Redemption - Leon Uris [179]
“It’s a bang-on proposition, Chris. The Turks have closed the Dardanelles Straits and we have to open them. It is a brilliant concept designed to knock the Turks out of the war with a single blow and move up the Danube Valley to split the Germans in half. However, and I’m going to fill you up with howevers, it is more of a political decision than a military decision. Winston Churchill is its most forceful advocate.”
Brodhead picked one of his pipes off the desk to use as a pointer. “This is it. This cock of land dangling into the Mediterranean. The Gallipoli Peninsula, forty miles long and varying in width up to four to ten miles. The Dardanelles Straits run along the eastern side into the Sea of Marmara, Constantinople, and the Black Sea. On the western side of the peninsula is the Aegean Sea.”
Chris nearly shivered with excitement. Rumors and being a small man in a large staff are one thing. But to sit before a general and become a part of it was an ethereal experience.
“The Gallipoli Peninsula is a wild place, sparsely inhabited, with primitive trails, sheer cliffs, mountains, deep valleys. It is filled with caves and ravines and ridge tops and gorges that can house hundreds of machine-gun nests, mines, and barbed wire. But these fellows up here,” he said, tapping a series of hilltop positions, “are the key. Turks have forts with coastal guns capable of shooting down onto both sides.”
“Yes, sir,” Chris said in a whisper.
“It is also a political and not a military decision for us not to ally yourselves with the armies of the Balkan union. The thinking is that the Serbs, Bosnians, and Bulgarians re too unstable politically and too volatile to be dependable I personally would like to see the Greeks drive across Thrace, but our Russian ally objects to that.
“What this means is,” Brodhead went on, “it will be a British show with some French support. Churchill argues that we have an abundance of naval power to subject Gallipoli to the most devastating bombardment in history. Frankly, I expect that Churchill thinks he is going to sink the peninsula…. Questions up to now?”
“Yes, sir. This naval assault. I take it, it must knock out the Turkish hilltop forts and otherwise disrupt and disorient the other Turkish positions so they will be soft objectives later on.”
“That’s the thinking.”
“You have reservations, sir?”
How much to confide, Brodhead pondered. “Yes,” he said. “Naval guns fire in a flat trajectory. They are meant to hit other warships riding above the water. Will they be that effective against dug-in land positions? Damned fact is, nobody knows! Never been done! There are other parts of this operation that have never been done, namely, the landing and supplying from the sea of an army of this size. Never been done!
“Now,” he went on, “come some other intangibles. What if we don’t force the Dardanelles open? That means we will not be able to land on the eastern side of the peninsula. We will have to land from the Aegean side with very little beach, and immediately fight uphill.”
The room, so splendid in its mythology a few moments earlier, now began to appear as a deadly vault to Chris.
“The plan is one, two, three,” General Brodhead went on. “The French land on the opposite side of the straits in Anatolia—ancient Troy, as a matter of fact. They secure a perimeter, and hold. The Turks haven’t much to send against them, nor do the French have to drive inland…just hold their side of the Dardanelles.
“The main British force will land on the tip of Gallipoli here at Cape Helles and drive up the peninsula. Their first major objective will be the hilltop of Achi Baba, about six miles upland.
“We,” Brodhead said deliberately, “have very little room for deception. The navy will be pounding them for weeks so they’ll know we’re coming. The Anzacs will land farther up the peninsula, take Chunuk Bair hilltop, and cut off the entire place from Turkish reinforcements and eventually be joined by the British driving up to meet us.”