Grand Duke Nicholas appeals for help

A British chronology of the war records under 30 December 1914 that the Russian commander-in-chief, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, suggested a British expedition against the Turks that would ease the Russians’ position in the Caucasus. Sources date the request itself differently. Russian works point to 31 December, and in London the telegram from the British ambassador in Petrograd, Sir George Buchanan, conveying the Grand Duke’s request was read on 2 January 1915. This short dispatch became one of the starting points of the operation in the Dardanelles.

Alarm from the Caucasus

The request was born in the most difficult days of the Battle of Sarikamish. The Ottoman Third Army under the war minister Enver Pasha had come through the mountains into the rear of the Russian forces, taken Ardahan and was assaulting Sarikamish. General Alexander Myshlayevsky, sent to the front by the Viceroy of the Caucasus, judged the situation hopeless, ordered a retreat and left the front. Alarming reports poured into Russian headquarters. Moreover, the Grand Duke could not send reinforcements to the Caucasus, because his armies had only just repelled the German offensive towards Warsaw on the Bzura and Rawka and were fighting the Austrians in Galicia.

According to the report of the British commission that investigated the circumstances of the Dardanelles expedition after the war, the Grand Duke asked whether Lord Kitchener could arrange a demonstration against the Turks elsewhere, naval or military, that would force them to withdraw some of their forces from the Caucasus. Paradoxically, by the time the dispatch reached London the worst danger had already passed. General Nikolai Yudenich had not carried out the order to retreat and had gone over to the counter-attack. On 4 January the remnants of the Ottoman IX Corps surrendered at Sarikamish. In Petrograd, and still more in London, this turn of events was not yet known, however.

Kitchener’s answer

The request fell on fertile ground. British politicians had for weeks been looking for a way out of the deadlock on the Western Front. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had proposed an attack on the Gallipoli peninsula at a meeting of the War Council as early as 25 November, and in the last days of December the Council’s secretary, Maurice Hankey, set out the idea of an attack on Turkey in a memorandum. On 29 December Churchill himself asked the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, whether there were not other alternatives than sending armies “to chew barbed wire in Flanders”.

The Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, did not believe that Britain could give the Russians any real help. He had no troops to spare for a landing, and no major operation could be ready for months to come. On 2 January, however, he wrote to Churchill that the only place where a demonstration might stop the Turks sending reinforcements east was the Dardanelles. On 3 January a reply went to Russia, drafted at the War Office and sent by the Foreign Office, in which the British promised a demonstration against Turkey, although they doubted it would induce the Turks to withdraw troops from the Caucasus.

From demonstration to expedition

That same day Churchill asked by telegram Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden, commanding the squadron at the entrance to the straits, whether he considered forcing the Dardanelles by ships alone practicable. Carden, who on 3 November had bombarded the forts at the entrance to the straits, replied on 5 January that the Dardanelles could not be rushed, but might be forced by extended operations with a large number of ships. The First Sea Lord, Admiral John Fisher, put forward at this time his own, much broader plan for a combined operation of army and fleet.

Thus within a few weeks a request for a demonstration grew into a great expedition. On 13 January 1915 the War Council instructed the Admiralty to prepare for February a naval expedition to bombard and take the Gallipoli peninsula, with Constantinople as its objective. When in time it became clear that the fleet alone would not break the defences of the straits, land forces were brought in. So began the Gallipoli campaign, one of the bloodiest campaigns of the war. Russia, which it was meant to help, sent no troops of its own.