managed to get out to the beach, which is very impressive. Have a barbie. Anyway, nightfalls, the Anzacs do have a foothold. They've got this little pocket with a kind of perimeter, which is about two miles long.

1:04:18Dominic Sandbrook:But in total, they've basically got only half a mile inland. They are nowhere near where they were meant to be. And they've already lost 2 ,000 men out of their 16 ,000 killed, wounded or missing. So that's the Anzacs. Now, meanwhile, the British have been landing further south at Cape Hellys. And this is actually the bigger landing. This is 21 ,000 men of the 29th Division. And they're given a tremendous send-off by their commanding officer, Major General Aylmer Hunter-Weston. Hunter Bunter. He says to them, the eyes of the world are upon us. Your deeds will live in history. To us now is given the opportunity of avenging our friends and relatives who have died in France and Flanders.

1:04:59Dominic Sandbrook:So I looked him up. Yeah.

1:05:01Tom Holland:Mustache. Very good mustache. Excellent mustache. I think the best British military mustache I've seen so far.

1:05:08Dominic Sandbrook:I think the mustaches at Gallipoli, by and large, are better across the board than British mustaches on the Western Front.

1:05:15Tom Holland:So Ataturk had an excellent mustache. It's like a pencil, though. Hunter Bunter's mustache is so ex-British military officer in the First World War. It's the platonic archetype of it. Do look at it. Do have a look. anyone who who's a fan of military moustaches right now things here at cape hellies do not go

1:05:35Dominic Sandbrook:according to plan at all so i mentioned there were five beaches and the main ones we'll forget three of them we'll just talk about two of them w and v so the first wave to land at w beach are the first lancashire fusiliers and when they get there they find that the turks are waiting with all their barbed wire and their machine guns i mean this is captain harold clayton there was tremendously strong barbed wire when my boat landed men were being hit on the boats and as they splashed ashore i got up to my waist in water i tripped over a rock and went under i got up and made for the shore and laid down by the barbed wire the front of the wire by now as a thick mass of men the majority of whom never moved again the trenches on the right raked us and those above us raked our right while trenches and machine guns fired straight down the valley the noise was ghastly the sights horrible i mean just so they've got inland they're stuck on the barbed wire and they're just being absolutely raked with machine guns.

1:06:28Dominic Sandbrook:So the Lancashire Fusiliers, they went ashore with 27 officers and 1 ,002 men. They end the day with 16 officers and just 304 men. But have they secured a foothold? They have secured a little foothold. I mean, they definitely got ashore. So that's something. Now, if you think that's bad, V Beach is the real shocker. So V Beach, the Turks had really put a lot of effort into reinforcing this beach. They had put two lines of barbed wire and then behind them two various lines of trenches. So one of the British naval commanders, who's called Edward Unwin, comes up with a clever plan that you and indeed Rupert Brooke would admire.

1:07:09Dominic Sandbrook:He says, look, we're just across the straits from Troy. And, you know, if you've done classics at public school, as I have, then you will know how to cope with Trojans. We need a Trojan horse. Not a literal horse. Not a literal horse, but a ship.

1:07:27Tom Holland:Roll an enormous horse on the beach. I mean, it would be original. Frankly, frankly. I mean, it couldn't go worse. I wouldn't put it past them.

1:07:36Dominic Sandbrook:And you're not wrong. It couldn't go worse than what they actually did. so they said instead of using a um a horse a wooden horse we'll use a bloody big ship like a huge old collier a coal ship called the ss river clyde we will put 2 000 men we'll put loads of ammo and we'll put loads of supplies in this big old ship and then we will deliberately run it aground we'll run the ship aground as close to the beach as possible we'll have another little ship coming up called a steam hopper and this will go in between the ship and the actual sand so all the men will be able to jump off the river Clyde onto the steam hopper and then jump off the steam hopper onto the sands and run up the beach brilliant and then this big ship that's stuck on the beach the river Clyde we can use that as our headquarters as a little field hospital as a kind kind of supply depot, all of this.

1:08:34Dominic Sandbrook:I think it's quite a good idea. Do you? How does it go? Well, we'll find out. So they start bombarding the beach, and then they're going to send up the Dublin Fusiliers first, and little rowing boats, and then this bloody big ship, the River Clyde. The Dublin Fusiliers make very slow progress, so unfortunately they land out of order. The River Clyde lands first, or crashes aground, but it hasn't got as close to the beach as they hoped it would it's still 80 yards away so the men can't jump out and wade they will just drown so this is where your steam hopper little boat which would act as a bridge kind of a gangway comes in unfortunately the steam hopper has also run aground but on the wrong side of the ship and pointing the wrong way so they can't use that at all so they're all stuck on this boat offshore like how are we going to get off at this point the Dublin fusiliers and their rowing boats come into land and they are absolute sitting ducks for the Turkish machine gunners who basically scythe through them some of the Dublin blokes jump out and they try to wade ashore but their packs are so heavy that they and they can't really make any progress they end up being riddled with Turkish bullets it's a terrible terrible scene private Robert Martin there were 25 in my boat and there were only three of us left it was terrible to hear our poor chums moaning to see the poor boys dead in the water others on the beach roaring for help but we could do nothing for them those who were left wounded on the shore in the evening the tide came in they were all drowned and i was left by myself on the beach so that's that's not great no and then what about this ship the river clyde yeah i'm sure that comes to the rescue it's just sitting there it's just sitting there right and the turks are just hammering shells at it and bullets oh it's a mad idea to have done that then yeah precisely right stupid idea because the men can't jump off they're in six feet of water their packs are so heavy they will just be dragged down and drowned and this guy who came up with the idea unwind can see that it's all falling apart so his massive credit he says i will fix this and he takes an able seaman with the excellent name of william williams they jump into the sea they've got all these barges with them they lash together all the barges with ropes and they literally hold them in place these two guys as a gangway okay that is impressive right and the turks are firing at them and they don't hit these two blokes which is so impressive that these guys such courage and the men start jumping down from the ship onto the gangway but they're being raped all the time with turkish bullets so the first 200 men only 21 of them reached the beach alive and there was a petty officer who was watching from the ship and he wrote in his diary, he said, one after another, the devoted fellows made the dash down the deadly gangways.

