Order to evacuate Suvla and Anzac

At 9.30 a.m. on 8 December 1915 General William Birdwood, commander of the Dardanelles Army, received at his headquarters on the island of Imbros a telegram from Lord Kitchener: “The Cabinet has decided to evacuate the positions at Suvla and Anzac at once. Helles will be held for the present.” The decision had been taken in London the day before, on 7 December, but the telegram arrived late. It had been sent to the commander-in-chief, General Charles Monro, in a new cipher to which only he had the key, and Monro had just sailed from Mudros for Salonika. The War Office had to repeat the message in the old cipher, and only then was it read on Imbros. After eight months of fighting on the Gallipoli peninsula, sentence had been passed on two of the three British bridgeheads.

Two weeks of hesitation

The order ended a long period of hesitation. On 22 November Kitchener, having inspected the bridgeheads, recommended the evacuation of Suvla and Anzac, and the next day the War Committee came out in favour of abandoning the whole peninsula. The Cabinet, however, could not make up its mind. Lord George Curzon begged for time to write a memorandum against evacuation. In it he warned of night-time panic on the beaches, of “the sinking of boats” and “hecatombs of slain”, and the General Staff itself predicted that the withdrawal might cost as many as 50,000 men. In a similar vein wrote the secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, Maurice Hankey, who proposed using at Gallipoli the divisions being released at Salonika.

Meanwhile the weather seemed to be deciding the matter by itself. From 26 to 30 November a storm raged over the peninsula, with a downpour followed by a blizzard and frost. The British official history records that at Suvla alone there were more than 5,000 cases of frostbite, and that more than 200 men drowned in flooded trenches or froze to death. On 1 December Kitchener informed Monro that the Cabinet had still not decided and that preparations for the evacuation must be halted. The next day, counting on divisions that could be taken from Salonika and impressed by news of the retreat from Ctesiphon, he himself changed his mind and asked whether Monro, if given four divisions from Salonika, could attack again at Suvla. Monro strongly advised against it, and Birdwood and the commander of IX Corps, General Julian Byng, although they argued that some ground could be gained with fresh troops, did not recommend a new attack at that time of year.

The allies’ deliberations settled it. On 4 December at Calais the British demanded the withdrawal of troops from Salonika as well, and the French prime minister Aristide Briand reluctantly agreed, but the very next day Paris demanded that the matter be reconsidered. On 6 December, at a military conference at the headquarters of General Joffre in Chantilly, all participants agreed that the Gallipoli peninsula should be evacuated in its entirety and Salonika held. On 7 December the Cabinet met. The British official history writes that few options remained: abandoning Salonika would mean a break with France, and the commanders on the spot did not want new divisions at Gallipoli. The ministers therefore decided to evacuate Suvla and Anzac. Helles was to be kept “for the present”, partly because the Admiralty wanted in this way to guard the entrance to the Straits against German submarines, and partly so as not to admit openly that the whole campaign had ended in defeat.

The navy’s protest

The navy objected most fiercely. Vice-Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss, who was standing in for the fleet commander, then on leave in England, and his chief of staff, Commodore Roger Keyes, still believed that the ships could force their way through the Dardanelles. British submarines were destroying Turkish ships in the Sea of Marmara, and on 2 December the battleship Agamemnon destroyed a bridge on the road across the Bulair isthmus by which the Turks brought supplies to the peninsula. Keyes recalled being woken in the night by the admiral’s secretary with a telegram: “In view of the unanimous military opinion, His Majesty’s Government have decided to shorten the front by evacuating Anzac and Suvla.” “I turned my face to the ship’s side and felt almost beaten,” he wrote. On 8 December Wemyss still telegraphed to the Admiralty that the fleet was ready to force the Straits and cut off the Turks on the peninsula from their supplies, and he wrote separately to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Arthur Balfour. The answer was a refusal, and on 12 December the admiral reported that he was complying with the order “with the deepest regret and misgiving”.

The evacuation begins

On the bridgeheads the order did not require long preparation. Since the end of November the staffs had been drawing up plans, and at Anzac General Alexander Godley had since 24 November been introducing periods of complete silence, in which neither snipers nor artillery fired, so that the Turks would grow used to the idea that a quiet trench did not mean an empty one. On 8 December Birdwood sent Suvla and Anzac a secret order to begin the so-called intermediate stage. According to the Australian official history, at Anzac only Godley and his chief of staff, General Brudenell White, knew of it. The soldiers were told that some units were leaving to ease the problems with water and supplies. At Suvla and Anzac there were then about 83,000 men, of whom just over 36,000, with 97 guns, were at Anzac alone.

On 9 December a conference on Imbros laid down that the final stage at each bridgehead must be completed within two nights. The fleet could take off at most 10,000 men from one place in a single night, so the last garrisons of Suvla and Anzac could number no more than 20,000 soldiers each. Everything depended on the weather, on the Turks noticing nothing, and on the repair of the breakwater in Kephalo Bay on Imbros, where after the November storm there was no shelter for the landing lighters. For the next ten days units, guns, mules and stores left the beaches every night, while by day the bridgeheads were to look the same as ever.