November 10, 2015

Finest Hour 169, Summer 2015

Page 13

By W. Mark Hamilton

W. Mark Hamilton earned his Ph.D. in history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His remarks are adapted from his presentation to the Thirty- second International Churchill Conference in May 2015.

A small library has been written during the last 100 years addressing the Dardanelles campaign in 1915 and the role and actions of Winston Churchill.

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The focus of this article is to review historiographically the most recent secondary literature on this subject. You might ask: What is historiography? The short answer is that it is the study of historical writing. Robin Winks in The Oxford History of the British Empire provides a more nuanced definition: “History is what happened in the past, what people believe happened in the past, and what historians say happened in the past.” Winks claims that the last two matter most.¹

Above all, history reflects the period in which it was written, which is good news for historians and their publishers because each new generation rewrites history. As a professor once reminded my fellow graduate students and me, “You are live dogs barking at dead lions.”

The Churchill Perspective

T he toll that the failure of the Dardanelles campaign took on Winston Churchill can hardly be overestimated. The late Sir Martin Gilbert, the official Churchill biographer, quoted Lady Churchill as saying that she thought her husband would never recover from his grief at the failure of the Dardanelles campaign, and might even die from it!²

The 5 February 2015 New York Times obituary of Gilbert quotes Gilbert’s response to being asked in 2007 if he had often dreamed about Churchill over the years. “I’ve only twice dreamt about him,” he replied—and one dream related to the Dardanelles campaign!

In his memoir The World Crisis, Winston Churchill wrote, “Upon me more than any other person the responsibility for the Dardanelles and all that it involved has been cast. Upon me fell almost exclusively the fierce wartime censures of press and public.” Churchill was correct.³

As with most memoirs, Churchill attempts to justify his actions. He complains bitterly about the delays and paralysis of government planning he saw as First Lord of the Admiralty and sees many situations that, decided differently, would have brought a Dardanelles victory, as opposed to total defeat. He is critical of the initial refusal of the War Minister, Lord Kitchener, to allow substantial troops in the campaign. Churchill laments that he did not have sole control of decisions, but instead had to defer to the War Council and the views of Prime Minister Asquith. Churchill was bitter over his removal before the campaign was concluded—as if that would have made a difference to the final outcome.⁴

The Professional Historians

I n his magisterial biography of Churchill, Sir Martin Gilbert is critical of Churchill’s defensive tone. Gilbert writes, “The attacks at the Dardanelles and Gallipoli convinced many of his contemporaries that Churchill was a man of blood, lacking sound judgment, and unfit for high office.”⁵ Churchill had dreamed that victory at the Dardanelles would “mean encouragement for France, food for India, salvation for Serbia, doom for Austria-Hungary, isolation for Germany, and new territory for the victors.”⁶

The American naval historian Arthur J. Marder, in From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow (1965), comes to the defense of Churchill as the “Dardanelles public scapegoat” and reminds his readers that in many historians’ view, the Dardanelles plan was the most brilliant strategic concept of the entire First World War. Marder contends that Churchill did not constantly overrule his naval expert advisers, despite his reputation as a young man in a hurry. As a more calm Clement Attlee later observed, “He did not like to wait for the pot to boil!”⁷ Marder is critical of Churchill for his over-valuing of the older British warships available to the Dardanelles campaign, the warships’ ineffective guns against the Turkish forts, and Churchill’s underestimation of Turkish fighting ability.⁸

In Churchill: A Biography (2001), Roy Jenkins is rather negative toward Churchill, both in terms of Churchill’s self-justifications in The World Crisis and of Churchill’s actual decision-making. In Jenkins’ view, it was Churchill who pushed for a naval-only attack, even against the concerns of Admiral of the Fleet “Jacky” Fisher.⁹

Canadian historian Christopher M. Bell, in Churchill and Sea Power (2012), is also critical of the role Churchill played in the Dardanelles disaster. For Professor Bell, the Dardanelles campaign demonstrated Churchill’s shortcomings as a war manager and strategist. Bell suggests Churchill was too optimistic and ignored the early warnings of disaster. Bell balances his criticism with the reminder that Churchill was not the sole decider of policy on the War Council, and in Bell’s view he lost control of events over time. One might say he was “swept up” by events or (in today’s terminology) tripped up by “mission creep.”

Bell defends Churchill’s boldness, imagination, and strategic insights, which he sees as vastly superior to those of his civilian ministerial counterparts. Churchill’s failures at the Dardanelles in 1915 pale beside the huge losses on the Western Front and blunders made there by senior military officials.¹⁰

In Peter Hart’s Gallipoli (2014), Churchill comes under heavy criticism as an “adventurer,” and Hart concludes that the Dardanelles campaign was neither a justifiable operation of war, nor did it have a realistic chance of success. He contends that Turkey was an unthreatening opponent and any thought of a possible Balkan alliance by many of the planners was nonsense, given the deep and ancient rivalries and hatreds in the Balkans.¹¹

Sean McMeekin’s The Russian Origins of the First World War (2011) primarily focuses on the role of Tsarist Russia. Observing that no great power had a more historic interest in the Dardanelles than Russia, he avers that Churchill expected Russian participation in the campaign and contends that this was never Imperial Russia’s plan. Turkey was a formidable enemy, and Russians were irritated by the lack of Anglo-French consultation. Ultimately, McMeekin dismisses claims that Churchill was a scapegoat and judges him justifiably responsible for the failure.¹²