1:11:23Dominic Sandbrook:But to our horror, we saw them suddenly begin to flounder and fall in the water. They went down, never to reappear, as the hailing bullets flicked the life out of the struggling men. We almost wept with impotent rage. So they're leaping off. They're incredibly bravely kind of running across this kind of improvised gangway and they're all being shot down. After about an hour, the shallows are absolutely choked with dead and drowning men the able seaman william williams he's shot and killed and unwin who's been holding the gangway in place with kind of from not so won't be swept away by the tide he basically collapses with exhaustion he has to be dragged back aboard the ship and at this point the commanding officers on the river glides say this has been a complete nightmare let's just wait here stop trying to get off the ship and wait for cover of darkness and then try to get ashore but i mean this is why you should never be too brave tom and i don't think this is an issue that we will never have to face frankly but just just so you know don't be too courageous because at this point one of the infantry commanders who's called brigadier general napier says no no we can still do this and he jumps down from the ship onto the gangway and he says come on men and somebody shouts at him you can't possibly land and napier says i'll have a damn good try and he starts to run across these barges followed by his loyal major and some of his men he gets to barge number three and a bullet just smacks into his head and he falls into the water and his body was never recovered and so that was the end of him i suppose they couldn't

1:12:54Tom Holland:recognize it if his head's been blown to pieces i guess his his second in command his major is right behind him a second bullet hits the major the major raises himself to one knee

1:13:07Dominic Sandbrook:carry on men and then another bullet hits him and that's the end of him as well so basically they're all killed by mid-afternoon there are still only 200 men on the beach and they're huddling for cover sort of under punishing turkish fire and there's a thousand blokes still on the river clyde and only when darkness falls and the turkish firing dies down can the rest of them get ashore and um they get ashore a lot of them by basically using the bodies as a bridge

1:13:39Tom Holland:but just to be clear if they're all now on the beach i mean they're just exposed well it's night yeah i know but when dawn comes when they all just be shot to pieces well no because they do

1:13:49Dominic Sandbrook:manage to push a little at cape helis they do manage to push a little way inland so they lost 2 ,000 men and they'd lost 2 ,000 men at Anzac Cove. But in the south, they do manage to push a little bit further. So it's a great triumph. Well, they have not come remotely close to realizing their objectives or to getting to where they wanted to. And it is terrifyingly obvious to them at this point that the Turks are not the sort of pushovers they thought they were, that they are dug in, they are well supplied, they're extremely well motivated. And the last thing the Turks are going going to do is to run away.

1:14:27Dominic Sandbrook:And that evening, the ANZAC commander, who was called William Birdwood, he sent a signal to Serene Hamilton. And he said, you know, my men have performed heroically, but they are thoroughly demoralized by snipers, shrapnel and shellfire. If we have to resume fighting tomorrow, he says, there is likely to be a fiasco. You need to get us out of here right away. And Hamilton actually talks to the naval officers, can this be done? And the naval guys say to him it's actually not possible we cannot there are no plans you know we don't have the we haven't prepared we literally cannot physically get them out at such short notice and so hamilton sends a signal back to the anzacs dig yourselves right in and stick it out dig dig dig until you are safe and so this is what they're doing and is this where the word diggers for anzac troops comes from i think it is actually yeah i was i i this is my assumption i guess although i'm not certain so both the anzac cove and at cape helis further south the men are now digging trenches and this of course is the grim irony of all this that this whole operation was meant to avoid the horrors of the western front it was a diversion from the western front and now after all they are

1:15:42Tom Holland:back in the trenches and i assume that it is much harder to dig trenches here than it is in the mud of Flanders. Definitely is. Definitely is in the chalk lands

1:15:52Dominic Sandbrook:of the Aisne or something. So the question now, now that they've landed, what's the plan? Is Churchill finally going to accept that this mad scheme has failed or is he going to throw in more men? We'll find out next time.

1:16:07Tom Holland:Yeah, there's only one way to do that. And that is to listen to the next episode. And of course, members of the Rest is History Club can do so right away. And if you're not a member of the Rest is History Club and you would like to listen to the next episode immediately and enjoy a host of supplementary benefits, then you can, of course, go to therestishistory.com where you will get them all. But for now, Dominic, thank you very much for what's been a very grim story. And I suspect that in the next episode, it will get even grimmer. Goodbye. Bye-bye.

1:16:47you