Pod Insights The Rest Is History 675. The First World War: Slaughter at Gallipoli (Part 5) About this episode Why was the Battle of Gallipoli, starting in February 1915, in Turkey, so disastrous for the Allies, and in particular, Winston Churchill? How has it become such a foundational moment in the national identity of New Zealand and Australia? And, how did it transform the destiny of Turkey?
Join Dominic and Tom as they launch into one of the worst military catastrophes of the First World War.
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Transcript 13,823 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by Lloyds Business and Commercial Banking.
0:05 Tom Holland? One of the great things about finance is that it may result in you having to pay tax and this was a constant grumble in Anglo-Saxon England, which was the most heavily taxed country in the whole of Christendom. And just when the Anglo-Saxons thought it couldn't get any worse, they got conquered by King Canute and Canute imposed a tax rate that was effectively 100%.
0:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, well, that was one very big change, Tom, but another tax change is upon us. And this is the advent of Making Tax Digital for Income Tax. And if you're at all concerned about it, this is where Lloyds come in because they're here to help make that change much simpler for you with a useful HMRC recognised accounting tool that will help you stay in line with all the Making Tax Digital requirements.
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3:31 Tom Holland? At dusk, all lights were put out and the troops rested for the ordeal at dawn. It was a beautiful calm night with a bright half moon. As the moon waned, the boats were swung out. The Australians received their last instructions. And men who six months ago were living peaceful civilian lives began to disembark on a strange, unknown shore in a strange land. The boats had almost reached the beach when a party of Turks entrenched ashore opened a terrible fusillade. The Australians rose to the occasion. They did not wait for orders or for the boats to reach the beach, but sprang into the sea, formed a sort of rough line and rushed the enemy's trenches. Their magazines were uncharged, so they just went in with cold steel.
4:16 Tom Holland? I have never seen anything like these wounded Australians in war before. Though many were shot to bits without hope of recovery, their cheers resounded throughout the night. They were happy because they knew they had been tried for the first time and had not been found wanting. There has been no finer feat in this war than this sudden landing in the dark and storming the heights, and above all, holding on while the reinforcements were landing. These raw colonial troops in these desperate hours proved worthy to fight side by side with the heroes of Mons, the Ayn, Eip, and Nerv Chappelle.
4:57 Tom Holland? So that was the first report of the Allied landings at Gallipoli in Turkey on the 25th of April 1915, and it was written by a chap called Ellis Ashmead Bartlett, and he was the war correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. And when it was reproduced in the newspapers in Australia a couple of weeks later, it caused an absolute sensation. And his praise for the courage of the Anzac troops, so the Australians and the New Zealanders, became a source of immense national pride down under. And it was all the sweeter because, as you could tell from my expert reproduction of his accent, Ashmead Bartlett wasn't Australian.
5:42 Tom Holland? You would of course expect an Australian commentator to big up Australian performance, but this chap was British. And so to quote one Australian historian, "And there it was, worthy to fight side by side. We belonged, and we've been tullied by a pom."
6:00 Dominic Sandbrook? I don't think it said by a pom, it says by an Englishman.
6:02 Tom Holland? No, he did, he said by an Englishman, he did say by an Englishman. So as our Australian listeners will know, and our Kiwi listeners as well, this is one of the foundational moments in their national identity. Perhaps the key moment, I don't know. And it's also, of course, intriguingly and suggestively, a key moment in the formation of what will become, in due course, the Republic of Turkey. So Dominic, it is a really historically significant episode.
6:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Absolutely, it is.
6:34 Tom Holland? For countries that are, you know, as different as Australia, New Zealand, and Turkey, but it's also... It's it's not a story in which Britain comes out well. I mean, it's kind of, let's be blunt, it's a cataclysmic disaster.
6:49 Dominic Sandbrook? It is. So hello, everybody. Yes, it's a massively important moment in the history of Australia, New Zealand, and indeed Turkey. But it's also one of the most colourful and gripping stories of the entire First World War. And as you say, Gallipoli ranks among the great military catastrophes of modern times. And you say the British don't come out well. I mean, some Britons come out extremely well, but others do not. And chief among those who do not is arguably the most celebrated man in all British history, Winston Churchill.
7:18 Tom Holland? So let me rephrase that. We've been talking about this phrase lions led by donkeys throughout and kind of slightly debunking it. I think this is the example of lions being led by absolute idiots.
7:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, we shall see. We shall see. I mean, among the men at Gallipoli, not just Winston Churchill, the man who carries the can for this disastrous operation, but Churchill's wartime deputy in the Second World War and successor as Prime Minister Clement Attlee, he was a captain.
7:43 Tom Holland? And he has a horrible time, doesn't he? Kind of crawling around among poo.
7:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, dysentery. Yes, dysentery. The father of modern Turkey, the single best known Turkish person of the last, you know, couple of hundred years, Mustafa Kemal, Ataturk, Father Turk. He makes his name at Gallipoli. Australia's greatest military hero, John Monash, he makes his name at Gallipoli. But all roads lead back to the man who came up with the entire scheme.
8:13 Tom Holland? The wheeze.
8:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, the man who dominates 20th century British history, and that man is, of course, the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston S Churchill, because it's his idea to turn the tide of the First World War by landing thousands of British, French, Australian and New Zealand troops on the Gallipoli peninsula, south of Constantinople. And we will see how that works out.
8:36 Tom Holland? So for those who listen to our series on the Battle of Marathon, that's the Thracian Chersonese, as was the Hellespont, isn't it?
8:44 Dominic Sandbrook? It is exactly the Hellespont. So let's start with Churchill himself.
8:49 Dominic Sandbrook? At the turn of 1915, Winston Churchill is still only 40 years old. And a couple of years ago, we did a series on the young Churchill, looking at his life, particularly in the 1890s. He has had an extraordinary life up to this point, an extraordinary four decades. He's fought in India, in Sudan, in South Africa. He was famously captured by the Burghs and escaped from a prisoner of war camp. He became a Tory MP. Then he defected to the Liberals. He became Home Secretary for the Liberals, for the Asquith government. Then First Lord of the Admiralty, his dream job really, running the Royal Navy. And he's been there since 1911.
9:30 Dominic Sandbrook? And when war approached in the late summer of 1914, Churchill was terribly excited. He loved the idea of a war. He's a martial sort of person. He's always put himself in harm's way and he can't wait to get stuck in. And a few months later, even after it's obvious that the war is going to be a terrible classicism for Europe, he's still thrilled and excited by it. So he sits next to Margot Asquith, the Prime Minister's wife, at a dinner on the 10th of January, and he says to her, "My God, this is living history. It will be read by a thousand generations. Think of that. Why I would not be out of this glorious, delicious war for anything the world could give me." And then he stops and he says, "I say, don't repeat that I said the word delicious.
10:15 Dominic Sandbrook? You know what I mean."
10:16 Tom Holland? I mean, he's a man who loves, actually, I mean, not just excitement, but a disaster. Because he famously said of the Titanic that it was a triumph for British pluck.
10:25 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly.
10:26 Tom Holland? Which I think is one way of framing it.
10:28 Dominic Sandbrook? And this is another one.
10:29 Tom Holland? Yes, it is indeed.
10:30 Dominic Sandbrook? This week, yes. And of course, for Churchill, the great disappointment of the war is that he is the First Lord of the Admiralty, but the German fleet, by and large, stays in port. So he doesn't get the great naval showdown that he's hoping for. Even so, Churchill sees his every opportunity to put himself at the centre of this stage. So only a couple of months into the war, in October 1914, he sends what's basically a sort of private army that is cobbled together of naval reservists, the Royal Naval Division. To Antwerp, which is still under siege by the Germans. He says, my Royal Naval Division will save Antwerp. And he actually goes himself to Antwerp and he offers Asquith his resignation and says, I would like to take personal charge of the defence of Antwerp. This is refused.
11:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Antwerp promptly falls and everybody back home says Churchill made an absolute fool of himself at Antwerp. He sent the Royal Naval Division for no reason. The press, the Morning Post, for example, Tory paper slams him as an erratic amateur. The Secretary of War, Lord Kitchener, says it was a piratical adventure. Even Asquith, the Prime Minister, says it was wicked folly to have sent so many men to Antwerp and to have made such a hullabaloo about it when it was obvious it was going to fall. But the point about Churchill, Churchill loves a gimmick. He loves a wheeze of a stunt and he will do anything to put himself at the centre of the story.
11:53 Tom Holland? Do you think, just to stick up for him, because we're going to dump on him quite a lot over the course of this, the next two episodes. I mean, in a sense, he is right, isn't he? That there is this stalemate and it's obvious on the Western Front, but it is also apparent at sea. And in a sense, if you're going to break the stalemate, perhaps you do need to some left field thinking, some blue sky thinking. It's just that his blue sky thinking turns out not to be, well, a bit dark, really.
12:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, it's not, it's the storm clouds of war are very, very much present in Churchill's blue sky thinking.
12:23 Tom Holland? But there is a problem.
12:25 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course, he's absolutely right that there's a stalemate on the Western Front and that it would be brilliant if they could break it. But his idea, which is we will come up with sort of great distraction and displacement exercises that will somehow, you know, obviate the need for an attritional campaign on the Western Front. He is deluded. The war is only ever going to be won on the Western Front.
12:45 Tom Holland? I'm amazed he didn't come up with my wheeze of invading Switzerland.
12:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
12:49 Tom Holland? We'd have got on, I think.
12:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, you would have got on. Anyway, so he's casting around for something to do. And it's at this point that his gaze falls on the Ottoman Empire. Now, to remind people about the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, which is always referred to in the shorthand as Turkey, although it's not just Turkey, of course. The Ottoman Dynasty had been ruling in Constantinople for almost 500 years. And in 1914, they're governing this vast, multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire, multicultural, more than 40 million people from the shores of the Mediterranean to the sands of Arabia. And this empire famously described as the sick man of Europe is in a pretty ramshackle condition.
13:33 Dominic Sandbrook? So having once been, you know, one of Europe's great powers, it's now fallen behind the industrial powerhouses of Western Europe. It's still very much a rural agricultural society, pre-industrial in many ways. In the late 19th century, the Ottomans had started to lose their Balkan territories. So they'd lost Serbia, they'd lost Bulgaria, they'd lost Romania. And in 1908, a group of officers in the army, a little bit like the Meiji Restoration in Japan, a group of army officers who were fed up with this, they were generally European born, so they were from the Balkans, they were from precisely the part of the empire that was beginning to fragment. And they were called the Young Turks and they decided they wanted to reverse the decline of the empire.
14:17 Dominic Sandbrook? They seize power in effectively a coup and they turn the Sultan into a puppet and the Young Turks now run the empire.
14:24 Tom Holland? And how does that go?
14:25 Dominic Sandbrook? It doesn't go terribly well because just four years later, the first Balkan war breaks out in 1912 and by the following year, the Ottomans have lost pretty much all their Balkan provinces except for eastern Thrace. So that's the bit right next to Constantinople.
14:43 Tom Holland? And some of the possessions they lose are what are now northern Greece, right?
14:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, northern Greece, north Macedonia, parts of Bulgaria, Serbia and so on, Albania.
14:54 Tom Holland? Specifically, they lose the city of Salonika, so Thessaloniki as today. And there is one particular officer who was born there, right?
15:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly right. So, and he is one of many people, hundreds of thousands of people actually, who are driven out of their homes, who lose their homeland, who are murdered, who are killed and so on and so forth. So these Albanian and Turkish Muslims. And this guy in particular, he was born in Salonika, as it would have been called at the time. He's an army officer, he fought against the Bulgarians in Thrace and his name is Mustafa Kemal. And we'll be coming back to Mustafa Kemal later on.
15:28 Tom Holland? Have you seen his house?
15:29 Dominic Sandbrook? I have, in Thessaloniki, yeah, I have, yes.
15:31 Tom Holland? Next to the Turkish consulate?
15:33 Dominic Sandbrook? It's very good. Yeah, I actually really like Thessaloniki, I think it's great. I mean, a lot of it is very modern because of earthquakes and fires and things, but yeah, it's a tremendous place.
15:41 Tom Holland? Yeah, it's great.
15:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Anyway, war breaks out in 1914. And the Ottoman Empire at first, rather like Italy, doesn't get involved, but it is keen to shop around for the best offer. And the young Turk leadership, in particular their war minister, who's called Enver, are basically putting out feelers to various parties, saying, what can you offer us? But it's always most likely that they will get into bed with the central powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. And the reason is that before the First World War, the Germans had worked really hard to win influence in the Ottoman Empire. They'd put loads of money into a very controversial railway link, which was going to go all the way from Berlin to Baghdad. And they had sent a Prussian general, who was called Otto Lehmann von Sanders, to modernise
16:24 Dominic Sandbrook? the Ottoman Empire along kind of German lines.
16:28 Tom Holland? Isn't there another reason also why they were always going to side with the central powers? Which is that their big paranoia is Russia. And Russia's abiding passion has been to seize Constantinople, to seize control of the Bosphorus, to seize control of the Dardanus, so that they will then be able to get into the Mediterranean. And essentially, Turkish policy throughout the 19th century has always been to ally with whichever powers will take their side against Russia. And most famously, that had happened in the Crimean War, when Turkey, the Ottomans, had allied with Britain and France. And now, of course, the issue is that Britain and France are allied with Russia. So therefore, the Turks were always going to ally with Germany, don't you think?
17:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, interestingly, Enver does actually shop around a fair bit. So they do offer a deal to the Russians, and have the Russians taken it. Who knows? It's not absolutely decided in 1914, 15, the Ottomans will jump the way they do. And in fact, there are a lot of people in Constantinople who don't want to get involved at all.
17:28 Tom Holland? Well, that's the most sensible course. I mean, as with the Italians.
17:31 Dominic Sandbrook? There's a big internal discussion. Anyway, Enver, the war minister, is very keen on the Germans. And in mid October 1914, he agrees a secret deal with the Germans. Basically, the plan is the Germans will give them a load of gold and the Germans will promise them their Balkan territories back if they win the war. And so basically, the way they get into the war is at the end of October, Enver sends an Ottoman fleet led by two German cruisers that are flying Ottoman colours for various complicated reasons. They go up into the Black Sea, they bombard the Russian ports in Odessa and the Crimea. The Russians, of course, then declare war on the Ottoman Empire and Enver and his colleagues say brilliant, now it's on.
