Dan Snow's History Hit - Gallipoli: What Led to Britain's WW1 Disaster?

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

What does the price of wheat and global food supplies have to do with one of the greatest disasters in the history of warfare? Why was the decision made to send thousands of Allied troops in an attempt to free up the most heavily defended waterway in the world, the Dardanelles Straits? Historian and award-winning author Nicholas A Lambert joins James from our sibling podcast Warfare to talk us through the lead-up to Britain’s worst defeat in World War One, the catastrophic Gallipoli campaign in 1915. Find out why Prime Minister Henry Asquith and his senior advisers ordered the attacks in the first place and the failed operation’s legacy. Nicholas’ book, The War Lords and The Gallipoli Disaster, is available now.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everybody and welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Every week we feature an episode from our sister podcast.

We're a podcast network now, folks. We're multiplying like a virus, or like the colonies greek or phoenician city-states perhaps that's a better metaphor just at the moment and this week we've got the brilliant warfare podcast which our military history podcast overwhelmingly looking at world war one and world war two although going back into 18th 19th centuries occasionally as well on this one the presenter james is joined by nicholas lambert He's an expert in Gallipoli. Now in 1915, the British and French thought they'd found a way to knock one of their adversaries, one of the empires ranged against them out of the war, the Ottoman Empire, which ironically the British in particular spent most

of the 19th century trying to keep alive. They decided to decapitate by sending a naval task force through the narrows from the Aegean, past the ruins of Troy, past the Gallipoli Peninsula to the north, and into the Sea of Marmaris and Istanbul itself, bringing that great city, the seat of Ottoman power, under fire, or certainly the threat of fire, from great naval guns. It would open up an all-season route to Russia, allow supplies to flow, and hopefully change the strategic balance against the central powers. It was not to be. Gallipoli soon bogged down to another one of those very recognisable, very futile, attritional, positional slogging matches for which the First World War is infamous. As you'll hear on this podcast,

Nicholas Lambert tells us why and how this all happened. It's absolutely fascinating. Please go and subscribe to Warfare wherever you get your pods. And if you want to go and subscribe to History Hit, we'd love that too. It's like a TV channel. All the podcasts there, hundreds of hours of podcasts, hundreds of hours of history documentaries like Netflix for History. We've just been nominated this week in the UK by Broadcast, which is kind of industry newspaper in the UK. we've been shortlisted in a prize for best specialist channel we're up there with a couple of small minnows like the bbc and sky i don't know i've heard them and i'm so proud that history is up there alongside them it's all because of you guys your crowdfunders the subscribers

the listeners this pod thank you very very much so over there, you get a month for free if you go to historyhit.tv now, and you join the revolution. Let's mix it up. In the meantime, everyone, here is Nicholas Lambert with James on the Warfare Pod. Hi, Nick, thanks so much for coming on the History Hit Warfare podcast. How are you doing today? Hello, good morning, James. I'm very well, thank you. And thank you for inviting me. Been looking forward to this for quite some time. Yes, me too. Where are you speaking to us from in the world? I'm just outside of Philadelphia, the United States. So about two hours north of Washington and two hours south of New York.

Yeah, about two hours south of me right now. Have you been getting the same torrential, endless down hours south of me right now. Have you been getting the same torrential endless downpours of this grey summer? Well, torrential downpours of sun. I mean, it's 90 plus out there. There's not much rain, at least. We keep getting threats, but it never materialises, which is not good for the garden. You're in that envious pocket of sunshine. It hasn't stopped raining here for 40 days and 40 nights in a biblical fashion. So lucky you. I'm happy to swap any time. Well, it is great to have you on the podcast, Nick. I have been looking forward to this. I'm really keen to hear your take on Gallipoli, one of the greatest disasters in the history of warfare, where the British sent hundreds of

thousands of troops over the course of a year to free up the Dardanelles Straits, the most heavily defended waterway in the world. This was, of course, to no avail. The Turkish held. But let's start with the basics. Why did the British land on these beaches in 1915 in the first place? That's a surprisingly simple question with a slightly complicated explanation and I suppose we might want to take it back a little bit further and why did they even start looking at Gallipoli and going there anyway? What was the intent? And so really if I may I would

reframe the question as what are the origins and the inceptions of the Dardanelles campaign? Basically what are the considerations that led the British government to think about launching an attack in this area? What's the background context? And then what is the specific plan of action and how did it develop over time? It initially starts in, the decisions are taken sometime in about January 1915, but it was originally conceived of as a low-risk navy-only plan to force the straits of the Dardanelles. But when that failed quite decisively in March of 1915, then they were left with the option of cutting their losses and leaving, or doubling down and launching a full-scale amphibious assault on the most heavily defended piece of property on the planet. And so that's what they actually did. And who are they? Who made this decision?

Because when we look through the history books, we know it was the first Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. It was all Churchill's fault. Is this true? No. That is the Churchill maybe of World War II. This isn't the Churchill of World War I. They are the warlords. And the term warlords actually was coined early part of the First World War by various members of the cabinet who were outside what might be called the inner cabinet.

