Hamilton’s position at this time is difficult to understand, for by now he had broken nearly all the rules which were subsequently evolved by Field-Marshal Montgomery in the second world war for operations of this kind. He had allowed his junior commanders to criticize and change his plan, and he had never conveyed to them by word of mouth exactly what he wanted them to do. Instead of keeping the control of the battle under his own hand, his generals and brigadiers were to act on their own discretion; they were to get forward ‘if possible’. In the same way Hamilton had failed to impress his will on Kitchener and the War Office; he had not wanted these new commanders, they were charming men of his own world, but they were old and they had a fatal lack of experience. Nevertheless, he had accepted them. What was wanted was young commanders with seasoned troops, but at Suvla it was the other way about.
Had Hamilton but known it there existed in his Army a man of quite exceptional ability who would have been the ideal commander for the Suvla operation. This was a brigadier-general named John Monash. Monash is something of an enigma in the first world war, for although Hamilton had noticed that he was an able officer, no one, either at Imbros or at Anzac or anywhere else, seems to have divined his peculiar talents as a leader. He was an Australian Jew, already fifty years of age, and his attainments were extraordinary: he was a Doctor of Engineering, and had also graduated in Arts and Law, in addition to being deeply read in music, in medicine and in German literature. Soldiering had been merely a hobby for Monash but for years he had been enthusiastic about it, and when he had volunteered for service at the outbreak of the war he had been made a colonel. He took a brigade ashore at Anzac in the April landing, and had since done well within the limits of that narrow front, but he had not advanced beyond the rank of brigadier.
This was the man who was soon to rise to the command of an army corps in France, and who towards the end of the war was to be considered as a possible successor to Haig as Commander-in-Chief of all the British Armies in France.
‘Unfortunately,’ Lloyd George wrote in his memoirs, ‘the British did not bring into prominence any commander who, taking all round, was more conspicuously fitted for this post (than Haig). No doubt Monash would, if the opportunity had been given him, have risen to the height of it, but the greatness of his abilities was not brought to the attention of the cabinet in any of the Despatches. Professional soldiers could hardly be expected to advertise the fact that the greatest strategist in the Army was a civilian when the war began, and that they were being surpassed by a man who had not received any of their advantages in training and teaching… Monash was… the most resourceful general in the whole British Army.’
But in August 1915 no one had thought of Monash in such terms as these, and indeed he had never been heard of outside his own narrow circle. In the coming battle he was confined to the role of taking one of the Anzac columns on a roundabout route up Sari Bair.
The plan itself was open to serious criticism; except for the Suvla landing it did not force the Turks to react to the British, it was the British who were reacting to the Turks. They were proposing to direct their main attack upon Chunuk Bair, the enemy’s strongest point, and it was not to be one concentrated blow on a broad manageable front, but the most congested of battles in which only a few men could take part at one time, and in the most difficult country where anything and everything could go wrong. The Anzac bridgehead was perfectly safe, and the Turks never had a hope of dislodging the Allies from it. It was an ideal training ground, and the new troops coming out from the United Kingdom might very well have been put in there to hold the line while the main attack was delivered not at Chunuk Bair but at Suvla.
The Australians and New Zealanders were by now the most aggressive fighters in the whole peninsula. They had not been heavily engaged through June and July like the British and the French at Cape Helles. They were eager for action, they wanted space and movement after all these claustrophobic months under the ground, and the Suvla landing, with a broad flanking movement round Sari Bair, was precisely the sort of adventure to which they would have responded. They knew the ground — from their perches in the bridgehead they looked down on it every day — they knew the Turks, and their commanders had all the experience of the April landing behind them.
But apparently neither Hamilton nor Birdwood ever contemplated this course, and it was left to the new soldiers who had never been to war before — who had never been abroad before — to land on the strange dark shore against a trained enemy, without knowing clearly what they had to do. And that perhaps was asking too much.
Yet when all this is said it has to be remembered that very similar errors were committed all over again in the second world war especially in the Italian campaign, and with almost painful fidelity at the time of the landing at Anzio, south of Rome, in 1944. At Gallipoli nothing was yet established, nothing was clear, not even the one principle that the campaign itself was already revealing — that everything which was done by stealth and imagination was a success, while everything that was done by means of the headlong frontal attack was foredoomed to failure. Hamilton was beset by problems that seldom became so acute in the second world war: the rub of the old Regular Army ideas against the new soldier; the preoccupation of the high command with the other front in France; the novelty of the whole conception of an amphibious operation; the hazards of maintaining morale among the troops of so many different nationalities in that distant and difficult place.
Yet despite the hesitations of the new commanders and the complications of the plan there were very good hopes of success as the first week of August ran out. The tired troops at Cape Helles were very ready to try again. At Anzac the spirit of the soldiers was high. The Fleet was more than eager; and the weather held good. Moreover, the Turks on their side were just as prone to error as the British, just as uncertain and no better equipped. Liman at this stage had no new ideas, no clear view of how he might gain the victory. He could think of nothing but to reinforce, to dig in and to hold on. Admiral von Usedom, the German commander of the defences of the Dardanelles, wrote to the Kaiser on July 30: ‘How long the Fifth Army can hold the enemy is more than I can prophesy. If no ammunition comes through from Germany, it can only be a question of a short time… it is a matter of life and death. The opinion of the Turkish General Headquarters appears to me to incline to a hazardous optimism.’
The German Supreme Command was seriously disturbed about Liman von Sanders at this time. On July 26 they sent a message ordering him to hand over his command to Field-Marshal von der Goltz and to come home to Germany to report. Liman managed to stave off this decision, but he was forced to accept on his staff a certain Colonel von Lossow who was to keep an eye on his superior, and even take a hand in the planning of operations.
But the battle itself soon swallowed up all disagreements and doubts on either side. On August 4 Samson went out on a last reconnaissance over Suvla, and reported that no Turks were on the move there. A shell was fired into the gleaming white surface of the salt lake. This was an unauthorized act which annoyed Hamilton very much, but it did prove that men could walk and even ride a horse on the caked and salty mud. The last intelligence appreciations of the situation were issued to commanders, and some attempt was made to provide them with an idea of the kind of country they would encounter as they made their way inland; they would find water once they got to the hills, they were told, but their progress might be impeded by the thick six-foot high scrub that was cut only by goat tracks.