18:14 Dominic Sandbrook? And a couple of weeks later, the Sultan Mehmed V, they get him to proclaim a holy war, a jihad against the Allies. And this very much, you know, this excites people in Britain, it seizes their imagination, terrifies them. It's the context for John Buckland's great thriller, Green Mantle.
18:32 Tom Holland? Comes out in 1916, doesn't it?
18:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, which has this great fear of a jihad and a holy war and a sort of general Muslim uprising across Asia. But actually, in real life, this does not happen at all. And as one historian puts it, the jihad is, and I quote, "a miserable failure." So basically, it doesn't get anywhere.
18:50 Tom Holland? But, I mean, it is an important context for why the British, once they've engaged in Gallipoli, are reluctant to retreat, is that they're nervous that any loss of face might precipitate a kind of Asian-wide jihad against the empire.
19:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So how does the war go at first for the Ottomans? It does not go well at all. So Enver takes 100,000 men and he leads them east to face the Russians in the Caucasus. And his plan is that he will encircle and destroy the Russian Caucasus army at a place called Sarakamish, which is a border town close to the border with modern-day Armenia. And the conditions at Sarakamish are absolutely awful, even by First World War standards. So they're 10,000 feet high, there are snowstorms, the temperature goes down to minus 26 degrees Celsius. By mid-December 1914, thousands upon thousands of men on both sides are dying of hypothermia or frostbite or typhus.
19:49 Dominic 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.
20:30 Tom Holland? And Dominic, which it has consistently been British policy to stop the Russians getting hold of.
20:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Correct.
20:36 Tom Holland? 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.
20:49 Dominic 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 and the beginning of the Mediterranean. This strait is called the Dardanelles.
21:31 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Chanukali.
21:56 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
22:08 Tom Holland? So that is the Thracian Chersonese, as was.
22:11 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
22:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Number two, if we took the straits and we were bombarding or indeed occupying Constantinople, 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, Churchill's
23:41 Dominic Sandbrook? idea wasn't that mad. So for example, we mentioned Clement Attlee. 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.
23:50 Tom Holland? Essentially, the Churchill's plan requires sea power alone.
23:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
23:56 Tom Holland? To, to win the war. So it's a bit like the reliance today on air power to win wars. That's that would be the kind of contemporary analogy.
24:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I guess so. So Churchill at this point is not talking about using about using troops and we'll get on to how the plan changes.
24:10 Tom Holland? But the plan is that the ships sail up, they more off Constantinople, they bombard it and the Turks surrender.
24:15 Dominic Sandbrook? And then the Turks change sides. Yeah, that's magically the Turks then change sides.
24:19 Tom Holland? It seems improbable.
24:21 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Aegean 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.
25:03 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders."
25:18 Tom Holland? I mean, you can see the force of that argument, can't you?
25:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course. However, you can also see the counter arguments.
25:25 Tom Holland? You can, yes.
25:26 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 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. And so Admiral Cardan says, well, I suppose it is doable. You know, we'd first of all, we'd destroy the, what I call 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.
26:11 Dominic Sandbrook? We'd send minesweepers in to clear the straits of mines. And then we would send our fleet in towards Constantinople.
26:19 Tom Holland? Entirely through naval operations?
26:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
26:22 Tom Holland? They're not proposing that they destroy these fleets by landing soldiers to do it. They do it with the guns from their battleships.
26:28 Dominic 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 is History series. Herbert Henry Asquith, the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, his Chancellor, Sir Edward Gray, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, Sir John French, the British Commander on the Western Front.
27:03 Tom Holland? Oh, well, I mean, if he's there, what could possibly go wrong?
27:06 Dominic 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 Maurice 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. The Turkish guns and forts, merely an inconvenience. Now, actually, Churchill is not being honest with them.
27:49 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. He's talking about doing it with naval power alone. And as even his hackiographer, Andrew Roberts, says, this is mad because ships cannot
28:30 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, that 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 is absolutely besotted with his daughter's
29:14 Dominic Sandbrook? mate, Venetia Stanley, who is 27. 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.
29:38 Tom Holland? Snap out of it. Focus.
29:40 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, 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. So it's great that Venetia Stanley will be invited.
30:07 Tom Holland? What are her views on forcing the? Forcing the dardanelles.
30:11 Dominic Sandbrook? We don't know because her letters, her letters are lost. Who knows?
30:14 Tom Holland? It's a lost military strategy.
30:16 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 half time.
30:47 Tom Holland? Do they have soldiers in reserve at all? Or is it entirely naval at this point?
30:53 Dominic 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.
31:04 Tom Holland? Right.
31:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Remember, the pre-war army has effectively been 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.
31:23 Tom 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?
31:31 Dominic Sandbrook? No, no.
31:32 Tom Holland? And that's, that's where the war is going to be won or lost.