And the warlords were the members of the cabinet of Henry Asquith, who were the decision makers on the committee responsible for war and diplomacy. And that generally became known tongue in cheek as the War Council. And I think it was Walter Runciman, who's head of the War Trade, who basically writes derisive letters to friends of his saying, the warlords are having another one of their secret meeting. They're making all the decisions. They're not telling any of us that this is supposed to be cabinet government. I don't approve of this at all. So they are the warlords and they are the prime minister. And then maybe six, seven, and it later gets added more senior

ministers. And of those ministers, Winston Churchill is the most junior, and the least trusted, and the least liked. And the idea that he can bamboozle or impose his views on the rest of the War Council doesn't hold water. What were Churchill's views at this point? Did he approve of this mass amphibious landing? Did he align with the politicians? Well, he was a politician, of course. He was the head of the navy, the first lord of the Admiralty. And he, in fact, had proposed this idea. He was the one pushing strongly for an attack at the Dardanelles. But this isn't the first time he'd done it. He'd done it at least four or five previous occasions since the war began. Even then, you could say, arguably, it's not really his idea. It's standard war plan for a British war against Turkey.

If you play chess, it's moving your king's pawn forward two spaces. That's the standard opening. Well, in a war against Turkey, threatening Constant, that's the standard opening. Well, in a war against Turkey, threatening Constantinople is the standard opening. And it had been so for a long time. But as I say, Churchill had been proposing a British attack around the Dardanelles to basically pressure Constantinople at least four times, possibly five or six times before January of 1915. And each time everybody had just said, oh, shut up, Churchill. So then I suppose you could argue the question becomes, why in January do they say, oh, all right, well, maybe this is a good idea?

That is the question. What are the political motivations behind this here? Because it doesn't sound like, if you're going to reject this five or six times beforehand, that it's not purely a military point of view.'s not good strategy that's coming in here instead as we know nick war is the continuation of politics by other means so what politics is at hand yes exactly it's the politics it was a political decision made by politicians. So you can't look for explanations in the papers of military leaders. Even people like Lord Kitchener or Jackie Fisher, I mean, they were part of it, but they weren't the ones actually making the decisions. It's Asquith and his senior ministers.

So the standard explanations are, of course, it was, well, there's two, basically, in most accounts. One is the Russian telegram thesis, where the Russians say we're under pressure on the Caucasus front, and we would like the British to conjure up some sort of demonstration to draw off forces, Turkish forces from the Caucasus front to help us. That's the first standard explanation. The second standard explanation is its strategic initiative, which is the idea that they'd already recognised there was a stalemate on the Western Front

and they have large numbers of Kitchener's new armies coming online in the spring. And the question is where to send them. And do we send them to chew wire and get mired in the mud of Flanders? Or do we choose something else? And those are the two standard explanations, as I say, which have basically been cemented more or less in place since the very origins of when the whole Dardanelles campaign came to an end.

The first explanation, the Russian telegram thesis, comes from a secret memorandum that's prepared for the Dardanelles Commission, which investigates the fiasco in 1916. And it's prepared by Morris Hankey, who is by then Secretary to the Cabinet, Secretary of the War Council, and a confidant or a member of ASCO's inner circle. And he's the one who actually says, well, actually, it's really the Russians asked us to help out. And so this is how it works. The second explanation, strategic initiative, well, it wasn't really first put forward as in a coherent way until probably Winston Churchill's memoirs, World Crisis in about 1923. And as I say, these may well be the standard explanations, but there are serious problems with

both of them. Tell us, what are the problems, Nick? Well, of course, like everything, nothing is ever simple, is it? The real explanation is far more complex and convoluted. But really, the key factor at the decisive moment is wheat. And you might think, what's that got to do with the price of bread or anything else? And, well... Did you say wheat? Wheat, yes. As in wheat, we make bread, we eat it, food. We do, we do indeed, yes. It's absolutely essential.

And back then, it was even more essential. It is the staples of the working classes in Britain. So this is about trying to feed a population in a wartime environment? Yes, it's a little bit more complicated than that, because you can always get the wheat. The problem is, is the price you pay for it. And that's a function of economics, really. But really, what you have to realise is, I should start at the beginning. In 1914, where does most of the wheat come from that is consumed by the British population?

Do you happen to know? I couldn't tell you. I would think domestically, but if we're needing to take straights in Turkey, then I'm assuming that we're importing quite an awful lot of this. Yes, we are. We're importing about 80, sometimes up to 85% of all the wheat. That's four loaves out of five eaten in Britain come from overseas. Okay, so this sounds like it could be a little bit of a weakness

when those strategically important choke points are shut off. Exactly. And in fact, the British government had realised since well before the war that wheat and food supply is what you might call the Achilles heel of the British Empire. And they had actually taken enormous investigations into this. There was a Royal Commission appointed in 1902 by then Prime Minister James Balfour, and he set up this Royal Commission on Food Supply in Time of War and Raw Materials. And he appointed a really high-flying cabinet minister called Lord Balfour Burley, or Robert Bruce, as the chairman. And this man had a phenomenal intellect. And also, he had considerable business experience. He understood international banking. Halfway

through, they appointed him chairman of the Bank of Scotland, central banker. And I think he took the job in 1904, and he's still there in 1920. I think he's the longest serving member of the... But anyway, the point is, is they actually had a chairman who really knew what he was talking about and what he was doing. And they look at this and they come up to the conclusion that the real problem is with the system itself. It's not so much the supply of wheat's the problem, it's the price you're going to pay for it. Not only is Britain dependent upon wheat, 80% of its imports, they are the largest consumer in the international market. Who's the largest exporter of wheat in the international market?

