676. The First World War: Churchill’s Calamity (Part 6)

23:02Dominic Sandbrook:So he's the kind of small guy who's yellow. He's yellow. he likes dancing likes church but he's also too old and is very disputatious and difficult now also some of the people in the liberal government are beginning to lose faith in churchill so lloyd george told marco asquith at the beginning of may churchill has not merely bad judgment he has none his dardanelles expedition gave the turk a frightfully long start he got us at war with the turk which he need never have done And so a few days after that, you have a succession of events which rock the Liberal government to put Churchill's own place in great jeopardy.

23:39Dominic Sandbrook:So first of all, we already described how Asquith was distracted through all this because of his infatuation with Venetia Stanley. On the 11th of May, Venetia Stanley tells Asquith that she's going to marry one of his ministers, Edwin Montague. And Asquith is absolutely devastated. He is heartbroken. He is a wreck of a man once she's told him this. It's almost as bad as suffering dysentery on an exposed hill in Gallipoli. Asquith's the real victim in all this stuff. Yeah, he really is. And that will run throughout the rest of this episode. Asquith's basically a shadow of a man now. The very next day, the 12th of May, Jackie Fisher makes his seventh attempt to resign.

24:22Dominic Sandbrook:And again, they have to persuade him not to. And the newspapers are now full of rumours that the Asquith government, which doesn't have an overall majority and they haven't had one um since the beginning of the war and basically there'd been a sort of political truce since the beginning of the war but now the conservatives are running out of patience the rumors that the aswith government is going to collapse two days after this on the 14th of may the times publishes this i mean i mean there's no other word but a bombshell bombshell report that the british troops on the western front are running out of high explosive shells and that this is because of government incompetence.

25:01Dominic Sandbrook:And again, rather like the Jackie Fisher stories, this is the result of leaks and briefings from within the government. So it's come particularly from Sir John French, the commander on the Western Front, who's in cahoots. Is it true? Yes, they were running out of shells. Everyone was running out of shells. I don't think it was that Britain was peculiarly incompetent. Every combatant by the spring of um summer of 1915 is basically running out of uh shells because they've used all their pre-war supplies um but in britain this is used as a weapon to expose what the critics of the government see as its kind of lassitude and you know asquith is reading the classics and having his hair cut and going to society parties and they think he should be chairing munitions meetings and being more serious so the same day the shell story breaks the war council meets in what churchill later called a sulfurous atmosphere and they discuss are we going to pull out of gallipoli and lord kitchener the war secretary repeats his point he says no we cannot pull out even now it will destroy britain's prestige in the muslim world it will lose us the possible support of the balkan neutrals people like romania bulgara whoever we just have to keep going to what end well this is the point i mean don't ask me i'm not lord kitchener i put it to you this is nonsense it is nonsense i wouldn't have gone in the first place let me be absolutely clear

26:26Tom Holland:i mean i i'm going to put it on the right i do not have as distinguished a military record as lord kitchener yeah but it seems to me madness because even if you push the turks if you the

26:37Dominic Sandbrook:turk sorry yeah off gallipoli so what yeah well exactly that's the whole point so what then you still got that i'm gonna forget this is a side quest it's not even the main quest it's mad it is mad so the next day 15th of may fisher finally does resign and in pleasingly bizarre and ludicrous circumstances he sends a resignation letter to ask with he says i was against gallipoli from the start it's mad you've made fools of yourselves i'm off and then he vanishes he leaves the amiralty and disappears and some historians think because he was very religious he went to pray at westminster abbey whatever it takes anyway asquith sends men after him to try to persuade him out of resigning i mean again it's rather like the kitchener they've employed these sort of old war horses who are useless but then they don't want them to resign because it would look really

27:26Tom Holland:bad the sort of pr would be really bad yeah so it's it's like kitchener doesn't want to withdraw from gallipity because it would look bad they don't want to attack fisher because that would look bad so they just nail to these mad appointments and exactly strategies exactly so

27:41Dominic Sandbrook:asquith sends men to track they track uh fisher down at the charing cross hotel and they hand him a letter from asquith and asquith commands him to return to his post in the name of the king which is a great thing to write fisher says well i'll only with return on the following conditions you will withdraw from the dardanelles and you will sack churchill quote a bigger danger than the germans and asquith says oh no no that's too much and asquith then says to the king fisher's gone mad i'm going to accept fisher's resignation but this turns out to be the trigger for the fall of the government because as we said until now there's been a truce between the two parties but the tory leader bonner law he says to asquith look you fisher going my back benches the ordinary Tories will no longer accept Churchill at the Admiralty.

28:32Dominic Sandbrook:And so the next few days in Westminster are dominated by these serpentine machinations. To cut a very long story short, Asquith, Lloyd George and Bonnellore, the Tory leader, agree to form a coalition government. And Asquith can stay on as Prime Minister, but he has to make two sacrifices. One of them, he has to sack one of his closest friends, Lord Haldane, the man who had modernised Britain's army before the war, who's now Lord Chancellor, Haldane has been smeared by the press as pro-German because he had the effrontery to have studied philosophy at the University of Göttingen. And so... Can't trust a man who studied philosophy in Germany.

