The Real Reason Britain
Gambled at Gallipoli
A new book argues that Churchill’s famous folly was
ultimately about food, fear, and free trade.
| APRIL 17, 2021,
8:00 AM
Australian
infantrymen sit on a transport as they head toward the beach at Gallipoli in
1915. MANSELL/THE LIFE PICTURE
COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES
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Virtually
since he was booted from the British Admiralty in 1915 for his role in the
disastrous Gallipoli campaign, Winston Churchill has been vilified for
masterminding the venture, one of Britain’s worst defeats in World War I. The
whole plan for the failed campaign has long been seen as Churchill’s
conception, launched in a bid to make an end run around the mud and blood of
Flanders. For Australians and New Zealanders, whose troops had just arrived in
Europe and suffered a deadly baptism of fire on the beaches of the Gallipoli
Peninsula in what is today Turkey, the episode—and Churchill’s role in
it—remains a bitter memory. Even during World War II, lingering Australian ire
at Churchill helped underpin Canberra’s determination to wrench Australian
troops out of the then-prime minister’s hands and bring them home to fight for
Australia, not the empire.
The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster: How
Globalized Trade Led Britain to Its Worst Defeat of the First World War, Nicholas A. Lambert, Oxford
University Press, 364 pp., $49.95, May 2021
But, argues
Nicholas Lambert in The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster, the
deadly fiasco wasn’t just about Churchill—and it wasn’t any sort of strategic
alternative to escape the stalemate on the Western Front. Rather, Gallipoli was
all about wheat. More specifically, Russian wheat—grain that Moscow needed to
export to earn hard currency to stay in the war and food that British leaders
felt they desperately needed as the world (and their island nation) faced
skyrocketing prices and fears of scarcity. Ever since the Ottoman Empire had
joined Germany and Austria-Hungary as part of the Central Powers late in 1914,
the Ottoman-controlled Turkish Straits had been closed to commercial shipping.
The Russian Empire, which had become one of the biggest suppliers of wheat to
the global market (and to Britain) in the years before the war, was suddenly
stuck without an outlet.
By the
beginning of 1915, that was becoming a problem for British leaders, already
acutely aware of their need to import most of their food. Global shipping had
largely abandoned the high seas due to the war. Bad harvests seemed to loom in
North America, South America, and India. A wheat crunch was coming—and with it
the prospect of, if not outright famine, ruinously expensive bread that could
spark major social and political upheaval in Britain.
Since the
fall of 1914, various ideas had indeed been kicking around in the British war
cabinet for some sort of operation in the Near East—whether a naval operation
to force open the straits or a landing in Syria or a new British front in
Greece, then still neutral in the war. But nothing came together until January
1915, when the British government formed a food price committee chaired by
Prime Minister H.H. Asquith himself (with an assist from a very junior Treasury
official named John Maynard Keynes). For the first time, Lambert writes, the
government had unified “war strategy, and the food problem.”
The food
problem was also a money problem: Russia was badgering Britain for massive
loans, and there were fears that Moscow would make a separate peace with
Germany if it couldn’t afford to import munitions. The only thing Russia had to
export was wheat, and that wheat needed to be shipped through the Black Sea and
the straits. The only option that could simultaneously tackle Russia’s financial
woes, alleviate the wheat shortage, and fend off riots in British streets was,
in British eyes, to open the Dardanelles—as the cabinet finally decided, more
or less, by the end of January.
“Asquith
seems to have recognized that the two separate major problems that confronted
the War Cabinet”—namely, where to fight and how to fight rising food
prices—“had a single solution,” Lambert writes. “He expressed the appeal of the
operation in his declaration that it would be ‘easier’ and ‘much cheaper’ to ‘storm
the Dardanelles’ than any of the other alternatives for averting social and
political unrest over food prices at home.”
The
decision-making was sound and superbly reconstructed by Lambert by trawling
through mountains of contemporary documents to give a blow-by-blow, sometimes
hour-by-hour, picture of how it all came together. But, ironically, none of it
mattered in the end—and not just because both the British naval attack and the
British-Australian land attack on Gallipoli utterly failed. Gallipoli, even if
successful, wouldn’t have been the silver bullet the government was looking
for. Unexpected record wheat harvests, especially in North America, solved the
wheat problem miraculously just as summer began. And it turned out that Russia
didn’t have any wheat ready to export anyway, even if the British could have
reopened the straits.
What’s
fascinating about The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster are
the echoes today of what Lambert characterized as the trade-offs that had
resulted from the first big era of globalization in the late 19th century:
“[T]he efficiencies, conveniences, and lower prices for consumers made possible
by globalization magnified strategic vulnerability.” Whether it’s trade wars,
tariffs, disrupted supply chains, or a pandemic wrecking the delicate cogs of
global commerce—or even the brief, recent closure of the Suez Canal—modern
leaders hardly need a refresher on just what globalization’s double edge can
feel like.
Lambert, who
made his name with a clutch of previous books on British naval strategy before
and during World War I, has done a remarkable job linking the 19th-century
transformations in shipping, finance, and agriculture to the bloody detritus
left in Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay. The War Lords and the Gallipoli
Disaster may not be quite the thing for a casual reader who shudders
at exegeses of dueling government memorandums. But for any serious student of
history, and especially the Great War, it’s a great read—and a timely reminder
that politics and economics always color military decisions, then and now.
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