It's actually, would you believe, Russia. And right up there next to them is Romania. And so when Turkey shuts the Dardanelles, effectively September, September 1914, it was shut. But no one expected it to remain shut. They all expected it to reopen. But November, it was firmly shut. You've effectively cut off 35% of the world's supply of wheat. So what happens, do you think, to the prices of wheat when you cut off 35% of wheat?

So this is going to go sky high. And if for a country that is in the midst of a world war, the last thing you want to be doing is spending astronomical amounts of money on wheat to feed your hungry population. Yes, or it's not so much feed them, but keep it affordable. Because the problem is, is if the prices go too high, then people are going to be very, very, very unhappy. They're going to go on strike, which is, by the way, what they were doing in 1915. There's been incredible pressure put on the government as well, because when you've enlisted vast amounts of troops

and you've sent them on expeditionary missions across the channel then it becomes your responsibility to feed these people and so does the government then become the largest purchaser of wheat does this add massive amounts to the national debt it would do if you actually had the courage to actually buy it all and or you felt it was necessary. And the point was, is that it didn't start doing that until 1916, 1917. So really, I suppose we should take it back to the beginning and then just simply say, well, you know, Britain is thinking about the weak problem before the war. They knew it was their Achilles heel.

And they had already taken a number of steps beforehand to try and ensure the free flow of the market in wartime. One of the first things they do, even before they decided to send the expeditionary force off to France in August 1914, is they introduce war risks insurance for ships. Basically, the government subsidized the insurance for ships coming to Britain to the tune of 80% of premiums. So it makes it easily affordable. There's certain other benefits you have from government subsidies of insurance too, because if a ship takes the insurance, then in the small print it says, and you have to follow the directions of any Royal Navy officer. So if a Royal Navy officer basically intercepts a ship and says, you can't go that way, you've got to go that way, and you choose to ignore it and you've just voided your insurance. Very crafty. There are a very close relationship between the Admiralty and

Lloyds of London, which isn't surprising because Clementine Churchill, who was her father, Henry Hosier, who was the chairman of Lloyds. Right, I see. You are really peeling back all the layers of this wartime politics and economics here. We could go into it, yes. And the CEO, effectively, what you would call the CEO of the Second Member, is Admiral Edward Englefield, who had been head of the Trade Division up until about 1905, 1906. And then he got an offer from Lloyd's and just said, well, you know more about this system than we do. Do you want to become Chief Operating Officer for Lloyd's? And he went, how much? And clearly they reached a deal. So he then moved over to Lloyd's and he remains there till 1918. So the links between the Royal Navy

and Lloyd's are very, very close indeed. They even have a secret dedicated phone line between them and they're exchanging all sorts of information. But that's another story. So as I say, the British government have taken steps, particularly with warless insurance, they have also sketched out a secret plan, which is what you might call a price manipulation strategy. And I don't want to get into too much detail, but basically they worked out that really if the price is the issue, then what matters is not real supply and demand, it's anticipated or projected future supply and demand. That's what governs prices. It's not what is available today, it's what you think is going to be available tomorrow and what the demand is. That's really what matters. So what they do is

they come up with a plan to manipulate this information through the futures market, which is based mostly in Chicago. This is incredibly sophisticated stuff. And so, for instance, one of the things they do is that, well, how can you manipulate the price of wheat on futures? How can you do that? Well, again, if you think about it, expectations are a function of information. So if you have insider information and you can control that information, then you have an advantage. So if you run through who the big exporters of wheat were in 1914, there's only seven. Seven countries account for 92% of all wheat exports in the world. Let me see, United States, Canada, South America, India, Australia, Russia, Romania. How many of those are under British influence or

control? India, Australia, Argentina to a considerable degree, Canada, but the problem is they're a bit close to the US and they're tied into the US system. But you've got fairly good control over this. And so one of the first things they do is they send agents up the supply chain line to gather early information on crop forecasts. And then they proceed to classify it, all the information, and feed the information back to London first. So India, for instance, is a very large exporter. Some years, depends on how the weather turned out that year. But so what they did is they announced to the world in late November, early December, that they have sown 26 million acres of wheat. And they're projecting an average crop, which means eight bushels per acre. So you can do the

mathematics yourself. And you can say that the government or that the market is expecting a certain quantity of wheat to hit the market around about March, April. What nobody knew, except the British government, is that the real figures were quite different. They had actually sown 32 million acres of wheat, and the projected forecasts were not average. They were well above average at 11. So the British government had information that there was going to be a vast quantitative, considerable increase in the quantity of wheat that's available on the market before the market knew. And they stored up these what I call information bombs and dropped them on the market at certain times. And you can do the same with

bad information too. So basically, they're timing the release of these information bombs onto the market. And then they're piling in behind by either buying or selling futures on Chicago. And so you can imagine, you know, if you wake up in the morning as a broker in New York and you're just drinking your coffee, you're seeing the price of wheat plummeting. What's your instinct? It's probably to think, gosh, somebody knows something I don't. I better sell myself. And when you think that the market is beginning to steady and somebody else starts to sell, you think, gosh, they really know a lot more than I do. I'm getting out of the market.

