The Gallipoli Campaign of April–December 1915 – the Allied landings on the shores of Turkey – has been the subject of a vast literature, which has most unfortunately propagated a great untruth – that the War Office was unprepared for operations in the Dardanelles area, and had little or nothing in the way of maps and geographical intelligence to give to Sir Ian Hamilton, the commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (Medforce), and his Staff. First explored in Aspinall-Oglander’s Official History,1 this theme is developed in most one-volume histories that have followed, and has since passed into mythology.2 Hamilton’s most recent biographer repeated this canard, echoing Hamilton himself in claiming that he only received from the War Office ‘a 1912 handbook on the Turkish Army, a sort of tourist guide to the area with a thoroughly defective map and the single sheet of general instructions from Kitchener’, while his Staff officers ‘were not given access to Callwell’s 1906 report or to the valuable reports on the Dardanelles by the British military attaché.’3 Yet the reality is somewhat different, and this book demonstrates that this myth, perpetrated by Hamilton himself among others, is a gross distortion of the truth. While there were problems in London with strategic policy and planning (or lack of it) at the highest level, the War Office (and the Admiralty) possessed a great deal of previously collected terrain information, maps and charts, covering the topography and defences of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles,much of which was duly handed over to Hamilton and his Staff, either before they left London or subsequently. Additional material was obtained from the Admiralty and Navy, and still more gathered in theatre, in the Aegean and the Levant before the landings.
Whether all this intelligence was properly processed, distributed and efficiently used is a different matter and this book, which incorporates much previously unpublished material, attempts to penetrate behind the veil of obfuscation to get to the truth of the matter. Intelligence has to be analysed, interpreted and evaluated, and then distributed and explained to commanders and their Staff, who must base their plans on it and not ignore it. All too often, politicians and commanders ignore intelligence, and indulge in wishful thinking by creating a false scenario in which they then believe. Very little has been written on the intelligence side of the Gallipoli Campaign, and it is typical that John Keegan’s recent bookIntelligence in War,4 admittedly a selective case-study approach, omitted it. It hardly featured in two key studies of British 20th century intelligence work: Michael Occleshaw’sArmour Against Fate, British Military Intelligence in the First World War,5 or in Christopher Andrew’sSecret Service, The Making of the British Intelligence Community.6 While we should not overstate the importance of intelligence – that most eminent of cryptanalysts David Kahn called it a secondary factor in war7 – it is undeniable that possession of desirable information gives a significant advantage and may occasionally tip the balance. We should also note, as Kahn did, that intelligence can only work through strength; the primary factor is force, and this is certainly true of the Dardanelles operations.
Briefly considering the types and sources of intelligence available before and during the Gallipoli Campaign, we will see that before the outbreak of war open-source intelligence, attachés’ reports and clandestine reconnaissances were vital sources. Once hostilities with Turkey had started, given the paucity of signals intelligence at the time, human intelligence was a vital source of strategic, terrain, operational and tactical intelligence in the Dardanelles operations before the landings. Imagery intelligence also provided vital information about Turkish defences before and after the landings.
The lies and myths about a lack of geographical preparations began during the Gallipoli Campaign itself, and the Dardanelles Commission, set up to determine the causes of failure, became a battleground of accusation and counter-accusation. An extreme perpetrator of the myth was the journalist Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, who stated, with complete untruth:
There were undoubtedly no maps in existence at all… The main difficulty was the question of maps; nobody had maps. There were no maps
