Churchill and the Dardanelles

"The Dardanelles was one of the most controversial episodes of Churchill’s career. Some people might still argue that, if it wasn’t for a few small things going wrong, then it could have been a great success. Again, it’s one of those episodes where Churchill, personally, attracted more opprobrium than was perhaps fully justified. But, at the same time, he walked into the trap. He was exonerated to an extent by the Dardanelles Commission, during the war itself, and he went to great lengths to provide evidence and persuade the commissioners of his righteousness. And it was true that he hadn’t single-handedly ordered this, that it had to have the approval of Asquith as prime minister and all sorts of military figures and other ministers. “The Dardanelles was one of the most controversial episodes of Churchill’s career.” His role in the Dardanelles was pretty fundamental but, again, the single hero/villain picture is too simplistic. The book does a very good job of looking at press coverage and shows the ways in which parts of the press, particularly the Morning Post , which by this time had turned against Churchill, were really out to get Churchill and were gearing up to attack him well before things had started to go wrong. Essentially they had some quite weird agendas of their own. At this point he was a Liberal and was seen as a traitor to the Conservative cause. Reading between the lines. Nobody says, ‘I’m going to do him in because he’s a turncoat’. They say, ‘He’s egotistical, he’s unreliable, he doesn’t listen to military expertise’ et cetera. But it gets so vitriolic that you think, ‘Well, what’s the agenda here, really?’ Chris Bell does a very good job of being very balanced, neither underplaying or overdoing the criticism of what was an absolutely foundational episode and, obviously, very critical for the interpretation of Churchill’s career. I think that he had a deep suspicion that he’d actually really ballsed everything up. If you wanted a psychological reading, based on speculation, you could argue that his sense of guilt was going to be alleviated if he could prove that actually everything was all somebody else’s fault. He was looking for someone else to validate that view. We all do this. We try and explain to ourselves and to anyone who will listen that it couldn’t possibly be us and that, if we did make a mistake, it was entirely understandable at the time, and it was probably somebody else’s fault we did make a mistake, because we didn’t have the right information, or whatever. I think there’s a powerful urge to self-justification, which we are all prey to and you can imagine how that might operate if you have played a significant role in a colossal military error. I think that did play on his mind and it almost became an obsession: ‘It wouldn’t have gone wrong, if only I’d really been properly listened to’ or ‘if only people had had the courage or conviction to carry on.’ It was as if he was arguing that it would have worked if only they had doubled down. Then it would have been worth it. That would have shown it to be justified. There’s obviously a direct political motivation. As you mention, he goes to the trenches, but he’s pretty keen to come back, really, not through any lack of physical bravery, but simply because, at a deep level, what he’s really interested in is politics, rather than military affairs. So there’s a practical reason why he needs to justify himself, or thinks that he does. But I think there’s also the more profound psychological motivation to absolve himself. It’s very difficult to separate out what the papers are saying from what people thought. If you look at World War II, where you start to get Mass Observation diaries, for example, you do see people recalling, or at least being aware of Gallipoli. How much that necessarily had an impact at the time is a bit unclear. There was a famous occasion in, I think, 1923, when he was making a speech and somebody from the audience shouted out, ‘What about Gallipoli?!’ But it wasn’t as if everywhere he went he encountered hecklers who shouted, ‘What about Gallipoli?!’. Even the Australian resentment may have actually taken a while to develop. This is something John Ramsden says in his book Man of the Century: Churchill was being invited to Gallipoli reunions in the 1920s."