Today is This past Saturday was the 100th anniversary of the initial landings by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps on the Gallipoli Peninsula.  [I started this post timely, but wasn’t able to finish it on the day.]

The invasion was the brain-child of Winston Churchill, at that time First Lord of the Admiralty.  He had realized that Turkey, so far from being a side-show which could only diminish Britain’s strength in the decisive theater (i.e., the Western Front), was in fact the fragile and barely guarded back gate to core of the Central Powers.  Take Turkey out of the war and suddenly you have year-round unimpeded supply of Russia (already acknowledged to be the weak link in the Allied camp) and you out-flank Austria.

And in early 1915, the Hellespont and the Sea of Marmara were a loaded gun at Turkey’s head.  The Gallipoli Peninsula, which runs from northeast at the landward end to southwest where it juts into the Mediterranean, was a rugged place of arid uplands, very little settlement, and — most importantly — ancient forts with antiquated guns and very limited ammunition supply.  Across the Hellespont, on the Asian side, were equally antiquated, equally poorly-supplied forts.  Not only were they critically short of ammunition (which fact was known to the Admiralty through its Room 40 decrypts, themselves a result of SMS Madgeburg‘s capture by the Russians, with its code books intact), but the guns they had were not capable of piercing the armor of a modern dreadnought . . . with which the Admiralty was richly supplied.  Even its King Edward VII class of pre-dreadnoughts were more than up to the task of running the forts.  The navy’s ability to run the forts was vital, since the Hellespont at its narrowest point is just a mile across — point-blank range for any artillerist who isn’t a cross-eyed lunatic with the delirium tremens.

Churchill and the admirals decided the Navy could do it alone.  They were right.  After a concentrated bombardment on March 18 by a combined Anglo-French fleet which pulverized the forts into powder and almost completely exhausted the forts’ ammunition supplies, the fleet was poised to strike the dagger into the heart of the Ottoman capital.  In fact the Ottoman government began to evacuate Constantinople.  [N.b.  Constantinople was Constantinople from 335 or so until 1453, just over 1,100 years.  The Turk has had the place not quite 600 years.  When they’ve had it another 500 years I’ll call it whatever the hell they want me to.  Until then, it’s Constantinople.]

And then it happened.  A Turkish mine-layer had laid a single line of mines along the shore, just at the edge of the channel.  If I recall correctly, it was only a half-dozen or ten mines; the rest of the channel had been swept by the Royal Navy’s minesweepers (navy vessels, but manned, for some incomprehensible reason, by civilians).  First a French battleship, the  Bouvet, struck a mine and sank with most of her 600 crew still aboard.  Then it was the British turn:  HMS Irresistable struck a mine, as did HMS Ocean, which had been sent to assist.  Both ships later sank.  HMS Inflexible, one of the Royal Navy’s original I-Class battlecruisers (two of the four of which came to grief at Jutland).  The navy backed off.  The minesweepers’ crews weren’t willing to brave the fire from the mobile shore batteries, which targeted them using searchlights on the shore, both to light up the sweepers and also to blind them.  The navy high command also got cold feet.  It was decided that the job was not to be done by naval power alone.  Troops would be landed.

And this is where Lord Kitchener comes into the picture.  To summarize the picture in spring 1915, nothing happened in the British army unless Kitchener signed off on it.  Nothing at all.  Lord K of K was not only the Secretary of War, in in the public mind he was the very face of the British land forces.  And Kitchener was a Western Front man, heart and soul.  He didn’t want any British soldier shot needlessly unless it was in one of his battles.  And he profoundly viewed a campaign on Gallipoli as being not his battle; in fact, he viewed it as being the Royal Navy’s battle.  He’d not approved landing troops in support of the navy’s initial efforts.  Even afterward he, too, went hot-and-cold about providing supporting troops.  The ANZACs were already in Egypt, staging and training for further transport to France.  It was hard to deny them to the campaign.  But he at first resolutely refused to consider sending in other troops, only later on to relent and send in additional divisions.  [One of them, the 29th, not only got itself shot to pieces at Gallipoli, but also got itself pretty badly knocked about on July 1 at the Somme; the Royal Newfoundland Regiment was nearly annihilated, and it was among the 29th Division that large numbers of troops in subsequent attack waves were shot down before they even could get to their own front-line trenches.]