And that's effectively what the British government was doing. They were selling. They were dropping the information bomb, allowing the market to fall, and then selling, and then buying back at the bottom of the curve, buying on the dip. What you might call yo-yoing the market. And if you look at the price of wheat after December 1914, when they start introducing this plan, it's yo-yoing all over the place. There's a number of reasons, but one of the main reasons

is the British government deliberately messing with expectations. That's incredible, isn't it? Yes, it's incredibly sophisticated. To be able to manipulate the market to that extent, to ensure that you are constantly buying the wheat at the cheapest point to keep those costs low to ensure it doesn't overwhelm your economy and then I suppose so you have more money to invest in the war these are things that we don't think about when we think about wartime strategies and the economics of war you might think about mass industrialization

you might think about the munitions crisis that was going on at this point but all of this needs money to pay for it and one of the ways that we're doing this is manipulating the wheat market you got it in one that's actually a far better summation than i gave that's exactly what's going on here except there's a problem because when they start this in december 1914 they start buying wheat and they continue it and there's another problem. Because when they start this in December 1914, they start buying wheat and they continue it. And there's another bit I should remind me to mention who the money man was and all this. It's quite an interesting story. But anyway, so when they start this, they know that the gardener's is shut and they're looking at projected prices of wheat and they're saying it's going to

double and maybe go a bit higher than that. And that's pretty bad. But anyway, unfortunately, 1914-15 is a perfect storm in the wheat market. I would say a once in a hundred year event, but it never happened before. So first of all, Australia is out. It's the year of the great drought. Even today, they talk about the great drought. They mean 1914. Australia that year was a net importer of wheat, not exporter, which means you've got one of your big seven suppliers completely offline. And not only that, they're putting extra pressure on the market by taking from other sources. Yes. I mean, luckily, there weren't that many people living in Australia, even fewer than there are today. But nevertheless, it's a problem. What also happens is South America, they're due to basically start exporting their wheat or start harvesting their wheat around about January, February.

But unfortunately, just before harvest, there's torrential rains in the area of the replate which wash out the roads and basically destroy about 20% of the crops in the field. That's a problem. And then we move up to North America. Well, there's an awful lot of wheat stored up west of Chicago in places like Winnipeg and in Chicago but as you may or may not know back then the Great Lakes used to freeze well they do freeze now but they couldn't run the ships across the Great Lakes so they couldn't get the wheat out of Minnesota and Chicago across to, let's say, Buffalo and then rail it or take it through canal to New York. They couldn't get it out. So as a result, this is unusually cold winter

and the rails were froze, the canals were frozen, everything was frozen. They had a fair bit of wheat, not a huge amount, but they had a fair bit of wheat west of Chicago, but they couldn't move it. And so they're offline. And then India, there's a problem developed. India has a slightly different problem because in India, the problem was is they had a pretty good crop that year. The problem was in some ways it was too good or everybody else was too bad because as the price of wheat started to rise, it became profitable to export wheat out of the Punjab via train down to Karachi and onto the world market. And so wheat was literally being sucked out of the interior of India, causing the prices in the bazaars in India, particularly in the north, to double.

And that's creating considerable trouble. If you've ever lived in India, you can know that crowd control is an art and an ever-present threat. Well, who do you normally rely upon to help you with crowd control? Well, I assume it would be the British presence there and the police. Yes. Yeah. Well, the army, actually. And where was the army? They had taken it out and sent it to Egypt and to France.

And so the problem is, is they were critically short of politically reliable troops who could be relied upon to keep order. And the Indian government is basically saying is, A, give us back our troops. We need them for internal policing. And B, they said, in the meantime, we're embargoing the export of all wheat. So they basically put a prohibition on the export of all wheat out of India. And they notified the British government of this on, I think, 30th of December 1914. And Asquith's initial reaction, the Prime Minister saying, with the British government, you can't do that. We've done

it, but you can't do it. We appointed you. I'm the Viceroy of India. Yes, but we appointed you. They wouldn't budge. And basically, the Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge, is basically saying is, you're going to have greater problems and high prices of wheat in Europe, because we're looking at a second mutiny, unless we do something about this. Hi everyone, this is Dan Snow's History here. More Gallipoli coming up after this. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. So these are the levels that we're talking about. Things are getting really, really turbulent for the British. A second mutiny in India is the last thing that they're going to need Things are getting really, really turbulent for the British. A second mutiny in India is the last thing that they're going to need at this moment in time. Even more important to keep India stable than it is to suck out the wheat from India to feed Britain and its troops. So then let's do a quick tally. So we've got seven countries, right? So you've got France and Canada, and Canada's wasn't a particularly good crop. So we've got seven countries, right? So you've got France and

Canada, and Canada's wasn't a particularly good crop. Most of the US crop and most of what was the left of the Canadian was stuck west of Chicago and would remain stuck until the freezing in May. Then South America, you've got a whopping great loss of at least 20% of the crop, maybe even more. You've got Australia completely offline. You've got India, which is basically embargoing export. And you've got the dark nails shut, which means you can't get the Russian wheat or the Romanian wheat, which basically means if there's wheat around in the world, you need it and you've got to have it and you're going to pay any price to do it. So January of 1915, the Board of Trade in Britain and the Board of Agriculture basically run the numbers and they present them to the cabinet, some preliminary numbers in January

