WI: Alexandretta instead of Gallipoli?
- Thread starter Northstar
- Start date
All very correct but frankly if you are going to commit a quarter million troops on a single operation instead of committing them in penny packets then the obvious strategic target is Gallipoli. The Ottomans won't collapse if they lose Syria and Iraq, they'll just fight on from Anatolia. On the other had they WILL collapse if you take Constantinople as you've just cut off their supply line for the whole empire and simultaneously opened up the supply line to Russia. Churchill had the right idea even if the execution was atrocious.
Venizelos famously or infamously had agreed to a Russian Constantinople as long as Greece got the west Anatolian coast, when accused of it he very frankly stated that he did not care for Greece to get the ire of 180 million Russians (of course I suspect he was hoping for British opposition to Russian control of the straits to reassert itself). Which leaves as with Constantine, who DID agree in August 1914 to join the war (the Entente in hindsight idiotically refused the offer to avoid offending the Ottomans and Bulgarians) and came a hairs breadth of agreeing at the time of Gallipoli. To be exact he did agree only to be persuaded by Metaxas and Sophia otherwise after Venizelos left him on his own, the man as mentioned before had a tendency to agree to the last person he had spoken to... later on he started avoiding Venizelos because in his words he feared Venizelos would be persuading him against his will.
If you want an easy POD, remove the episode that led in the replacement of Victor Dousmanis with Metaxas. Dousmanis was an ardent royalist himself but far more likely to go along with the Gallipoli plan than Metaxas...
The tricky part, though, is that whole "take Constantinople" part.
Allied execution was (yes) sloppy and slow. But given the capabilities of the British for amphibious operations at that point, and the capabilities the Ottomans had for defending at Gallipoli, it was never going to be an easy operation.
Alexandretta has lower payoff, no question. But it had an excellent chance of succeeding. Gallipoli never did.
Gallipoli at a minimum needed 3 more divisions storming the beaches at D-Day, which if you bring the Greeks in you get and ideally Churchill not ordering the bombardment of the outer forts and the naval attack at the forts happening simultaneously with the landings. In short proper staff planning and somewhat better diplomacy. Neither were insurmountable problems.
Actually, OTL, I think they were insurmountable problems. Where are the 3 extra divisions coming from, where is the better staff to do the planning, and who are the better diplomats?
No, not quite insurmountable, perhaps. (@Comte de Geneve does raise valid questions.)
But I think we have to work with the Allies playing at par, not having the 18 holes of their life, unless you can come up with an earlier point of departure that raises par but is still highly plausible.
The Greeks jumping in certainly helps at Gallipoli - IF you can use them properly. Which, I don't think, can be assumed given how badly Hamilton handled the whole thing. Churchill's role is harder to get around: Yes, you can remove him from the scene in a tragic bourbon bottle or car accident, but then you need to be explicit about that; the problem was, he wasn't the only one who favored the bombardment, a quite plausible and natural move for the British to make at that point.
(I sometimes wonder if the Greek army wouldn't have been more useful just charging at full strength overland through Thrace, even if it meant tangling with the Bulgarians.)
It's so easy to look at Gallipoli and see all the mistakes, and how it could have gone better; but we also have the benefit of not only perfect intelligence, but also a whole century of amphibious warfare development and experience, a lot of which was carved out of the bloody hides of the Gallipoli tragedy: the U.S. Marine Corps spent the entirey of the interwar period and even beyond studying the hell out of Gallipoli, and thinking about it, greatly to their benefit. Expecting the British to make the right move at every necessary point . . . well, it is not *impossible*, but it's unlikely.
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I suppose that is something to be considered? What came out of the failure at Gallipoli that might be missing ITTL? A good object lesson in amphibious warfare would be one, as a landing at Alexandretta is likely to be mostly through the port. Additionally, a good chunk of the forces deployed in Egypt were those evacuated from Gallipoli. Them holding Cilicia means those troops will have to come from elsewhere (though we did say there might be 9 divisions more than needed to hold Cilicia in the Gallipoli bag, so maybe not too big a deal).
