Less well known, but only slightly, is that Churchill played a significant role in World War I, when, as a man in his early forties (about half a generation younger than his fellows in the Cabinet), he served as the First Lord of the Admiralty. This position, essentially the government liaison with the Admiralty, was a crucial post in peace and even moreso in war, and he acquitted himself fairly well. His greatest failure in this capacity was his support of the Dardanelles Campaign, which would degenerate in the meatgrinder of Gallipoli. Following its profound failure, Churchill spent nearly two decades as a political pariah.
Significantly less well known are the connected facts that not only was the assault on the Dardanelles widely considered (among those who were actually involved in the command of the expedition) to have come within a hair's breadth of success before being thrown away, but that such a success would have profoundly altered the course of the war - and thereby, the course of twentieth century.
Writing in 1934, Admiral of the Fleet Roger Keyes (who was a Commodore during the Dardanelles Campaign and served as Chief of Staff to the commanding officer of the campaign, Acting Rear Admiral de Robeck) wrote that "I wish to place on record that I had no doubt then, and have none now - and nothing will ever shake my opinion - that from the 4th of April [when new mine-sweeping trawlers were made available to address the major problem faced by the navy, namely minefields] onwards the fleet could have forced the Straits and, with losses trifling in comparison to those the army suffered [in the land-based Gallipoli Campaign], could have entered the [Sea of] Marmara [on the shores of which Constantinople rests].... This operation... would have led immediately to a victory decisive upon the whole course of the war."
After the war, Henry Morgenthau, American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913-1916, "declared that the appearance of an Allied fleet off Constantinople in March 1915 would have toppled the Turkish government and driven that nation out of the war. 'The whole Ottoman state, on that eighteenth day of March when the Allied fleet abandoned the attack, was on the brink of dissolution,' Morgenthau wrote."
Had the Ottoman Empire been forced out of the war in 1915 and the Dardanelles opened again to Allied traffic, the Russian army could have been supplied with Western supplies; so equipped, the constant defeats suffered in the real history might have been prevented or mitigated; revolution, culminating in the real history in the rise to power of Lenin and his fellows, might well have avoided that outcome; and while Germany remained strong, the fall of the Ottoman Empire would almost certainly have brought the waffling Balkan states in on the side of the Allies. Between these factors, Austro-Hungary could have collapsed in 1915 instead of 1918, and we might today talk about the Ten Months' War of 1914-1915 rather than of World War I, the first act of two which combined killed at least eighty million people and set the stage for the horrors of the twentieth century.
Writing in 1934, Admiral of the Fleet Roger Keyes (who was a Commodore during the Dardanelles Campaign and served as Chief of Staff to the commanding officer of the campaign, Acting Rear Admiral de Robeck) wrote that "I wish to place on record that I had no doubt then, and have none now - and nothing will ever shake my opinion - that from the 4th of April [when new mine-sweeping trawlers were made available to address the major problem faced by the navy, namely minefields] onwards the fleet could have forced the Straits and, with losses trifling in comparison to those the army suffered [in the land-based Gallipoli Campaign], could have entered the [Sea of] Marmara [on the shores of which Constantinople rests].... This operation... would have led immediately to a victory decisive upon the whole course of the war."
After the war, Henry Morgenthau, American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913-1916, "declared that the appearance of an Allied fleet off Constantinople in March 1915 would have toppled the Turkish government and driven that nation out of the war. 'The whole Ottoman state, on that eighteenth day of March when the Allied fleet abandoned the attack, was on the brink of dissolution,' Morgenthau wrote."
Had the Ottoman Empire been forced out of the war in 1915 and the Dardanelles opened again to Allied traffic, the Russian army could have been supplied with Western supplies; so equipped, the constant defeats suffered in the real history might have been prevented or mitigated; revolution, culminating in the real history in the rise to power of Lenin and his fellows, might well have avoided that outcome; and while Germany remained strong, the fall of the Ottoman Empire would almost certainly have brought the waffling Balkan states in on the side of the Allies. Between these factors, Austro-Hungary could have collapsed in 1915 instead of 1918, and we might today talk about the Ten Months' War of 1914-1915 rather than of World War I, the first act of two which combined killed at least eighty million people and set the stage for the horrors of the twentieth century.