Just about not a damned thing was done correctly on April 25, 1915, or at any time later, until the final withdrawal from the peninsula.  Between the mid-March naval attack and the landings over a month later, the Turks poured everything they could into beefing up the defenses, re-supplying the forts, and generally getting ready.  And they were ready enough, even if just barely in places.

Incredible as it seems, the British command in the field seems to have had no particular notion of what should happen once the troops and such modest equipment as they could handle got ashore.  By the end of April 25 there were literally several thousand British troops milling about on the beach because no one had thought to get them to the top of the cliffs.  Elsewhere, where individual commanders had taken some initiative, the British had made some progress up the slopes, although not uniform.  Mustafa Kemal’s troops held, however thinly; in some places they were reduced to bayonet charges when the ammunition ran out.

The overall British commander of the operation, Gen. Sir Ian Hamilton — a buddy of Churchill’s from way back in the Boer War — seems to have believed himself capable of running an amphibious operation followed by a protracted land battle from first a battleship and then the island of Lemnos.  Hamilton finally got himself fired, the new commander more or less taking over for the purpose of liquidating the front.

While excoriated for many years — in many households in Australia and New Zealand his name is still seldom uttered without a curse — Churchill’s conception of the Central Powers’ vulnerability at Constantinople was spot-on.  I’ve seen it described as the single master stroke of strategic thinking on either side of the entire war, and while I suppose you could quibble here and there, I’ve never seen anyone else attempt to identify a plan or an operation that, had it been vigorously prosecuted and properly supported, had the potential to be a game-changer on all fronts at once, which must be something like the philosopher’s stone of military strategy.  The concept was brilliant, the execution tragically bungled.  Why?  The problem, other than on-site incompetence staggering in its blindness, must in part be laid at the feet of the British system of governance.

But first, a word on the incompetence:  In fairness it must be conceded that the Gallipoli landings were the world’s very first industrial-scale opposed landings.  No one had ever done it before.  But in truth, how much imagination was required to understand that if your landing beaches are at the foot of cliffs, you’ve got a preciously small window of time to get yourself and your artillery to the top of those cliffs, and that until you get there you’re utterly vulnerable?  The value of high ground has been known since organized warfare began.  How hard could it have been to understand that aggressive advance, always a critical component of any attack, would be all that much more crucial under the situation that they had to have known awaited them?  And while we’re on the subject of the situation they ought to have understood awaited them:  One area in which Churchill’s aggression betrayed the entire plan was in the disastrous wait between March 18 and April 25.  Had the full might of the Mediterranean Fleet and the land forces been hurled on the peninsula at once, with no advance warning, there is a good chance that, however poorly led the troops were, the objectives would have been met, the shore batteries harassing the minesweeping operations suppressed, and the fleet sailed triumphantly into the Golden Horn.  But at that time Kitchener wasn’t willing to cut loose the ground forces.  Churchill’s failure was that rather than wait it out and maneuver Kitchener into consenting, he bit down on Fisher’s claim that the fleet alone could get the job done.

This last point highlights the institutional weakness of the parliamentary/cabinet system of governance as a war-fighting structure.  Lord Kitchener was Secretary of War; Winston Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty.  Both were therefore cabinet members, and thus equals.  There was no person in the government who had coercive authority over either of them.  The British cabinet rests, even now and much more back then, upon the notion of “collective responsibility,” according to which no major decision is made until the cabinet as a whole can agree, with the dissenters having the choice to shut up or resign.  In many instances this arrangement is a positive strength; it permits ministers to resign on points of principle, without destroying their public careers (they remain members of Parliament, and in fact tradition accords the resigning minister a free shot on goal in the form of a speech on the floor of the House), and without foreclosing their re-ascent into the cabinet under other circumstances, as has happened repeatedly over time.  But where there is no agreement — as there was not on whether or how to attack the Dardanelles — and where you have a fundamentally weak Prime Minister (and Herbert Asquith was nothing if not weak; there was almost no principle he would not sell out, no colleague he would not under-bus, in order to stay in office), you get actions like the Gallipoli campaign.  In the American system a president would have had the ability to inform Kitchener that he had one of two choices: find X troops and get them to the theater, or go look for another job.  Churchill could have been forbidden to proceed without land support.  Asquith, even assuming he had had sufficient hair on his balls, could do neither.