That is a possibility sure. On the other hand the Greeks were bringing more than just cannon fodder, after all they had their own, rather detailed, plans to make landings in Gallipoli. And if you have the Greeks in you don't even need freak accidents, at the very least Metaxas who made the Greek plans will be attached in the staff running the operation. And if we make the logical assumption the Greek corps is landed in one piece at frex Suvla it will be under their own corps commander and we know all four and their abilities from the Balkan wars. Gennadis was excellent, but unlikely to be the one in charge,his corps was covering east Macedonia after all. Same for Moschopoulos C corps in central Macedonia. Which means either A corps under Kallaris or B corps under Manousogiannakis. I'm inclined towards A but both were solid capable officers with a fair bit of combat experience.
And of course this leaves aside the potential of Constantine himself in overall command of the operation. Constantine was the most likely commander in chief of a Balkan front TTL. But there are political considerations to keep him off direct command of the operation although in theory at least Hamilton should be under his command...
McPherson
Banned
No. (Time for the maps.)
Uncategorized | Gallipoli Dispatches 1915 | Page 2
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The thing about a strait is that to use it, one has to control or at least neutralize both shorelines. The people^1 who came up with this disaster obviously never could manage a latrine detail. That includes...
Ian Hamilton
Herbert Kitchener
John de Robeck
William Birdwood
Winston Churchill(From wiki)
Suppose the Gallipoli landings go in and everyone races up the peninsula, Gets past Hill 60, Scimitar Hill, Achi Baba, Kilid Bar, etc., and reaches the Ederne Railroad and follows the cuts to the trench-lines outside Istanbul. NOW WHAT?
http://ian.macky.net/pat/map/marm/marm.html
Many people do not really look at Gallipoli and understand the complete insanity involved. The operation would take 3/4 of a million men and take a YEAR to execute if everything went exactly right. Compared to that idiocy, ANACONDA II not only makes sense, it is practically the only viable way to eliminate the Turks.
For you see, as long as the CP can float stuff out of Bulgaria, the Turks are in the War, and as long as an Entente fleet cannot get past the Bosporus, the whole bloody exercise was pointless. SEAPOWER. Learn it, love it, hug it, and get used to it... especially the naval geography of chokepoints and how to use them to bleed your enemy to death.
The thing about a strait is that to use it, one has to control or at least neutralize both shorelines. The people^1 who came up with this disaster obviously never could manage a latrine detail. That includes...
(From wiki)
Well, that's not really fair, though, is it? None of these men were exactly idiots.
Even Hamilton, who was obviously unsuited to the job commanding it...he had proven his ability at lower levels of command. And there wasn't exactly a deep pool of men with amphibious warfare experience sitting on the British bench in 1915.
But they all had imbibed too much of the Sick Man of Europe narrative. The Turks had lost pretty much every single modern war they'd fought. Why not this campaign, too? There was a serious failure of intelligence here, too.
And with one possible exception, no one had ever staged a major amphibious invasion with and against 20th century defensive weaponry before. That one exception was hardly encouraging: The siege of Port Arthur, which the Japanese only managed by landing unopposed, sixty miles away, and the effort to conclude the siege with both naval and ground forces ended up taking five months, and costing it 16 warships and nearly 100,000 casualties - and all that despite the inept and passive leadership of General Stoessel, whom no one could readily confuse with Otto Liman von Sanders or Mustafa Kemal. If there's anyone worth assigning to latrine duty, it's Stoessel (and let Fok relieve him for second shift).
[EDIT: It is intresting to note that Hamilton was a military observer in the Russo-Japanese War, the only foreign observer present, in fact, for the full duration of land combat in Manchuria. And in fact he drew some valuable lessons from the war, such as the obsolescence of horse cavalry and the growing value of aircraft. But he doesn't seem to have been present at Port Arthur, so none of the lessons he learned and published related to amphibious operations.]
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McPherson
Banned
Manila Bay. Santiago de Cuba.
I'm only pointing out what was obvious in hindsight or to anyone who bothered to wargame the 'what-ifs" pre-sight. It is one thing to land on a land spur jutting out into the Aegean. It is another to look at the SEA OF MARMARA and ask the fairly obvious questions of; how do we get through the Dardanelles, survive the six or seven minefields, get past the coastal forts, break into the Sea of Marmara, sink whatever is waiting there, take the fortified islands in it, and then fight our way through the Bosporus? And what if the Turks opposite shore in Asia Minor get frisky and how bloody is Istanbul going to be to reduce during the inevitable siege, and what happens when, not if, the Bulgarians come in?
