Grasping Gallipoli

Introduction: The Issues

The Gallipoli Campaign of April-December 1915 - the Allied landings on the shores of Turkey - has been the subject of a vast literature, which has most unfortunately propagated a great untruth - that the War Office was unprepared for operations in the Dardanelles area, and had little or nothing in the way of maps and geographical intelligence to give to Sir Ian Hamilton, the commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (Medforce), and his Staff. First explored in Aspinall-Oglander's Official History,1 this theme is developed in most one-volume histories that have followed, and has since passed into mythology.2 Hamilton's most recent biographer repeated this canard, echoing Hamilton himself in claiming that he only received from the War Office 'a 1912 handbook on the Turkish Army, a sort of tourist guide to the area with a thoroughly defective map and the single sheet of general instructions from Kitchener', while his Staff officers 'were not given access to Callwell's 1906 report or to the valuable reports on the Dardanelles by the British military attaché.'3 Yet the reality is somewhat different, and this book demonstrates that this myth, perpetrated by Hamilton himself among others, is a gross distortion of the truth. While there were problems in London with strategic policy and planning (or lack of it) at the highest level, the War Office (and the Admiralty) possessed a great deal of previously collected terrain information, maps and charts, covering the topography and defences of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles, much of which was duly handed over to Hamilton and his Staff, either before they left London or subsequently. Additional material was obtained from the Admiralty and Navy, and still more gathered in theatre, in the Aegean and the Levant before the landings.

Whether all this intelligence was properly processed, distributed and efficiently used is a different matter and this book, which incorporates much previously unpublished material, attempts to penetrate behind the veil of obfuscation to get to the truth of the matter. Intelligence has to be analysed, interpreted and evaluated, and then distributed and explained to commanders and their Staff, who must base their plans on it and not ignore it. All too often, politicians and commanders ignore intelligence, and indulge in wishful thinking by creating a false scenario in which they then believe. Very little has been written on the intelligence side of the Gallipoli Campaign, and it is typical that John Keegan's recent book Intelligence in War,4 admittedly a selective case-study approach, omitted it. It hardly featured in two key studies of British 20th century intelligence work: Michael Occleshaw's Armour Against Fate, British Military Intelligence in the First World War,5 or in Christopher Andrew's Secret Service, The Making of the British Intelligence Community.6 While we should not overstate the importance of intelligence - that most eminent of cryptanalysts David Kahn called it a secondary factor in war7 - it is undeniable that possession of desirable information gives a significant advantage and may occasionally tip the balance. We should also note, as Kahn did, that intelligence can only work through strength; the primary factor is force, and this is certainly true of the Dardanelles operations.

Briefly considering the types and sources of intelligence available before and during the Gallipoli Campaign, we will see that before the outbreak of war open-source intelligence, attachés' reports and clandestine reconnaissances were vital sources. Once hostilities with Turkey had started, given the paucity of signals intelligence at the time, human intelligence was a vital source of strategic, terrain, operational and tactical intelligence in the Dardanelles operations before the landings. Imagery intelligence also provided vital information about Turkish defences before and after the landings.

The lies and myths about a lack of geographical preparations began during the Gallipoli Campaign itself, and the Dardanelles Commission, set up to determine the causes of failure, became a battleground of accusation and counter-accusation. An extreme perpetrator of the myth was the journalist Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, who stated, with complete untruth:

There were undoubtedly no maps in existence at all. The main difficulty was the question of maps; nobody had maps. There were no maps in existence and it was almost impossible to fire from the ships without them. If the War Office engages in a war with a nation, you would think they would make preparations before the war starts.8

As this book demonstrates, there were many maps (though not many large-scale ones to start with), and also much supporting strategic, geographical, terrain and tactical intelligence, a huge amount of which was gathered in the immediate pre-war period.

What happened to all this material within MO2, a section of the Directorate of Military Operations (DMO, which included Intelligence) at the War Office, and within the Naval Intelligence Division at the Admiralty, forms an important part of this study, as does the way in which it was fed (or not, as the case may be) to the field commanders. The fact, and problem, of divided command was recognised as an issue by a few perceptive individuals at the time, and has been accepted, with the benefit of hindsight, as one of the contributory causes of failure.

Hamilton was no stranger to the concept of combined amphibious operations, as John Lee has recently shown. In the early 20th century, Britain experienced a collective hysteria relating to a predicted German descent upon her coastline. Henry Rawlinson had introduced his study to the Staff College in 1903, and his protégé, George Aston of the Royal Marines, led staff rides along the south coast of England to further their understanding. The analysis in 1905 by an Admiralty and War Office Committee of a botched 1904 joint manoeuvre led to a report which laid the foundations for the Manual of Combined Naval and Military Operations of 1911 (reprinted 1913).9 This established the principles followed (as far as was possible) for the actual landings in 1915. In the pre-war period, naval officers lecturing at the Staff College assumed an unopposed landing; the firepower of modern weapons made an opposed landing unthinkable, while Aston himself had concluded that naval gunfire was powerless to overpower modern coast-defence forts.10 While GOC Mediterranean in 1912 (just after the new Manual had appeared), Hamilton observed the work of the new Combined Operations Command in Cairo and attended combined operations exercises and debriefs. In the same year he also studied amphibious operations from the defenders' viewpoint. Churchill and Kitchener were also present at joint exercises in the Mediterranean.11

Combined operations always present a particular hazard because of the dangers and problems associated with divided intelligence, planning and command - the inevitable friction between army and navy jealous of their own capabilities and traditions. There have been many disasters due to these causes - Walcheren in 1809 during the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimea in 1854-5, Gallipoli in 1915. The American historian Theodore Ropp judged that 'British Army intelligence did very badly in World War I . in amphibious operations [i.e. Gallipoli], where intelligence responsibilities were no clearer than they had been during the Crimea .'12

Intelligence matters were not all well-ordered within the Admiralty and the War Office. In the 1860s, even after the lessons of the Crimea:

British military intelligence lacked central direction and management. . Weaknesses in Britain's intelligence system . were generally not in the collection of information, but in two other major functional areas, processing-analysis and dissemination-reporting.13

Certain aspects improved in the 1870s with the establishment of an Intelligence Branch, but the Gallipoli tragedy was to demonstrate that all was not necessarily well in those functional areas.

A similar situation pertained apropos the mapping of potential operational areas. Despite repeated warnings of Boer unrest, and the experience of the First Boer War in 1880-1, the British Army began operations against the Boers in 1899 without any good mapping, and had to improvise half-inch scale cover in the field from farm surveys. This time the British learnt from experience, and preparations for operations in France and Belgium were accordingly much better; any deficiencies in the maps used by the BEF in 1914 were due to the tardy state of French national mapping (despite the experience of 1870) rather than to any inefficiency in the Geographical Section at the War Office. What is more, in the aftermath of the Akaba incident of 1906, a one-inch map of the Gallipoli Peninsula had been prepared, in two sheets. Much more will be said about this later, but at least a reasonable operations map was available in 1914-15. However, good, large-scale operations maps could not be improvised; they relied upon a pre-existing data-bank of geodetic and trigonometrical data, and for inaccessible areas, as this book will show, this presented a huge problem. But how inaccessible was the Gallipoli Peninsula? We will return to this question in Chapter 2.

In 1887 that splendid and efficient intelligence officer, Henry Brackenbury, instructed the young Charles Callwell, later one of the major players in the Gallipoli saga, in the proper duties of an intelligence officer:

I shan't expect you to be able to answer...