31:34 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. 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
32:18 Dominic Sandbrook? fault that we lost this terrible battle. It's actually the fault of fifth columnists and traitors within the Armenians.
32:24 Tom Holland? Who stabbed us in the back.
32:25 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. 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.
33:01 Tom Holland? Well, he'd launched the Dreadnought, hadn't he? The first Dreadnought, HMS Dreadnought, the kind of the prototype for that entire class.
33:07 Dominic Sandbrook? He had been the man in charge of the navy before the war and he'd been brought back from retirement in 1914.
33:14 Tom Holland? Jan Morris's great hero. She loved him, always writing books about him.
33:18 Dominic 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. He would go to, 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 suffered from seasickness. On the other hand, he was an incredibly good and enthusiastic dancer.
33:40 Tom Holland? How did he have time with all the church and the?
33:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Also dancing on board ship, if you were seasick.
33:46 Tom Holland? Sloshing all over the place.
33:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. Anyway, Fisher is a great character. Everybody loves Fisher. They're very excited that he's been brought back, rather like bringing back Kitchener to run the War Office. But actually, 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 Dardanelle 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. Churchill doesn't listen to him. Fisher is more and more enraged.
34:32 Dominic Sandbrook? He goes to see Lloyd George's secretary slash mistress, Frances Stevenson, and he says, "We are trying, 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,
35:17 Dominic Sandbrook? launches the first stage of the operation.
35:19 Tom Holland? So the French have, they've joined as well?
35:21 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
35:29 Tom Holland? And they've basically joined because they are, they're the Allies, they've got ships.
35:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, exactly. So they're in the 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, who 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, it's just 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 daughter Violet at a dinner. He says, "I love this war. I know it is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment, and yet I
36:17 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 in Gallipoli.
36:27 Tom Holland? Yeah.
36:28 Dominic Sandbrook? And he says, "It's going, 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, on 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."
37:03 Tom Holland? Some chicken, some neck.
37:05 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, absolutely insane from Churchill. 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've brought up more artillery. And some of Churchill's own, you know, subordinates are now becoming extremely anxious about this. So Admiral Carden, who was already ill, two days before the operation, has a complete nervous breakdown and has to be sort of taken away.
37:49 Dominic Sandbrook? And he is replaced by his vice admiral, John de Robec, 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. Sixteen British and French ships steam towards the entrance to the Narrows, the Straits.
38:12 Dominic Sandbrook? And immediately, things go wrong. So one of the French ships, the Buvay, 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. 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 Robec says, "Okay, we're calling off this off, this has been an absolute shambles."
38:54 Dominic Sandbrook? They have cleared one line of mines out of nine. Of 176 Turkish shoreguns, they have knocked out precisely four.
39:04 Dominic Sandbrook? And of their sixteen 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 thirty British lives and two or three worthless ships. So the French, he just forgets about them. He 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?
39:43 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. Are 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
40:26 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 the authority of our empire is based on the
41:06 Dominic Sandbrook? perception of our superiority. Quote, the effect of a defeat in the Orient would be very serious.
41:12 Tom Holland? I mean, it's, there's a slight kind of Trump wanting to pull out of the Iran war.
41:17 Dominic Sandbrook? The, 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
42:01 Dominic Sandbrook? coastline, and then we can send our ships through. It will be dead easy, and nothing could possibly go wrong. But could it?
42:10 Tom Holland? We will find out after a break.
42:15 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by Disclosure Day. The new movie Disclosure Day is directed by legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg.
42:23 Tom 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?
42:38 Dominic Sandbrook? See, I'm, 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.
42:52 Tom 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.
43:11 Dominic Sandbrook? But on the big screen. Disclosure Day is in cinemas Wednesday, June 10th. So book your tickets now.
43:38 Speaker 03 We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.
43:44 Speaker 04 Holding the Russians accountable is World War III. They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.
43:49 Speaker 05 Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not?
43:55 Speaker 04 You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!
44:02 Speaker 04 We would need to understand the policy context.
44:05 Speaker 05 All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.
44:13 Speaker 06 A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?
44:18 Speaker 05 Yes.
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45:05 Tom 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?
45:21 Dominic 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.
45:42 Tom Holland? So can I just ask, the nearest land bases that Britain has are what, Egypt and Cyprus?
45:47 Dominic 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, who's a guy called Sir Ian Hamilton. So Ian Hamilton is often given a very bad press in books about Gallipoli. You know, 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, he is regarded as, you know, the most cerebral, the most intellectual of the British Army's senior officers. He's
46:32 Dominic Sandbrook? 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's, you know, that suggests that he's not, 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, you know, by sea on enemy territory facing modern technology. He's been given a month to plan it. So this is not D-Day, you know, months and months in the planning. This is going to be much quicker.
47:11 Tom Holland? But presumably even a month is giving the Ottomans time to beef up their defences.
