I recently became interested in the ramifications of an Entente victory at Gallipoli and started a TL on this premise. Here's the beginning of that TL.
In October 1911, Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty and continued to serve in that capacity into the Great War. While serving in this position, he put strong emphasis on modernization, was in favour of using aeroplanes in combat, and launched a programme to replace coal power with oil power. When he assumed his position, oil was already being used on submarines and destroyers, but most ships were still coal-powered, though oil was sprayed on the coals to boost maximum speed. Churchill began this programme by ordering that the upcoming Queen Elizabeth-class battleships were to be built with oil-fired engines. He established a Royal Commission chaired by Admiral Sir John Fisher, which confirmed the benefits of oil over coal in three classified reports, and judged that ample supplies of oil existed, but recommended that oil reserves be maintained in the event of war. The delegation then travelled to the Persian Gulf, and the government, largely through Churchill’s advice, eventually invested in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, bought most of its stock, and negotiated a secret contract for a twenty year supply.
The most important brainchild of Winston Churchill was arguably his plan to land at the Gallipoli Peninsula. Plans had been floated to land at Alexandretta, which had a Christian populace and formed the strategic centre of the Ottoman Empire’s railroads, the capture of which would cut it in two. The Alexandretta landing was abandoned because militarily it would have required more resources than France could allocate, and politically France did not want the British operating in their sphere of influence, a position to which Britain had agreed in 1912.
However, by late 1914 the war on the Western Front had become a stalemate; the French-British counter-offensive of the First Battle of the Marne had ended and the British had suffered many casualties in the First Battle of Ypres in Flanders. Lines of trenches had been dug by both sides, running from the Swiss border to the English Channel as the war of manoeuvre ended and trench warfare began. The German Empire and Austria-Hungary closed the overland trade routes between Britain and France in the west and Russia in the east. The White Sea in the arctic north and the Sea of Okhotsk in the Far East were icebound in winter and distant from the Eastern Front, the Baltic Sea was blockaded by the Imperial German Navy and the entrance to the Black Sea through the Dardanelles was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. While the empire remained neutral supplies could still be sent to Russia through the Dardanelles, but prior to the Ottoman entry into the war the straits had been closed and in November they began to mine the waterway.
French Minister of Justice Aristide Briand's proposal in November to attack the Ottoman Empire was rejected and an attempt by the British to pay the Ottomans to join the Allied side also failed. Later that month, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed a naval attack on the Dardanelles, based in part on erroneous reports of Ottoman troop strength. Churchill wanted to use a large number of obsolete battleships, which could not operate against the German High Seas Fleet, in a Dardanelles operation, with a small occupation force provided by the army. It was hoped that an attack on the Ottomans would also draw Bulgaria and Greece (both formerly ruled by the Ottomans) into the war on the Allied side. On January 2nd 1915, Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia appealed to Britain for assistance against the Ottomans, who were conducting an offensive in the Caucasus. Churchill viewed the Ottomans as the Central Powers’ “soft underbelly” and favoured these plans.
However, in December 1914 Churchill suffered a minor stroke, commonly attributed to his heavy drinking and smoking. In order to recover, he returned to the comfort of the Churchill family home in Oxfordshire: Blenheim Palace. He, however, refused to resign from his position of First Lord of the Admiralty and the government was reluctant to fire him in times of war when he was most effective, conflicting with advice from his doctors. A compromise was made: he was forbidden from working for more than three hours a day and Admiral John “Jacky” Fisher was given many of his responsibilities. Fisher promoted his own plan to procure a speedy victory, the so-called Baltic Project, a plan to land British and/or Russian forces on the flat beaches of Pomerania, less than 150 kilometres from Berlin. Fisher began started out with the most essential components by practicing amphibious landings and training effective minesweeper crews, who would man the first of over 600 specialized vessels needed. These also included landing craft, destroyers, light cruisers, monitors and heavy shallow draft support ships in the shape of the Courageous-class battlecruisers. Submarines and extensive mining, it was proposed, would protect the invasion force against the Imperial German Navy.
Churchill’s physicians and his wife Clementine kept him away from cigars and liquor as much as possible, and he spent the four months after his stroke pretty much sober. He found new energy and in an incredible tour de force he managed to recover and get a clean bill of health, allowing him to resume his full responsibilities as First Lord of the Admiralty by March 1st 1915. He scratched Fisher’s “Baltic Project” and dismissed it as suicidal, saying there would be so many sea mines and U-boats that one could walk from Denmark to Sweden, not to mention that the Imperial German Navy would fight a life or death fight on its home turf. He did, however, gratefully utilize the minesweepers and the officers educated in amphibious tactics for his own baby.
He pressed his plan for a Dardanelles Campaign, but if there was to be any hope of it taking place in 1915 than some alterations would have to be made. The only preliminary bombardment would take place on the day of the landings, which would ensure the element of surprise. Secondly, Entente forces would land on the western side and southern tip of the peninsula, avoiding a dangerous trip toward the Sea of Marmara. Cape Helles and Gaba Tepe, a headland overlooking the northern Aegean Sea, would be the main objectives of the early phase. The landings would be supported by one battleship, three battlecruisers, 28 pre-dreadnoughts, 23 cruisers, 25 destroyers, 13 submarines and one seaplane carrier. Churchill stated that even the loss of a dozen pre-dreadnoughts wouldn’t necessarily end the operation since these obsolete ships were never intended to face the full might of the Germans in the North Sea. They had therefore not been factored into the calculations of a full scale battle between the Grand Fleet and the High Seas Fleet to begin with. Their loss subsequently wouldn’t change the Royal Navy’s strategic situation vis-à-vis the German navy in the North Sea, which was one of naval superiority (besides that, without the war, many of them would have been decommissioned already).
On April 22nd 1915, the Dardanelles Campaign commenced with a massive naval bombardment with gun calibres up to 15 inches (381 mm), dropping thousands of shells on the landing beaches and the immediate hinterland. It was followed by the world’s first true amphibious operation on April 25th, which Churchill called X-Day The fact that the landings took place only 72 hours after the naval bombardment started ensured that the Ottomans hadn’t had the time to redeploy any reinforcements here. The 3rd Infantry Brigade therefore encountered little resistance and had taken the strategically important Gaba Tepe headland by nightfall. After that Anzac forces advanced toward the forts at Kilitbahir in order to cut off the defenders there. The Helles landing was made by the 29th Division, under the command of Major General Aylmer Hunter-Weston. The division landed on five beaches in an arc about the tip of the peninsula, named from east to west as ‘S’, ‘V’, ‘W’, ‘X’ and ‘Y’ Beaches. On May 1st, the 29th Indian Brigade (including the 1/6th Gurkha Rifles) landed, took and secured Sari Bair above the landing beaches, and were later joined by two other Gurkha battalions, the 1st/5th and the 2nd/10th; the Zion Mule Corps landed at Helles on April 27th. At ‘Y’ Beach, during the first engagement around the village of Krithia (First Battle of Krithia), the Allies were able to land unopposed and advance inland. There were only a small number of defenders in the village, and with explicit orders to break out from the beachhead the ‘Y’ beach commander decided to exploit this. During his short tenure as Churchill’s substitute Fisher had helped develop an amphibious doctrine, which dictated that any such operation would fail if the defenders managed to pin down the attackers on the beaches. It was therefore imperative that landing forces got off the beaches before the defenders could be reinforced to the point that they could encapsulate the beachheads and counterattack. The capture of Krithia on April 28th (X+3) was followed two days later by the seizure of Achi Baba, a height dominating the Gallipoli Peninsula.
By May 10th Entente forces had reached a line running from Gaba Tepe to Kilithbahir and Ottoman reinforcements couldn’t dislodge them. However, optimistic Entente plans to of an Ottoman collapse and a capture of Constantinople within a few weeks proved unrealistic. The initial speed of the Entente advance quickly slowed to a snail’s pace because major Ottoman reinforcements arrived and used the terrain to their advantage. The Entente presence swelled from a mere 30.000 to 200.000 men and they advanced up the peninsula slowly and methodically against determined opposition during spring and summer of 1915.