29:11Dominic Sandbrook:And so basically, this is a terrible... I mean, I'm a big Asquith fan, but this is very, very bad behaviour from Asquith. Asquith sacks one of his closest friends. No greater love hath a man than to lay down his life for a friend. Yeah. And then the Tories say, we want you to get rid of Churchill. we hate Churchill Churchill used to be one of us he's a traitor he's a snake he goes around making mad speeches he's a he's a braggart he's totally unreliable and mad get rid and the funny thing is you know Churchill obviously you know the greatest Britain whatever he is at this point unbelievably unpopular across the political spectrum so Askwith when he's debating this with his wife Margot he said churchill is by far the most disliked man in my cabinet by his colleagues oh he's intolerable noisy long-winded and full of perforations lloyd george said to his mistress this is churchill's own fault you know he saw in the war the chance for glory for himself and he's entered on a risky campaign without caring a straw for the misery and hardship that it would bring to thousands i mean lord george is quite right about that by the way george the fifth wrote in his diary he He said it'd be brilliant to get rid of Churchill from the Admiralty.

30:23Dominic Sandbrook:He is the real danger. So basically, the deal is they'll get rid of Churchill. They'll also get rid of Fisher. All of this. Asquith will stay on as prime minister of a coalition government.

30:32Tom Holland:I mean, presumably now they've got rid of Churchill. That's brilliant. They can say it's all been a disaster. Pin the blame on him and, you know, cut your losses.

30:40Dominic Sandbrook:This is the insane thing, right? This is absolutely bonkers. The same day as all this is going on, the 17th of May, Sir Ian Hamilton sends a cable to the war office from the Aegean. He says, we've tried to break out of our beachheads. The Turks have resisted much more stubbornly than we expected. The troops have done well, but they are absolutely exhausted. We need, if you're going to keep us here, we absolutely need reinforcing as soon as possible. But because of the political crisis, no one answers. And in fact, they don't answer for weeks. The war council doesn't meet again until the 7th of June, which is almost a month later and then if they do decide to send reinforcements it would take weeks to get them there so basically for the next six weeks these poor blokes at gallipoli with dysentery are stuck in their trenches the turks shooting at them and they're waiting to find out what happens at westminster for the politicians to sort themselves out and to get their act together and what makes that worse is that churchill won't go so he's still fighting to cling on to office He drafts a public letter saying none of this is his fault.

31:50Dominic Sandbrook:It's all Fisher's fault. He has a massive strop and a tantrum with Lloyd George, who'd once been one of his closest friends. Churchill's so self-regarding. You don't care what becomes of me. You don't care for my personal reputation. Lloyd George says, no, I don't. I only care about winning the war. And then this brilliant thing. He gets Clemmie to write Asquith a letter, a tear-stained letter. Why would you part with Winston? you will be committing an act of weakness your coalition government will be you know rubbish and all this kind of thing asquith there's some excellent cat in us now asquith shows this letter to his wife margo and margo is what's your expression a baggage and margo's a massive baggage she is like a the world's most she makes virginia wolf look democratic and open-minded so a baggage not a spitfire she's both a baggage and a spitfire she's the worst kind of baggage yeah the worst kind of spitfire ask this shows marco this letter from clementine churchill and marco says it shows the soul of a servant that that touch of blackmail and insolence and the revelation of black ingratitude and want of affection justifies everything i've thought of this shallow couple and ask with says basically that's going a bit far isn't it it's the letter of a wife and margo says a fish wife you mean yeah she is a spitfire and a baggage no question anyway churchill's basically dragged out of the admiralty on the 25th of may he's fobbed off with a kind of non-job chancellor of the duchy of lancaster most officers in the navy were delighted that churchill had gone admiral jellico wrote to fisher we owe you a debt of gratitude for having saved the navy from a continuance in office of mr churchill admiral beaty the navy breathes freer now that it is rid of the succubus churchill churchill is gutted i mean churchill goes around saying to everybody you know i'm i'm i'm finished i've been totally humiliated and all this and um clemmy said later on to one of his biographers i thought he would never get over the dardanelles i thought he would die of grief and there were some people who thought that churchill might actually take his own life that he was so crushed and depressed by his public humiliation but he signs up and goes off fights he does indeed and we'll just we'll come to that a little bit later now callipoli they're still waiting for news they launch a third battle of krithia under sir aylmer hunter western with his excellent moustache classic kind of first world war behavior bombardment over the top they get about 200 yards and then basically yeah the turks kill them all they lose about 6 000 men the australian writer les carlian said that general hunter weston he was one of the great war's spectacular incompetence he threw away men the other way that other men tossed away socks and is that fair i mean i get the sense that it is probably i think it's actually a bit harsh i think blaming the generals for this is too harsh they're in an impossible situation and it's you know it's churchill's fault it's not their fault i think they what do they do i mean they can't just they can't just sit there and do nothing so yeah it's i think they're in an impossible situation and it's the politicians fault for putting them there frankly but they are throwing away men that men the way other men toss their souls i mean they was throwing away men yeah but i mean they they keep thinking to themselves well maybe next time no and never yeah of course i mean the bonkers thing is churchill still won't shut up even though he's been booted out so the day after this battle he was in Dundee addressing his constituents and he said through the narrows of the Dardanelles along the ridges of the Gallipoli Peninsula lies some of the shortest paths to a triumphant peace beyond those few miles of ridge and scrub on which our soldiers our French comrades our gallant Australians and our New Zealand fellow subjects are now battling lie the downfall of a hostile empire the destruction of an enemy's fleet and army the fall of a world famous capital and probably the accession of powerful allies and that's just

