THE STORY OF GALLIPOLI

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXII, Issue LXXII, 24 May 1917, Page 2

THE STORY OF GALLIPOLI

KING CONSTANTINE. IN IT

The Dardanelles report was recently debated in the .British Parliament, and prior to the debate the Government pubhhsed the sense of some of the passages deleted. One shows that towards the end of August, 1914, Mr Churchill formed the opinion that Turkey would join Germany at any moment, and on September 1 of that year he wrote to General Douglas, then Chief of the General Staff, informing him that on the previous day he had arranged a conference between the Admiralty and the War Office to work out a plan for the seizure, by means of an adequate Greek army, of Gallipoli, to admit our Fleet to the Sea of Marmora. On September 3 General Callwell, Director of Military Operations, in a memorandum, wrote that an attack from outside the Straits was "likely to prove an extremely difficult opei-ation," which would not be justifiable with less than 60,000 men. An Admiralty officer gave it as his opinion that the arrival of the- British Fleet would "certainly" have produced a revolution in Constantinople. The Commission states that at the time of the naval bombardment the Admiralty suspected that the Turkish forts were getting short of ammunition, a suspicion which subsequent evidence showed was well grounded. It was after this that 200 Skoda guns were rushed down by the Austrians. Au excised passage in Mr Walter Roch's minute uiscloses that the success of the first naval attack fixed the eyes of the Balkan nations on the Dardanelles. On March 1, 1915, the British Minister m Athens telegraphed that M. Venizelos proposed to offer the co-opera-tion of a Greek army corns of three divisions in Gallipoli.' He "telegraphed again on the 2nd that this proposal had been made after King Constantine had already been "sounded" and that he heard from another source that the King "wanted war." _„WitlL in m fortnight reports showed | that the lurks were moving back to Adnanople and developing their front | against Bulgaria. On "March 17 General Paget, who was engaged on a special mission in the Balkans, telegraphed to: Lord Kitchener that "the operations in the Dardanelles have made a deer, impression - that all possi- I bilities of Bulgaria attacking any Balkan State that might side with the ! Entente is now over, and there is some reason to think that shortly the Bulgarian Army will move against Turkey to co-operate in the Dardanelles opera-