12th of 1915. And the British government don't like the look of these and they said, we want more detail. So they do. And they run the next set of figures. And they presented the next cabinet meeting, which is on the 20th of January. And these figures are frightening. They are saying it's not going to double. It's going to quintuple, quadruple or quintuple. And that's not a disaster. That's a catastrophe. The price of wheat going up by a factor of four or five, you're going to have riots in

the street, bread riots in the street with that number. And so what they do is they decide on the 20th of January that this is the top priority problem they've got to deal with. And so they appoint a subcommittee, a cabinet, to investigate this called the Food Committee or Food Price Committee. And they insist that Asquith is chairman of it to give it some weight. And that's very unusual indeed. Asquith, he'd been prime minister since, what weight. And that's very unusual indeed. Asquith,

he'd been prime minister since, what, 1908, and he'd only chaired three cabinet committees. It's very unusual for the prime minister to be on a subcommittee. And one of them was the Marconi scandal, another one was on banking fraud, and the other one was electoral reform in 11. So these are pretty major issues. And if you stack them up, that's sort of an indicator of how much importance they attach to it. And in addition, they also add Lord Crewe, that's sort of an indicator of how much importance they attach to it. And in addition, they also add Lord Crewe, who's the Secretary of State for India, but he's also, in effect, what you might think of as the Deputy Prime Minister. He really is Asquith's right-hand man. And then you have the usual suspects from the Board of Trade and the technical departments. And the first meeting is actually on the 22nd of January, and they run through the options.

And the options are rationing. And this is a liberal government. We're not going to ration. They say, well, we can buy the as you suggest the beginning where we can buy the entire stock and sell it to the population as a loss. What are the numbers on this? And they run the numbers and it looks to be, let's say, just quadrupled. That would put it around about 270 million pounds for the wheat to last you maybe a year. The entire British defence budget pre-war is 100 million. That's to put it in perspective.

The entire national debt is 650 million at the beginning of the war. So if you're going to add 270 just for nine months of wheat, that's expensive. And so they run through the options. And anyway, we know what actually happens in this meeting to an extraordinary degree, because also very unusually, they appointed a committee secretary to take the minutes, which is in the cabinet, very unusual indeed. And what is more, instead of destroying all the minutes, he kept them. And he also kept the working papers that were discussed and the agenda sheet.

We have a full folder of what was discussed at these various meetings. Anyway, this is the light in the whole thing, is do you care to guess who the money man was and the secretary was of this committee? Ah, yes. You promised to tell us who the money man was. Reveal, tell us, let us know. John Maynard Keynes, the most famous economist in the world in the 20th century. It was a very young John Maynard Keynes and they appointed him secretary to the cabinet subcommittee because he was actually the money man running the secret operation through the Bank of Liverpool to wreak the price of weak futures. As the security term goes, he had been read in and he knew what was going on. So

that limited the number of people who could possibly have been helping them out to a number of people, probably fingers on one hand. So then it was John Maynard Keynes. And then luckily, he was very young and obviously didn't get the instruction to burn everything because he kept it all. And so in the minutes, he's actually quoting the prime minister. He says, there's a great line. If this was visual, I could hold them up and show you. He actually says, he records the prime minister as saying, when the Board of Agriculture

proposed a scheme for rationing and control and regulation of wheat bakeries throughout the country, being enforced by policemen. That's just horrible. He just said it would be easier to storm the Dardanelles than to introduce such a scheme as this, and much cheaper too. And that's on the 22nd of January. So the next stage is that basically there's a summary memo prepared by John Maynard Keynes, which is printed on the 25th of January. And this copy of this paper is on the table of the minutes of the meeting of the War Council when they meet on the 28th of January. And this is the context for the decision of what are we going to do about the Dardanelles. So quite literally, the decision about the Dardanelles, the decision that builds up to what we now know as the failures of Gallipoli is a political and economic

calculation about what is essentially cheaper for the country. Is it cheaper to send in vast amounts of troops, hundreds of thousands of men onto those beaches, or is it cheaper to buy up all the wheat and impose vast amounts of social and economic constrictions onto the British people? From a distance, you could argue that. But of course, when they initially took the decision in January, they weren't thinking of sending troops at all, at least not many. They thought of it in terms of a Navy-only operation, to basically, they were going to blast their way through the straits jackie fisher is saying this is nonsense this is well known everybody knows the suggestions that he didn't make his views clear are complete and utter nonsense so that's interesting so there were dissenting voices at this time who knew that the chances of breaking

through with a royal navy force alone is just going to be impossible. Well, no one ever liked to use the word impossible because they possibly could do it, but it would be incredibly expensive and it probably wouldn't achieve the objective anyway. And as Fisher points out, he just says, all right, let's say we do manage to lose half the battleships and get through, then what? What are we going to do? I mean, they're going to be battered and shattered and they can't get back and their supply lines are cut. And anyway, if your objective is to get merchant ships carrying wheat out and sending munitions into Russia, then that's not going to work

because if those forts are still manned, they're just going to shoot up the ships. You're going to have to send troops anyway. But anyway, he thought that the whole thing was crazy. He had a much better idea, which was to basically attack at an Alexandretta. He was supporting the idea put forward by Kitchener, but the French government totally wouldn't have anything to do with that, because they regarded Alexandretta, which is basically the corner of Syria, as their sphere of influence, and they were afraid of the British getting their foot in the door in Syria, or at least mucking things up for the French ambitions in the region. But anyway, so yes, if you go back to the question, why did the cabinet decide or the war council decide at this moment to accept this idea put forward by Churchill, when they chucked

it out four or five times? It's because the circumstances had changed. They needed to do something. Wheat was their number one problem. The only supply or source of wheat they thought was in Russia and Romania. If you open the Dardanelles, in theory, 35% increase in supply, it was actually more than that percentage-wise, but anyway, there'll be a flood of wheat would be unleashed upon the world market and the price of wheat would come back down to more manageable prices. Is there not political considerations going on in Russia and Romania here as well? To have that massive market cut off to the world must have meant that they were suffering pretty bad in terms of their own economies and bringing in sufficient amounts of money. Yes, exactly. And that's the other side of the story.

