July 14, 2009

By Joshua Silverstein

Mr. Silverstein ([email protected]) is a senior history major at Yale University and a member of the highly selective Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, an interdisciplinary course in statecraft and leadership. This piece was written during his sophomore year for a Graduate level International Relations course and was praised by Churchill scholars Col. David Jablonsky and Sir Martin Gilbert. Joshua’s next major project is his senior thesis, which will be written under the guidance of the Cold War historian, John Gaddis. Mr. Silverstein is treasurer of Yale’s History Honor Society and is currently using a fellowship from Yale’s Center for International Security Studies to intern for the Truman National Security Project in Washington D.C.

The Search for a Solution

I think it is quite possible that neither side will have the strength to penetrate the other’s line in the Western theatre…My impression is that the position of both armies is not likely to undergo any decisive change-although no doubt several hundred thousand men will be spent to satisfy the military mind on the point…On the assumption that these views are correct, the question arises, how ought we to apply our growing military power. Are there not other alternatives than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders…If it is impossible or unduly costly to pierce the German lines on existing fronts, ought we not, as new forces come to hand, engage him on new frontiers?[1]

At almost the start of the war, Winston Churchill articulated the question that would dog him for the next four years, since every operation, plan or enterprise he crafted from 1914 to 1918 can be seen as a response to it.

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Even before the murderous offensives at the Somme and Passchendaele, Churchill had already realized the enormous advantage trench warfare provided a defender against his attacker, which made attacks on the Western Front, the war’s primary battleground, strategically ineffective. Yet for four years the British and French threw themselves against entrenched machine gun positions only to be rewarded with insignificant swathes of muddy land and the loss of millions. Churchill contended there was a better way.

As the character of this “total war” came into clearer view, Churchill adopted two goals: defeat the Germans, and avoid unnecessary carnage. His grand strategy was to weaken Germany by attacking its more vulnerable periphery, opening up new fronts in distant theaters. His objective was to win peripheral victories, bringing new support for the British-French-Russian Triple Entente, while force Germany and the other Central Powers to rearrange their military and economic resources to the detriment of their western defenses.

Altering in the balance of forces in the west, Churchill believed, would allow a coordinated offensive that would overwhelm German defenses, break the stalemate of trench warfare, and ultimately, end the war. Attacking the Germans on multiple fronts would weaken their most decisive one.

Churchill’s strategy was unique not so much for its tactical and operational elements, but for recognizing the unity of politics, economics and war. As Churchill wrote, “The distinction between politics and strategy diminishes as the point of view is raised. At the summit true politics and strategy are one.”[2]

Churchill recognized the importance of lesser events to the fortunes of war. An action that brought a new ally to the cause, he thought, could be as important as an action that won a battle.[3]

Churchill’s strategy was the nexus of the Western and Eastern schools which dominated Allied strategic thinking. Because it recognized the importance of the West, while acknowledging that affairs on the periphery could be equally crucial, the strategy appealed to the British War Cabinet. This is not to say that Churchill was the only man seeking an alternative solution; but his ideas were consistently the most nuanced and most far-reaching in their implications.

Strengths and benefits aside, Churchill’s grand strategy could only be validated by its success. Turkey, Churchill believed, was where the tenets of his strategy-flanking action, overwhelming force and surprise-could set in motion a chain of events that would end in Germany’s defeat. The gamble he took in early of 1915, attacking Turkey at the Dardanelles and Gallipoli, was all the more bitter for its abject failure. To understand his strategy and how it failed is to understand why World War I became the war that it did-and whether it could have been different.

Background to a New Kind of War

World War I was hardly Churchill’s first experience with war; rather, it was the climax of a life devoted to the study and practice of war. Churchill’s involvement in the South African Boer War some fifteen years earlier had suggested a new and disturbing stage in war’s evolution as he witnessed the horrible power of technology against even the most courageous soldiers: “I had carried away from the South African veldt a very lively and modern sense of what rifle bullets could do.”[4] Just a week after arriving in South Africa, Churchill foresaw that “…a long and bloody war is before us – and the end is by no means as certain as most people imagine.”[5] The Boer War, a brutal struggle lacking decisive battles and opportunities for maneuver, had an important impact on Churchill’s concepts as World War I developed.

