1915

1915 talk by General Sir Tony Walker KCB

It is during this year that Winston Churchill writes to the Prime Minister, Asquith, with a notion for armoured tractors with caterpillar tracks.  But the tank is still two years away from the battlefield; the Royal Flying Corps is still in its infancy; want of radio communication condemns the commanders to sit at road, rail and telephone hubs and hence earns them the appellation of “chateau generals”.

Two, quite different, attempts to break the deadlock during 1915 will not go well.

However, the year starts conventionally enough and in accordance with our strategy.  The French run an indecisive campaign in Artois and Champagne starting in the winter of 1914/15.  The BEF joins in.  In March 1915 they attack at Neuve Chapelle in an attempt to sever an important German railway supply link and to demonstrate their readiness for action. The fighting is preceded by a massive artillery barrage from 342 guns lasting 35 minutes.  In which time they fire more shells than were used in the whole of the Boer War. Nevertheless, the result is inconclusive, as is a later attempted assault on the nearby Aubers Ridge.

It is now that the Germans try for a decisive advantage to break the impasse.  The afternoon of 22 April is sunny, with a light easterly breeze. At about five o’clock in the afternoon a low, grey-green mist begins to drift from the German trenches towards the Allied lines.  It is gas - chlorine gas.

The physical effect is horrible: the psychological effect even worse. Many men die.  Many more flee the gas cloud so that a gap opens in the Allied positions.  Fortunately, the Germans have not deployed enough reserves to exploit the weaknesses.  And resolution – particularly of the Canadian troops – stands solid against further gas attacks in the following few days.

The use of poison gas shells were banned by the Hague Conventions which set out the laws of war.  But we should not be too quick to claim the moral high ground.  Within days of the German attack Kitchener obtains Cabinet approval for the British to use gas.  And use it we do, with mixed results, at another inconsequential encounter - the battle of Loos in September. 

But the major British attempt to achieve a breakthrough is quite different.  It involves attempting to force a passage through the Dardenelles, the narrow strip of sea which divides Europe from Asia and enters the Black Sea. The operation has multiple aims: to drive our enemy, Turkey, out of the war; to provide warm water access to our ally, Russia; to persuade the Balkan states to join our side against Germany and Austria.  And perhaps above all, to divert attention from the lack of progress in Flanders.

So on 18 March an armada of French and British battleships, led by minesweepers, attempts to force the straits.  It fails, with heavy loss of warships.  On 22 March the allied commanders agree that any further attempt must be supported by an amphibious landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula, overlooking the Dardenelles. D-day is set for 25 April. 

This is not the time for a detailed analysis of the Gallipoli operation.  But any successful amphibious operation requires meticulous planning, intelligence, even rehearsal.  Normandy, nearly 100 years later in the Second World War, shows how it should be done. The allies at Gallipoli have none of them.  They do have determined opposition, disease, poor logistics, inhospitable terrain and weather.  The result is inevitable.  The operation is a failure. Over the turn of the year the Allied force is covertly withdrawn and by 9 January 1916 the last British soldier has left Gallipoli.

The Helles Memorial at the southern tip of the Gallipoli peninsula records the name of 21,000 Commonwealth troops who perished there.  Five of them came from Hyde – Garrett, Ginn, Green, Hart and Phillips.  All of the Royal Hampshire Regiment and almost certainly in their Territorial battalion which was titled The Isle of Wight Rifles (Princess Beatrice’s) and which in August assaulted Suvla Bay on the north west of the peninsula with the loss of 89 men.  

A soldier in the battalion wrote a poem to his local newspaper after Gallipoli.  Part of it reads:

On an occasion such as this evening it is natural and right for us to think principally about the men in the front line, especially those whose names are on our memorial.  That is why we are here.   But to give context to our commemoration we should recall three other factors.

First, this was the first war fought in three dimensions – on land, at sea and in the air.  At sea the German U-boat fleet has considerable success in 1915 including the sinking of the Cunard liner Lusitania on 7 May on a voyage from New York.  The American casualties do much to persuade US public opinion that they should join the war.

In the skies, aeroplanes increasingly act to provide information to the ground commanders.  And there is a significant first step towards total war on 19 January when two Zeppelin airships bomb Yarmouth and Kings Lynn, causing four civilian deaths.  The involvement in war of populations, not just armies, has begun.

The scale of fighting calls for a similar expansion of the logistics needed to sustain it.  Increasingly, it is women who carry the burden left by men who have gone to fight. Munition workers, yes; nurses, yes; but also farm-workers, policewomen, bus-conductors, drivers. And all this while caring, single-handed, for their families.

 The Army Service Corps – transport – expands tenfold between 1914 and 1916.  As for stores, the official history of the war records that in 1915 just one depot, Calais, issues 40,000 miles of electric cable, 3,600.000 yards of flannelette (for weapon cleaning, not pyjamas!), 12,800 bicycles, 447,000 Lewis-gun magazines, 2,260,000 bars of soap and so on and on and on: one depot, one year.  The Army Postal Service handles more than 10 million letters a week.

The medical services expand enormously, not only in size but in capability.  Casualty evacuation to early treatment is improved.  The introduction of triage means that the wounded are dealt with in some order of priority.  But the numbers of dead and wounded are awful to remember, even today, so I think it is appropriate to end with the words written 100 years ago by John McCrae, a doctor in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps.  After two days dealing with the bloody aftermath of German attacks on Ypres in May 1915 he wrote this: