CONSTANTINE AND GALLIPOLI

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3090, 22 May 1917, Page 7

CONSTANTINE AND GALLIPOLI

NEW DISCLOSURES

BULGARIA'S AID LOST

The Dardanelles report vef recently debated in the' British Parliament, and prior to I ho debate, the Government published the- fence of fonie of the passages deleft*!. One shows lha.l. towards the end of August, 1914, Mr. Churchill fornied Iho opinion (hat Turkpy would join Germany at any moment, ;ind on September 1 of that year he wroto to General. Douglas, then Chief of l.ho General Staff, informing him that on the previous d;i,r ho Jiarl arranged a conference between the Admiralty and the War Office to work out a plan for the seizure, by means of an adequate Greek army, of Gallipoli, to admil our Fleet to the Sea of Marmora.

On September 3 General Ca.llwell, Director of Military Operations, in a memorandum, wrote that an attack from outside (he Straits was 'likely to prcirn an eitremely difficult operation," which would not be justifiable with less than 60,000 men.

An Admiralty officer gave it. as his opinion that the arrival of,the British Fleet would "certainly" have produced a revolution in Constantinople. The Commission states that at the time of the naval bombajdment the Admiralty suspected that the Turkish' forts were getting short of ammunition, a suspicion which subsequent evidence showed waa well grounded. It was after this that 200 Skoda guns were rushed down by the Austrians. An excised passage in Air. Walter Roch's minute discloses that the success of the first naval attack filed the eyes of the Balkan nations on the Dardanelles. On March 1. 1315, the British Minister in Athens telegraphed that M. Venizelos proposed to offer the co-opera-tion of a Greek army corps of three divisions in Gallipoli. He telegraphed again, on the 2nd'that this proposal had been made aiter King: . Conskntine, had already been "sounded" and that ho heard from another source that the King "wanted war."

•Within a fortnight reports fbowed that the Turks were moving back to Adrianople and developing their front against Bulgaria. On, March 17 General Paget, who was engaged on a special mission in.the Balkans, telegraphed to Lord Kitchener that "the operations in the Dardanelles have made a. deep impression; that all possibilities of Bulgaria attacking any Balkan State that might side with the Entente is notr orer, and there is some Teason to think that shortly the Bulgarian Army will move against Turkey to co-operate in the Dardanelles operations."