As 1914 staggered to its bloody conclusion, the “Great War” dissolved into a horrific grind along the 500 battle-scarred miles of the Western Front. Britain and France had suffered nearly a million casualties in the war’s first four months alone, and the deadly stalemate in the trenches increasingly frustrated Britain’s 40-year-old First Lord of the Admiralty who asked the prime minister, “Are there not other alternatives than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?” That rising star of British politics, Winston Churchill, believed he had the solution for breaking the impasse—a second front.
Although the political head of the Royal Navy, the ambitious Churchill also fancied himself a military strategist. “I have it in me to be a successful soldier. I can visualize great movements and combinations,” he confided in a friend. The young minister proposed a bold stroke that would win the war. Abandoning his earlier plan to invade Germany from the Baltic Sea to the north, he now championed another proposal under consideration by the military to strike more than 1,000 miles to east. He proposed to thread his naval fleet through the needle of the Dardanelles, the narrow 38-mile strait that severed Europe and Asia in northwest Turkey, to seize Constantinople and gain control of the strategic waterways linking the Black Sea in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. Churchill believed the invasion would give the British a clear sea route to their ally Russia and knock the fading Ottoman Empire, the “sick man of Europe” that had reluctantly joined the Central Powers in October 1914, out of the war, which would persuade one or all of the neutral states of Greece, Bulgaria and Romania to join the Allies.