In the aftermath of the failed campaign, the cabinet underwent a fundamental reorganization, with an inner War Cabinet effectively assuming control of the British war effort.  Churchill was made the scapegoat, and although a parliamentary inquiry more or less pinned the blame where the bulk of it lay — squarely on Kitchener and his refusal to act in good faith support of the effort — by the time its conclusions were drawn events had moved on.  Churchill was serving in the trenches in France, in the front lines and under fire.  Kitchener went down on June 5, 1916, when HMS Hampshire, carrying him to a meeting with the Russians, struck a mine and sank.  And then of course, on July 1, 1916, the Somme fiasco started.  By the time Haig finally gave it up as a bad job that November, the quarter-million dead and wounded of Gallipoli were dwarfed by the 624,000-odd of the Somme.

In Australia and New Zealand, however, the memories of Gallipoli remain.  The utter futility of the campaign repeatedly rose like a specter to haunt Churchill in all his future dealings.  It was the recollection of Gallipoli that lead General Marshall to declaim point-blank and to Churchill’s face, with FDR present and watching, “Not a single American soldier is going to die on that goddam beach,” when Churchill was plumping for an invasion of Rhodes in follow-up to the victory in North Africa.  It was at least in part the recollection of Gallipoli that made Churchill so reluctant a participant in Overlord.  How would he face the nation if a second expeditionary force was hurled back into an ocean?  The Americans, having had the luxury of observing and learning from Gallipoli, as well as much practice in the Pacific theater in their own war, were much more eager to shoot the dice.  The Americans were determined to launch a direct invasion of northern France, and Churchill could either get on board or see his role as an Allied leader further diminished.  So he got on board.

And for the Aussies and the Kiwis?  Gallipoli became their Valley Forge, and forge them it did.  Some time between April 25, 1915, and December of that same year, something happened on the hillsides in that miserable corner of hell.  While before they had been from Australia or from New Zealand, after Gallipoli they were Australians and New Zealanders respectively, on a mythical level, on a level at which nations are born.  That spirit was communicated back during the war, and brought home by the survivors afterward.  No more would Australia or New Zealand be off-shoots of some mother country.  “Back home” could never again be some island off the northern coast of Europe.

In the first episode of Ken Burns’s The Civil War, during an interview with Shelby Foote, he observes that you cannot understand the United States without a firm understanding of the Civil War, in that the Civil War “made” the United States in a way that no other trauma of our existence has.  I think you can say the same thing about the Gallipoli campaign for Australia and New Zealand.

So I hope everyone had a Happy ANZAC Day.  I sure did.  Unfortunately about the closest I could get were a few Foster’s oil cans (and those not even brewed in Australia).  Ended up being in a couple of bars that night, and not one of the bands could play “Waltzing Matilda.”  A shame.  But at least for a few moments, the memory of the ANZACs was honored, half a world away.

Well played, the ANZACs.

I suppose the temptation to weigh in at least a little bit on Lincoln’s assassination, 150 years ago today, is just too great.

Even the Europeans, who can find little good to say about the U.S. except for the fact that we elected Dear Leader twice — but perversely refuse to close ranks behind him and gratefully bow our heads beneath his yoke (a continent of atheists and agnostic whispers in our ear: “His yoke is easy, and His burden is light”; have they no sense of irony?) — relax their rules about envy and scorn, for example, here, under the headline “Death of a Savior“.

Among the numerous navel-gazing questions about Lincoln and his life, the question of what would have happened to his reputation had he lived remains right up there with the most popular.  The City Point conference, between Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Porter formed the basis for both Grant’s surrender terms to Lee and Sherman’s to Johnston.  Grant’s have been — rightly, as I think — hailed as the first step towards restoring the U.S. to a single country.  Sherman’s, which were repudiated immediately upon their becoming known, were and remain condemned as handing the farm back over to the foxes.  In truth Sherman’s terms, at least to the extent that they addressed themselves to the political reconstitution of the nation, were beyond what he was authorized to offer.

So why did Sherman, who according to a recent biography was self-admittedly most comfortable in the No. 2 Role, even when that No. 2 Role involved vast, largely-independently-exercised authority, go so far into what he must have known was forbidden territory?  Well, between Grant on April 9 and Sherman on April 18 Lincoln had been shot.

