Hamilton takes command at the Dardanelles

At three in the afternoon on 17 March 1915 the cruiser Phaeton dropped anchor off the island of Tenedos (today Bozcaada), among the ships of the Allied fleet attacking the Dardanelles. On board was General Ian Hamilton, appointed five days earlier commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. At the same moment the French general Albert d’Amade, commander of the Orient Expeditionary Corps, entered the harbour. A few days earlier he had arrived with his soldiers in Mudros Bay on Lemnos, and he had been brought to the meeting with Hamilton by Rear-Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss.

The voyage

Hamilton left London on 13 March. At Marseille he boarded Phaeton, but it turned out that no one had fuelled the ship, so on the morning of 15 March she had to put in at Toulon for fuel. The cruiser then steamed at 30 knots. During the night she passed Corfu, where Hamilton had been born, and at noon on 17 March, already in the Aegean, she passed the ship carrying Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden to Malta. The fleet’s commander at the Dardanelles until then had fallen seriously ill, and on 16 March the doctor had sent him on sick leave. Command passed to his deputy, Vice-Admiral John de Robeck. On the same day, 17 March, the Admiralty informed him of his appointment, and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, asked whether he considered the planned attack sound and practicable. De Robeck replied that he did and announced that, weather permitting, he would attack the next day.

The conference aboard Queen Elizabeth

Immediately after his arrival Hamilton went to a conference aboard the dreadnought Queen Elizabeth, de Robeck’s flagship. It was also attended by the fleet’s chief of staff, Commodore Roger Keyes, the commander of the French squadron, Rear-Admiral Émile Guépratte, Wemyss, d’Amade and Hamilton’s chief of staff, General William Braithwaite.

De Robeck spoke openly about the difficulties. He could silence the heavy guns of the forts, but mobile howitzers and field guns fired from concealed positions and prevented the Straits from being swept of mines. The minesweepers were slow, had worn-out engines and civilian crews. The seaplanes that were meant to spot the batteries could barely get off the water. On the Gallipoli peninsula the Turks were digging new trenches and putting up wire every night. All the suitable landing places were already covered, and the admiral admitted that the ships’ guns would be of little help to the army in a landing. Even so, he was convinced that the fleet would get through on its own, and he intended to try before calling on the army for help. If the ships entered the Sea of Marmara and the army struck at the Bulair isthmus, the Turks on the peninsula would be trapped.

This corresponded exactly to the instructions Hamilton had received from Lord Kitchener. The army was to wait until the fleet had exhausted every possibility. When Braithwaite read these instructions to the meeting, Keyes asked: “Is that all?”. According to Hamilton’s diary, everyone then looked somewhat taken aback. Hamilton declared that he would begin preparations for a landing, which would be useful in any case: whether the fleet passed through the Straits and put the army ashore on the Bosporus, or the peninsula had to be taken. He did not want to decide on the landing place from a map and resolved to inspect the coast the next day from the deck of a cruiser.

A poor base

The question of a base was also raised at the conference. Lemnos was not fit to receive a large army. Until water could be piped down from the hills, the island could supply at most 10,000 men; Mudros Bay had no quays or piers, and in any stronger wind boats could not ply between the ships and the shore. In the evening Hamilton telegraphed Kitchener that the admiral, without underrating the dangers, was determined to exhaust every means before calling on the soldiers, and that Lemnos seemed a poor base. He dined with de Robeck and returned to Phaeton.

The next morning Hamilton sailed to Lemnos and then along the coasts of Gallipoli to view them from the sea. On the way back he saw the final phase of the great naval attack on the Dardanelles and the battlecruiser Inflexible, which had struck a mine. What he saw on 18 March confirmed his conviction that the Straits could not be taken without land forces. The very next day he wrote to Kitchener to say so.