Gallipoli Diaries IX

The Amphibious Withdrawal

My dissertation (and all of my other work) defines types of amphibious operation in the five types described by U.S. joint doctrine: amphibious assaults, amphibious raids, amphibious demonstrations, amphibious withdrawals, and amphibious support to other operations. Obviously, I’m biased to lean on the American definitions, but I also think it does a pretty good job describing the range of possible uses.

What this means for the dissertation is that I can’t just focus on the amphibious assault phase of the Gallipoli campaign, but I also have to cover the amphibious withdrawal phase. Fortunately, there’s excellent recent scholarship on the withdrawal and it’s readily accessible in Armies in Retreat: Chaos, Cohesion, and Consequences from Army University Press. Available for free right here.

Armies in Retreat is edited by my co-editors for On Contested Shores Volume 2, Tim Heck and Walker Mills and they did another excellent job with this volume, but the relevant chapter here is by Dr. Aimée Fox of the University of Saint Andrews. (You should also check out her excellent Learning to Fight.) Fox builds on that work to analyze the amphibious withdrawal phase in the chapter titled, “Evacuating Gallipoli: Military Advice and the Politics of Decision-Making, 1915-1916.”

Fox’s focus in this chapter is the nexus of strategic decision-making and the civil-military relationship. Most of the chapter therefore covers the government’s decision to withdraw rather than the mechanics of the withdrawal itself. While that’s not quite the same angle as my work, there’s a lot of interesting points in the story.

The primary point is the prevalence of politics in the decision to withdraw. This should come as no surprise to even a casual reader of Clausewitz, but politics drives the decision more than any other factor. The primary concern for the English is the reaction of the French to a withdrawal since the entire war hinges on that relationship. Once the French are on board with withdrawing, the English decision is almost inevitable. Another interesting point is how much the military, or at least the British Army, was hiding from the policymakers throughout the campaign. It was the cabinet that ultimately had to make every major decision, but Secretary of State for War Lord Horatio Kitchener withheld as much information as possible and even ordered Hamilton not to communicate with anyone but him. Policymakers ignorant of the dynamics of war is one civ-mil problem, but military leaders deliberately making them ignorant is another. Kitchener here straddles the line as he holds a civilian office as Secretary of State for War and simultaneously a military commission as Field Marshall. Such arrangements are always a bad idea.

There’s still a place for what today we call “best military advice”, but strategic concerns should and in this case did outweigh the tactical. The military side of the decision came in the form of a new commander, Lieutenant General Sir Charles Monro. He was sent to Gallipoli to both relieve General Hamilton and report back to the cabinet on his recommended next steps.

He did so, and recommended withdrawal, but he also warned of high casualties. Retreating in good order is one of the most difficult operations in war, hence Heck and Mills’ important book. Doing so amphibiously is even more difficult and Monro had to assume that the Turks would both detect the withdrawal and exploit the chance to drive home their victory.

In the end, they did not detect the withdrawals and were thus unable to exploit them. The troops on Gallipoli employed a wide variety of deception measures to mask the withdrawals and these were so successful as to make the event anticlimactic. Suvla Bay and ANZAC were evacuated between 18 and 20 December 1915. The Hellas beachhead was evacuated over 8 and 9 January 1916. Casualties were light and the Turks, once they discovered the withdrawals, mostly found empty beaches.

The most dangerous part was that the assembled fleet lacked the capacity to evacuate all three beachheads simultaneously. That 19-day period between the evacuation of Suvla and ANZAC and the evacuation of Hellas was a point of high vulnerability for the British and their allies as the Turks could not concentrate solely on one beachhead. The lack of amphibious shipping, which had constrained Hamilton’s options during the initial landings, was not fixed by the time Monro had to withdraw.

And that wraps it up for Gallipoli. My reading has outpaced my writing for this series so I’ve started writing the actual dissertation chapter. However, I will take a break for that in the next few weeks to talk about some other amphibious operations of World War I, Zeebrugge and Operation Albion.