In South Africa Churchill discerned elements that would characterize total war, such as the Boers’ use of entrenched positions to defend against superior firepower, and interior lines to prevent breaks in the front from gaining momentum.[6] The Boer War also presaged the loss of strategic mobility and mass slaughter that would define the Western Front. Churchill would argue that many deaths on the Western Front were futile, since they were not sacrificed in the execution of a sound strategy. He deplored the utter lack of reason displayed in these early assaults-a failure of generals to respond to a new kind of war that was strikingly different from their past experiences.[7]

Churchill considered it unconscionable to waste valuable soldiers in attacks motivated by nothing more than force of habit and despair. The military’s refusal to alter its methods inspired Churchill’s Clausewitz Ian belief that strategy in total war, which mobilized not just armies but “whole nations,” had to be controlled at the highest level.[8] The military arm was simply insufficient in conflicts between states; thus, it was folly to let the military direct the war. With this reality in mind, Churchill strove to develop a strategy that would combine actions at all levels of warfare in all theaters of conflict.

Components and their Manifestations

Analyzing some of World War I’s early operations and plans, it is possible to identify Churchill’s tactics and methods of warfare. The basic thinking behind his strategy was that if one accepts that breaking the enemy’s lines is impossible-or prohibitively costly-then one should not try to break them. All of Churchill’s operations and maneuvers, both tactical and technical, sought to defeat the Germans without attacking the bulk of their forces on the Western Front: to rout the enemy without actually routing him; to flank him on land or at sea; or to open entirely new fronts against his weakest points.[9]

The defense of Antwerp in 1914 was a flank operation Churchill himself personally conducted. Here he recognized that “Delaying an enemy is often of far greater service than the defeat of the enemy.”[10] This and other flanking operations served both offensive and defensive purposes, slowing the German advance and diverting resources from the thrust of their attack.

Another of Churchill’s key beliefs was that one should only go on the offensive when in possession of overwhelming force. This stemmed from the Allied realization that offensives against an enemy with interior lines inherently lacked depth and momentum. As the war progressed, Churchill saw this logic proven in the blunting of British offensives. On 24 March 1918 he ruefully told David Lloyd George: “Every offensive lost its forced as it proceeded. It was like throwing a bucket of water over the floor. It rushed forward then soaked forward, and finally stopped altogether until another bucket could be brought.”[11]

Breaching the Western Front was, Churchill concluded, simply too costly. The British could never conquer enough territory to make offensives strategically feasible. For this reason he deplored frontal attacks that achieved little because they prevented the Allies from building up sufficiently dominant strength. After the Battle of the Somme, Churchill argued that “the pent-up energies of the army [were] being dissipated” by such offensives.[12] Favoring superiority over parity, Churchill stressed the need for dominant troop strength and, recognizing the holistic nature of war, turned to the power of technology and economic strength to augment the power of numbers.

If superiority and flanking were two tenets of Churchill’s strategy, then surprise was undoubtedly the third in the trinity. Early in the war Churchill recognized that the ability to surprise the enemy by the strength, location, or timing of an attack was often the key to its success. “Novelty and suddenness” was a force multiplier, increasing the actual power of an attack without augmenting its objective strength.[13] The best illustration of his feelings on surprise comes from his experience in the development and deployment of the tank.

Churchill fervently believed that the tank’s power would come partially from its novelty and ability to shock the enemy into submission. In December 1915 he wrote, “[No tanks] should be used until all can be used at once. They should be disposed secretly along the whole attacking front.”[14] Churchill would rather advance without the tank at all than reveal its technological secrets prematurely, or use it in small, ineffective groupings. He was convinced that if the tank’s surprise had been combined with overwhelming superiority over the length of the front, the war could have been ended with a single battle.

Finally, Churchill sought to use both overwhelming superiority and surprise in actions on the enemy’s flank to confuse their intelligence and determine the deployment of their resources. He recognized that events in other theaters could have a huge impact on German disposition, even if the events themselves were not militarily decisive. This was why Churchill saw that even a distant and indecisive flank could be the enemy’s most vulnerable position.

A convincing example of this principle in action can be found in the crucial linkage between the Marne and Tannenberg battles. At the height of the Battle of the Marne, the German commander Moltke diverted six corps from the West to participate in the destruction of a Russian army in the East. At the crucial moment, when the Allies were literally being driven to the sea, an event in another theater of the war forced the Germans to rearrange their deployments in such a way as to ruin German hopes for victory.

The three fundamental principles of Churchill’s strategy at the tactical and operational levels were thus, overwhelming force and the exploitation of surprise against vulnerable positions on the enemy’s periphery. Alone, force or surprise offered formidable advantages; together Churchill considered them invincible.

In using overwhelming force, Churchill believed he could limit the likelihood of attrition by focusing on single massive offensives that achieved grand strategic objectives. With surprise, Churchill thought he could augment the power of that force by tactical and technical measures to shock the enemy into panic and submission. Churchill combined these traditional principles of war to his own convictions about the importance of the periphery and the flank. If superiority and surprise were exploited fully in a flanking action like Turkey, he was certain the fortunes of war could be turned.

Case Study: The Dardanelles and Gallipoli

The operations in Turkey were the largest and most complicated endeavors involving Churchill during World War I, and the best opportunity for him to carry out his strategy on a grand scale in a way that could change the course of the war. Two questions must be answered: (1) Were Churchill’s initial plans were inherently sound?; and (2) How were they put into practice?

There were two fundamental inconsistencies within the conception and execution of the Turkish campaign. At one level, the effort failed because execution was inept to the point of incompetence. Egregious errors at the operational and tactical levels of war prevented the plan from succeeding. On a second level, the maneuver failed to reflect many of Churchill’s guiding strategic principles. The plans themselves bore little resemblance to the dynamic and aggressive standard he expected. As a result of the exigencies of war, bureaucratic squabbling and a lack of strong cohesive leadership, neither the Dardanelles nor the Gallipoli operations embodied the assertiveness and novelty that were Churchill’s ideals.

In January 1915 the War Council agreed that sailing through the Dardanelles would take Turkey out of the war. Once past the straits into the Sea of Marmara, the navy had only to destroy the paltry Turkish fleet and bombard Constantinople into submission. At a meeting of the War Council on 28 January, Arthur Balfour said the campaign “would cut the Turkish army in two; it would put Constantinople under our control; It would give us the advantage of having the Russian wheat, and enable Russia to resume exports.”[15] The economic benefit was as great as the military advantage.

Politically, Churchill and others thought that attacking Turkey could also unite the then-recalcitrant and uncooperative Balkan neutrals into a powerful coalition. Lloyd George pinpointed the benefit to be gained from a Balkan confederacy, which would confront Germany’s chief ally, Austria-Hungary, with an army of 1.5 million men on its weak and porous southern border.[16]

A Balkan Confederation was the equivalent of a flanking movement, forcing the Central Powers to contend with a new threat and the need to redeploy their forces. The Turkish campaign would combat the Germans not only with armed force, but also with new allies and economic strength. Far from another trench war, it was an aggressive offensive against a vulnerable outpost, to be executed with speed and surprise. It was exactly the kind of operation that total war demanded.

An important question is whether these original plans actually reflected the strategies of Churchill himself. At the tactical level, the goal of the naval operation was to breach the straits and defeat did not mean catastrophe: If the straits could not be breached, the ships would simply retreat and take up another operation. Although Churchill hoped that troops would be available to support the operation, Kitchener’s War Office claimed no sufficient military force was available. No one adamantly objected to Kitchener, because no one had the authority and because most thought the naval action alone could be decisive.

