This photo published in The War Illustrated for 24th July, 1915, shows General Sir Ian Hamilton, commander-in-chief of the Allied forces at Gallipoli. He has been inspecting the Royal Naval Division. The report added: “The Commander-in-Chief’s task for the Empire in the Levant has been regarded as one of the most difficult undertakings in the history of warfare”, a judgment with which John Masefield wholeheartedly agreed.
Part 1 of 2
A LITTLE while ago, during a short visit to America, I was often questioned about the Dardanelles Campaign.* People asked me why that attempt had been made, why it had been made in that particular manner, why other courses had not been taken, why this had been done and that either neglected or forgotten, and whether a little more persistence, here or there, would not have given us the victory. These questions were often followed by criticism of various kinds, some of it plainly suggested by our enemies, some of it shrewd, and some the honest opinion of men and women happily ignorant of modern war. I answered questions and criticism as best I could, but in the next town they were repeated to me, and in the town beyond reiterated, until I wished that I had a printed leaflet, giving my views of the matter, to distribute among my questioners.
See The Gallipoli Landings. The campaign was devised early in 1915 as a new front against the German Empire. The plan was to knock Turkey, or the Ottoman Empire as it then was, out of the Great War by sailing the Royal Navy’s Aegean fleet right up to her capital Constantinople (Istanbul) through the connecting Dardanelles Strait. This required the army to clear guns from the slim Gallipoli Peninsula that forms the northern shore. The campaign began on April 25th, 1915; by December little progress had been made, despite the loss of some 44,000 Allied lives. The ships never sailed through the Strait; Winston Churchill was dismissed as First Lord of the Admiralty; Herbert Asquith’s reputation as a weak wartime leader became more widespread, and he was ousted by David Lloyd George in December 1916.
Part Two
This photo shows the first Anzac Day Parade, held in Sydney on April 25th, 1916, a year to the day after the Gallipoli Landings began. Some 44,000 Allied soldiers died in the Gallipoli Campaign, including 8,500 Australians and 2,721 New Zealanders. John Masefield refused to regard the Dardanelles Campaign negatively, because there is nothing negative about failing to achieve one’s goals if those goals are noble. Belgium’s defiance of Germany in 1914, he reminds us, led to immediate conquest, but it was still the right thing to do and Belgium should be proud of it.
LATER, when there was leisure, I began to consider the Dardanelles Campaign, not as a tragedy, nor as a mistake, but as a great human effort, which came, more than once, very near to triumph, achieved the impossible many times, and failed, in the end, as many great deeds of arms have failed, from something which had nothing to do with arms nor with the men who bore them.* That the effort failed is not against it; much that is most splendid in military history failed, many great things and noble men have failed. To myself, this failure is the second grand event of the war; the first was Belgium’s answer to the German ultimatum.*
Masefield believed that the original plan had been a two-pronged attack, with the British Empire and France approaching Constantinople from the west simultaneously with Russia from over the Black Sea. Problems with Russia’s Polish front led to her withdrawal, and a late readjustment that left Sir Ian Hamilton and his Allied forces with a nigh impossible task, especially after Bulgaria decided to join the Central Powers.
On August 2nd, 1914, the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm II demanded swift passage through Belgium to attack France and achieve European dominion in six weeks, before Tsar Nicholas II’s Russian Empire could mobilise. The Belgians refused, and the following day the German army marched into Belgium.