Because as I mentioned a while ago, Britain is the largest importer of wheat, but Russia is the largest exporter of wheat. And they can't get their wheat out. So their creditworthiness on the international markets drops to zero. They lose a substantial amount of their army and equipment at Tannenberg and Missouri and Lakes. They're having to furiously rearm themselves by importing stuff even if they can get place contracts it's a question of getting the material is one thing getting it in is another thing but paying for it is probably the most difficult thing the russians face so hang on hang on so they need to sell their wheat in order to get enough money and credit on the international

stage to then buy in material to rearm and to take part in the war. Who would have thought it's really the linchpin of the international economy? Who would have thought wheat was so important? When they go to war with Turkey in 1914, the British attitude is, well, they can't seriously hurt us in any way, shape or form. I mean, look at the Turkish army, ha ha, look at the Navy, and they're falling about laughing. Basically, there's a perception that the Turks can't really do anything serious to hurt us, but they've forgotten about the wheat problem. And by shutting the Dardanelles, they can't hurt them militarily, but they absolutely hamstring the entire entente. Because the British have got food problems, French to a lesser degree, but the

Russians have got international credit problems. And you a lesser degree, but the Russians have got international credit problems. And you can see this, you track the price of the ruble on the international exchange. Already by September, there's a 20% drop in the value of the ruble. And it didn't help that they were refusing to exchange it for gold or international currency, they were giving paper rubles out, while the printing press in Moscow or St. Petersburg was cranking out more rubles than you can believe. But the real problem becomes is round about, well, by October, it's up to about 30% discount. By late November, December, basically all banks are refusing to take any rubles. Basically, the ruble has become unconvertible.

And did the Turkish make these considerations? Did they know what they were doing in this respect? Or was their decision purely a military one? I don't think they knew, but I mean, one would have to do the research in the Turkish archives. That's the next book, Nick. Yes, my old Turkish is not good, any form of Turkish. I struggle with German. But no, and anyway, I'm too old for that. So that's somebody else's problem. We'll hand that mantle down to the next generation. Yes, exactly. Here I bestow this great task, this quest to the next generation. But surely this is an incredibly important topic to keep studying, because as you're talking, all I can think of in my head, all I can see is the container ship, the Evergreen, sat in sewers, blocking off all of our supplies coming into the

UK, coming into Europe from around the world. So we are an island nation. This is surely a problem that still persists. Are there lessons that we need to take from your book, Nick? It's just as true today. Basically, it's the structure of the global economic system, how it's set up and how things operate on a day-to-day level, have enormous strategic implications. And to a very considerable degree, the same structure of the international system defines almost the strategic environment in which militaries, especially navies, operate. So yes, the resonances between then and now, we're in a period of globalisation. And the first great period of globalisation was just before the First World War, 1870 to 1914. So yes, there's considerable overlap. But anyway, so to go back

to the 1914, so the Russians have got a money problem, they haven't got any money. So they basically look around and say, well, who's the richest nation in the world? Well, Britain, obviously. So they basically, in early December 1914, they write to the British government and say, we want a loan, please. And the British government go, oh, right, we just gave you 20 million. What happened to it? It's gone. We'd like a little bit more just to keep us going for the next five months. And the British government say, right, how much? And the Russians come back with 100 million pounds, which is, again, to put it in perspective, is one sixth of the British national debt.

And the British government's attitude is, how much? Yeah, 100 million will keep us going for a few months. That'll do nicely, thank you. British government, A, they probably can't do it, but that's a staggering sum of money. And B, they don't want to do it because they think the Russians are slightly pulling their leg. But then the Russians say, well, we're not sure we can continue the war unless we get some serious financial help.

There's an implied threat in that. So how much do they end up giving them? Well, by the end of the war, it's 100 million. It's probably over 1,000 million, way over 1,000 million by the end of the war. But they initially give them 40 million more. So Britain's own pre-established national debt linked into Russia is also a major problem and consideration in reopening. It's a really tangled web, this is.

And it really all revolves around economics. But the initial British reaction was, we don't want to give the Russians 100 million, because as I say, we don't think, well, we need it. And we don't think we could get it anyway. And plus, the fact is, is in the next war, we're afraid we're going to be fighting Russia. So why do we want to help strengthen Russia in the war after the present one? There's always that lurking in the back of their mind. And so that's another factor that leads to the decision to basically let's, can we find a way around this? And they start thinking, well, if we open the Dardanelles, not only do we get our wheat cheaper, but of course, that restores the Russian foreign exchange, and they can buy their own damn munitions,

because they can get loans because they have a revenue stream and bankers will give you a loan if you have revenue streams and maybe even pay back some of that debt and maybe even pay back some of that debt yes okay now i understand now i understand why the dardanelles campaign why gallipoli continues to be invested in terms of blood and treasure? Why, even in the face of what looks like mad strategic reasoning and the dissenting voices of military officers, it continues to be pushed forward by the politicians? When is it that the politicians make that decision that this isn't going to be successful? This isn't the cheap alternative that they wanted. Ah, well, the problem is, again, we're living in a world where of great confusion. I mean, you have to stop and think,

and what did the British government know? What did they think they know? What's the information they're getting? And where is it coming from? And how reliable is it? Well, the British government has very imperfect information. But the situation is constantly changing as well. And so wheat, it never goes away in importance until around about June 1915, and then for very unusual reasons. But it becomes eclipsed by other concerns as well. And as I say, it just becomes a really tangled mess. Anyway, long and the short of it is, is that when they attempt the naval attack, and it's already clear through back channels, various officers are saying, Churchill has been exaggerating, and the fleet commander Cardon isn't up to it. And even though

the fleet commander is sending very optimistic reports back to London, various senior officers, captains, and even the chief of staff, who was Roger Keats, were sending through back channels information back to London saying, he's not telling you the whole story. And so they were already beginning to suspect there were difficulties in early March. And that was sufficient to get people like Jackie Fisher and Hankey to say, we need to basically stop, slow down, think through if we really want to do this. And if we really do want to do this, we've got to come up with a clear, coherent plan. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose,

brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. And the politicians are going hum-ha, hum-ha, but this is important. And while they're deciding whether or not they're going to decide anything,

they send in the attack on the 18th of March, which was not a long-range bombardment. It was basically point blank, open fire, get in close. And it all went horribly wrong. They lost a third of the battleships that day. So they take stock. And although the commander, who by then is de Robeck, says, oh, we're going to give it another go tomorrow, he sleeps on it. And that's enough for him to say, no, we can't do this. And so with a quick consult with the army commander, who's in Hamilton by that time, is out

there. He just arrived and witnessed the disaster. And his initial reaction is he looks at the beaches and goes, you must be kidding. We can't do this. But anyway, and he sends a telegram back to Kitchener to saying, I don't think you quite realize the situation on the ground here, sir. We can't do it. Not with the troops you've given me. And plus, the fact is, it's going to be a bloodbath even if we do succeed. Very high risk operation. And Kitchener just says, I don't want to hear it. For political reasons, you have to go in. And so they go, OK, right. So they then say, well, if we're going to do this, we've got to do full scale amphibious assault. And the reasons why Asquith agrees to this, and he doesn't consult the War Cabinet, by the way, that's very significant indeed, because he already knows if he basically holds a formal meeting,

then it will be formally recognised that the majority of the War Council don't think this is a good idea. So they don't have an official meeting. So therefore, Asquith says, I'm going to take this decision on myself. And I'm only going to talk to two people. One is Kitchener, and the other one is Churchill. And he basically reduces it to a committee of three. So to say they have vested interests, Churchill has got his entire reputation tied up to it, into this Garbin-Elsa. He knows that it's a disaster. He actually tells a couple of people in March,

he says, if this all blows up, my career's at an end. He really does want to double down. And Kitchener, of course, is what you might call the viceroy, governor general of Egypt. And he has a particular interest in the region. And he's also very sensitive to the question of prestige, and he's very worried about the idea of the British suffering, what would be seen in the Muslim world as a serious reverse.

And he thinks that could lead to all sorts of trouble in Egypt, in India, all over. And he just says, we can't afford to take the loss. But other people have changed their minds. So Balfour, who was originally one of those, and Crewe, who were originally keen supporters of the Dardanelles, basically say, well, no, when we agreed to this, there was no talk about high-risk amphibious operations. We'll take a hit in terms of prestige. It'll cause complications, sure. But this is a very high-risk operation. And if it doesn't work, we're in even deeper water than we are right now. And so they actually move their votes to the negative column.

And then there's a couple of new people who've been added to the committee, who's Lewis Harcourt and McKenna, both of whom just instinctively hate Churchill anyway. So anything Churchill proposes, they're going to be guaranteed against it. And so you've got four votes right there. And then there's a couple of others of undecideds. But probably if you tally up the votes, the majority opinion is going to be opposed to the amphibious landing. But Asquith says, no, I know it's a high risk. And he seems to regard the whole operation as a silver bullet

to solve all sorts of problems. Well, we know it certainly was not. It was a disaster. So how does all of this come to an end? How does this get wrapped up? Does the government just start getting distracted by ever increasing a litany of problems and the need to just move troops out and redeploy to different areas? It would do, yes, ultimately. But again, the circumstances change so considerably. So first of all, the initial reaction when the government say to push this through, which this decision is taken in March, is that the poll of opinion among all the military officers who had an informed opinion was just staggering how opposed

they were to it. So people think in terms of the army being Kitchener and Hamilton being the army commander, and those are the opinions that matter. Well, no, there is a lot of other people involved who were in the know as well. One of them is this guy called General Maxwell, who commanded in Egypt, who supplied most of the troops. He thought this was insane, and said so repeatedly to Kitchener. General Birdwood, who commanded the Anzac Corps, who did the first on-site inspection in early March, took one look at the defences and going, don't like the look of this. And as time goes by, he becomes more and more pessimistic. But there's another general involved who's Field Marshal Lord Methuen, who had commanded the army in the Boer War until he got captured out for a

stroll one day and been taken over by Kitchener, who won the war. But anyway, Methuen had been parked as the governor of Malta. And he thought this was insane, too, and said so. And I could run down the list. And then, I don't know, you probably know the much maligned Hunter Weston, commander of the 27th Division. He thought this was crazy as well. And in fact, he actually sends a letter to his wife while on the trip ship saying is, yeah, the more I think about this, it's not going to happen. Don't send out my winter uniform. I'm not going to be needing it. We'll probably get there and they'll turn us around