As the date of the naval attack neared, however, many advisers began to voice concerns that the navy alone would not succeed. In response, on 16 February, the War Council voted to prepare 50,000 men to follow up the Dardanelles attack by taking the Gallipoli Peninsula in European Turkey, pressing overland to Constantinople. The army would then take the lead, with the fleet supporting it.

Lloyd George thought that as many as 97,000 troops should be assigned to Gallipoli, as did Churchill.[17] They believed strongly that large troop deployments were necessary for a decisive victory. But for weeks Kitchener refused to send the 29th Division, which they wanted, or any other regular British troops. His hesitation proved crucial. When Kitchener finally agreed to provide the needed troops, naval operations had been halted for over a month while waiting for them. Tactically, initiative, audacity and surprise were all lost, allowing the Turks to prepare their land defenses.

Churchill allowed the naval attack to proceed despite his apprehensions and sadly, his fears proved well founded. The naval attack commenced with the bombardment of the outer forts on 19 February 1915. Six days later, four of the forts had been destroyed.[18] In spite of Churchill’s ardent desire to press the naval attack, several ships fell victim to mines, and the naval operation ceased until sufficient troops could be deployed to support it.

The campaign resumed as a joint naval-military operation with 30,000 men landing at locations on Gallipoli on 25 April. None reached their objectives; individual units were completely separated from the chain of command and had no decisive leadership. General Sir Ian Hamilton, the commanding officer, had no personnel on ground reporting back to headquarters. By 8 a.m. there over 8000 British troops on the peninsula, facing only 500 Turks, but in the confusion of the landing this advantage was not pursued. Soon, rapidly growing Turkish forces encircled the British regiments and trapped them on their beachheads. Hamilton’s massive offensive on 6 May gained only 500 yards.[19] Gallipoli took on the same character as the war in France; the trenches were simply dug in sand and stone instead of mud. When the British finally pulled out on 9 January 1916, they had spent 259 days of gruesome trench warfare without achieving a single military, economic or political objective.

Anatomy of Failure

Why did operations that had for weeks consumed the effort and planning of Britain’s entire military-political apparatus meet such a stunning defeat? The answers are found not only in military strategy but also in domestic politics, not only in Turkey but also in the meetings of the War Council and in Parliament. It was a failure of tactics and strategy, and it is useful to analyze the naval and army operations separately, as each failed for different reasons.

The naval assault failed mainly because it was not fully executed. Vice-Admiral John De Robeck refused to press the attack after 18 March, despite the fact that reports suggested the Turks were low on ammunition.[20] Churchill had also impressed upon De Robeck’s predecessor, Admiral Carden the importance of maintaining constant naval pressure, writing that great losses would be acceptable for the sake of victory. [21] Carden and de Robeck ignored these injunctions. Speaking before the Dardanelles Commission, Churchill declared: “German and Turkish officers have repeatedly stated that the naval attack would have succeeded if it had been persevered in….It is said that only three rounds a gun remained after the 18th of March for the heavy guns in the forts of the Narrows.” Churchill was convinced that had the Navy pushed harder, they could have broken through. Lack of determination was the greatest failing at the Dardanelles.

By contrast, the Gallipoli landings foundered because the military failed to pursue initial tactical and operational advantages and squandered an opportunity for early victory. The opening stages bore witness to the tactical failure. The chain of command between those creating strategy and those implementing it was broken.[22] Successes had depended on a swift attack that employed surprise and overwhelming force. Those assets were squandered when the Turks were given time to regroup. In the aftermath of Gallipoli Churchill wrote, “Force and time in this kind of operation amount to almost the same thing…A week lost was about the same as a division…Three divisions in February could have occupied the Gallipoli Peninsula with little fighting. Five could have captured it after March 18. Seven were insufficient at the end of April.”[23]

The question of Churchill’s responsibility for the failures is complicated, and there are reasons both to support and condemn him. The operational and tactical mistakes by de Robeck and Hamilton did not emanate from him. And Churchill never stopped pushing Kitchener to provide the requisite troops, even when doing so enraged his colleagues, whose influence overruled him with the Prime Minister.