Simultaneously, the British and the French were busy trying to convince the Greeks and the Bulgarians to join the war against the Ottoman Empire and satisfy their territorial claims. That was made difficult by the fact that Bulgaria and Greece were bitter enemies: the former had started the Second Balkan War by stabbing its former Greek and Serb allies in the back, after which Romania and the Ottomans had intervened against Bulgaria. Both needed a final push in order to be convinced.
The Soft Underbelly
Chapter I: Consequences of a Stroke, December 1914-May 1915.
Chapter I: Consequences of a Stroke, December 1914-May 1915.
The most important brainchild of Winston Churchill was arguably his plan to land at the Gallipoli Peninsula. Plans had been floated to land at Alexandretta, which had a Christian populace and formed the strategic centre of the Ottoman Empire’s railroads, the capture of which would cut it in two. The Alexandretta landing was abandoned because militarily it would have required more resources than France could allocate, and politically France did not want the British operating in their sphere of influence, a position to which Britain had agreed in 1912.
However, by late 1914 the war on the Western Front had become a stalemate; the French-British counter-offensive of the First Battle of the Marne had ended and the British had suffered many casualties in the First Battle of Ypres in Flanders. Lines of trenches had been dug by both sides, running from the Swiss border to the English Channel as the war of manoeuvre ended and trench warfare began. The German Empire and Austria-Hungary closed the overland trade routes between Britain and France in the west and Russia in the east. The White Sea in the arctic north and the Sea of Okhotsk in the Far East were icebound in winter and distant from the Eastern Front, the Baltic Sea was blockaded by the Imperial German Navy and the entrance to the Black Sea through the Dardanelles was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. While the empire remained neutral supplies could still be sent to Russia through the Dardanelles, but prior to the Ottoman entry into the war the straits had been closed and in November they began to mine the waterway.
French Minister of Justice Aristide Briand's proposal in November to attack the Ottoman Empire was rejected and an attempt by the British to pay the Ottomans to join the Allied side also failed. Later that month, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed a naval attack on the Dardanelles, based in part on erroneous reports of Ottoman troop strength. Churchill wanted to use a large number of obsolete battleships, which could not operate against the German High Seas Fleet, in a Dardanelles operation, with a small occupation force provided by the army. It was hoped that an attack on the Ottomans would also draw Bulgaria and Greece (both formerly ruled by the Ottomans) into the war on the Allied side. On January 2nd 1915, Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia appealed to Britain for assistance against the Ottomans, who were conducting an offensive in the Caucasus. Churchill viewed the Ottomans as the Central Powers’ “soft underbelly” and favoured these plans.
However, in December 1914 Churchill suffered a minor stroke, commonly attributed to his heavy drinking and smoking. In order to recover, he returned to the comfort of the Churchill family home in Oxfordshire: Blenheim Palace. He, however, refused to resign from his position of First Lord of the Admiralty and the government was reluctant to fire him in times of war when he was most effective, conflicting with advice from his doctors. A compromise was made: he was forbidden from working for more than three hours a day and Admiral John “Jacky” Fisher was given many of his responsibilities. Fisher promoted his own plan to procure a speedy victory, the so-called Baltic Project, a plan to land British and/or Russian forces on the flat beaches of Pomerania, less than 150 kilometres from Berlin. Fisher began started out with the most essential components by practicing amphibious landings and training effective minesweeper crews, who would man the first of over 600 specialized vessels needed. These also included landing craft, destroyers, light cruisers, monitors and heavy shallow draft support ships in the shape of the Courageous-class battlecruisers. Submarines and extensive mining, it was proposed, would protect the invasion force against the Imperial German Navy.
Churchill’s physicians and his wife Clementine kept him away from cigars and liquor as much as possible, and he spent the four months after his stroke pretty much sober. He found new energy and in an incredible tour de force he managed to recover and get a clean bill of health, allowing him to resume his full responsibilities as First Lord of the Admiralty by March 1st 1915. He scratched Fisher’s “Baltic Project” and dismissed it as suicidal, saying there would be so many sea mines and U-boats that one could walk from Denmark to Sweden, not to mention that the Imperial German Navy would fight a life or death fight on its home turf. He did, however, gratefully utilize the minesweepers and the officers educated in amphibious tactics for his own baby.
