Gallipoli: Attack from the Sea (review)

Since 1915, "Gallipoli" has become a by-word for military incompetence. The failed British attempt to capture the Dardanelles Straits has been held up as a textbook case of how combined-service operations should not be conducted. Victor Ruddeno, however, believes that previous historians have 'largely overlooked' the Royal Navy's many accomplishments during the campaign. Accordingly his book seeks to provide a 'fresh outlook on the defined historical sequence of events' as well as a 'thorough and penetrating analysis of the strategies and actions of all land, sea and air forces'. The author's particular objective is to highlight the contribution to the campaign made by the crews of the British (and Australian) submarines that ran the gauntlet up the Straits to operate against enemy supply lines across the Sea of Marmora.

This book is divided into thirteen chapters. The first serves as an introduction to the subject, offering a summary of some events and circumstances that led to the decision by the British political/strategic executive to mount an attack; the last offers some conclusions. The remainder, chapters two through twelve, provides a straightforward narrative of naval and military operations. Approximately one quarter of the text is devoted to blow-by-blow accounts of submarine operations, which are derived almost entirely from after-action patrol reports and repackaged by the author to create a daily diary of events. The rest is nothing more than a selective scissors and paste of events described many times in previous books. While footnotes are provided, these exist mainly to supply details that could not conveniently be inserted into the narrative rather than for identifying sources. Those that do designate a source show that, except for reading a couple of diaries (all cited before by previous authors), Ruddeno has done no archival research. The bibliography is equally revealing. A cryptic one-page list of primary sources he used is supplied - but no locations or descriptions are given. To give a typical example, what is a reader supposed to divine from the following: "Hall, P., c.1915-16. Letters"?

The real problems with this book stem from the author's failure to read widely or carefully enough to be able to contextualize properly the material he presents. The result is a plethora of serious factual and interpretative errors. As is transparent from the first chapter, the author made no attempt to come to grips with the complex political and strategic dynamics that led to the initiation of the Dardanelles campaign. Discussion of inter-allied relations and British perceptions of their role within the alliance is particularly lacking. As a consequence, Ruddeno's rendition of the strategic rationale is grossly oversimplified and compromised by omissions and inaccuracies. For instance, he conflates (p. 15) the meeting of Winston Churchill's Admiralty "war circle" of 5th January with Prime Minister HH Asquith's so-called "war council" of 7th January 1915. The key "war council" of 28th January, at which the decision was taken to go ahead with the proposed attack, is not mentioned at all; nor are the events immediately preceding which are crucial to understanding why objections were overruled and the order given. In creating his 'new historical sequence of events' the author is overly dependent upon Churchill's post-war memoirs (The World Crisis); he is oblivious to scholarship demonstrating how the former First Lord of the Admiralty misled his audience – as he did when testifying in late 1916 before the commission of enquiry set up to investigate the Dardanelles fiasco. The author did not even bother to avail himself of numerous published volumes of documents. Utterly inexcusable is the failure to consult the relevant companion volumes to the biography of Winston Churchill edited by Martin Gilbert (The Challenge of War, 1914-1916 [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971]).

In the conclusion, the author informs his readers of the 'noteworthy fact' (pp. 271-2) that after the termination of the campaign (February 1916) not one member...