Nevertheless, Churchill approved and advocated a campaign that he knew involved serious deficiencies. He continued to speak in favor of the naval and military operations, even when they had departed from his strategic principles. In retrospect, which is always clearest, Churchill should have opposed and not advocated such operations. He told the Dardanelles Commission: “It is not right to condemn operations of war simply because they involve risk and chance…one can only balance the chance….All war is hazard. Victory is only wrestled by running risks.”[24]

Yet even as the strategic possibilities were withering, Churchill continued to believe the risks were worth taking. He believed that success at the tactical and operation level would outweigh the plan’s strategic incoherence. Ever after, he believed that the Turkish campaign was a gamble-but, given the potential gains, a legitimate one.

The Turkish campaign failed not because Churchill’s grand strategy was flawed, but because the campaign did not pursue that strategy. The Dardanelles and Gallipoli were operations on the flank, but they also lacked surprise, initiative and the aggressive application of overwhelming force. Maurice Hankey, Secretary of the War Council, articulated this basic inconsistency when he wrote” “Although on general principles the operation is brilliantly conceived…We have given the Turks time to assemble a vast force, to pour in field guns and howitzers, to entrench every landing place, and the operation has become a formidable one.”[25]

It was tragic irony that a strategy that intended to circumvent the horrors of trench warfare led to the same kind of stalemate. Turkey was Churchill’s great opportunity to implement his grand strategy on the largest possible scale. His failures were not as a strategist, but as politician; his ego, his ambition, his calculations and his conviction that he could end the Great War in one blow drove him accept operations that defied his most basic precepts. His belief that tactical and operational success could mask strategic incoherence was mistaken. The idea of fighting on periphery to effect change in the decisive theater was revolutionary; the Dardanelles/Gallipoli operation was not. Its failure doomed the British to fight a conflict of mindless and savage attrition.

The End of Strategy

The fire roared on until it burned itself out, as events passed largely outside the scope of conscious choice. Governments and individuals conformed to the rhythm of tragedy, swaying and staggering forward in helpless violence, slaughtering and squandering on ever-increasing scales, until devastating injuries were wrought to the structure of human society.[26]

In Churchill’s view the “art of war” had fallen into “hopelessness.”[27] Grand Strategy requires all the instruments of national power in pursuit of a political objective. World War I became a war dominated solely by military thought.[28] Economics, politics and psychology were largely ignored. In the end victory was won only through German miscalculations and through savage slaughter.

It is impossible to know for certain what would have happened had Churchill been able to execute his strategy. The evidence suggests that the defeat in Turkey was a vindication of Churchill’s grand strategy, all the more vividly demonstrated by the lack of strategic thinking that followed.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, vol. III 1914-1922 (New York: Chelsea House, 1974).
Martin Gilbert, ed., Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume III, Part I July 1914 – April 1915; Part II May 1915 – December 1916 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973).
Martin Gilbert, ed., Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume IV, Part I, January 1917 – June 1919 (London: Heinemann, 1977).

Secondary Sources

Tuvia Ben-Moshe, Churchill: Strategy and History (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 1992).
Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis: 1911-1918, abridged and revised edition (New York: Free Press, 2005).
Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. 2, 1915 (New York, Scribners, 1923).
Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. 3 1916-1918, Parts I and II (New York: Scribners, 1927).
Eliot A. Cohen, “Churchill and Coalition Strategy in World War II,” in Paul Kennedy, ed., Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s Political Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1981).
Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 3, The Challenge of War 1914-1916 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971).
Robert Greene, 33 Strategies of War (London: Penguin Books, 2006).
Michael Howard, “British Grand Strategy in World War I,” in Paul Kennedy, ed., Grand Strategies in War and Peace, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
David Jablonsky, Churchill, The Great Game and Total War (London: Frank Cass, 1991).
David Jablonsky, Churchill: The Making of a Grand Strategist (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 1992).
Norman Rose, Churchill: An Unruly Life (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