He pressed his plan for a Dardanelles Campaign, but if there was to be any hope of it taking place in 1915 than some alterations would have to be made. The only preliminary bombardment would take place on the day of the landings, which would ensure the element of surprise. Secondly, Entente forces would land on the western side and southern tip of the peninsula, avoiding a dangerous trip toward the Sea of Marmara. Cape Helles and Gaba Tepe, a headland overlooking the northern Aegean Sea, would be the main objectives of the early phase. The landings would be supported by one battleship, three battlecruisers, 28 pre-dreadnoughts, 23 cruisers, 25 destroyers, 13 submarines and one seaplane carrier. Churchill stated that even the loss of a dozen pre-dreadnoughts wouldn’t necessarily end the operation since these obsolete ships were never intended to face the full might of the Germans in the North Sea. They had therefore not been factored into the calculations of a full scale battle between the Grand Fleet and the High Seas Fleet to begin with. Their loss subsequently wouldn’t change the Royal Navy’s strategic situation vis-à-vis the German navy in the North Sea, which was one of naval superiority (besides that, without the war, many of them would have been decommissioned already).
On April 22nd 1915, the Dardanelles Campaign commenced with a massive naval bombardment with gun calibres up to 15 inches (381 mm), dropping thousands of shells on the landing beaches and the immediate hinterland. It was followed by the world’s first true amphibious operation on April 25th, which Churchill called X-Day The fact that the landings took place only 72 hours after the naval bombardment started ensured that the Ottomans hadn’t had the time to redeploy any reinforcements here. The 3rd Infantry Brigade therefore encountered little resistance and had taken the strategically important Gaba Tepe headland by nightfall. After that Anzac forces advanced toward the forts at Kilitbahir in order to cut off the defenders there. The Helles landing was made by the 29th Division, under the command of Major General Aylmer Hunter-Weston. The division landed on five beaches in an arc about the tip of the peninsula, named from east to west as ‘S’, ‘V’, ‘W’, ‘X’ and ‘Y’ Beaches. On May 1st, the 29th Indian Brigade (including the 1/6th Gurkha Rifles) landed, took and secured Sari Bair above the landing beaches, and were later joined by two other Gurkha battalions, the 1st/5th and the 2nd/10th; the Zion Mule Corps landed at Helles on April 27th. At ‘Y’ Beach, during the first engagement around the village of Krithia (First Battle of Krithia), the Allies were able to land unopposed and advance inland. There were only a small number of defenders in the village, and with explicit orders to break out from the beachhead the ‘Y’ beach commander decided to exploit this. During his short tenure as Churchill’s substitute Fisher had helped develop an amphibious doctrine, which dictated that any such operation would fail if the defenders managed to pin down the attackers on the beaches. It was therefore imperative that landing forces got off the beaches before the defenders could be reinforced to the point that they could encapsulate the beachheads and counterattack. The capture of Krithia on April 28th (X+3) was followed two days later by the seizure of Achi Baba, a height dominating the Gallipoli Peninsula.
By May 10th Entente forces had reached a line running from Gaba Tepe to Kilithbahir and Ottoman reinforcements couldn’t dislodge them. However, optimistic Entente plans to of an Ottoman collapse and a capture of Constantinople within a few weeks proved unrealistic. The initial speed of the Entente advance quickly slowed to a snail’s pace because major Ottoman reinforcements arrived and used the terrain to their advantage. The Entente presence swelled from a mere 30.000 to 200.000 men and they advanced up the peninsula slowly and methodically against determined opposition during spring and summer of 1915.
Simultaneously, the British and the French were busy trying to convince the Greeks and the Bulgarians to join the war against the Ottoman Empire and satisfy their territorial claims. That was made difficult by the fact that Bulgaria and Greece were bitter enemies: the former had started the Second Balkan War by stabbing its former Greek and Serb allies in the back, after which Romania and the Ottomans had intervened against Bulgaria. Both needed a final push in order to be convinced.
Last edited:
