Why and how was the decision to attack the Dardanelles made?

The decision by the British to attack the Dardanelles and their subsequent persuasion of the French to join them was based on two factors: the necessities of the war and an excessive underestimation of the Ottoman army.

Essentially, the British had been considering targeting Ottoman coasts and launching an amphibious operation at a strategic point ever since the Ottomans entered the First World War. The reason why the Dardanelles, the strongest point of the Ottomans, was chosen as the target was Russia.

In the early days of the Sarikamish Operation, which began on December 22, 1914, the Russian defense had collapsed and the Ottomans had achieved unexpected successes. Although the operation would turn into a disaster due to changing weather conditions, the Ottoman advance did not seem stoppable in the first week of the operation. The Russians had already suffered an extremely heavy defeat against the Germans in the first month of the war (August 1914). Declaring that they would not be able to continue the war if they suffered a similar defeat against the Turks, the Russians requested urgent help from their allies.

This was an extremely realistic assessment. Had the Sarikamish Operation succeeded, it is almost certain that the Russian Revolution of 1917 would have occurred much earlier. It was obvious that the only way to prevent this was for Russia to withdraw from the war while there was still time. Seeing this reality clearly, Britain and France were going to do everything in their power to keep Russia in the war. Likewise, they were barely holding the Germans on the Western Front and saw no chance of success if the Russians did not keep a considerable portion of the German army occupied on the Eastern Front. Therefore, they could not ignore the Russian demands.

The Sarikamish Operation turned into a disaster for the Turks in the final days of 1914, and the world learned the scale of the catastrophe by mid-January. However, the fact that Russia had gained an undisputed advantage on the Ottoman front would not lead to any change in the attitude of the British and French, and they would continue to plan the Dardanelles operation. Indeed, even if the Ottoman danger had passed, the German danger was still real, and this kept alive the possibility of Russia making a separate peace with the Germans. The Russians were completely helpless against the Germans, and the heavy defeat they would suffer in February would reinforce this reality once again. Without British and French aid, especially in ammunition, there seemed to be no possibility for Russia to continue the war effectively.

The Russians were also aware of their strategic importance in this war and were going to exploit it to the fullest. At the beginning of the war, they had received a promise from the British that Istanbul would be given to them. On March 5 (after the Dardanelles operation had begun), they would clearly imply to the French ambassador in St. Petersburg that they would withdraw from the war if the handover of Istanbul and the straits to Russia was not officially accepted. The British and French were not in a position to reject these demands and would accept the Russian terms with the Straits Agreement signed on April 10. The Straits Agreement would be added to the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which was signed a year later and envisioned how Ottoman lands would be partitioned among the Allied powers.

The Straits Agreement and the subsequent Sykes-Picot Agreement are concrete evidence that British foreign policy had entered a completely different trajectory. Until the First World War, Britain had considered Russia's seizure of Istanbul and the straits as a very serious threat to its own interests and had resolutely kept Russia away from Istanbul and the straits from the beginning of the 19th century until the day the war broke out. However, the existence of Germany had fundamentally changed the conditions, and Russia's access to warm seas had become a rather insignificant event compared to the threat posed by Germany. So much so that the British were not only giving the green light to the Russian imperialist ambitions they had blocked for years, but were also agreeing to capture Istanbul and the straits themselves and gift them to Russia.

The other factor that led the British to decide to attack the straits, their underestimation of the Turks, stemmed from the misfortunes the Ottomans had been experiencing for a long time.

The Ottomans had suffered a humiliating defeat in the Balkan Wars, and the reasons for the defeat included the collapse of the Turkish soldier's morale one after another and their inability to fight for various reasons. With the Balkan War, a general belief would emerge that the Ottoman army was inadequate and its soldiers were cowardly.

With the Ottoman entry into the First World War, the experiences observed by the British were in line with this. In December 1914, a British cruiser named Doris arrived in Iskenderun to strike railway facilities and lines and anchored in the bay. Upon encountering no reaction, the ship's captain sent word to the town's administrator, stating that he would refrain from bombardment if the targets were blown up by the Turks themselves and the British citizens in the region were handed over to them. As a result of the negotiations held through the mediation of the American consul in the town, it was agreed that two locomotives in the hangar would be blown up, but the handover of the British citizens in the region was refused.

This compromise was characterized by London as cowardice. From that date on, a general belief had formed that the Ottomans would bow to attacks carried out by the British from the sea without showing resistance in other points, just as they had in Iskenderun. Furthermore, the reconnaissance operation carried out after the Iskenderun incident revealed that the vast majority of the Ottoman coasts were completely defenseless, just like Iskenderun. In this direction, the British concluded that the defense in the Dardanelles was also weak.

In addition to the belief formed about the morale of the Turks, the test bombardment carried out on November 3, 1914, on an artillery battery in front of the Dardanelles from a distance of about 16 kilometers, which resulted in the destruction of the entire battery and the martyrdom of five officers and sixty privates, would lead the British to conclude that the weapons they possessed were extremely effective. After this incident, the areas around the artillery batteries were protected by building earthen embankments. Although the explosive potential of the shells fired from the massive guns of the ships was enormous, they could not cause significant damage to the thick earthen walls built. The only way to knock out the batteries was for the shells to clear the earthen walls and fall into the middle of the position or for a direct hit to be recorded on the guns, of which only the barrels were visible. Both of these possibilities were quite low. The British and French would not realize how difficult it was to destroy the renewed Turkish artillery positions until they began the operation on February 19.

The British and French made the decision for the operation based on these assumptions. Although they realized on the first day of the operation that the Turkish artillery positions could no longer be easily put out of action, their assumptions about the lack of morale of the Turkish soldier and the inadequacy of the Ottoman army had not changed. In this direction, it was decided to force the straits on March 18 without infantry support. The architect of the operation, Winston Churchill, hoped that even if the fortifications where the coastal batteries were located could not be blown up, he would be able to negotiate with the Turks after a certain point, just as in Iskenderun, and force them to surrender.

The March 18 operation revealed that these assumptions were completely wrong. The Turkish soldier was neither cowardly nor incompetent. Despite the heavy bombardment on March 18, not a single soldier moved from their position, and the Turkish artillery would cause heavy damage to British and French ships with their expert marksmanship, and mines placed in the right spots would lead to the sinking of three battleships. The March 18 operation resulted in a definitive victory for the Turks.

It can be said that almost everything went wrong for the Ottomans in the process leading up to the Battle of Gallipoli, including the Balkan War. These developments led the British and French to misinterpret events and, as a result, make irrational decisions. These decisions led them to a fiasco rarely seen in history, such as March 18. Although Russia's helplessness against the Germans made an initiative necessary, the Dardanelles was clearly an unreachable target. Therefore, this operation should not have been carried out.

The British and French were as right in their predictions about Russia as they were wrong in their assumptions about the Ottomans. Although Russia had fought actively until late 1916 in an unexpected way, the morale of the people had collapsed completely as a result of its inability to show presence against the Germans, and it could not escape the revolution in 1917. The role of the Battle of Gallipoli in the October Revolution was undeniable.