35:59Tom Holland:bonkers from him when he's coming out with that kind of stuff in the second world war it's great and your heart soars and you feel a great patriotic glow when he's coming out with that stuff in the face of a disaster like this you just think that's mad of course you do it's kind of bogus the language is over inflated yeah you know who he reminds me of there and this will i mean who

36:23Dominic Sandbrook:he undoubtedly is like he is boris johnson at this point yeah talking about ukraine and everything

36:29Tom Holland:that britain should be doing for ukraine we haven't actually got any arms because his government

36:35Dominic Sandbrook:has failed to invest in it he's making like wild promises and claims in the most grandiose rhetoric while back in the office the people working with him are in tears of frustration and rage because he's embarked on a course that's just utterly self-destructive and suicidal. But he's not the only one because two days later, the new coalition have set up a new war cabinet, which they call the Dardanelles Committee, a sign of how important the Dardanelles now is to them. And they said, well, what will we do? Shall we finally cut our losses? No, we won't. We'll actually send more men. So they say, we will send Sir Ian Hamilton and his reinforcements we will send four new divisions of lord kitchener's new army and the generals on the western front say are you mad when we need men so desperately against the germans why would you waste men on this mad lunatic scheme so douglas haig not an uncontroversial general himself said at the time he said you could send the entire british army to gallipoli and it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference you're never going to get a fleet through those straits you're never going to capture constantinople you're never going to knock the ottoman empire out of the war you are deluding yourselves and i quote i think it is fatal to pour more troops and ammunition down the dardanelles sink but maybe he's wrong yeah maybe maybe it'll work maybe one more heave will do the trick yeah the date for the reinforcements to land is set for the 6th of august hamilton is planning to land almost 30 000 fresh troops at suvla bay which is just up the Gallipoli coast.

38:14Dominic Sandbrook:And at the same time, the Anzacs will launch a massive breakout to capture the high ground in the centre of the peninsula.

38:20Tom Holland:Well, I think when you put it like that, that might work. Yeah. I mean, that's sounding promising.

38:24Dominic Sandbrook:These are the stakes. If this works,

38:26Tom Holland:I think this could change the course of the Gallipoli campaign. Which you know what it would result in? It would result in the downfall of a hostile empire, the destruction of an enemy's fleet and army, the fall of a world famous capital and possibly the exception of powerful allies.

38:36Dominic Sandbrook:I think this could be the moment that wins the war. First World War, as everyone knows, ended in 1915.

38:41Tom Holland:We'll be giving the details of that after the break.

38:44Dominic Sandbrook:Brilliant. This episode is brought to you by Disclosure Day. The new movie Disclosure Day is directed by legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg.

38:54Tom 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?

39:09Dominic Sandbrook:See, I feel 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 my disposal. So I'm excited about it.

39:23Tom Holland: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.

39:44Dominic Sandbrook:Disclosure Day is in cinemas, Wednesday, June 10th. So book your tickets now.

39:50Tom Holland:It's nearly that time, everyone. The Rest is Football will 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.

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41:18Tom Holland:Hello, everyone. Welcome back to The Rest is History. It is now the late summer of 1915. Gallipoli has been a total mess, but it's okay because the British government are sending reinforcements and this will undoubtedly enable the allies to take constantinople and to end the war in triumphant circumstances isn't that right dominic that's what history tells us happened it

41:41Dominic Sandbrook:is indeed so to remind people about the plan they're going to land 27 000 fresh troops at suffler bay which is on the western side of the gallipoli peninsula so the aegean side meanwhile those allied forces who are already on the peninsula so cape helis and anzac cove they will launch a series of attacks from their beachheads this is known as the august offensive and they will push the turks back they'll capture the turkish trenches and they will seize the hills and the ridges that are further inland so the commanding heights of the gallipoli peninsula and all this is scheduled to begin on the evening of the 6th of august and a big spoiler alert now it doesn't go entirely according to plan so if we begin with the landings at soffler bay the same old story basically they do get the troops ashore but they're under punishing turkish fire it's all a bit chaotic some of them arrive at the wrong point or the timings are wrong they take very heavy casualties and they don't make much progress at all basically like before all these blokes get stuck at their beachhead they're pinned down it's baking heat they don't have supplies they don't have any fresh water and when they try to get in land the turks drive them back with their machine guns and with bayonet charges and things i mean i suppose to be fair to them there's no way they

42:55Tom Holland:could have worked out that that's what was going to happen because it's not like anyone's tried

42:59Dominic Sandbrook:that before how are they to know and and it's the same bloke who um who drives them back as drove them back before mustafa kemel so he wasn't the initial commander at savler there was another bloke another turk he was sacked after a few days because of inertia mustafa kemel was sent in mustafa kemel had been in the trenches all this time he was delighted to be leading the counter attack he said for four months i live 300 meters away from the firing line breathing the fetid smell of corpses having left in dungeon-like darkness at 11 o 'clock that night i was able to breathe clean air for the first time so he's having a tremendous time although history might have been very different because at one point he's hit by a piece of shrapnel in the chest and the story goes if you read in admiring biographies of uh mustafa camel by turkish historians that he was saved by his watch how did that work because the shrapnel hit him and he had his watch in his pocket oh i see oh right had that not happened then who knows turkey might not exist huge swathes of turkey would be speaking greek the other big story of the day is the australians and the new zealanders attempt to break out of the anzac cove beachhead i mean you say the one

44:10Tom Holland:other there is another story that follows this but we'll come to that when you've told this bit

44:14Dominic Sandbrook:So they're trying to break out of Anzac Cove. There's a whole series of battles that some of our Australian listeners will be very familiar with, all these places called Lone Pine, Dead Man's Ridge, or The Neck. And they go down, an Australian kind of legend. Basically, they charge out, and they're machine-gunned by Turks. Sergeant Cliff Pinnock of the Victoria Light Horse said, they were waiting ready for us, and they simply gave us a solid wall of lead. I was in the first line to advance, and we didn't get 10 yards. Every one of those felt like lumps of meat. All your pals that have been with you for months and months, blown and shot out of all recognition.

