THE WAR LORDS AND THE GALLIPOLI DISASTER

Oxford Studies in International History

by Nicholas A. Lambert

An eye-opening interpretation of the infamous Gallipoli campaign that sets it in the context of global trade.

In early 1915, the British government ordered the Royal Navy to force a passage of the Dardanelles Straits-the most heavily defended waterway in the world. After the Navy failed to breach Turkish defenses, British and allied ground forces stormed the Gallipoli peninsula but were unable to move off
the beaches. Over the course of the year, the Allied landed hundreds of thousands of reinforcements but all to no avail. The Gallipoli campaign has gone down as one of the great disasters in the history of warfare.

Previous works have focused on the battles and sought to explain the reasons for the British failure, typically focusing on First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. In this bold new account, Nicholas Lambert offers the first fully researched explanation of why Prime Minister Henry Asquith and
all of his senior advisers--the War Lords--ordered the attacks in the first place, in defiance of most professional military opinion. Peeling back the manipulation of the historical record by those involved with the campaign's inception, Lambert shows that the original goals were political-economic
rather than military: not to relieve pressure on the Western Front but to respond to the fall-out from the massive disruption of the international grain trade caused by the war. By the beginning of 1915, the price of wheat was rising so fast that Britain, the greatest importer of wheat in the
world, feared bread riots. Meanwhile Russia, the greatest exporter of wheat in the world and Britain's ally in the east, faced financial collapse. Lambert demonstrates that the War Lords authorized the attacks at the Dardanelles to open the straits to the flow of Russian wheat, seeking to lower
the price of grain on the global market and simultaneously to eliminate the need for huge British loans to support Russia's war effort.

Carefully reconstructing the perspectives of the individual War Lords, this book offers an eye-opening case study of strategic policy making under pressure in a globalized world economy.

Genres: History, World War I

360 pages, Hardcover

First published February 5, 2021

About the author

Nicholas A. Lambert is an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (Whitehall) as well as visiting fellow at Australian National University. He has held fellowships at Yale University, Southampton University, Wolfson College, Oxford, and the University of Texas at Austin. Between 2016 and 2018, he held the Class of 1957 Chair at the United States Naval Academy.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over the past 105 years, so much has been written about the Dardanelles campaign that any new books about it face the question of what they are adding to our understanding of the subject. After all, why should we read a new work on the offensive when in just the past two decades we have been blessed with fine books by such authors as Robin Prior, Peter Hart, Lys Carlyon, and Jenny Macleod on the subject, not to mention older studies ranging from the official histories to the memoirs of the participants to Alan Moorehead’s classic account?

To his credit, Nicholas Lambert addresses this head-on in the introduction to his book. While acknowledging the unceasing flood of literature on the subject over the past several decades, he notes that over the past century the focus of these books has shifted from the question of “why” the campaign was launched to “how” it was conducted. As a result, certain assumptions have taken hold: namely, that Winston Churchill was chiefly responsible for pushing it through the cabinet, and that it was undertaken primarily or exclusively for military reasons – namely, to drive the Ottoman Empire out of the war and regain access to Russia’s Black Sea ports so as to supply their armies with much-needed armaments. Lambert challenges both assumptions in a book that expands the traditional narrative of the campaign’s genesis to consider a key motivation for the campaign that he asserts has been largely ignored in previous accounts.

That motivation was food security, specifically the availability of wheat. This was a consequence of the globalization of trade over the course of the 19th century and Britain’s growing dependency upon foreign crops to feed her population. Though Britain took a number of steps to secure their food supply when they entered the conflict, they could do little to combat the steadily escalating price of wheat on the global market. And the single most important reason for this rise was the closure of the Dardanelles by the Ottoman Turks in September 1914, which cut off Russia’s access to the global market. This decision had enormous consequences for the war, as not only did it drive up food costs for the British and fuel concerns for the nation’s social stability, but it also deprived the Russians of the foreign currency it needed desperately to buy munitions abroad.