47:15 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 of War, Lord 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'd been serving all over, you know, 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. Then there is Churchill's Royal Naval Division. Churchill's so proud of this, you know, his favourite child or whatever. They're basically a load of naval reservists and volunteers
48:00 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
48:08 Tom Holland? Right.
48:09 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. And these had been made up of volunteers, sent by the two dominions of Australia and New Zealand at the outbreak of war. They thought they were going to fight in Europe, and they have been training in the desert outside Cairo.
48:44 Tom Holland? So that will prepare them for the mud of Flanders.
48:46 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
49:13 Tom Holland? It's like a kind of Australian ashes preview.
49:16 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 of New Zealanders. But actually, in Cairo, these blokes don't bring great credit on the
50:00 Tom Holland? Cairo!
50:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, it's Cairo. They don't bring great credit on the Australian flag. They, there's a lot of fighting, there's a lot of drunkenness, there's a lot of looting, there's a lot of sexual misbehaviour, there's allegations of rape. Two out of 10 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 Wazir. And this is, 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.
50:42 Tom Holland? Oh.
50:42 Dominic Sandbrook? And there's a huge, there's a massive riot, basically, as they run amok, anyway.
50:47 Tom Holland? But I suppose it helps to build up elite mateship.
50:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Do you think so, elite mateship?
50:51 Tom Holland? Elite mateship is what the Anzac spirit is all about.
50:54 Dominic Sandbrook? It is, it's all about mateship. Yeah. So they could, they could not be in a better condition.
51:00 Tom Holland? They're ready to have a crack, a crack at the Turk.
51:02 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 of this kind of operation, it hasn't really been done before.
51:19 Tom Holland? I mean, it just, the more you go on, the madder the whole scheme seems.
51:22 Dominic Sandbrook? But the rationale for it, obviously, is they say, yeah, but all that doesn't matter because it's only the Turks. So as soon as we get ashore, the Turks will undoubtedly run away.
51:33 Tom Holland? Because they are just hanging around, smoking hookahs and drinking very sick coffee.
51:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, this brings us to Johnny Turk, as the, 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 defence of their native land, for their native soil. The idea that they're just going to run away is laughable. And they have been very busy. So this German guy, Otto Lehmann von Sanders, he has been modernising the Ottoman army and he has now been moved specifically to the Dartan Isles and told.
52:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Take charge of the Fifth Army, the Ottoman Fifth 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. We'll establish trenches, we'll establish our barbed wire, we will lay mines, we will bring have supply roads ready to bring up more ammunition. We will prepare our positions on the high ground. When the Allies lands, 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
53:07 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. And one of the men on the island is the Cambridge educated poet Rupert Brooke. And Rupert Brooke is 27 years old. He is, he was described by W. B. Yeats as the handsomest man in England. I always find that kind of ludicrous. Like, has Yeats seen every other man in England? No, he hasn't.
53:49 Tom Holland? I mean, he is in an absolute laugher of excitement about all the classical and the historical associations, isn't he?
53:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
53:56 Tom Holland? 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."
54:16 Tom Holland? I mean, his dream will come true, or will it?
54:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, will it? Brooke 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.
54:31 Tom 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.
54:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, he will lead his men over the plain of Troy under beating sunshine.
54:42 Tom Holland? In a chariot.
54:45 Dominic Sandbrook? You know, everyone cheering.
54:46 Tom Holland? Yeah, the most handsome man in England in blade, you know, in burning armour. How does he die, Dominic?
54:52 Dominic Sandbrook? He's bitten on the lip by a mosquito. 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, this report in the newspapers, the Asquith family knew him very well. They were devastated by this. Churchill knew him, was devastated, wrote a absolutely sort of tear stained, syrupy obituary for him, I think in The Times.
55:32 Dominic Sandbrook? And you might say, this is quite a bad omen, that this bloke who was going to lead the kind of the attack on Troy.
55:38 Tom Holland? I just think generally attacking Troy is not sensible.
55:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
55:42 Tom Holland? And it's going to go on for 10 years at least.
55:44 Dominic Sandbrook? There's a slight sign at this point, I think the 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, is, is it, how's it going to go, this business at Gallipoli? You know, you must be absolutely, 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 favour and we play for vital gains with non-vital stakes. 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.
56:28 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Kum Kala 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.
56:53 Tom Holland? What a wheeze.
56:54 Dominic Sandbrook? And then a brilliant wheeze, actually, the Royal Naval Division will pretend to land at a place called Bollea, which is in the north of the peninsula. And actually, they get New Zealand's greatest war hero, Bernard Frayberg. He swims ashore and lights flares on the beach to distract the defenders and then he swims back again. And this is an incredible feat of New Zealand pluck. There's not as much New Zealand action in this story as there should be.
57:23 Tom Holland? Well, New Zealand is generally more retiring, aren't they, I think, than Australians?
57:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Unless it comes to rugby.
57:29 Tom Holland? Yeah, I guess.
57:31 Dominic Sandbrook? They're putting all their energies into rugby and not enough into boasting about their martial feats. Is that true?
57:35 Tom Holland? Yeah, all swimming ashore and lighting flares.
57:37 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Third Australian Infantry Brigade. They will 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 Twenty-Ninth Division, will land at the very southern tip of the peninsula, which is called Cape Helles. And there are five beaches, S, V, W, X and Y, around this tip, and they will land at these five beaches.
58:14 Tom Holland? Can I just ask, are there more British than Anzacs?
58:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
58:19 Tom Holland? Because that's not the sense you get, is it, generally?
58:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Are you dissing, are you dissing Australian stuff?
58:24 Tom Holland? No, I'm not dissing, I, I mean, my sense is that Gallipoli was entirely fought by Anzac's. I think that's the kind of the vague sense you have.
58:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
58:32 Tom Holland? And that there are British generals lurking in the background, being sinister and posh and like Douglas Jardine.
58:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, drinking tea.
58:38 Tom Holland? Yeah.
58:38 Dominic Sandbrook? They're, they're drinking tea and swimming, the British on the beach, while Australian, plucky Australian boys, who've come with cork hats from the, from the outback, outback have been mown down by cruel Turkish gunners.
58:49 Tom Holland? Loads of British being mown down as well.
58:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, we will see. Yeah, loads of British being mown down.
58:53 Tom Holland? Yeah.
58:54 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, will they? We'll find out. 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.
59:24 Tom Holland? I mean, just, has this ever happened before?
59:26 Dominic Sandbrook? No, no one has ever done this before.
59:29 Tom Holland? I mean, that's a massive ask.
59:31 Dominic Sandbrook? It's huge.
59:31 Tom Holland? You've been, you've come all the way from Australia, you've had, what, six, six months of training? You've got to do something that no one in, no one in military history has done.
59:39 Dominic 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 in the back of their minds all through D-Day because it was such a shambles. So to go back to the Anzac's, 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, 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 Steigl's of the Third Australian Battalion. He was part of the second wave that went ashore. And I'll read what he's, what he said. "It was pitch dark, then all of a sudden the coast, a dim outline of the coast loomed up.
1:00:22 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. 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.
1:01:04 Tom Holland? Oh, God.
1:01:05 Dominic Sandbrook? So it takes them about four hours to get their men ashore, the Ann Saxons.
1:01:09 Tom Holland? It's amazing they do get ashore, really.
1:01:12 Dominic Sandbrook? It is. It's very impressive. I mean, that opening reading, I mean, they do perform very, very bravely.
1:01:17 Tom Holland? Yeah.
1:01:18 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 be seen, but the air was literally full of bullets and the sound was deafening. The point-blank explosion of rifles and the concealed snipers firing on us at close quarters. Our bayonet charge had failed, the men became disorganised. Some ran about distractively, poking in 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 inland.
1:02:03 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, 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,
1:02:48 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, that would, 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 around and they run back into the fray and they drive the Australians back down towards the beach.
1:03:26 Tom Holland? I mean, the Australians do love a beach.
1:03:28 Dominic Sandbrook? The Australians do love a beach, but you wouldn't associate Australians with going backwards, would you?
1:03:33 Tom Holland? No, you wouldn't, no.
1:03:34 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Fielders of the 12th Battalion.
1:03:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Four of us lay under shrapnel, machine gun and rifle fire, not daring to lift our heads the whole while. If we'd budge, we'd have been killed dozens of times over. The bullets were streaming so thick over our heads. 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.
1:04:14 Tom Holland? That's impressive.
1:04:15 Dominic Sandbrook? That's so impressive.
1:04:16 Tom Holland? I mean, do you think, is this worse than fighting on the Western Front? It is really, isn't it?
1:04:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I think in the grand scheme of things.
1:04:24 Tom Holland? 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.
1:04:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, it's really hot. As we will see, particularly in our next episode, in Thursday's episode. I think the conditions of Gallipoli are just unbelievably hellish.
1:04:41 Tom Holland? Yeah.
1:04:41 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 favour was it wasn't Gallipoli, which was so much worse.
1:04:51 Tom Holland? Yeah, it sounds awful.
1:04:53 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
1:05:00 Tom Holland? Have a Barbie.
1:05:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Anyway, night falls, the Anzacs do have a foothold. They've got this little pocket with a kind of perimeter, which is about two miles long. 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 Helles. 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 Alma Hunter Weston, Hunter Bunter. He says to them, "The eyes
1:05:43 Dominic Sandbrook? 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."
1:05:52 Tom Holland? So I looked him up.
1:05:53 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. Moustache, very good moustache.
1:05:55 Tom Holland? Excellent moustache. I think the best British military moustache I've seen so far.
1:06:00 Dominic Sandbrook? I think the moustaches at Gallipoli by and large are better than, across the board, than British moustaches on the Western Front.
1:06:07 Tom Holland? So Ataturk had an excellent moustache.
1:06:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Sorry, pencil though.
1:06:10 Tom Holland? Hunter Bunter's moustache 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's a fan of military moustaches.
1:06:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Moustaches. Right. Now, things here at Cape Helles do not go 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 lay down by the barbed wire. The front of the wire by now is a thick mass of men, the majority of whom never moved again. The trenches on the right raked us and those above us raked
1:07:09 Dominic Sandbrook? our right. Were trenches and machine guns fired straight down the valley. The noise was ghastly. The sights horrible." I mean, just, so they've got to land, they're stuck on the barbed wire and they're just being absolutely raked by machine gun fire. So the Lancashire Fusiliers, they went ashore with twenty seven officers and one thousand and two men. They end the day with sixteen officers and just three hundred and four men.
1:07:33 Tom Holland? But have they secured a foothold?
1:07:35 Dominic Sandbrook? They have secured a little foothold. I mean, they've 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. 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.
1:08:16 Tom Holland? Not a literal horse.
1:08:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Not a literal horse, but a ship.
1:08:19 Tom Holland? Roll the horse off the beach. I mean, it'd be original.
1:08:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Frankly, frankly.
1:08:25 Tom Holland? I mean, it couldn't go worse.
1:08:27 Dominic Sandbrook? I wouldn't put it past them. And you're not wrong. It couldn't go worse than what they actually did. So they said, instead of using 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 two thousand 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, and the actual sand. So all the men will be able to jump off the River Clyde onto the steam hopper, and then
1:09:08 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 of supply depot, all of this.
1:09:26 Tom Holland? I think it's quite a good idea.
1:09:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Do you?
1:09:28 Tom Holland? How does it go?
1:09:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, we'll find out. So, so they start bombarding the beach, and then they're going to send up the Dublin Fusiliers first, uh, 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 eighty 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
1:10:12 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 scythed 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 twenty-five in my boat and there were only three of us left. It was terrible to hear our poor chums moaning and 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
1:10:54 Dominic Sandbrook? the shore, in the evening, the tide came in and they were all drowned and I was left by myself on the beach. So that's, that's not great.
1:11:02 Tom Holland? No.
1:11:03 Dominic Sandbrook? And then what about this ship, the River Clyde?
1:11:05 Tom Holland? Yeah, I'm sure that comes to the rescue.
1:11:07 Dominic Sandbrook? It's just sitting there. It's just sitting there, right? And the Turks are just hammering shells at it and bullets.
1:11:13 Tom Holland? Oh, it's a mad idea to have done that then.
1:11:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, precisely, right?
1:11:17 Tom Holland? Stupid idea.
1:11:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Because the men can't jump off, they're in six feet of water, their packs are so heavy, they would just be dragged down and drowned. And this guy who came up with the idea, Unwin, can see that it's all falling apart. And to 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.
1:11:47 Tom Holland? Okay, that is impressive.
1:11:49 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 are being raked 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, 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
1:12:34 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, but 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 Clyde 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 to shore." 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 ever 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
1:13:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Napier, says, "No, no, we can still do this." And he jumps down from the ship onto the gangway and he says, "Go 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.
1:13:45 Tom Holland? I suppose they couldn't recognise it if his head's been blown to pieces.
1:13:49 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
1:13:59 Dominic Sandbrook? It's carry on men and then another bullet hits and that's the end of him as well.
1:14:04 Tom Holland? God.
1:14:05 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 they get ashore, a lot of them by basically using the bodies as a bridge.
1:14:31 Tom Holland? But just to be clear, if they're all now on the beach, I mean, they're just exposed.
1:14:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, it's night.
1:14:37 Tom Holland? Yeah, I know. But when dawn comes, won't they all just be shot to pieces?
1:14:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, no, because they do manage to push a little, at Cape Helles, they do manage to push a little way inland. So they lost 2000 men and they'd lost 2000 men at Anzac Cove. But in the south, they do manage to push a little bit further.
1:14:57 Tom Holland? So it's a great triumph.
1:14:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, they have not come remotely close to realising 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 to do is to run away. And that evening, the Anzac commander, who was called William Birdwood, he sent a signal to Sir Ian Hamilton. And he said, you know, my men have performed heroically, but they are thoroughly demoralised by sniper 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
1:15:39 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 are doing.
1:16:08 Tom Holland? Diggers for Anzac troops comes from.
1:16:10 Dominic Sandbrook? I think it is actually. Yeah, I was, I, I, this is my assumption, I guess, although I'm not certain. So both at Anzac Cove and at Cape Helies 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 back in the trenches.
1:16:37 Tom Holland? And I assume that it is much harder to dig trenches here than it is in the mud of Flanders.
1:16:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Definitely is, definitely is, and in the chalklands of the Ain 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.
1:16:59 Tom 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 grammar. Goodbye. Bye bye.
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