This is not rocket science. It is hardly difficult military science. Now military science... If you look at the Murphy awful terrain and LLOC problems from the landing beaches to the Ederne Railroad and then at the imbeciles who proposed this operation who have to solve those problems, you ask yourself what form of hashish or cocaine were they using when they dreamed this nightmare up?
If I were a German on the Großer Generalstab, and I was asked to design an operation to kill the maximum number of Entente soldiers with the CP minimum of effort, Gallipoli comes darn close to being ideal. Next to the idiocy of parking all those Entente divisions in Greece to watch Bulgaria for 2 years and essentially doing nothing, Gallipoli was probably the most useful gift "the amateur strategist"^1 gave to the Germans in WWI.
^1
Is it any wonder the Americans were tearing their hair out in frustration in WWII with him meddling after 1942?
The same man who championed Gallipoli, threw away Cyrenaica, let his navy lie to him about the Singapore Bastion Defense, botched up ABC 1 and 2, meddled constantly with the Desert Army (until a plane crash put the right British general in command.) listened to the wrong people, (Pound and Portal), did not listen to his allies and good advisors (Americans, especially Marshall and/or Alan Brooke) and persisted obstinately in his own peculiar stupid fixations such as the Italian campaign (Anzio)...
I can hardly suggest that any of the named individuals even bothered to think it through. Look, as far as ANACONDA II is concerned, for all its difficulties of the operations in moving through the Sinai into Palestine, up the Tigris in Iraq, landing at Tripoli to secure the Lebanon, landing at Samandag to start the western arm of the Fertile Crescent campaign and that crossing 450 kilometers of arid hill country to reach the Eurphrates and then following both rivers about 600 kilometers both ways and fighting what are essentially two massive cavalry campaigns to reach Baghdad... that stands a better chance than Gallipoli ever did. It is better planned and it takes into account of Turk incompetence and ineptitude in the region where they are weakest and it does them the most harm with the least Entente cost.
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Well, I mean, because the Entente did not know about the minefields - not their extent, at any rate. They did not know how numerous and mobile the Ottoman batteries were, or how many German advisors and commanders they had on hand. The plan was, reduced to its basics, to sail the ships up the Dardanelles, park them off Constantinople, and wait for the Sublime Porte to sue for peace. When they ran into the mines and the coastal batteries, making the landings to secure the straits for the ships was the fallback plan.
The bottom line was just that they badly underestimated Ottoman capability to resist, and willpower to resist. It was an intelligence failure.
I think I should confine myself to saying that I have a somewhat higher estimation of Churchill than you have seem to have. But then, if you get down to it, so did Brooke, too (for all his frustrations with Churchill).
No. (Time for the maps.)
Uncategorized | Gallipoli Dispatches 1915 | Page 2
Gallipoli campaign | National Army Museum
Battle of Gallipoli timeline | Timetoast timelines
The thing about a strait is that to use it, one has to control or at least neutralize both shorelines. The people^1 who came up with this disaster obviously never could manage a latrine detail. That includes...
(From wiki)
Suppose the Gallipoli landings go in and everyone races up the peninsula, Gets past Hill 60, Scimitar Hill, Achi Baba, Kilid Bar, etc., and reaches the Ederne Railroad and follows the cuts to the trench-lines outside Istanbul. NOW WHAT?
http://ian.macky.net/pat/map/marm/marm.html
Many people do not really look at Gallipoli and understand the complete insanity involved. The operation would take 3/4 of a million men and take a YEAR to execute if everything went exactly right. Compared to that idiocy, ANACONDA II not only makes sense, it is practically the only viable way to eliminate the Turks.
For you see, as long as the CP can float stuff out of Bulgaria, the Turks are in the War, and as long as an Entente fleet cannot get past the Bosporus, the whole bloody exercise was pointless. SEAPOWER. Learn it, love it, hug it, and get used to it... especially the naval geography of chokepoints and how to use them to bleed your enemy to death.
In short... no. First let's see from Edward Erickson Gallipoli the Ottoman Campaign parts of which can be found online here: https://books.google.gr/books?id=Vo... ottoman campaign&pg=PT20#v=onepage&q&f=false
In particular lets see maps 1.2 and 2.2. The first is the Ottoman dispositions right before the start of the campaign the second right before the landings. In February you have a single division (7th infantry) with 15,000 men covering the whole north of the peninsula and another division (9th infantry) covering BOTH sides of the straits in the south with 34,500 men in the whole fortified area. By the time of the landings this has increased to the Ottoman 5th army with twice the number of divisions immediately available while in the area of the landings, divisions have increased from one to three, with the 19th infantry under Kemal still at Rodosto in February moved to the European side and the 3rd infantry moved from Balikesir to Kum Kale. Saying that 8 allied divisions in February (assuming the Greeks are in) with 138,000 men cannot beat 2 Ottoman ones with 49,500 seems to me, highly problematic to put it mildly.
