Hillsdale Dialogues: The World Crisis

The Hillsdale Dialogues are weekly broadcasts of discussions between Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn and commentator Hugh Hewitt. In 2023-24 they discuss Churchill’s The World Crisis, his classic memoir of the First World War. This essay addresses the question of who conceived and supported the attack on the Dardanelles. The answers still surprise some people. To search for all World Crisis essays published to date, click here. For the accompanying audio discussion, refer to World Crisis Dialogue 16, Turkey and the War  —RML

Churchill and the Straits

Approaching the 80th Anniversary of D-Day, we may reflect on an earlier seaborne expedition. The attempts to force the Dardanelles, and the opposed landing on Gallipoli, were abject failures. But many lessons were learned, not least by Winston Churchill.

The Allied attempt to force the Straits, and subsequently to land on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula, was a tale of military and political failure at the highest level. It offers timeless examples of hypocrisy, skewed logic, wishful thinking and disloyalty. Winston Churchill observed that such problems often assail countries at war. Yet many historical accounts fix most of the blame on him.

Asquith, Fisher and Kitchener

Over a century later, we may wonder why Prime Minister H.H. Asquith wasn’t pushed aside sooner. Britain, then the superpower among nations, was fighting for survival. At crucial cabinet meetings, Asquith rarely opened his mouth. For almost two months he didn’t hold a war council. Privately he exchanged gossip with his lady friend Venetia Stanley. Most of what we know about his opinions at that time we know through their letters.

In cabinet, Asquith encouraged Churchill; behind his back he doubted and disparaged him. Nor was Lloyd George above criticizing the friend he had mentored. One of Churchill’s civil commissioners, Sir Francis Hopwood, carried slander to the King’s private secretary.

Churchill’s First Sea Lord, Admiral Fisher, military head of the navy, owed his prominence to Churchill. He threatened to resign every time he failed to get his way, and ultimately did so, abandoning his post.

Above all stood Lord Kitchener, Minister of War, enthusiastic for action but unwilling for a time to commit troops when they were first asked for. Vain and unyielding, Kitchener held a veto even over decisions of the Prime Minister. Yet all these people initially backed the Dardanelles naval operation—without reservation.

Getting around the slaughter

It is widely believed that Churchill proposed the Straits expedition to bypass the static slaughter in Europe’s trenches. While this is true in the abstract, the original plan was not his, nor was it hatched overnight.

Churchill and others first contemplated assaulting Germany and Austria-Hungary from the south. Churchill also proposed attacking Germany from the north, even as the Dardanelles operation was being approved by the War Cabinet.

By autumn 1914, Turkey seemed likely to join Central Powers, making Greece a potential British ally. Foreseeing this, Churchill offered the Royal Navy to support a Greek offensive against the Turks. On 4 September he cabled Captain Mark Kerr, on loan to the Greeks to command their navy, authorizing him to raise this possibility with the Athens government.

“The right and obvious method of attacking Turkey,” Churchill wrote Kerr, “is to strike immediately at the heart.” Churchill thought the Greeks could occupy the Gallipoli Peninsula by land, while an Anglo-Greek fleet forced the Dardanelles. This would link up with the Russians via the Bosphorus and Black Sea.

If the Greek plan didn’t work, Churchill offered an alternative: an invasion by Russian troops of European Turkey. Russian casualties might be heavy, but such an enterprise would mean “no more war with Turkey.” At this point he made no mention of British troops.

Hesitation and naïveté

No action was taken on Churchill’s ideas. Then, at the end of September, the Turks mined the Dardanelles, cutting off the Russians from their ice-free link to the Mediterranean. This focused fresh attention on the strategic waterway.

“British military supplies could no longer reach Russia except by the hazardous northern route to Archangel,” Martin Gilbert wrote. “Russian wheat, on which the Tsarist Exchequer depended for so much of its overseas income—and arms purchases—could no longer be exported to its world markets.”

On October 28th, Turkey formally joined the Central Powers. Two days later, Turkish warships began shelling Russian Black Sea ports. The British cabinet fretted over the effect on Russia, and whether the Turks might also attack Egypt.

Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley: “Few things would give me greater pleasure than to see the Turkish Empire finally disappear from Europe…. Constantinople [might] become Russian (which I think is its proper destiny) or if that is impossible neutralised and become a free port.” These are certainly examples of vapid imaginings.

