• Continued..

  • The Royal Navy made a half hearted attack on the forts in November 1914, instead of forcing the narrows and steaming into the Sea of Marmara. All this achieved was to alert the Turks to their vulnerability and they then laid mines and strengthened the defences so that when the Royal Navy tried again 3 months later it was much more dangerous.

    • The "Spirit of Nelson" was badly missing.

  • The Royal Navy, acting on orders from an Admiral that did not cover himself with glory, failed in some half hearted attempts to force the narrows for a second time (Feb 1915) and third time (18 March 1915). Thus the "world's greatest navy" had three times failed miserably in their effort and as a result a hasty and ill prepared plan to turn the campaign into a military invasion was formulated. 

    • The troops used had previously been earmarked to occupy Constantinople after the RN had forced the Dardanelles.

  • A naval campaign suddenly became a military one and the RN were reduced to providing low grade artillery support and casualty evacuation.

    • At Helles the Royal Navy were stingy in the amount of artillery support they offered the British troops. They wanted to "save" the ammunition for when they shelled Constantinople.

    • Naval artillery is designed and built to be fired on a flat trajectory at other ships or shore installations. It is not very effective against infantry. The problem found here with naval artillery support for ground troops was later reproduced at Singapore in WW2.  At the Straights and at Helles at least the Navy had buildings to target. It is next to impossible to target trenches when the maps are wrong and there is no radio communication from ground to ship. So naval artillery support for the troops at Anzac was spectacular, but largely ineffective.

    • In May the British naval artillery advantage was diminished following the  torpedoing of the battleships HMS Goliath on May 13, HMS Triumph on May 25 and HMS Majestic on May 27. 

      • After these losses much of the battleship support was withdrawn and those remaining would only fire while under way, reducing their accuracy and effectiveness.

  • The British senior officers were old, inexperienced, dismissive of casualties and did not trust each other. Hamilton was scared of Kitchener, Stopford was in his first ever combat command and out of his depth and Hunter-Weston was a murderous butcher of British troops unrivalled until Haig gained control in France.

  • The Anzacs were landed well north of the planned site. Again the Royal Navy failed. 

    • It is explained that unexpected currents pushed the boats northwards and or that 

    • the navigators made a mistake in positioning the ships too far north because they were working from poor quality charts at night. 

    • It is claimed that navigators mistook Ari Burnu to the north for Kabatepe (Gaba Tepe) in the south. 

  • Had the Anzacs landed near Kabatepe the whole story would be different.

  • The cost of landing in the wrong spot cannot be over estimated. Instead of being able to smash through the reasonably light defences and roll across fairly level ground to their objective the Anzacs were dropped at the base of cliffs and spent the next 8 months hopelessly entangled in country that was designed for defence and almost impossible to successfully attack, regardless of numbers. Australian troops would not see anything like it until the worst of the Kokoda Campaign in Papua New Guinea in WW2. But at least at Kokoda they had the cover of the jungle. At Gallipoli there was no cover, so the snipers and artillery spotters had a field day.

  • It is unimaginable that even inefficient senior planners actually planned to drop an invading army into a tangled range of hills when just south there was an almost flat plain leading straight to the objective.

    • "A rugged and difficult part of the coast had been selected for the landing, so difficult and rugged that I considered the Turks were not at all likely to anticipate such a descent. The actual point of disembarkation was rather more than a mile north of that I had selected". Sir Ian Hamilton, overall commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force

  • In terms of the Gallipoli offensive the Divisions involved were, on paper, supposed to have had a complement of at least three hundred and six guns to support them; in reality they had one hundred and eighteen with limited ammunition. 

    • Here again the influence of the Western front was to take its toll: the landings on the 25th April coincided with the 2nd Ypres offensive, the stock-piling of munitions for this had a knock on effect on the Gallipoli planning.

  • The troops were hopelessly undersupplied with material. They had to make their own grenades (bombs) out of jam tins filled with gun-cotton.

    • Undoubtedly the greatest grenade battle of the war occurred on the Pozieres Heights on the night of 26-27 July 1916.Lasting for twelve-and-a-half hours without a break the Australians, with British support, exchanged grenades with their German foes (who threw multiple types of grenade: sticks, cricket balls, egg bombs and rifle grenades). The allied contingent alone threw some 15,000 Mills bombs during the night. That is probably more grenades used in 1 day than were delivered to Anzac in 8 months.

The Turkish soldier, whose courage is undoubted, cannot win battles on an empty stomach; but he can at least defend fortresses, and it may well he that in the winter campaign of 1914 he will add the name of Erzerourn to those of Plevna and Adrianople. 

This is a verbatim quote from the magazine "Navy & Army" December 1914. This was read by most military types. Why did they think that the Turks would run at the first sign of trouble when they were defending their homeland, their homes and their families?

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