Second you seem you propose that had the landings succeeded you just see the Turks pulling back in defensive lines further up the peninsula. To which I'd only say... how exactly? The Greek plan at least had a blocking force landing at Bulair and cutting off the peninsula. So in the good scenario your early landings have cut off the peninsula in the north, destroyed the forts on the European side after which you suppressed with artillery the forts on the Asian side which your landings at Kum Kale expanded to take. At which point you've just opened the way to put a fleet in the sea of Marmara.
Third Constantinople being supplied by sea from Bulgaria. Leaving aside the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, Bulgaria is still neutral at this point. The obvious question is if it looks Turkey is losing, why it jumps on the German side and does not join the Entente to grab Thrace instead. We'll leave aside how the supplies reach Bulgaria in the first place with Serbia still in the fight and Romania neutral.
I still maintain that they should have kept at it - the minesweepers had become better organised and under near 100% RN control (they had been mostly civilian at the start) with several battleship crews suddenly without a ship.
The loss of 'Battleships' while bad only involved ships that were so obsolete that they were going to be decommissioned and used as depot ships etc after the campaign anyway even during wartime - so their loss was not so great in hindsight with only the Bovet suffering heavy losses in life when she capsized.
Yes it was costly but - in man power not so much - a literal drop in the ocean (no pun intended) - especially when we compare it to the losses being sustained on land on both fronts and in the subsequent Gallipoli land campaign
Basically the local leadership bottled it.
While I don't believe that nonsense about Turkish gunners nearly out of ammo - I do believe US Ambassador Morganthau who gleefully wrote about the panic in Ottoman (where the leaders where ready to flee) and German (whose ambassador had begged the Americans to let them seek sanctuary in the US Embassy) circles in Istanbul and had the RM and MN broken through then given that all of the Ottomans major industries are in that city including their only munitions factory as well as their main communication with Europe.
So even if they did not throw in the towel they would be effectively knocked out as a major power in the region.
Worth the loss of some obsolete ships IMO and directly and immediately impacts one of the main fronts in allowing supplies to reach Russia via the Black Sea and allows for further options in Eastern Europe.
McPherson
Banned
You assume that the Ottomans were stupid and 3 additional Entente divisions actually changes things. It does not. WHERE IS THE LIFT and where is the SUPPLY? If it could have been done, it would have been done. Same with the Greeks. You don't land where the idiots did if you have the Greeks. You march east with THEM . You have not demonstrably achieved the 6 to 1 odds, nor eliminated the naval mine barrier or shown how to reach and supply from the beaches to the Ederne railroad in TIME to prevent the Ottoman reinforcements to establish a defense and withdrawal up the peninsula as carted.
Show me that evidence and you "might" have a case. A slim one, because as I pointed out, it is the sea of Marmara and the Bosporus, NOT Istanbul.
Entente moving in on Istanbul, the Bulgarians will mobilize as eventually happened, because they will figure they are next. The Russian Black Sea Fleet? Art thou kidding? From Sofia's viewpoint, if the idiots bottled up at Gallipoli are that incredibly stupid to shove their troops into that kill funnel, how are the Turks losing again?
McPherson
Banned
You could look at that layout and if you had any brains at all, visualize the setup as the Red Team. I don't know if the British even thought that way in WWI. Hell, George Dewey and American Consul Oscar Williams, ran spies in on the Spaniards and mapped out the Manila Bay defense and Subic Bay just so the East Asia squadron would not be blown up by the expected minefields and shore batteries. The Spaniards ran into a sudden shortage of copper wire they wanted for their naval minefields, because their hired Hong Kong supplier, told them he was out of the special insulated wire they needed. Montojo had to tear up a telephone line from Manila to Dagupan just to get the wire he needed. As it turned out, that wire did not work and the Spanish minefields... failed. Especially in front of Montojo's fleet when two of the command mines exploded prematurely.
Now I wonder who arranged for the non-supply of wire? Maybe it was the same folks who thwarted the Cámara Expedition at the Suez Canal?
He killed a lot of British soldiers and sailors when he should have confined himself to policy. Policy is eliminating the French fleet when it had to be done. That is a political decision, at the time, which makes sense and which the professional British military did not like. THAT is what a national leader does. Greece arguably was a political decision. A poor one when one sees the military problem, still for politics, Greece might be "saved", so one "might" throw Libya (in the hand) away to try it.
ABC-1 and ABC-2 were the grand strategy conferences between the United States Navy and the Royal Navy on the global naval war and who would handle what and when. LANTFLT was supposed to base forward and take over the coverage in the GIUK and in the western Med and off Western Africa (TORCH was born in those conferences. It was NOT a British idea.). On the other side of the world, Eastern Command (Layton and that imbecile Brook Popham) was to help stand up Force Z, (Phillips, DCNS who infuriated the Americans at ABC-1 with his nonsense about how the Royal Navy expected to incorporate PACFLT into RN naval movement like the USN was just an RN squadron. More on THAT in a moment when it comes to Churchill and politics and war.) with the elements of Force H that would be released to secure the Indian Ocean and protect the Malay Barrier.
Now it gets interesting, because Churchill smelled a rat in his own navy. For once his political instincts were telling him that Singapore and the scheme to defend it was not quite what it seemed. The essence of the scheme was that Force Z would operate much as Force H had operated to support Malta. It would make sweeps into the South China Sea with the Philippine Islands operating as the substitute for MALTA in the notional naval strategy.
PACFLT was supposed to be the other element as the Mediterranean Fleet based at Alexandria had been in the Mediterranean Campaign. Do you know what Phillips did that infuriated the Americans? He suggested first that PACFLT raid Yokusuka as the opening move in a general Pacific War. As a substitute to that insanity, he suggested second that PACFLT move to Manila and/or Singapore and that it chop ships over to the British fleet (Force Z.) which the British commander would use to run the naval war against Japan. Was any of this nonsense getting through to Churchill? It should have.
It amazes me, that FDR was even willing to compromise enough with British plans to move PACFLT west to Pearl Harbor, but he did it against the advice of his own admirals and naval staff who argued against it. It was a political decision to support an ally that he regretted.
Do you think Churchill should have made a political decision and sacked a bunch of admirals and air marshals at this juncture and brought in fresh talent as he did with the Desert Army generals? He did not. He assumed the RN knew what it was doing with the Singapore Bastion Defense. Even at that, he made inquiries of Pound as to whether it might be prudent to hold the nucleus of Force Z's fast squadron at Sri Lanka and wait for an aircraft carrier and the R-class battleships and their assigned escorts to arrive as he was briefed was planned and play fleet in being until the full Force Z was stood up.
As for Phillips (and Pound) after the SAVAGE criticism the Americans (Ghomley and Turner) gave to the foolish proposals of ABC-1 and ABC-2 and eventually the ABD conference, it appears from their actions that they, Pound and Phillips, were going to implement the Singapore Bastion Defense with or without PACFLT.
Churchill may not have known exactly, but he did ask Pound about it. Pound told him the man on the scene should make the ultimate call to base forward. This was when Phillips was stopped at Columbo with Force Z.
Later, when Phillips flew into Manila to coordinate (6 December 1942 local time) with Thomas Hart, how the Anglo-American response to the discovered Japanese moves at sea, because the Americans already knew the jig was up and had warned the British to get ready for attacks on the Malay Settlements... Can you imagine how Hart reacted to Phillips when he met the man and Phillips told him what he proposed to do with Force Z?
Again, was Churchill unaware? Roosevelt was told, but by then he had his own mistakes to fix. (Stark's days were numbered (Drumbeat was his fault, not King's) , Kimmel's, Short's because of the Oahu disaster: why MacArthur and Brereton survived Clark Field amazes me, but then the Luzon Campaign went a lot better subsequently than the Singapore and Malay campaigns so Roosevelt made a political call not to meddle. That might have been a mistake.).
Anyway... AFTER Hart had had his say to Phillips where he could shove his plan, after Pearl Harbor, after Clark Field and AFTER Popham told Phillips there would be no air cover, Phillips set sail into the Gulf of Siam with his ships and the Special Attack Force Rikkoed him.
That was probably when Churchill finally found out that his navy lied to him.
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Churchill went on to kill a lot of Americans the same way. He NEVER lesson learned and then he lied in his own memoirs instead of owning up to his numerous political mistakes (Including the Bengal Famine that cost Britain what little good will she had left in India.)
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FDR screwed up badly at Pearl Harbor. He was never able to own it or deny it publicly; because he never lived to write his own memoirs... and during wartime it would not be politically expedient to own up to such a catastrophic error in political judgement and why he thought he had to politically make it to support an ally; (I would like to think, that as in his fireside chats to the American people, he would explain in his memoir, what he tried to do and why it did not work and what he did next to fix it.) but he lesson learned from it and tried hard after to let his professionals do their jobs, only making the necessary political over-rulings when those had to be made. About that...
TORCH and the subsequent campaign into Italy were political decisions he made. Those made sense as to the situation FDR found, though his own generals chafed at it. In retrospect I chalk that perspicuity up as a Murphy gift because imagine Sledgehammer or Roundup?
Freezing the British out of the Pacific War was another political decision HE made. He was the author, not King. Notice that the BPF got nowhere at all really until PACFLT won the victory and then FDR allowed it? Even then FDR listened to his admirals and let them manage it.
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Do I have a low opinion of Churchill? He was the exact man needed at the exact time to grab the flag and rally the cause, when it needed to be rallied at the time when the world was on the brink of catastrophe. He made the political connection with FDR and figured out how to cooperate with that master politician. The necessary expedient political deals Churchill made and his political interactions with Stalin were a mixed bag. No-one, I estimate, could deal with the Moscow Madman in any capacity whatsoever, and not come away absolutely filthy with the SHIT that oozed off that war criminal, sociopath, mass murderer, treaty breaker, aggressor, international law violator and monster.
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Those are the considerable political positives to offset the numerous errors Churchill made when he tried to play "operational artist".
His Balkans mania, his racism, his colonialist imperialist global viewpoint, and his absolute ignorance of how naval warfare actually works (ANZIO), are his weakest aspects as to his performance metrics. He trusted the wrong people (See discussion above.)and did not remove those same people (Sempill; for example) he should have had removed when he knew about the harm they did.
He was a hopeless 19th Century romantic stuck in a world that needed an FDR once the rally had been made.
Sometimes you need a cold-blooded Dutch tradesman to take team lead over for the cause after the initial crisis; instead of the Bengal Lancer who charges the guns. Fortunately, Murphy supplied a good one.
Does that answer the question?
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My quibble here is just that the crews were clearly more valuable than the ships (well, except for Queen Elizabeth). But the British and French were lucky they didn't lose more men in the ships that were sunk. And that would be a risk making another try to penetrate up the Dardanelles.
The fact was that the British Mediterranean Fleet over the past century had made numerous visits to Constantinople, most notably in 1878 to stop the Russian Army at the gates of the city. And I wonder how much that uneventful history was lurking in the minds of British planners, however much they knew intellectually that it would not be so easy this time around.
I think the war was a steep learning curve for everyone.
This is not to say that there was not room for criticism in foresight, not just hindsight (and clearly, there *was* at the time, even if some of the criticism was erroneous). They ought to have tried to get much better intelligence. They ought to have tried harder to get the Greeks onside. They ought to have looked harder at alternatives like Alexandretta. I mean, for starters.
Greece clearly cost Britain the chance to wind up Libya, though the politics at least made sense, even as a futile gesture (though I might have made it a smaller and more symbolic gesture while having O'Connor race for Tripoli). Churchill was on stronger political ground in 1944 with Greece, over the opposition of Brooke and other generals.
But you know, sometimes he actually did have good *military* ideas to go along with his bad ones. The Mulberry Harbors are an excellent case in point. With Churchill, you just have to take the good with the bad, knowing his good is so valuable that you can tolerate the bad.
The Navy was a better protected service politically than the army, and always had been; and that it generally racked up a better record in the war than the Army, made it even more so.
My only quibble is that it failed and in my opinion and that of Commodore Keyes Cardens Chief of Staff and the man who reorganised the minesweepers after their earlier failures they having learned from the earlier attempts and improved their methods should have kept it up.
Unfortunately his Commander Carden was too old and his replacement John De Roebuck too slow with the latter bottling it.
I have no doubt that it would be hard and incur losses - a ship should not fight a fort and all that - but the prize would have been worth the cost.