Admiral Carden eyes the Dardanelles

With the approval of First Sea Lord Fisher, Churchill ordered the Mediterranean commander Admiral Sackville Carden, “without risking any ships,” to bombard the forts at the Dardanelles entrance, at a safe distance from Turkish guns. Carden was instructed to retire “before fire from the forts becomes effective. Ships’ guns should outrange older guns mounted in the forts.”

Carden did so on November 3rd, reporting that the forts were vulnerable to naval bombardment. No allied ships were damaged. One shell hit the magazine of a fort at Sedd-el-Bahr (Gallipoli side of the Straits) which blew up with the loss of almost all its artillery. It was never repaired—nor did the Turks improve other Dardanelles defenses. They remained short of guns, mines and ammunition.

Genesis of the naval attack

The successful shelling of November 3rd caused many to consider Turkey vulnerable. “Like most other people,” Churchill wrote, “I had held the opinion that the days of forcing the Dardanelles were over.” Carden had demonstrated otherwise. The Admiralty War Group concurred.

Results nearby confirmed these views. In December the Mediterranean port of Alexandretta (now Iskerenderun) surrendered under the guns of a single British cruiser, HMS Doris. The Turks actually assisted in demolishing its defenses.

It seemed, Churchill testified, that “we were not dealing with a thoroughly efficient military power, and that it was quite possible that we could get into parley with them.” Characteristically, Churchill was looking for a chance to talk.

“By ships alone”

On 3 January 1915 Churchill, with Fisher’s approval, asked Carden if he thought the Dardanelles Straits could be forced “by the use of ships alone.” Churchill conceived of using a fleet of older British warships, superfluous to the Grand Fleet in home waters.

WSC added: “Importance of results would justify severe loss.” (Emphasis added.)

Carden replied that while he did not think the Straits could be “rushed,” they might be “forced by extended operations with a large number of ships.”

Critics later said Carden was “a second-rate officer who found himself unexpectedly in a sea command instead of in charge of Malta dockyard.” But Carden was the on-scene commander. One only wishes Churchill was blessed with such clear contemporary vision as his hindsight critics.

Churchill telegraphed again to Carden: “Your view is agreed with by high authorities here. Please telegraph in detail what you think could be done by extended operations, what force would be needed, and how you consider it should be used.”

The enthusiastic Admiral Fisher

It is important to note that Churchill’s top Admiralty commander was then still strongly behind the enterprise. Fisher even proposed to supplement Churchill’s older naval vessels with the new battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth. For practice!

The navy’s latest dreadnought, Queen Elizabeth was the first to mount 15-inch guns. She was about to leave for the Mediterranean for test firings. Why not, Fisher suggested, “use her practice shots on the Dardanelles etc. and the possibilities flowing from it.”

Carden said he would need twelve battleships, three battlecruisers, three light cruisers, a flotilla leader, sixteen destroyers, six submarines, eight seaplanes, twelve minesweepers and twenty other craft. Excepting Queen Elizabeth, all could be older, surplus vessels. All were still fit to fight because Churchill had devoted some of his prewar budget to maintaining them.

Carden proposed to start by bombarding the Turkish forts from a safe distance. Then, preceded by minesweepers, he would sail into the Straits, demolishing shore batteries as he found them. He proposed a feint at Gallipoli (Churchill had suggested this in November)—a bombardment but no landings.

Emerging into the Marmara, Carden would keep the Straits open by patrols in his wake. Weather and morale of the enemy were variables, he added, but he “might do it all in a month about.”

Almost total euphoria

The British War Council met on 13 January 1915. Every member was enthusiastic, Maurice Hankey wrote. They “turned eagerly from the dreary vista of a ‘slogging match’ on the Western Front…. The Navy, in whom everyone had implicit confidence, and whose opportunities so far had been few and far between, was to come into the front line.”

Asquith himself drew up the fateful minute. The War Council agreed to a man. Nobody seemed to notice one curious addition. The Admiralty, Asquith wrote, should “prepare for a naval expedition in February to bombard and take the Gallipoli Peninsula with Constantinople as its objective.”

Unanswered questions

How do you “take” a peninsula without troops? Did Asquith mean for sailors to land and march on Constantinople? In the general ardor, no one asked. All eyes were on sailing through the Straits. A fleet this size, appearing off Constantinople, would surely cow the Turks into surrender.

Churchill alone held out for an alternate: attacking the north German coast. Kitchener said there were no troops for that. (He was always short of troops, except to be slaughtered in Flanders.) Of the strictly naval enterprise he was fully supportive. Fisher did not demur.

The War Council waxed euphoric about the possibilities. Next, what about a naval attack up the Danube, landing at Salonika, and sending a fleet up the Adriatic? Colonial Secretary Lewis Harcourt wrote a paper entitled “The Spoils.” He envisioned the end of the Ottoman Empire and expansion of the British Empire as far as Palestine.

None of these naively optimistic visions were voiced by Winston Churchill.

Next: the Gallipoli landings.

More on the Dardanelles

“Dardanelles-Gallipoli Centenary,” 2015.

“Dardanelles Then, Afghanistan Now: Apples and Oranges,” 2009.

“Churchill’s Potent Political Nicknames: Admiral De Row-Back to Wuthering Height,” 2020.

Gallipoli, 1915

Anzac Day, April 25th, marks the Centenary of the landings on the Gallipoli Peninsula. The operation ended with heavy losses of British, Australian and New Zealand life. Churchill usually comes in for (and deserves) some of the blame, but rarely does everybody “get it right.” Such is a faulty piece was published in Forbes: “Winston Churchill’s Terrible Leadership Failure.”

This piece had several facts wrong and oversimplified to the point of confusion. Churchill’s failure was over the Dardanelles naval attack of 18 March 1915. The landings on Gallipoli came in late April, after the naval attack had failed. They were not directed by him.

The original idea was not proposed by Churchill, who initially doubted it. His First Sea Lord, Fisher, who later deserted him, at first supported it. Churchill was First Lord not “Lord” of the Admiralty; Prime Minister Asquith was not at that time a Lord.

Forcing the Dardanelles

Far from offering “disaster utterly incommensurate with any advantage,” the naval plan, whose first phase nearly succeeded, offered an alternative to the slaughter on the Western Front, a chance to put Turkey out of the war, and to relieve the Russians in the Black Sea. Clement Attlee, later a Labour Prime Minister, called it “the only imaginative concept of the war.”

It is true that Churchill continued to support the operation far too long and placed inordinate faith in on-scene commanders; but in the subsequent inquiry he was largely exonerated, and they were blamed.

“Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan”—yet Churchill took responsibility and admitted his mistake: “trying to carry out a major and cardinal operation of war from a subordinate position.” He never did that again.

Mr. Daniel Knowles (“Time to scotch the myth of Winston Churchill’s infallibility,” (originally blogged on the Daily Telegraph but since pulled from all the websites where it appeared), wrote that the “national myth” of World War II and Churchill “is being used in an argument about the future of the House of Lords.”

Mr. Knowles quoted Liberal Party leader Nick Clegg, who cited Churchill’s 1910 hope that the Lords “would be fair to all parties.” Sir Winston’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames MP, replied that Churchill “dropped those views and had great reverence and respect for the institution of the House of Lords.” Soames concluded: “But it doesn’t matter. The basis of this argument is mythology, not history.”

Churchill’s view on the Lords was more nuanced than Clegg stated, and certainly did change after passage of the 1911 Parliament Act, which Churchill helped pass. It eliminated the Lords’ veto of money bills, restricted their delay of other bills to two years, and reduced the term of a Parliament to five years. You can look it up.

What to do about the House of Lords is a matter for the British people and their representatives. My task is merely to refute nonsense about Winston Churchill—which I will now respectfully proceed to do, quoting from Mr. Knowles’s treatise:

 • “We idolise Churchill because we don’t really know anything about him.”

Only sycophants idolize Churchill. But if they do, it’s not because they know nothing about him. He has the longest biography in the history of the planet. He has 15-million published words. There are a million documents in the Churchill Archives. One hundred million words were written about him. He gets 37 million Google hits. Don’t be silly.

 • “His finest hours aside, Winston Churchill was hardly a paragon of progressive thought.”

Churchill’s was at times so progressive that he was called a traitor to his class. His own Conservative Party never quite trusted him because they knew he continued to harbor principles of the Liberal Party he had been part of from 1904 to 1922. To cite examples would bore you. So let’s just say that he favored a National Health Service before the Labour Party did, and believed in a system of social security before the Labour Party existed.

 • “He believed that women shouldn’t vote – telling the House of Commons that they are ‘well represented by their fathers, brothers, and husbands.’”

Churchill never said that in the Commons. It’s a private note pasted into his copy of the 1874 Annual Register in 1897, when he was 23. At that time the majority of British women themselves were opposed to having the vote. Churchill changed his view on women’s suffrage after observing the role women played in World War I—and when he realized, as his daughter said, “how many women would vote for him.”

 • “He was fiercely opposed to self-determination for the people of the Empire….”

Was the fierce independence Churchill admired in Canadians, Boers, Zulus, Australians, Sudanese, New Zealanders and Maoris a sham and a façade, then? Churchill did have a tic about the early Indian independence movement, with its Brahmin roots. Yet in 1935 he declared that Gandhi had “gone very high in my esteem since he stood up for the Untouchables.” And Churchill was proven right that a premature British exit from India would result in a Hindu-Muslim bloodbath—how many died is still unknown.

 • “….advocating the use of poisoned gas against ‘uncivilized tribes’ in Mesopotamia in 1919.”

That Golden Oldie has been refuted repeatedly for twenty years. The specific term he used was “lachrymatory gas” (tear gas). He was not referring to a killer gas like chlorine.

 • “Even his distrust of Hitler was probably motivated mostly by a hatred of Germans.”

Is this the same Churchill who urged that shiploads of food be sent to blockaded Germany after the 1918 armistice, incurring the wrath of his colleagues, who wished to “squeeze Germany until the pips squeaked”? Is this the man who wrote to his wife in 1945: “…my heart is saddened by the tales of masses of German women and children flying along the roads everywhere in 40-mile long columns to the West before the advancing Armies”? Really, Mr. Knowles should be ashamed of himself.

 • “In 1927, he said that Mussolini’s fascism ‘had rendered service to the whole world,’ while Il Duce himself was a ‘Roman genius.’”

Lots of politicians said favorable things about Mussolini after he restored order to a reeling Italy in the 1920s. Churchill was among the first to realize and to say publicly what Mussolini really was. Churchill wasn’t always right the first time—but he was usually right in the long run.

 • “In 1915, he had to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty after the disaster of Gallipoli.”

He had to resign because of the Dardanelles, not Gallipoli, which was someone else’s idea (and hadn’t yet become a disaster). Churchill initially was even doubtful about the plan to force the Dardanelles, but he defended it and was a handy scapegoat. He vowed never again to champion “a cardinal operation of war” without plenary authority; hence his assumption of the title “Minister of Defence” in World War II.

 • “His decision in 1925 to restore Britain to the Gold Standard caused a deep and unnecessary recession.”

There was already a recession. Churchill, Keynes and the Gold Standard comprise a far more complicated subject than Mr. Knowles represents. Among other things, the Gold Standard was insisted upon by the Bank of England. Churchill was certainly wrong to buy their arguments, and saw many of its effects coming; he was also incredibly unlucky in the way things transpired.

 • ”That led directly to the general strike in 1926, in which he was reported to have suggested using machine guns on the miners.”

Mr. Knowles confused his red herrings. It was the Welsh miners at Tonypandy in 1910 against whom Churchill is mythologically supposed to have sent troops—but top marks for the machine guns, a new twist on the old myth. (In fact, Churchill opposed the use of troops, in Tonypandy and in the General Strike.)

Mr. Knowles concluded:

Yes, he was, in the most part, a brilliant war leader. His role in the creation of the modern welfare state is also worth remembering. But his views on Lords reform are as irrelevant today as his views on India or female suffrage. This is a debate we should have based on principle, and on a practical evaluation of how well the House of Lords works. Citing dead men only muddies it.

Well, it is my instinctive feeling anyone who fails to do basic research can produce only what amounts to a national myth, divorced from reality.

Churchill was not always “a brilliant war leader.” He did help create what became the welfare state–and warned against its excesses. His views on Lords reform are not irrelevant, but they do require more study than we read in the Telegraph Blogpost. His views on India are still relevant to certain Indians who have written on the subject. (As one wrote, the Axis Powers had quite different ideas in mind for India than the old British Raj).

As for female suffrage, ask all the women who voted for him. Citing live Telegraph bloggers only muddies the waters.

Mr. Knowles has tweeted that “The whole point of the post was to take down Clegg. That piece is bizarre.” I certainly agree his piece is bizarre. But Mr. Clegg lasted until 2015.