Tim Travers, in Gallipoli 1915 (2009), draws from Turkish source materials more than most historic accounts of the battle. He believes that Turkish fighting morale was high and strongly nationalistic. Travers’ unflattering verdict of the Dardanelles battle plan is that it could be characterized as “imaginative and grandiose ideas by a confident and optimistic ruling class, with an eye to their own reputations.”¹³

One of the more recent books on Churchill’s action is The Dardanelles Disaster (2009) by Dan Van Der Vat, who charges Churchill with being a “hands-on” micro-manager of the campaign. For this historian, Churchill’s greatest mistake was in forcing the campaign to be solely a naval operation. This book is especially useful, including a chapter on the 1916 report of the Dardanelles Commission.¹⁴

Graham T. Clews, in Churchill’s Dilemma: The Real Story Behind the Origins of the 1915 Dardanelles Campaign (2010), contends that Churchill’s main focus was always on a Baltic campaign and not the Eastern campaign in Turkey. Clews is extremely critical of scholars who have ignored the Borkum Island plan in the Baltic Sea, which Clews believes was the “holy grail” of Churchill’s offensive strategies. History would both deny Churchill a Baltic campaign and bring disaster at the Dardanelles.¹⁵

Perhaps the most critical book on Churchill’s actions in the Dardanelles is John Charmley’s Churchill: The End of Glory (1993). For Charmley, Churchill was the key promoter of the Dardanelles campaign and was misled by lots of wishful thinking. Charmley paints a picture of an angry Prime Minister Asquith, whose tolerance for Churchill’s actions continually diminished over time.¹⁶

Eugene Rogan, in his just-published book The Fall of the Ottomans (2015), takes some of the blame off Churchill’s shoulders, viewing Lord Kitchener as the ultimate decision-maker, noting that it was Kitchener to whom all of the War Council deferred.¹⁷

In another recent book, The Churchill Factor (2014), Boris Johnson concludes, “Churchill was unlucky in his admirals, unlucky with colleagues, and unlucky in not being able to control the timing, but the Dardanelles concept was flawed and wildly over-optimistic!”¹⁸

Conclusion

The last twenty years of scholarship have not resulted in a positive revisionist school of history either for the Dardanelles campaign or Winston Churchill’s role and responsibility for the calamitous outcome. The assessment of the Dardanelles campaign, both as an operation and in its execution, can be seen only as a disaster. And Churchill has to be seen as a prime planner and mover.

Given his ministerial responsibility, it is reasonable for Churchill to be given most of the historic blame. The fact that he was young, energetic, and determined to succeed cannot obscure the catastrophic results—tens of thousands killed on both the Allied and Ottoman sides, and thousands more wounded.

David Fromkin also has harsh words for Churchill in A Peace to End All Peace (1989): “Churchill was insensitive to the moods and reactions of his colleagues, and oblivious to the effect he produced upon others.”¹⁹

Still, some positive factors should be noted on Churchill’s Dardanelles “balance sheet.” In his favor, it must be said that he was not the sole decision-maker on the War Council and that he did have to defer to Lord Kitchener and Prime Minister Asquith. For Churchill to have been made the sole scapegoat was not completely fair. Most historians have noted that the Dardanelles campaign strategy was a brilliant idea, even if seriously flawed in planning and execution. There was stalemate on the Western Front and there needed to be an Allied alternative to sending England’s armies, as Churchill famously said, “to chew barbed wire in Flanders.”²⁰

To Churchill’s everlasting credit, few individuals could have had the resilience and ability to “bounce back” as Churchill did—even if the Dardanelles failure was a life-long torment for him. Recent scholarship has given more attention to Churchill’s lasting personal torment given the huge cost in human lives on both sides of the Dardanelles–Gallipoli disaster.

Perhaps Michael Shelden, in Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill (2013), best sums up the impact of the Dardanelles–Gallipoli campaign on the forty-year-old Winston Churchill: “He had a spirit that once served him well from crisis to crisis. But it flickered and went out in 1915 and Churchill was never the same. He remained a romantic at heart, a great patriot, and a courageous fighter, and he persevered in politics until his moment in the sun came again in 1940. But by that time he was a harder, much less exuberant character, whose boyish innocence and earnestness survived only in an occasional mischievous smile and thoughtful frown.”²¹

Endnotes

1. Robin W. Winks, The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), vol. V, p. xiii.

2. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, The Challenge of War, 1914– 1916 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1971), p. 473.

3. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), vol. II, p. viii.

4. Ibid., p. 545.

5. Gilbert, Churchill, p. xxiii.

6. Ibid., p. 350.

7. Arthur J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow—The War Years: To the Eve of Jutland, 1914–1916 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 259.

8. Ibid., p. 260.

9. Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2001), p. 161.

10. Christopher M. Bell, Churchill and Sea Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 73–74.

11. Peter Hart, Gallipoli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. viii.

12. Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 136–41.

13. Tim Travers, Gallipoli 1915 (Stroud, UK: The History Press, 2009), p. 42.

14. Dan Van Der Vat, The Dardanelles Disaster: Winston Churchill’s Greatest Failure (London: Duckworth Overlook, 2009), p. 72.

15. Graham T. Clews, Churchill’s Dilemma: The Real Story Behind the Origins of the 1915 Dardanelles Campaign (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), p. 100.

16. John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), p. 116.

17. Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2015), p. 130.

18. Boris Johnson, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (New York: Riverbend Books, 2014), p. 201.

19. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), p. 159.

20. Churchill to Asquith, 29 December 1914, Churchill Papers, 26/1.

21. Michael Shelden, Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), p. 323.