The Dominion. TUESDAY, MAY 18, 1920. SIR IAN HAMILTON STATES HIS CASE

Dominion, Volume 13, Issue 199, 18 May 1920, Page 6

The Dominion. TUESDAY, MAY 18, 1920. SIR IAN HAMILTON STATES HIS CASE

Whether any useful purpose will be served by the publication of Sin lan Hamilton's Gallipot! diary is at best art open question. In essentials, the first instalment of the cabled summary,. which appeared yesterday, is little more than a restatement of.facts that were already familiar. It has long been evident that a powerful and well-directed attack on Turkey in tho early days of the war offered Britain and tho Allies their best hope of speedy and decisive victory. An effective blow at the heart of the Ottoman Empire would have changed the whole course of the war. Giving the other Allied Powers free contact with Russia, it at .the same lime would have given the Entente an assured predominance in the Balkans, and made the stranglehold on ,i;he Central Empires in all respects complete. Undertaken in the right conditions, the attack on Turkey might well have produced the reBiilts, envisaged by Lord Kitchener 'wlien.he said to Sir lan Hamilton as the latter was leaving England fQJ.''the Dardanelles:—"lf .the fleet ■tets through, Constantinople will fall of itself. You will have won npt a .battle, but the war." But it is not more evident that a wellorganised attack on Turkey offered magnificent results.'than that the conditions in which the campaign at the' Dardanelles was undertaken precluded any reasonable hope of success. Instead of being based on a well-considered plan, the campaign was organised in conditions of almost unbelievable muddlcmcnt; its failure and the needless sufferings and loss of life it occasioned followed in natural sequence. In his diary, Sir lan Hamilton- is .at groat pains to emphasise the extraordinary handicaps under which he laboured in taking up his command and opening the attack on the Dardanelles. It is largely upon the, existence of_ these handicaps, however, that his critics rest their caEC. Undoubtedly others share with;him responsibility for inaugurating the campaign in such unfavourable circumstances, but this 1 does not justify his acceptance of the command, still less_ does it justify his .persistence in the campaign after its tragic futility had been made fully manifest.

What 'Sir lan Hamilton has to say about,the difficulties by which he was encompassed in taking up his ■ .command,, and the formidable character of the problem that confronted him at the Dardanelles is fully borne oiit by the authoritative report of the Dardanelles Commission. That body found, for instance, that concentration by the British Government on the Dardanelles enterprise was only possible by the limitation of expenditure of men and material:-on;the Western front, a condition which was never fulfilled. Sir lan Hamilton's diary shows that at the outset Loud Kitchener made it absolutely clear that this condition would not be fulfilled. Nothing could be plainer: than the then' War Secretary's state-' ment:—"lt must be clearly understood that all things earmarked for the East are regarded by powerful, interests at home and in' France as being stolen from' the West." If Sir lan Hamilton were how justifying a refusal to accept the Dardanelles command, the prominence he gives to this statement and' others throwing light on the conditions in .which the expedition' originated would be understandable. Presumably it-was open to Sir lan Hamilton either to refuse the command or to make his acceptance contingent upon a complete transformation of the conditions proposed. That he .agreed to direct the expedition .after being told practically that it :would be neglected and starved seems inexcusable. There were later stages at which Sir lan Hamilton : might well have considered the advisability of retreating from .a "hopeless task rather than vainlv sacrifice his gallant little army. Weeks before the Battle of the Landing, on March 17, 1915. it was pointed out to him by Admiral de Robeck that the Gallipoli Penin.sula was rapidly being fortified,, that all the landing places were then defended by lines of trenches and effectively commanded by field guns and howitzers, which could not be located from the sea, and that the Turks were so ably disposed and heavily entrenched that they had not much to fear from the flat trajectory guns of the Navy. If he had fairly appraised these conditions, Sir lan • Hamilton surely would have been justified jn reporting that hopes of a successful attack on the Peninsula had vanished, and -strongly recommending the abandonment of the enterprise. He chose instead to persevere* in what had visibly become a desperate forlorn hope. It is one of. the most material faots stated in the diary that Sir lan Hamilton determined he would not write to any public personage except Lord Kitchener, ''as in war no man could serve two masters," and yet "all through he regretted his inability to communicate with Mr.- Churchill personal-' ly,, as he could have relied on his kicking red-tape into the wastepaper basket." -To the unprejudiced observer, it will no doubt seem that Sir lan Hamilton owed a much higher duty to his country, and to the army under , his command, than to Lord Kitchener, and ought not to have neglected any possible chance of getting "red tape kicked into the waste-paper basket," and securing such "a concentration of national resources in the Gallipoli adventure as might have redeemed its tragic waste of heroic lives, and opened the way to victory. Broadly speaking, the case stated against Sir lan Hamilton is that ho launched the attack on Gallipoli in conditions which jmade success impossible, and persevered with inadequate resources wji'en he ought rather to have recommended the extrication of his army. This case is strengthened, arid not weakened, by the extracts from his diary thus far cabled. j