Electronic Resources

David Welch, “August 1914: Public Opinion and the Crisis.” A Companion to Gordon Martel, ed., Europe 1900-1945. Blackwell Reference Online, 13 February 2008

http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/tocnode?id=g9781405106641_chunk_g978140510664117

Stibbe, Matthew. “The War from Above: Aims, Strategy, and Diplomacy.” A Companion to Gordon Martel, ed., Europe 1900-1945. Blackwell Reference Online. 14 February 2008

http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/tocnode?id=g9781405106641_chunk_g978140510664119

Paul Addison, “Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874-1965)” in H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Lawrence Goldman, ed., Online Edition, January 2008.

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/32413

“Omdurman, Battle of,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 15 April 2008

http://search.eb.com/eb/article9057084

[1] Winston S. Churchill to H.H. Asquith, 29 December 1914, in Martin Gilbert, ed., Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume III, Part I July 1914 – April 1915. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973) 343,

[2] Winston S. Churchill. The World Crisis: 1911-1918, Abridged and Revised Edition. (New York: Free Press, 2005), 294.

[3] Eliot A. Cohen, “Churchill and Coalition Strategy in World War II,” in Paul Kennedy, ed.m Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 44.

[4] David Jablonsky, Churchill: The Making of a Grand Strategist. (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 1992), 8.

[5] Norman Rose. Churchill: An Unruly Life (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 42.

[6] Jablonsky, Making of a Grand Strategist, 8.

[7] Churchill, The World Crisis: 1911-1918, 821.

[8] In a speech to a munitions factory in 1917, Churchill said the Great War “was not a war only of armies, or even mainly of armies. It was a war of whole nations.” David Jablonsky, Churchill, The Great Game and Total War (London: Frank Cass, 1991), 51.

[9] Tuvia Ben-Moshe, Churchill: Strategy and History. (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 1992), 30.

[10] King Albert I of the Belgians in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume III, Challenge of War, 1914-1916 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971). 125.

[11] Winston S. Churchill. The World Crisis, vol. 3, 1916-1918 Part II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927), 144.

[12] Winston S. Churchill, memorandum, 1 August 1916, in Martin Gilbert, ed., Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume III, Part II May 1915 – December 1916 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 1538.

[13] Winston S. Churchill, “Variants on the Offensive,” memorandum, 3 December 1915, in Gilbert, Companion Volume III, Part I, 1305.

[14] Ibid. 1304.

[15] War Council extract, Secretary’s notes, 28 January 1915, in Gilbert, Companion Volume III, Part I, 463.

[16] David Lloyd George, “Some Further Considerations on the Conduct of the War,” memorandum, 22 February 1915, in Companion Volume III, Part I, 544.

[17] Meeting of the War Council, Secretary’s notes, 19 February 1915, Companion Volume III, Part I, 530.

[18] Vice-Admiral Carden telegram to Winston S. Churchill, 25 February 1915, Companion Volume III, Part I, 565.

[19] Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume III, 415.

[20] Ibid., 337.

[21] Winston S. Churchill telegram to Vice-Admiral Carden, 11 March 1915, in Companion Volume III, Part I, 677.

[22] Robert Greene, 33 Strategies of War (London: Penguin Books, 2006) 58.

[23] Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. 2, 1915 (New York: Scribners, 1923), 413.

[24] Winston S. Churchill statement to the Dardanelles Commission, extracts, 28 September 1916, in Companion Volume III, Part II, 1568.

[25] Maurice Hankey to Lord Esher, 15 March 1915, Companion Volume III, Part I, 701.

[26] The World Crisis: 1911-1918, 291.

[27] Jablonsky, Making of a Grand Strategist, 11.

[28] Ibid., 37.