44:51Dominic Sandbrook:So to cut a very long story short, this breakout attempt lasts four days. The Australians, you know, they fight heroically, but they lose more than 12 ,000 men killed or wounded. And it's, you know, they're basically pushed back into their beachhead. And in the film Gallipoli, the Peter Weir film that made Mel Gibson's name, it is claimed in this film that while the australians are fighting and dying like lions the british are playing in the scenes and drinking tea on the beaches this is a lie

45:24Tom Holland:a shameful lie it's astonishing that mel gibson would uh would associate himself with

45:30Dominic Sandbrook:well anglophobic propaganda mel gibson really does hate britain doesn't he he absolutely hates

45:36Tom Holland:britain well let's be more precise england yes he does i mean can i tell you why he's wrong yeah i do he is overlooking what is the most significant episode in the whole gallipoli campaign i'm amazed you left this out and this is the fate of the sandringham company and these were basically estate workers recruited from the uh royal estate in norfolk in sandringham and they get that you know they're going off to serve king and country in gallipoli and they get sent to um as part of this kind of attack to try and force the Turkish lines. And they march into a wooded, heavily defended area. And as they're pushing towards the Turks, they are lost to sight and sound.

46:19Tom Holland:And a New Zealand forces engineer watches them go. And he says that a low hanging cloud, which is loaf shaped, descends and it envelops the battalion. and then it kind of goes up and when the cloud has gone the battalion has gone as well so there are two theories as to this one is that it's uh you know hallucination encouraged you know a result of the the mist and the gunfire and the shell smoke and everything yeah also truly driven mad by dysentery yeah they're dropping dead of dysentery or whatever they just they are kind of wiped out and they're never found but the other theory which i think is much more plausible is that this is a a ufo a flying saucer that has descended and is interested in picking up human specimens for a future study and they've come down and they've they kind of picked up all the uh the sandringham estate workers who are now in the army and gone off whatever and this was my introduction at the age of nine to the gallipoli campaign i read a whole book about it wow it was a new zealander who came up with this yeah basically the people from new zealand are usually very level-headed well i don't think he said that it was a flying saucer because obviously people didn't know about flying saucers until after the second world war but it's a retrospective interpretation this peculiar loaf-shaped cloud right and actually there was um there was a bbc drama about it with david jason as the commander of the sandringham well he was like carson in downton abbey going

47:48Dominic Sandbrook:to war so anyway i just throw that out all right flying saucers aside where are we now so hamilton has got his reinforcements ashore on the other hand he hasn't made any dent in the turkish defenses really uh the tactical balance hasn't changed basically everybody now knows this is an unbreakable stalemate and it's you know this is basically trench warfare at its most tedious at its most grueling and attritional we're into the summer it's swelteringly hot blistering sunshine so they're all incredibly badly sunburned the flies everywhere the body's rotting the dysentery is actually worse than ever as peter hart says in his brilliant book you know they can look out they can see the hospital ships at night with the lights twinkling in the darkness but all gallipoli had to offer them was unending misery disease and the threat of death so after the suffler landings two other important things happen so number one is there has been a big another of these bidding wars with the ottoman empire's neighbor bulgaria and the bulgarians had been shopping around as the italians and the ottomans had before them they were they the bulgarians felt very cheated because they'd fought the first balkan war with their neighbors against the ottomans but then their neighbors serbia greece and romania had all ganged up on them and basically taken the bulgarians gains so the bulgarians are very cross and they want to get a better deal they decide by the late summer early autumn of 1915 that the allies are a complete shambles and the central powers are going to win and they sign a secret treaty with the germans and then they enter the war and attack serbia i mean i'm sad about that i'm sad about that because

49:34Tom Holland:i'm very very fond of bulgaria um thanks to simon my bulgarian personal trainer to whom i owe so much three wickets at the weekend just mentioning that um but i can understand it so two things

49:46Dominic Sandbrook:first of all i myself am a massive bulgarophile because i've been i've i've been traveling backpacking twice around bulgaria okay okay so it's a meeting of minds that's unexpected yeah i love bulgaria i've been to provdiv i've been to veliko tarnovo all kinds of tremendous places in bulgaria oh we had a great time in plovdiv saw nick cave in the roman theater there it was brilliant right i didn't see nick cave i saw a uh it was in late 1990s it was a strange folk dancing festival in which the stage literally collapsed under the feet of a serbian pantomime horse god what a great country uh also actually talking of toilets some of the worst toilets i've ever seen on the turkish bulgarian border anyway that's by the by so it's so it's sad but but the bulgarians are not on the wrong side britain is on the wrong side you want to be with that come on you want to be with the ottoman empire the bulgarians the austro-hungarian empire and

