Attempting to gain perspective on Churchill

[phil andrade]

Why is it that the notion of Gallipoli as a brilliant idea that was flawed by ineptitude in execution will not go away ?

Even as late as 1990 - the 75th anniversary - I remember Margaret Thatcher making an official commemorative visit to the Dardanelles and emphatically endorsing that point of view.

The idea will not die......I can understand why this is so exasperrating for Pete : the sense of irritation in his book is almost palpable.

The historiography is so fascinating.

I am intrigued as to how far people assess the operation by its true merits, and how far it is guaged as a measure of Churchill the man.

Phil (PJA)

[PMHart]

It is frustrating but hey ho!

Ollie Pete

[Roy Evans]

Whilst in no way wishing to stifle debate on this controversial subject, I would remind members of the forum rules regarding respect for other members. Please do not use the forum as a means of deriding other members, either explicitly or implicitly, just because their views differ from your own.

Roy

[IanA]

I have been following this thread, with interest, from the sidelines and I think that the above warning is out of place - all the inmates participants are grown-up, possess a fine sense of humour, and can take as well as give. I see no malice whatsoever and it would be a pity if a debate which is intent and spirited is sat upon from above.

[PMHart]

No I was out of order - I mentioned Salesie's poetry! I've no complaints!

Ollie Pete

[George Armstrong Custer]

No I was out of order - I mentioned Salesie's poetry! I've no complaints!

Ollie Pete

I'm almost impossible to offend.

His poetry's not off limits and only some of it is bearable! I've been in several threads with old Salesie, and think we've established a rapport over the years - often finding myself arguing from the same corner as him, but sometimes not. What I can say is that in adversary he's one of those who can take a bit of p*ss taking banter in between the factual debate, without going off whining that he's 'being bullied' because someone makes an unanswerable point supported by evidence or has a go at him for making a stupid point. And he can respond in kind and in a similar spirit. My long tiome sparring partner PJL (who has the effect of a saddleburr on me!) has similarly risen to the occasion, going so far as to appropriate without permission the Payloresque 'oh'. I have to say that I see the frivolous interludes which pepper the more serious material (some of which is of high standard I would venture to say) posted on this thread as making it the kind of exchange I enjoy participating in. As Ian has noted, this is consenting adults exchanging robust views which are leavened with some p*ss taking banter, with no profanity and no vicious abuse - personally I reserve the latter for Pete! I really think that if there's going to be this sort of nannying from above then many will simply not bother posting rather than trying to second guess whether their post will pass muster as humour or receive a warning about 'deriding' other members. What we'll end up with is a forum of granddad hunters engaged in a sterile ladies knitting circle of deadly serious exchanges of facts delivered with faux moderator enforced politeness. As it is, I expect that this thread will now wither on the vine, having had the spirit knocked out of it.

George

[truthergw]

No I was out of order - I mentioned Salesie's poetry! I've no complaints!

Ollie Pete

Another fine mess you've got us into. You've upset the prefect! If I get lines, you'll have to do them for me.

[phil andrade]

My long tiome sparring partner PJL (who has the effect of a saddleburr on me!) George

Are you referring to me ? A saddleburr ? As a form of banter, that's almost Churchillian !

I'm sad to find out that you're not my father, George, but I still want to be like you when I grow up.

I've enjoyed this thread.

There are one or two more things I would like to discuss, but I don't want to be guilty of flogging a dead horse.

Phil (PJA)

[PMHart]

Another fine mess you've got us into. You've upset the prefect! If I get lines, you'll have to do them for me.

I see Tom or Phil as the Ben Turpin figures in all of this! Salesie I have as the rather wonderful Professor von Schwarzenhoffen (played by Billy Gilbert) in the Music Box film!

Ollie Pete

[George Armstrong Custer]

I'm sad to find out that you're not my father, George, but I still want to be like you when I grow up.

Don't push it, sonny.

George

[salesie]

No I was out of order - I mentioned Salesie's poetry! I've no complaints!

Ollie Pete

I actually read that post, Pete, and when it disappeared I wondered if you'd pulled it yourself or whether a "Redcap" had - it now seems that the censor who has "red-lead in his pencil and the same colour on his hat" has been at work. And that really pisses me off - I can assure you that I did not complain; I'm a lot of things but a whinging-grass, NEVER! (or should the be whispering?)

Although I understand the Mods' position, and realise that order needs to be maintained - I saw nothing in this thread to warrant such action. Do they wish the Forum to end up being inhabited solely by a bunch of Anoraks with nothing but arty-farty, too easily offended, personas?

Cheers-salesie.

PS. Consider yourself lucky - after reading your post, I felt a poem coming on but the muse went away.

[salesie]

Don't push it, sonny.

George

If I were you, George, I'd ask Jezza Kyle for a DNA test.

Cheers-salesie.

[George Armstrong Custer]

I would mate - but imagine if it came back positive!

Daddy Cool

[AlanCurragh]

Chaps - no-one complained, it is just one post strayed a little over the line - and was rightly pulled. And the poster in question (author of many fine volumes available at knock-down prices at your local book discounter) has admitted as such.

Of course we don't want to stifle robust debate. This has been a fascinating argument - and if it has anywhere else to go, than please carry on.

Redcap Alan

[truthergw]

I see Tom or Phil as the Ben Turpin figures in all of this! Salesie I have as the rather wonderful Professor von Schwarzenhoffen (played by Billy Gilbert) in the Music Box film!

Ollie Pete

Can I be Fatty Arbuckle?

[George Armstrong Custer]

No. That's me - I know how to throw a wild party, you know.

Roscoe

[PMHart]

No. That's me - I know how to throw a wild party, you know.

Roscoe

And you are fat,

Ollie Pete

[George Armstrong Custer]

You're not Ollie or Stan - everybody likes Laurel and Hardy, but nobody likes you.

FBS

[salesie]

No. That's me - I know how to throw a wild party, you know.

Roscoe

No wonder you have illegitimate sons popping-up all over the shop!

Now, back to business, I think.

Pete, in his removed post, bemoaned the fact that I hadn't addressed Churchill's problem with Fisher's resignation; so here goes. Fisher enjoyed a public persona not as great as Kitchener’s but similar. He was not, however, universally popular behind the scenes even in the navy (not to mention the antagonism he had fostered with the War Office during his first stint as First sea Lord; it seems the army were not great fans of his at all). Churchill, however, had befriended him when Fisher was First Sea Lord and Churchill a mere under-secretary at the Colonial Office a few years before the outbreak of war. Apparently, Churchill looked on their friendship as a kind of father/son relationship (not unlike GAC & PJA) - after a couple years though their relationship soured, over some squabble the details of which escape my memory, but this seemed to be one sided on Fisher's part; Churchill was unaware of any antagonism and thought their relationship to be as sound as before, so much so that he had no hesitation in requesting Fisher as his First Sea Lord when Louis Battenberg resigned shortly after the outbreak of war.

From what I can gather, Fisher blew hot and cold regularly over the Gallipoli expedition, to the exasperation of the cabinet - and when Fisher resigned on May 15th 1915 he made sure Bonar Law got a copy of his resignation letter. It is telling that at this point Asquith refused to accept Churchill's resignation when offered, but within a couple of days he received Bonar Law's ultimatum that no coalition if Churchill remained, and Asquith then had no choice but to sideline Churchill to save his and his party's collective necks. Fisher was one factor in Churchill's "dismissal" - but Bonar Law was not concerned about Gallipoli per se, only in settling old political scores.

Cheers-salesie.

[phil andrade]

" The Great Amphibian"....that's how Churchill describes his envisaged role for Britain at war in 1914.

Immediately prior to the Battle of the Somme, Haig writes " ....the loss of one-tenth of the manhood of the nation is not too great a price to pay in so great a cause."

The one is determined to avoid committing British youth to eurozone battlefield slaughter, and seeks to use maritime power to infiltrate and exploit the periphery.

The other deplores " the sink" of the Dardanelles.

In the historical perspective, Churchill wins the visceral approval of the British people ; they recoil from Haig because they see him as an aberration. : some persist in seeing him as an abomination.

Are we deluded fools, or what ?

Phil (PJA)

[simonharley]

Asquith absolutely refused to give up Churchill in 1914 when the King started digging in over the proposed appointment of Fisher as First Sea Lord - the result of refusal would have been Churchill's resignation. Even Asquith admitted to having reservations about the appointment, but caved in, bowing to Churchill's superior judgement. Not a good sign.

Salesie, did Churchill offer to resign on the 15th? I'm looking through "Winston S. Churchill" Volume III and can't see any mention of a proferred resignation, just Churchill seeking to bolster his own position before the prospect of facing Parliament on the 17th.

Simon

[salesie]

Asquith absolutely refused to give up Churchill in 1914 when the King started digging in over the proposed appointment of Fisher as First Sea Lord - the result of refusal would have been Churchill's resignation. Even Asquith admitted to having reservations about the appointment, but caved in, bowing to Churchill's superior judgement. Not a good sign.

Salesie, did Churchill offer to resign on the 15th? I'm looking through "Winston S. Churchill" Volume III and can't see any mention of a proferred resignation, just Churchill seeking to bolster his own position before the prospect of facing Parliament on the 17th.

Simon

I wrote that brief summation from memory, Simon, so the exact date that Churchill offered his resignation, and Asquith declined it, might not be the 15th of May. But the exact date is immaterial to that fact that Churchill did offer it around that date and Asquith had no intention of letting Churchill go until Bonar Law's ultimatum (otherwise why would Bonar Law make such a demand of Asquith?).

It is also worthy of note that Fisher sent a copy of his resignation letter to Bonar Law; a highly irregular move seeing as Bonar Law was the leader of the opposition. Which is, of course, a highly political move and shows that Fisher was neither a political innocent nor above settling old scores himself, imagined or real, with Churchill.

Now I've just come across, by accident, a speech given in the University of Berne, 4th March 1970, by Admiral of the Fleet The Earl Mountbatten of Burma (Louis Battenberg's son). I thought it interesting because he seems to be hinting that Kitchener's tardiness was also crucial to failure, not just Churchill's haste when failing to heed advice, and could he be hinting at the animosity between the War Office and the Admiralty (an animosity still festering after Fisher's first stint as First Sea Lord)? More crucially, though, his father resigned as First Sea Lord in late October 1914 (paving the way for Fisher's recall), and if the conversation he relates between his father and Churchill is factual (and I've no reason to doubt the man) then this places the Dardanelles firmly on the agenda (at the Admiralty at least) well before the war-cabinet meetings of January 1915, and even before Fisher's return in late 1914. Here's the relevant extract:

"...Churchill then went into politics, and held ministerial posts from 1904 up to the time he went to the Admiralty in 1911. At the beginning of the 1914 war a wave of hysteria against Germany swept over England. People kicked dachshunds in the streets because they were a German breed of dogs. They would not listen to Wagner being played by bands because he was a German composer. They pushed Lord Haldane out of office because he had been at a German university, though he had in fact reorganised the British Army. In due course there was a campaign against my father, who had to resign as First Sea Lord. Winston Churchill supported him to the end and when he did resign, wrote him a letter, which was published, saying: "The first steps which secured the timely concentration of the Fleet were taken by you." This was a generous acknowledgement that it was my father not Winston Churchill who had stood the Fleet fast at the end of the test mobilisation at the beginning of August 1914.

When my father went to say goodbye to Winston he said: "I suppose now I've gone you will go ahead with the Dardanelles operation with the Fleet only." Winston replied: "Yes." My father went on: "I believe the Dardanelles is a fine concept, don't spoil it by alerting the land defences with the Fleet only. Wait until you can launch a combined operation with the Army!" But Churchill wouldn't wait. He couldn't get Kitchener to produce the soldiers, so he sent the Fleet by itself to bombard the forts.

Attlee (Winston's deputy in the Second World War) has stated that the Dardanelles was the only imaginative concept of the First World War but it went wrong because the Fleet was used by itself. And yet it very nearly succeeded because on the I5th of March 1915, the day that the Allied Fleet made their last attack on the forts and then gave up, the Turkish forts had only got 27 rounds left that they could fire against armoured ships. If the Allied Fleet had gone on they might have got through and opened up communications with the Russians and turned the flank of the Central Powers, which would have altered the course of the war.

What it did reveal was the complete lack of co-ordination of the war direction, because it was only after the naval bombardment had failed that Kitchener produced the troops. Meanwhile the German general, Liman von Sanders, and a young Turkish brigadier called Kemal (later the famous Atatürk) had prepared the defences so that we were defeated..."

Cheers-salesie.

[truthergw]

So another facet to our view of Churchill. He insisted on appointing Fisher as 1st Sea Lord against deep seated opposition. When reading extracts from Fisher's letters, I am convinced that the man was more than half mad. Putting a senile old man of dubious sanity in charge of the Senior Service is another instance of Churchill's tendency to irrational action based on nothing more than his own emotional impulses.

[salesie]

So another facet to our view of Churchill. He insisted on appointing Fisher as 1st Sea Lord against deep seated opposition. When reading extracts from Fisher's letters, I am convinced that the man was more than half mad. Putting a senile old man of dubious sanity in charge of the Senior Service is another instance of Churchill's tendency to irrational action based on nothing more than his own emotional impulses.

There was deep-seated opposition to Fisher's appointment as 2nd Sea Lord, Tom, let alone as 1st Sea Lord the first and second time around. And indeed, Fisher resigned the first time around as 1st Sea Lord after picking a "fight" he couldn't win with the incumbent First Lord. Yet his public persona was unblemished in 1914.

Not making excuses for Churchill, just pointing out that even in this debate it has been hinted at that Fisher's reputation and expertise automatically made his resignation a "death knell" for Churchill - when, in fact, Fisher was far from being universally liked, and that his "tantrum" in May 1915 was nothing unusual.

Cheers-salesie.

[phil andrade]

Attlee (Winston's deputy in the Second World War) has stated that the Dardanelles was the only imaginative concept of the First World War

Cheers-salesie.

That's worthy of notice : Attlee was present at Gallipoli, IIRC.

Phil (PJA)