Aylmer Hunter-Weston - Dardanelles Campaign

Dardanelles Campaign

When the Battle of Gallipoli commenced in March 1915, Hunter-Weston was promoted to the command of the British 29th Division, which was to make the landing at Cape Helles near the entrance to the Dardanelles.

When asked for his advice before the landings, Hunter-Weston cautioned General Hamilton that the Turks had had ample time to turn the peninsula into "an entrenched camp", that Helles was less vulnerable to Turkish attack than Suvla Bay but conversely offered little room for maneouvre and given Britain's lack of High Explosive shells needed to cover attacks risked an Allied bridgehead becoming "a second Crimea" which would damage Britain's standing with then-neutral Greece and Romania.

On the day of the Helles landings Hunter-Weston "remained anchored off W beach.. He was out of contact with S and Y, neglected X and seemed determined to avoid any knowledge of V... (he) took no steps to gather information for himself. His one positive move (to shift troops from V to W beach) had nothing to do with the situation at V and only succeeded because the Turkish defence was stretched too thinly."

Hunter-Weston was referred to as "The Butcher of Helles". Progress up from the bridgehead at Helles was severely hampered by lack of artillery: at the First Battle of Krithia (28 April 1915) only 18 guns were available - a comparable division-sized assault on the Western Front at the time might have had 200 - and there was a shortage of mules to pull them forward, and nobody was sure where the Turkish front line actually was. On 2 May, seeking to exploit the repulse of a Turkish attack the previous night, he launched an attack across the line, despite his troops being tired and short of ammunition - the 86th Brigade, too tired even to attack, stayed completely stationary - "no ground was gained by this lamentable episode". By this time 29th Division had suffered 4,500 casualties, leaving 6,000 effectives, although the French attacking on the right flank had suffered in similar proportion.

At the Second Battle of Krithia, 105 guns were now available, of which probably 75 were used, but this was still far fewer than would have been used on the Western Front, and there was still a lack of HE shells (many guns were 18-pounders firing only shrapnel), mules and knowledge of the Turkish positions, whilst Hunter-Weston's plans were excessively detailed and complex, full of map references and complex wheeling maneouvres. When his plan of attack failed on the first day, he proceeded to repeat the plan on the second and third days.

As the campaign proceeded and more reinforcements were dispatched to Helles, Hunter-Weston's responsibilities grew until on 24 May he was promoted to lieutenant general and given command of the VIII Corps.

At the Third Battle of Krithia, Hunter-Weston planned with more caution and realism, gaining better intelligence of Turkish positions (including aerial photography), ordering night digging to get the start-off point within 250 yards of the Turkish positions (it had been 1,800 yards the previous time) and ordering a lull in the bombardment in the hope that the Turkish guns might give away their positions by retaliating, thus enabling counter-battery fire. However, although a breakthrough towards Krithia was almost attained by the British infantry in the centre - where the artillery fire had been concentrated - he was worried about an advance in the centre being trapped a salient and so committed his reserves to the unsuccessful attacks by the Indians on the left flank and the Royal Naval Division on the right. This error of reinforcing failure rather than success made the battle "not one of (his) finer moments".

However "there is strong evidence that (Hunter-Weston) took to heart the lessons" that concentrated High Explosive bombardment by heavy howitzers was needed for success, and held a series of meetings with the French General Gouraud at which they agreed to cooperate with their artillery and adopt this strategy in future. Progress was made in some attacks in late June and early July, with one French attack using a density of shelling up to 20 times that of the early attacks. In some cases these inflicted greater casualties on the Turkish defenders than were taken by the attackers, as lack of space, reserves and guns did not allow the Turks to adopt the defensive tactics used by the Germans later in the war: holding the front line thinly, counterattack and artillery duels with Allied batteries. Even in this period, attacks did not always turn out as hoped: during the Battle of Gully Ravine in late June 1915 he attacked with the inexperienced Scottish 52nd (Lowland) Division - the attack succeeded on the left, where artillery fire was concentrated (as the Indians had been thrown back there earlier in June), but the attack was over too wide a distance, and half the 156th Brigade, attacking on the right with insufficient artillery support, became casualties, of which over a third were killed (this was the attack of which Hunter-Weston claimed he was "blooding the pups").

However, having been discovered by the Allies, these "bite and hold" tactics were then abandoned and their discovery in Gallipoli largely forgotten by historians. This may be because Hunter-Weston and Gouraud were both soon invalided out of the peninsula, or because the Allies had never intended Gallipoli to be about trench warfare and so were not interested in learning tactical land warfare lessons from it, or simply because the development of artillery tactics throughout the war was not a clear-cut process, as is shown by the fact that similar tactics almost worked at Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, but were then not used for over a year afterwards. When political leaders in London agreed to commit a further five divisions to Gallipoli in July, they decided that further attacks from the Helles bridgehead were too slow and costly, and that a fresh landing at Suvla Bay offered a better chance of swift victory.

Gordon Corrigan claims - without giving further detail - that his command of the division was "one of the more competent aspects" handling of the Helles landings and that "his handling of the division, once ashore, was thoroughly competent" but this appears to be a minority view.

Hunter-Weston was invalided from Gallipoli in July and returned to England. In his Gallipoli (2001) Les Carlyon wrote: " What was wrong with (Hunter-Weston) has never become clear. The explanations run from sunstroke and exhaustion to enteric fever and dysentery to a collapse and a breakdown. Hamilton ... saw him 'staggering' off to a hospital ship.”