Page 343 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo I

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World War. Britain had unsuccessfully tried this type of expedition nearly a century
earlier, in 1807, which saw Admiral Duckworth retreat through the Dardanelles with his
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tail between his legs. More recently, throughout 1912 and 1913 both nations had been
concerned with the outcome of the Balkan Wars. At the outbreak of war in August 1914,
together, Britain and France enjoyed naval supremacy in the Adriatic, Aegean, and the
Mediterranean. It was a region in which they were both heavily invested.
At the military-strategic level, Britain and France shared a common objective at Gal-
lipoli (however flawed that objective was): to get through the Dardanelles defences to
Constantinople, defeat the Ottoman Empire, and through it, victory over the Central
Powers. But both nations approached the campaign with different national-strategic in-
terests and objectives. Buoyed by an approach on 2 January 1915 from the commander
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in chief of the Russian army, Grand Duke Nicholas, Britain agreed to relieve pressure
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on the Russians in the Caucasus by attacking the Ottoman Empire. Underlying this
agreement to aid an ally, and to open another theatre of war, however, was Britain’s own
interests in the region. These were principally tied to imperial security. The route to In-
dia, the bastion of British imperialism, relied on the safety of Egypt and a free passage
through the Suez Canal. Quite simply, the British could not afford to lose Egypt to the
Ottoman Empire and the Central Powers. It was a different story for the French, whose
primary concern was the war being waged on its own soil. According to historians Eliza-
beth Greenhalgh and Frédéric Guelton, the principal reason why France committed to
the Gallipoli expedition was to keep an eye on Britain: ‘The eastern Mediterranean
represented a French sphere of influence, hence France would not permit the British to
have a free hand there’. There were three supplementary reasons: France saw itself as
the protector of the Ottoman Empire’s Christian populations; France realised that any
success would provide Russia, which opposed France’s control over the holy lands, with
even stronger influence in the region; and third, France, as per its agreements with Brit-
ain, had naval responsibility for the Mediterranean. And while France preferred that the
Ottoman Empire remain intact, it also desired that should the ‘sick man of Europe’ be
dissolved and divided, France should not miss out on the spoils of war. 8
Notwithstanding these varying strategic interests, both nations committed them-
selves, albeit at different levels, to achieving their combined strategic objective. In this
sense, so long as France was assured that the Gallipoli campaign would not seriously im-
pede the efforts to dislodge German forces from French soil, it was prepared to cooper-
ate. It was also prepared to take direction from Britain, which, because it had instigated
and would make the largest contribution to the Gallipoli campaign, was given overall
strategic and operational command.
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5 Nigel Steel and Peter Hart, Defeat at Gallipoli, Pan Books, London, 2002, p. 4.
6 For a discussion of the national-strategic and military-strategic levels of war see: Milan N. Vego, Operational
Warfare (NWC 1004), Naval War College, Newport, RI, 2000, pp. 18-19.
7 Prior, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth, p. 13.
8 Elizabeth Greenhalgh and Frédéric Guelton, ‘The French on Gallipoli and observations on Australian and
British forces during the August offensive’, in Ashley Ekins (ed.), Gallipoli: A Ridge Too Far, Exisle,
Wollombi, 2013, pp. 215-216.
9 Greenhalgh and Guelton, ‘The French on Gallipoli’, p. 214.