and send us right back again. And then the Marine Commander Paris says, nope. The French Commander Darman goes, nope. Even in London, you've got the Chief of the Imperial General Staff who generally speaking kept his mouth shut in this matter and didn't voice an opinion. and most people think that there is no recorded opinion but actually it turns out

there is he was a protege of methuen and so there's some correspondence between caldwell and methuen and before the attack goes in wolf murray said yeah this is a really high risk operation but the politicians are determined to do it. And the other one is the Director of Military Operations who was acting Major General Caldwell and he thought this was nuts too. But they send it in and it wasn't as much of a disaster as they thought it was because most people thought they wouldn't get onto the beach but they managed to get a toehold on the beach and then sat down and stayed there for the next nine months. But by then after they actually get ashore,

they basically had some more intelligence reports come back that let the British government know that the Russians don't have the wheat, which is the ultimate sting in the tail, you might say. The whole operation was initiated in order to get wheat out of Russia. And they had assumed that the wheat existed. But the wheat didn't exist. I mean, it did. It was on the farms in Russia, rotting in the fields,

because the Russian farmers couldn't move their wheat to the port of Odessa, where it would then be put on a ship, because the Russian army had commandeered all the trains and all the trucks. And they'd started basically shutting certain lines in order to relay tracks towards the front so the wheat wasn't there yes and this report reaches them i think it's on three days after the landings and everybody who saw this went gulp because their initial thought was well this is a disaster because the price of wheat's going to go shooting up and what are we going to do and to add to the misery the British

wheat growers the traders had discovered the British government so it had been uncovered their secret manipulation because it would cost them a fortune and they basically went on strike so the wheat importers in Britain basically said we're not going to import another grain of wheat until the British government gets out of this business or tells us what's going on or shows the books and so if you look at wheat imports into Britain, they're effectively next to zero in April 1915. And if you look at the stockpiles of wheat in Britain in April, May of 1915, they're at the lowest point they were in the entire war. They were lower in 1915 than they were at the height of the U-boat campaign in 1917, by a considerable margin.

And then, as I say say the wheel turns once more and suddenly originally they're thinking well where are we going to get wheat from and then they've been looking at the american crop forecasts and they were fairly pessimistic to well all right it'll be an average crop but in late april may june there's perfect growing conditions for wheat in North America. And as a result, by mid to late June, it's suddenly the world wakes up to the fact that there's this bumper crop in North America, 1,200 million bushels. They didn't produce that much wheat in the United States until 1946. Up until that time, it was a record, broke all records. And Canada was, by the way, similar. They had another 400 on. Basically, even without opening the Dardanelles in Romania,

the world was awash with wheat. You could take a bath in the stuff. And the price came right back down naturally to almost where it was since before the war. So, Nick, in the light of this being a massive intelligence failure and the wheat not being there, was this the right decision should this campaign have ever taken place when you look at the other options they reviewed all the other

options there was rationing there was buying up everything and there was storming the lard nails these are the only three practical options open to them now a liberal government are not thinking in terms of four years and a million dead and they're thinking it's a relatively short war. It's politically impossible to pay for it. No one would agree. They wouldn't have got it through Parliament. And the short answer is, they were very, very few options, and they had to do something. And they looked for other options, and they couldn't find any. So sometimes you are not presented with good options and bad options. Sometimes you have bad options,

really bad options and disastrous options. So the trick is to pick the bad option. And from that perspective, you could argue the decision to basically send the troops ashore at Gallipoli was a bad option, but it was probably the right decision, albeit for, and this is a horrible thing to say, it was a very high risk operation, high risk, high reward operation, they knew it going in, and it came down tails instead of heads. Well, you have taken us on a

bloody rollercoaster ride, Nick. I didn't realise how important wheat was, and i didn't realize that it sowed the seeds for the dardanelles campaign thank you that was a pun that i've been waiting to release for a little while now i can tell by the look on your face that you've been saving that one something was coming down the pipe at me that was it was it oh dear that was it yeah that was my finishing line nick absolutely now there's so much to unpack here. And I think there's still so much more to learn about this. And I feel like we could do three or four podcasts on it. But it turns out that someone has written a book on this.

And that somebody is you. So where can people read more and buy this book? Well, the book is The Warlords and the Gallipoli Disaster. And it's now available in the UK. It was originally stuck on a ship somewhere. Ironically. Yes, like everything else, it was stuck in a container somewhere, but they managed to get a container or two into the UK

with some of the books there. So yes, you can buy it through Oxford University Press website, Amazon.com, the usual places, WH Smiths, Foils. I should basically charge a percentage commission shouldn't i for all these places i've just named you definitely should but we will put a link direct to the publisher in the bio for this episode nick thank you so much i mean i didn't know any of this i've learned so much you're always welcome on the warfare podcast thank you very much it's always fun to talk about and forgive me for going down into the weeds a little bit, but I find this stuff fascinating.

And understanding how it works. It's an amazing story. It really is. So thank you. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all of our gods, and finish. Well, that, folks, was an episode of Warfare with Dr. James Rogers. We've extended the remit of warfare to First and Second World War, but also the great wars of the 18th and 19th centuries. So I hope there'll be something in the warfare feed for you all to enjoy. If you want to subscribe to Warfare, just head over to wherever you get your podcasts, search Warfare, and feel free to give it a rating and a review as well. Thank you. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone,

including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.