With the Russians constrained by their lack of armaments, their army’s supreme commander, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich sent a telegram on January 2, 1915 requesting a military demonstration that would relieve the pressure on Russian forces. A number of proposals for offensive action were debated by Asquith’s cabinet (the “war lords” of the book’s title), ranging from an attack on Zeebrugge to the creation of a Balkan military federation to a landing in Alexandretta. Here Lambert diligently reconstructs the evolution of the debate in the government cabinet, showing how French ambitions in Balkans and Syria helped channel British operations towards the Dardanelles. The deciding factor, though, was the need to regain access to Russia’s wheat, which convinced a reluctant Asquith that a low-risk naval operation to force the Dardanelles had a strategic objective justifying the commitment of resources.

Churchill’s press release on February 20 announcing the intention to force the Dardanelles was enough to trigger a drop in wheat futures, albeit only temporarily. Unfortunately, this drop also exposed the government’s attempt to manipulate wheat prices through a private proxy. With price controls and rationing politically unfeasible, the only option remaining after the failure of the Allied naval attack on March 18 was to send troops to Gallipoli. Within weeks of their landing, though, the wheat crisis was over, as projections of a bountiful wheat harvest in the U.S. and Canada soon brought prices back down to affordable levels, thus eliminating one of the problems that the offensive was launched to solve.

To those familiar with the history of the Gallipoli campaign it may seem that Lambert’s arguments are tangential or fanciful. Yet he bases them on a formidable amount of archival research, which he uses meticulously to reconstruct the course of the decision-making process. In the process, he succeeds in the difficult task of compelling a reconsideration of a campaign seemingly covered to exhaustion, and he does so in a way that makes the motivations behind it more comprehensible. The result is a book that is necessary reading for anyone interested in the motivations behind Britain’s efforts to seize the Dardanelles. Even if they disagree with Lambert’s analysis, they cannot afford to ignore it.

[Dale · Rating 5 out of 5]

wheat

I had always looked at Gallipoli as an idea of Churchill’s to knock Turkey out of the First World War. I had never considered that economic forces were driving a Strategy that would lead to a military expedition to open national lines of supply, specifically wheat.

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book I’ve read in the past year; providing a history of the strategic deliberations leading to Britain’s Gallipoli operations in World War I. The author, noted British historian Nicholas Lambert, continues his “intent-centric” histories of the early 20th century by focusing on the economic-political-military considerations behind one of the more famous military debacles. Unlike most books on the topic, this work does not place the Gallipoli operations as the product of a misguided Winston Churchill nor overly concentrates on the failure of military leadership to redirect their political leaders against a course that plainly doomed disaster. Instead, Lambert uses a unique combination of primary sources and insider interpretation to paint a picture of political leadership trying to reconcile national economic realities with military strategy. The trading of wheat (the critical commodity of its day) and the machinations of the global economy are shown to be more important considerations of operations in the Dardanelles than the effectiveness of naval gunnery or bravery of ANZAC troops. A great book for those wanting to understand the critical importance of economics and politics in military decision making. The concluding chapter should be required reading for anyone who endeavors to engage in conversations of national strategy in an age of great power competition.

[David C Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very thorough analysis of the total situation that led to England’s launching the Gallipoli Campaign, ranging from economic disruptions, global food trading (the closing of the straits by Turkey cut off Russian exports) to stalemate on the western front to political in fighting among the governing class. The subtitle is too sensationalist though as global trade did not cause the decision but was the context for it. Also, while international trade - from new marketing mechanisms (futures, derivatives, hedging) and electronic communication - had evolved, economic warfare was not as new as Lambert claims. The Continental system and blockades of the Napoleonic Wars were equally an attempt at economic war even if the burgeoning international capitalist economy was at an earlier state of development.

Also: anyone who fetishizes Churchill’s leadership skills (Hi Boris!) should actually pay attention to the reality. His obstreperous behavior and obsession with the “soft underbelly” of the Eastern Mediterranean is quixotic at the least.