THE DARDANELLES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19048, 27 June 1924, Page 9

THE DARDANELLES

SIR lAN HAMILTON’S SOME OF THE BLUNDERS. THE WORK OF KITCHENER. LONDON. April 17. Speaking at Hull on the Dardanelles campaign. General Sir lan Hamilton offered some frank personal opinions upo.i a few of those who helped to direct the miHtary and naval operations. “By the winter of 1914-15,” he said, "the First Sea Lord was Win ston Churchill. That is a name to conjure up brickbats or bouquets according to fancy. But we need not here trouble ourselves with his goodness or badness. Genius is an X-ray faculty which enables a. mortal to see what is on the other side of the mountains. Whether, having seen, he uses his knowledge ill or well, is another matter. Mr. Churchill saw. After all, he is an artist —a seer. He can see; he saw the Dardanelles, and so seeing he resolved to use Iho long distance boots given us by dur fleet to get round the enemy’s eastern flank. “Next in power to this young genius sat an old man of the sea. Lord Fisher also understood that the series of assaults on fortiflc'l positions which was going on in France was bound to end in the defeat of Europe. He understood that to escape from the misfortunes which are actually on us to-day we must quickly find a way round. But his eyes were glued on the othei flank—-the Western flank. For years he had drdfcmed of the three months of the Baltic; of Borkum, and of the Kiel Canal. Brilliant as he was, sensible as he could be, he was more narrow than Winston Churchill in that he was essentially a one-ele-ment man’. He never wasted a thought on anything so dry as the land. He reckoned to mask Borkum, force an entrance to the Baltic, and land Russian and British armies within seventy miles of Berlin. KITCHENER’S LIMITATIONS. “Next as to the War Office . The chief of the War Office was Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, who had been pulled off his ship just as he was starting to carry on the fifth year of his civilian work in Egypt. Lord Kitchener w'as eager to save the nation, but he was badly handicapped. On the day of declaration of war he found himself, committed to the foolish French Plan XVII., and he found also that all the biggest generals were about to seamper

off to France taking with them the pick of the General Staff. 'Take the War Office as a whole —there were shining exceptions like the Q.M.G., Sir John Cowan and a dug-out D.M.0,. Sir Charles Callwell—but generally speaking either the officers were capable but In the wrong posts, or they were capable but too terrified of Lord iKtchener to say ’No’ to him. “In some respects he was remlscent of Scobeletf. Certainly he belonged to a type which can flourish only in Russia or the British Empire. In the more closely organised Continental systems there is no room for these primitive originals. He had not vision, or if he had, he could never explain what he saw; but he had instinct, and, given a free run it rarely failed him.” A MISSING DOCUMENT. It was the morning of March 12, 191 b, when Lord Kitchener sent for Sir lan Hamilton. Sir lan thus described it: “I entered his room. After a moment he looked up and said, “We are sending a military force to support the Fleet now at the Dardanelles, and you are to have command.’ When the King of Denmark sent Hamlet to England,” observed Sir lan, “he commanded him to make himself scarce 'with fiery quickness.’ Thus it was with King Kitchener and Hamilton. Within twenty-four hours he must hand over a command three times larger than the British Expeditionary Force; receive his instructions; select a staff; get the hang of the Dardanelles and of the nature of the whereabouts of his new force, and —bundle off! “As was to be expected in so much agitation, all sorts of things were overlooked. For instance, in 1906, the General Staff had drawn up a considered memorandum upon the question of forcing the Dardanelles. But the General Staff were in France, and no one at the War Office knew of the existence of the document. Not till 1916, long after the last of our troops had quitted the i Gallipoli Peninsula, did I myself ever hear of it. So now- you see our party of thirteen officers starting off on .March 13—a Friday—for the Dardanelles. My instructions, on a half-sheet of foolscap, were vague.” THE BRAIN WAVE.

Sir lan Hamilton spoke in detail of the operations at the Dardanelles. “V Beach,” he said, /had we but known it, was next door to impossible as a landing. Our evil genius had planned our ruin here, and yet, at the last hour, good angels came and saved us by sending into the naval minds the thought of how, by the gift of a wooden horse, Troy and all her citadels had fallen. Commander Unwin was the name of the hero who had the brain wave, and as he is miraculously still alive I can still take my hat off whe n I meet him. So it came about that Admiral Wemyss fixed up an old steel-built tramp steamer called the River Clyde to bear within her womb two battalions of infantry. Not one of our men would have returned to tell the tale but for the River Clydesold now to the Spaniards by a Government of spendthrifts who could find millions for anything except sentiment.’ ’

THE BRIGADE IN EGYPT. Sir lan spoke of the lack of reinforcements, and declared that it was easier to get butter out of a dog’s mouth than troops out of the War Office—except, that was to say, for the Western Front. We had the sworn testimony of General Street, the General Staff Officer of the 29th Regular Division, before the Royal

Commission on the Dardanelles, that “even a fresh, well-trained brigade would have turned the scale” on April 28. Had England then no fresh, well-trained brigades? Yes, indeed, in Egypt it was standing by—idle. So far back as March 25 he had begged for leave to take these troops. The voyage from Egypt to the Dardanelles took three days, “afterwards” twice as many Turks had also arrived on the Peninsula. In the end the Higher Direction of the British at home proved less tenacious than the Turk, although it was not really so much the Turk as pressure from Western theorists which caused them to give way. Then, sadly, the army of the Dardanelles left its battlefields and its dead, and, without having lost guns or trenches, sailed away into the night.