50:39Tom Holland:our friends the germans we've made a massive we've had a shocker anyway so so essentially bulgaria's entered the war against us so that's now a problem right yeah massive problem because

50:49Dominic Sandbrook:they're in the balkans your whole constantinople scheme now looks ridiculous it's looking even i mean it's looking ridiculous now yeah yeah it's looking bad before it's looking really bad now the bulgarians who are the ottoman empire's northern neighbors have also entered and the other thing is after the savler landings there's a shift in public opinion in britain so for the first time people are now openly saying this campaign you know they're openly saying it in the newspapers this campaign's not going according to plan and the most famous example of somebody who says this is a young reporter from melbourne called kath murdoch relation and he is the father of Rupert Murdoch so that's where it all originates it is well this is a big moment in so this is a very well-known moment in Australian history and particularly Australian media history so Keith Murdoch worked for the Sun a newspaper in Sydney and in the late summer of 1915 he went to Anzac Cove and then he went on to allied headquarters on the island of imbros and there he was befriended by the bloke we mentioned last time uh ellis ashmead bartlett of the daily telegraph so here's the bloke who had written the first reports of the ansat landing and basically created the idea of exceptional australian new zealand heroism and ashmead bartlett who's british says to the keith murdoch this campaign is a total disaster hamilton is useless they're all useless and because of wartime censorship people in london aren't getting the truth and he gives keith murdoch a letter basically a report and he says i want you to take this to london and give it to asquith personally murdoch goes off by ship when he gets to marseilles he's intercepted by british military police the top brass have found out about this letter and the letter is confiscated from keith murdoch so he goes on and he gets to london and now he writes a report of his own for the australian prime minister andrew fisher who is a friend of keith murdoch's and murdoch it will amaze people familiar with um journalism and the the way that you know some elements of the press behave that keith murdoch writes this incredibly exaggerated embellished version of the previous report he says the entire operation i this bit's not wrong at all has been one of the most terrible chapters in our history a series of disastrous underestimations now this is sad from keith murdoch and he lets himself down he's very rude about the british soldiers he says they're not to be compared with the australians and their physique is very much below that of the turks pie chuckers they are merely a lot of childlike youths without strength to endure or brains to improve their lot i mean this is such sledging from the Australians.

53:45Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, it really is. It's very ashes punditry, isn't it? David Boone. He goes on to say, the real fault though, the British soldiers are useless, feckless, weak, stupid, but the British officers are worse. The continuous and ghastly bungling over the Dardanelles enterprise was to be expected from such a general staff as the British army possesses. The conceit and self-complacency of the Redfeather men are equaled only by their incapacity. Anyway, Keith Murdoch has become pals with David Lloyd George and he tells David Lloyd George this and Lloyd George says I want you to send a copy of this to Asquith and meanwhile the telegraph bloke Ashmeed Bartlett he's now arrived in London too he's been sent home from Gallipoli and he goes and he meets Lord Northcliffe the most powerful press baron of the day and he says the operation is a shambles so thanks to Murdoch and Ashmeed Bartlett all kind of London high society political kind of classes all those kind of people in the of salons of Westminster and Whitehall.

54:43Dominic Sandbrook:They're talking about what a nightmare the campaign has become. And so by early October, instead of saying, are we going to call it off? People are actually saying, well, when are we going to call it off? Do they accept any kind of responsibility? The politicians. Or do they just blame the officers and the commanders? I think they blame Winston Churchill. They have an excellent scapegoat. They have an excellent scapegoat. But they start sacking everybody, don't they? All the kind of military top brass.

55:10Tom Holland:they do they keep changing all the generals of course but when they do that do they say actually

55:14Dominic Sandbrook:we're complicit in this we've really screwed up here no no one ever does that no i guess not so kitchener who definitely is complicit in it by the way kitchener said to ian hamilton sort of early october i want you to think about an evacuation how many men do you think you would lose and hamilton says i'm you know an evacuation is a terrible idea we would lose half our men i mean this is one reason why they don't get off by the way because a lot of the top brass think if we start evacuating we'll be sitting ducks on the beaches and the turks will just kill us all so we're stuck anyway after hamilton said that the war council said okay hamilton's got to go his career is basically over they sack him and they send a guy called charles monroe who'd been on the western front near ypres monroe went to gallipoli he spent three days touring the beach heads and after three days he said okay i've had a look this is madness we've got to get out of here that this is hopeless when the word gets back to london churchill who's still actually in the government with this kind of non-job churchill went absolutely ballistic he said this will be the greatest disaster since the loss of the american colonists and they said what would you do and he said maybe have another crack at the straits with some ships and some more men i mean that's that's ridiculous at that point so he's lost the plot the war council says no church flounces out of the government completely he sends a resignation letter to asquith and says i have a clear conscience time will vindicate my administration of the admiralty which is not true at all but then to his credit remember he's only 41 churchill then tries to redeem himself he goes to the western front he becomes a lieutenant colonel in the scots fusiliers and he serves you know he doesn't really see that much action there's constant bombardment and he is almost killed i think by a shell at one point so he does put himself in harm's way and i think this is the point where the comparison with yeah boris johnson evaporates and indeed i mean you think about all those disgraced ministers in the last government sort of matt hancock or whatever i mean they did not do anything like

57:20Tom Holland:this they did reality tv programs matt hancock went off and and got trained by the sas i think

57:26Dominic Sandbrook:yeah there's a brilliant clip online of an sas man shouting at him you're a i can't say the word what are you and a miserable matt hancock the man who'd been in charge of a covid response standing there on channel five or whatever uh being being berated by the sas i mean i mean what

57:43Tom Holland:what you can't say about churchill is that he was ever a coward no i mean he was insanely brave and when he said that he loved war i mean he genuinely meant it he did i mean he this has

57:55Dominic Sandbrook:not been his finest hour by any means no it's always been the great blot on his escutcheon hasn't it yeah yeah and we'll maybe talk about that right at the end the men at gallipoli back to them you can't evacuate people overnight and that means that they are going to have to stay there for a few more weeks they're basically going to have to stay there into the winter at the end of november the weather turns it's really cold it's rainy it's windy and then it starts to snow tragically many of the british and anzacs are still in their thin summer uniforms so thousands of them get frostbite and a lot of them literally freeze to death i mean there are stories about when it starts raining the trenches fill with rainwater and some of them are so weak with dysentery that they can't pull themselves out and they just lie there and they drown oh dear So there's a story, a lieutenant in the field ambulance, he described seeing an officer, his feet were frozen and he was making his way to our dressing station.

58:49Dominic Sandbrook:He asked two others who were with him to go on and he sat down in the mud. They went on and they sent back stretcher bearers. But when the bearers reached him, he was dead of cold and exhaustion. And this is a very, very common story. So the first evacuations, which are at Subler and Anzac Cove, are scheduled for late December. Hamilton had said he would lose half his men and in this he was actually quite wrong I mean this is the one example of being too pessimistic this is the one bit of the operation it really is a spectacular success they do it over several nights so the Turks don't attack them they do lots of clever things with their guns so the guns will keep firing kind of they set them they rig them so they'll fire at regular intervals never so that the the Turks won't realize they're running away I think withdrawing, Dominic.

59:37Dominic Sandbrook:They're not running away. They're withdrawing. Withdrawing, okay. Yeah, running away is too harsh. So they are taken off the beaches on the night of the 20th of December, about 80 ,000 of them. They leave a load of their kit behind, but they lose almost no lives at all. It's a remarkable achievement. And it was later said of Clement Attlee, who has come back to Gallipoli after his bout of dysentery, that he was the second to last man off the beach, Savlo or something like that. I don't know how anyone would ever be able to prove this or calculate it but anyway he's one

1:00:10Tom Holland:of the last to leave I guess it's reflection of of kind of a sense of his courage yeah exactly

1:00:15Dominic Sandbrook:you know how well he's performed exactly the men at Cape Helis so mainly British they had to wait another couple of weeks the operation started on the 7th of January there's a huge bombardment by the ships that gives them allows them to pull back they're a little bit inland by this point about five miles inland so they pull back to the beaches and then the very last troops to leave which are the newfoundland regiment they left at 4 a.m on the 9th of january and again they didn't really suffer any casualties at all and for a lot of the men this was obviously a bittersweet even traumatic moment to leave behind after so much had been sacrificed so i quoted earlier a guy called joe murray who was an ordinary seaman in the royal naval division he was looking back later are on he said as we got further from the line i remember the advance we'd had on may the 6th when more of my pals died such as petty officer warren and young yates i could still hear young horton crying for his mother as he died and i remembered colonel quilter leading the advance and going to his death armed with a huge walking stick very british behavior the tears were streaming down my cheeks i just couldn't restrain them my eyes were smarting so much i think i walked the rest of the way with my eyes closed i knew it so well though i couldn't go wrong so it was all for nothing one of the great british military disasters and you actually made this point a little bit earlier the plans were unrealistic they were incoherent they were poorly organized all of this kind of thing but the mad thing is even if the gallipoli campaign had worked so what so what there's no guarantee they could have got the fleet through the straits because they've only secured one side of the straits.

1:01:57Dominic Sandbrook:There's still all the forts on the other side. And imagine they've got their fleet through. They don't have enough men to occupy Constantinople. So the fleet arrives outside Constantinople and they fire at Constantinople and the Turks just fire back at them. Greek fire. Yeah, then what? What do they do then? The Ottomans aren't going to change sides. As Peter Hart says in his brilliant book on Gallipoli, the whole thing was just a complete distraction. from the Western Front, because basically they couldn't accept, they got themselves into a war that was going to be a really gruelling war of attrition, and it would take years to win it.

1:02:35Dominic Sandbrook:There were no shortcuts. Yeah, there's no shortcuts. And Churchill is definitely the primary culprit. Even Andrew Roberts in his biography says, you know, he's the scapegoat in chief, but he deserves to be the scapegoat in chief. It's not just that it's his idea originally. I mean, people often come up with ideas that don't work in politics or in war. It's the fact that even after it is demonstrably failing, he will not give it up and he's still vigorously campaigning for it at a point when other people have woken up to the reality of it. It's the very worst side of Churchill, the irresponsibility, the recklessness, the selfishness, the kind of stubbornness.

1:03:16Dominic Sandbrook:In the Commons, when he was defending himself in his resignation statement, he said, He thought it was a legitimate war gamble with stakes that we could afford to lose for a prize of inestimable value. And people slammed him afterwards. They said, that is classic Churchill. He's a gambler. But the shocking thing about that to me is not the word gamble. It's the stakes we could afford to lose because the stakes. He's talking about people. Yeah. And a lot of people. He's talking about all those people dying in puddles of their own excrement. Exactly. so to give people a sense in total casualties so that includes wounded missing and so on sick british and anzacs 200 000 men the french 47 000 the turks a quarter of a million in deaths alone the british and irish troops lost 30 000 the french 12 000 anzacs 11 000 again the turks who always forgotten in accounts i mean not in turkey but in allied kind of english language accounts they lost 86 000 men killed which is a lot so that surprises me it's a bit like with

1:04:22Tom Holland:the italians and the austrians that actually the turks even though they were defending had

1:04:26Dominic Sandbrook:they lost more yeah what i feel they're not always defending because sometimes they are on the they're trying to push them back into the sea and of course the turks are you know they are on home ground but they are technologically industrially behind so their equipment's not as good yeah you know it's not like the british and the anzacs and whatnot and the french aren't good at fighting they are good at fighting and they kill a lot of turks um but yeah you're right i think it's precisely because they are not they're not just sitting there waiting for them to come on to them they're trying to drive actively trying to to drive them back for churchill you said it was the great stain on his reputation and you and you're right it took years for the humiliation to fade people would shout at him at public meetings well into the 1930s what about the dardanelles you know when he's talking when he's talking about hitler for example there are still people who won't forgive him for gallipoli there were people posh people in london kind of society hostesses and whatnot who would walk into a room and they would see churchill there or even just his wife clemmy and they walk out again i will not be in a room with the man who sent my my husband my son my brother to die for his own vanity you know in this mad scheme.

1:05:41Dominic Sandbrook:Do you think he learns lessons from it? Well, to a degree. You know, Andrew Roberts in his biography says of Churchill, he's more cautious about mission creep. He is quicker to sack generals who are no good. He is quicker to cut his losses. That said, he still loves a mad scheme, doesn't he? He does. In the Second World War, his generals are still having to argue him out of mad lunatic schemes and whatnot so did he really learn from it i don't think he did actually i think it's always part of his character and perhaps one of the remarkable things is that in the second world war when he's at his best he is constrained by circumstance because britain is a bay um and so he can't get up to mad lunatic schemes but i think left to him you know he loves he never loses that sort of boyish yeah that boyish fondness for a stunt yeah but unfortunately a stunt that could cost thousands and thousands of lives as it did in this case the big winner obviously is mustafa kemel um in his brilliant book on ataturk andrew mango his biographer says you know it's the foundation of his career it makes his name in the army and it means that when the Ottoman Empire collapses in 1919, and it looks as though Turkey itself, kind of, and the Anatolian heartland is going to be completely dismembered.

1:07:06Dominic Sandbrook:It's to Mustafa Kemal that the army turns as its savior, and people remember him saying at Anzac Cove, I don't order you to attack, I order you to die. And people say, God, what a brilliant line this is. What Churchillian, I suppose. This is the kind of spirit we need now when we're all falling apart. And so it becomes part of his legend, I guess, and allows him to turn himself into Ataturk, kind of the father, father Turk or whatever, which is his nickname.

1:07:31Tom Holland:I mean, I suppose to because what he goes on to do is essentially to kind of cut Turkey's losses. Yeah. He has the military reputation that enables him to do that. People accept this is a guy who defended the homeland and threw the great imperial power back into the sea. so we can trust him to do what he thinks is necessary. And if he hadn't had that, it might not have been possible.

1:07:56Dominic Sandbrook:I think it's also important with Mustafa Kemal that he'd lost his own birthplace and never got it back. Yeah, of course. I mean, Thessaloniki. Anyway, we'll end with, since we love our Australian listeners, we should end with what it meant for Australia. And we were talking beforehand, weren't we, how some listeners would be surprised that three times as many British and Irish soldiers died at Gallipoli as Australians. proportionately is that the same though i imagine it's pretty similar i would imagine it's pretty similar but i'd have to check the reason it's such a big deal in australia and and in new zealand is that first of all it's the first time australians have fought and died in such numbers so it's not the first time they fought australians were in the burr war 20 000 of them but only about 500 of them died 250 from disease 250 from bullets or whatever so to lose 8 000 for if you're australia it's a really big deal i mean it's unprecedented in australia's short history the timing the political context is really important because the commonwealth of australia the federation of the colonies had only happened in 1901 so the 1900s and 1910s were an age of basically inventing a nation creating an australian political and cultural identity distinct from british so that's why gallipity plays such a big part in that and people like keith murdoch the first reports i think mattered because they created this idea of australian heroism and manhood and then it's such a shock when you know a few months later you have reports saying actually it's not all going according to plan and our boys who have been so heroic when they landed are actually being you know they're suffering horrendously and they're being cut down by turkish machine guns and whatnot and then obviously in the years after the war people like keith Murdoch they turn it they turn Gallipoli into this kind of populist patriotic fable so you have brave innocent strapping Anzacs and then you have effete snobbish arrogant useless British officers and that obviously is a stereotype that persists to this day doesn't it well I mean you could say

1:10:10Tom Holland:the other great kind of myth building um episode in australian history is the body line tour when england um sends the cricket team to australia and um they unleash this body line so targeting the body with the cricket ball and they win england wins for one but the australians see this as as absolutely kind of treacherous behavior and they're captained by he's actually scottish but he Douglas Jardine he becomes the kind of emblematic figure of a kind of uncaring heedless british ruthlessness that is simultaneously a feat yeah and i think the kind of the sense of of that with the notion of the british high command at gallipoli um being incompetent and kind of heedless of slaughter yeah it's very kind of damaging for britain's reputation in Australia.

1:11:04Tom Holland:Definitely is.

1:11:05Dominic Sandbrook:And it's an image that is carefully created by, for example, Australia's official war historian, who was a man called Charles Bean, massive figure in kind of Australian historiography. Bean was the only war correspondent to be at Gallipoli throughout the whole campaign. And in the 1920s and 1930s, he wrote all these books and articles saying that basically Gallipoli was the foundation of Australian identity. The big thing in the war for Australia was the discovery of the character of Australian men. It was character which rushed the hills at Gallipoli and held on there during the long afternoon and night when everything seemed to have gone wrong and there was only the barest hope of success.

1:11:43Dominic Sandbrook:Anzac stood and still stands for reckless valour and a good cause, for enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship, and endurance that will never own defeat. So it's this idea that Australians, they have the culture of mateship, of comradeship. You never let your mates down. they have a sort of a fighting spirit a simplicity an honesty a courage that the british have lost and that's why i think you know it there's such an appetite for that in this new country in the 1910s and 1920s and that's why it becomes completely enshrined and of course the 25th of april the day of the landings becomes a public holiday in australia and new zealand which it remains to this day so i had a look at the most recent anzac day 25th of april 2026 just a couple of weeks ago anthony albanese the prime minister of australia issued a statement he said anzac still stands for the courage selflessness and mateship that define our national character so this it's basically exactly the message from the 1910s and 1920s but tom we love our australian and new seen in distance don't we we absolutely do we absolutely do so we wouldn't dream of disagreeing

1:12:57Tom Holland:or undermining their sense of themselves no just just one kind of postscript to this and again it touches on cricket because cricket is so important as a metaphor for anglo-australian relations but one guy who completely bought into this and weaponized it was steve war who was the remorseless captain of Australia's greatest test team. It just kind of repeatedly murdered England through the, the, um, the 1990s and the, the two thousands. And in May, 2001, before the ashes tour of that summer, he took the Australian team to the graves at Gallipoli to ponder the lessons of mateship. But of course, subliminally, because they're then going on to play the England team, it's kind of buying into the idea of, of the British having, uh, being enfeebled in a feat and kind of faintly treacherous that um puts the the image of australian mateship into a kind of even more heroic perspective i think it's not just about australian mateship it is also about how the british were useless and i think that that is unfair on the british record of the certainly of the men who were fighting there because they seem to have been just as brave as the as the anzacs i mean totally if you'd said this to the guys

1:14:16Dominic Sandbrook:at Cape Helles or at Suffler or whatever, you know, the Lancashire Fusiliers or the Munster Fusiliers or the Dublins or any of these other people. Or the Sandringham guys who got abducted by aliens. Yeah, if you said to these guys, did you know that you were a feat and you're useless and you're weak and all this kind of thing? I mean, they would have been so shocked and offended that that would be their reputation after the war. And it's completely undeserved. I mean, they died in massive numbers. They were just as brave. But thanks to things like the Mel Gibson film, it's very hard for them now to escape you know because there's nobody batting for them as it

1:14:48Tom Holland:were i mean it goes back to churchill it's the idea of patrician british figures yeah just being heedless kind of you know churchill and douglas jardine kind of blur into a single toxic image of british imperial command well so that's glippantly that's the end of our series about

1:15:05Dominic Sandbrook:the first world war in 1915 and next year we will go on to 1916 and there's some very dramatic stuff in 1916 so there's the battle of jutland at sea and then the two titanic battles of verdun and the somme and those of other stuff as well but tom we've got a total change of pace and tone

1:15:24Tom Holland:uh next week don't we because the world cup is upon us yeah i mean war by other means so um we are actually going to be focusing on something that has always been um emblematic of of nationalism and that is the national anthems that are played at the start of each match. So it's not, I suppose, completely divorced from the spirit that drove the European nations to war in the First World War. We might be looking at some of that because we're going to be looking at the Star Spangled Banner, at God Save the King, a host of other national anthems, and looking at how they emerged, what they tell us about the countries for which they're the anthems.

1:16:07Tom Holland:So I think a really, really interesting way of celebrating the World Cup and of looking at some deep history.

1:16:13Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, should be really fun. And Rest is History Club members can hear those episodes first. So if you want to join them, sign up at therestishistory.com, which is, of course, the only way that you can access all the unbelievable benefits. They're unbelievable, aren't they? I mean, they're genuinely incredible.

1:16:28Tom Holland:They're just literally unbelievable. But anyway, thank you, Dominic. that was uh i mean it was grueling but a brilliant series um well i mean it is tough isn't it i think the first world war i do think it's tough i mean you kind of said at the beginning of this series oh it's you know it's it's kind of dramatic and it is dramatic but it is i share in churchill's frustration you know i quite like it to be over oh no well don't worry there's only about three more four more years of this to go it is just people kind of you know maybe this will work out and they all end up dead on barbed wire um some people love that some people don't what can i say well it's i mean it's it's been a gripping series a really gripping series so thank you very much and thank you everyone for listening so alas maledic goodbye