March 12, 2015

Finest Hour 158, Spring 2013

Page 56

By Christopher H. Streling

The Defence of the Dardanelles: From Bombards to Battleships, by Michael Forrest. Pen & Sword Books, hardbound, illus., 254 pp. $39.95. Member price $31.95.

Yet another book on the “damned Dardanelles” (to bowdlerize Admiral Fisher)? Yes, though this one is quite different from the existing accounts. Forrest argues that Churchill and the admirals should have known better than to try and force the waterway with ships alone—since British Intelligence had a pretty good idea how the Turks would resist. But rather than highlight politics or inter-service squabbles, this well-illustrated volume focuses on the development and effective use of the forts, batteries and minefields that stopped the Allied fleet cold in March 1915.  This was long before Allied landings on Gallipoli, and before Germans under the command of Gen. Liman von Sanders appeared on the battlefields.

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Churchill crops up in several places in this narrative of the building, manning and eventual impact of what emrged as a highly effective Turkish system of coastal fortification. Forrest begins (briefly) with the castle-like forts built in the late 1600s, and carries the story through the Chanak crisis of 1922 that helped to bring down the Lloyd George government. The focus, however, is on the events of 1915.

Nine appendices offer details on the forts and the Allied ships that sought to get by them. Clear maps show how hopeless the attack really was. More minefields and numerous guns were in wait at the Narrows, had the Allied ships gotten that far.

The new battleship Queen Elizabeth, focus of Fisher’s frustration with Churchill that led to the admiral’s resig- nation in May 1915, figures in several places, as does the old French battleship B o u ve t , whose loss began to turn the Allies back from their mid-March attack. Contrary to many defenders of the oper- ation, Turkish ammunition was not running out—“evidence now shows that ammunition stocks after the attack were far from low” (138).

This is not a rehash of the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, but rather a useful study of why that subsequent ground attack proved necessary. For it became clear to the naval leadership on the scene that the only way to silence the many guns and clear the fearsome minefields was with a ground campaign, costly failure that it turned out to be. The end of the book offers details for touring the many existing fortification ruins and reconstructions along both shorelines of the Dardanelles.