While Sherman must have known he was exceeding his authority, let us not, 150 years after the fact, and with the experiences of all that has come during that time to inform our thinking, be too eager to excoriate Sherman.  The simple fact is that in April, 1865 everyone was facing a universe of facts that had never in recorded human history converged.  For the first time — ever — a republic had successfully weathered a full-blown civil war.  The Roman republic weathered a slave insurrection, but its civil war shattered it, and in fact the next successful republic of any size, Venice, did not arise for another thousand-odd years.  The next geographically extensive republic did not arise until 1789, with the United States.

No one knew in April, 1865 how the Union was to be restored, or even whether it would be in its former form.  Certainly there were not a few voices in the North who vocally opposed re-admission of the Southern states, on any terms.  When I wrote “successfully” in the paragraph above, I said that in the sense that there was still a republic in its pre-war form . . . in the North.  That republic had not been destroyed, but no one had ever re-grafted geographically-defined rebels back onto the body politic of a subsisting republic.  The war was also “successful” in the sense that the rebellious areas had been recovered; they would not form any part of a foreign country.  But beyond that much, no one knew or could know when or if we could once again have a United States of America, covering the continent and constituted as it had been.

Moreover, we’d just shot a president.  That had never happened before, either.  The Army of Northern Virginia had laid down its arms and was in the process of disbanding.  But there were still large numbers of armed Southerners out there.  Sherman must have viewed as among his very highest priorities transforming them into formerly-armed Southerners.  Was it so unreasonable to fear that Lincoln’s killing might be used as the occasion for renewed combat, either by Southerners thinking they were back in the game or by Northerners seeking the kind of scorched-earth victory urged by dimwits like the author over at The New Republic whose article I excoriated the other day?

In any event, Sherman’s terms were rejected by the new administration and by Congress, as doubtless they would have been by Lincoln had he not been shot (of course, in that event it’s unlikely that Sherman would have offered the terms in the first place).

There are two schools of thought about how, in terms of reconstruction, a second Lincoln administration would have played out.  The first takes the saintly view that Lincoln would have multiplied the fishes and loaves and all would have come aright, with nine million illiterate, unskilled, destitute former slaves seamlessly integrated as full participants in the socio-political fabric of a society in which they’d been, a very few years before, the chattel property of the majority group.  This is a species of the same thinking that ordinary Germans and Soviets, caught up in the grinding mechanisms of their respective hells on earth, used to exclaim at the most recent outrage observed or experienced by them:  “If only the Führer knew!”  “If only Stalin knew!”

The second view — more realistic, I think — holds that Lincoln would have run aground on the shoals of a Congress which was packed with people who wanted vengeance, neither more nor less.  While the North had not experienced the demographic devastation the South did — fully one-quarter of all Southern males of military service age were dead or wounded, many maimed with arms and/or legs missing, eyes shot out, festering abscesses where bullets remained lodged in their bodies — there were full many towns across the North who could engrave the names of a large proportion of their sons on the monument out on courthouse square.  The North had to pay for its war as well, and that can’t have sat very well with the electorate.  What kind of chance would Lincoln’s overall notion to “let ’em up easy” have stood in that Congress?  Recall that Lincoln was emphatically not viewed at the time with any kind of the same reverence we hold for him.  For many people he was just another politician temporarily holding office.  Everyone who counted in the North knew that on March 4, 1869, Abe Lincoln was going back to Springfield.  In contrast, the political machine run by Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s first secretary of war and a man of whom it was said that the only thing he wouldn’t steal was a red-hot stove, lasted for years and years after the war, longer than reconstruction itself.

For that matter, how would Lincoln have reacted when his overtures toward the South were rejected, when his generosity was abused?  What would he have made of the Black Codes that swept across the landscape in the war’s aftermath?  We know for a fact that Lincoln could be, when he saw the need, just as brutal a politician as anyone who’s ever practiced the craft.  Witness how Maryland got treated at the war’s outset.  Lincoln wasn’t about to take a chance on having Washington isolated by enemy territory from the rest of the country, and so Maryland got to feel the weight of Lincoln’s boot on its neck.  Lincoln also fully approved of Sherman’s march to the sea, the sole objective of which was the civilian population and its means of support.  Is there any reason to suppose that a victorious Lincoln, having let ’em up easy only to get kicked smartly in his shins for his trouble, would have reacted with any greater forbearance towards those who kicked him?  It’s not at all inconceivable that, so far from burning his political capital to ram-rod a gentle settlement down the Congressional throat, Lincoln would have in response to the South’s continued resistance embraced every last single measure of what we know today as Reconstruction.

But John Wilkes Booth saw to it that we were spared the spectacle of a tarnished hero.  Every society must have its saints; it is an illusion to suppose that humans can do without figures of divinity.  We already had Washington, but Washington belongs to another world, a world in which the U.S. was a feeble string of recent colonies whose very existence as a nation the rest of the world wasn’t going to accept and didn’t accept fully until 1815.  Washington is also tainted by the very sin — slavery — which Lincoln excised.  Lincoln, struck down in the hour of his triumph, a figure unmarred by the inevitable filth of having to pick up pieces and re-assemble them, is a figure so dramatic that if he hadn’t actually existed, we would still be seeking to invent him.

One more set of thoughts on Lincoln.  It is fashionable these days — from a remove of 150 years, of course, and from people who will bear neither moral nor political responsibility for having been wrong — to execrate Lincoln for not coming to office pledged to do whatever it took to end slavery.  The argument goes something like this:  Slavery was recognized as a wickedness by wide segments of the population.  There was and could be no good-faith disagreement whether it must end.  So to say that Lincoln approached it with the attitude of his time is a bullshit cop-out excuse.  He should have made the extirpation of slavery the center-point of his administration from the first day and never deviated from it in the slightest degree.  That he didn’t is justly an indictment of him.

How trite.  People whose putative, hypothetical choices — 150 years later — can carry no moral responsibility for the blood, horrors, and death of civil war, for the destruction of the world’s only functioning republic (which was the first truly representative republic in, you know, fucking forever), for the splintering and crashing to rubble of what actually then was “the last, best hope of the earth,” can safely sit upon their moral thrones and hurl scorn at the man whose real-world choices would and did bear that responsibility.  People today can build into their “well I would have done thus-and-such” proclamations the unspoken knowledge that the country did survive, that government of the people, by the people, and for the people did not perish from the earth. The people whose decisions would make the difference between survival and destruction of that nation had no such luxury.  They had no idea whether a republic could survive a civil war.  Remember that the entire knock on republics as a form of government was that they must inevitably fly apart, riven by faction.  It’s why everyone, from Washington on down, described the United States as an experiment.

Today’s moralizers overlook that the most crucial outcome of the war was not the abolition of slavery, but rather the once-and-for-all-time determination that the United States was a permanent union.  If the answer had been anything other than that, then abolition would never have happened.  The Civil War amendments to the constitutions, with the possible exception of the 13th, would never have come about.  Instead of the world’s most vibrant, flexible, potent economy ready and willing to act as the arsenal of democracy, we’d have squabbling little penny-ante states, all divided by mutual suspicion and seeking nothing so much as their neighbors’ undermining.

Lincoln anticipated as much in his House Divided speech.  He was right: A house divided against itself cannot stand.  He did not expect the house to fall, but he did expect it to cease to be divided; it would become all one thing or all the other.  What happened over the course of 1862 is that Lincoln came to the conclusion that the abolition of slavery had become necessary to save the union now, without which saving the eventual abolition of slavery would have been a vanished hope (at least for his time).  Without saving the union now — in 1862 — none of the reasons for which the union’s preservation was sought — including the abolition of slavery — could be hoped for.  Once the union was lost, it could never be re-established, north or south.  And so in the crucible of war the eventual political objective — destruction of slavery — became a political predicate for its own enabling circumstance — union.  A result truly “fundamental and astounding,” to borrow Lincoln’s own words.

And those people who claim that Lincoln should have campaigned in 1860 and come to office in 1861 on a platform of immediate abolition?  They demonstrate only their own foolishness, and their own cavalier disregard for what remains the last, best hope of the earth.

Thus today we observe the passing of our only unblemished secular saint.  It is intriguing, but ultimately unproductive, to speculate on what would have happened had he not died when he did.  It is morally contemptible to damn him for not acting as we — safely removed from responsibility and with the solid rock of indissoluble union beneath our feet — in our moral purity claim he should have.

Although his Gettysburg Address is the more widely quoted (in fact it is, by a wide margin, the longest single entry in my mother’s 1953 edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and the only speech given in full), I have long felt much more deeply moved by the peroration of his Second Inaugural:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

More than which cannot be said, and better than which has never been said.