Darkest Hour – View Info – 2024-08-04 06:16:28

/ world today news/ After the failure of the Dardanelles, Churchill remained with a permanent dislike for the Bulgarians. And this was evident in the Second World War

In recent weeks, a film with this title has been playing in our country, dedicated to one of the most tense moments of the Second World War for Britain. At its center is Sir Winston Churchill, a man who, with his steadfastness, courage, and ability to work, was able to lead his country to victory in 1945.

Attentive viewers must have noticed that twice in the film, characters who dislike Sir Winston very much remind him of his defeat at the Dardanelles. Exactly these two phrases connect Winston Churchill’s political career with Bulgaria.

In 1911, a disheveled (then still quite hairy) 37-year-old Winston rushed up to Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s daughter, a friend of his who had been listening adoringly to his endless tirades, and shouted: “Your father has just offered me the Admiralty !”. A remarkable achievement for his age, considering that the Admiralty, the Treasury and the Foreign Office were the three most important Cabinet posts. Asquith was not wrong. In three years until the start of the world war, the ambitious Churchill achieved quite a bit. He returned to the fleet the energetic old Admiral John Fisher, began to rebuild the diesel-powered ships, using political tricks, increased the budget of the department entrusted to him.

In the summer of 1914, world war broke out. Despite some bold attempts by the Germans to attack the British by sea, the powerful British fleet blocked the actions of their opponents in the Baltic and North Seas. Churchill had more than the ships he needed to prevent the Germans from putting their noses in the World Ocean. He began to look around where he could apply the power of the fleet.

He had to face the Balkans and their problems

even before the start of hostilities. In the summer of 1914, the British fleet in the Mediterranean was playing cat and mouse with two German cruisers that the July Crisis had found here. With a series of maneuvers, the Germans were able to escape from the British pursuing them and docked at the port in Constantinople. Their presence strengthened the positions of the pro-German circle in the government. The German emperor announced that he was giving the two ships to the Young Turks, the sailors put on fez, the ships were renamed “Sultan Selim” and “Midili”, on October 30 they bombarded the Russian coast and thus the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of the Central Powers.

The question was how to react to the actions of the new adversary. At a government meeting, according to the Prime Minister, “Winston – vehemently anti-Turkish … Gray prudent and criticizes everyone else”. A major obstacle to an active policy of the Agreement on the peninsula was Bulgaria, which was gloomily waiting for an opportunity to avenge the collapse of 1913.

Churchill himself was a supporter of an active policy – “I want everyone – he claimed – I want the Prince of Monaco”. At a meeting of the government, he strongly supported the idea of ​​sending the brothers Noel and Charles Buxton, famous for their philanthropic appearances after the Ilinden Uprising, on a research mission to the peninsula. He also wrote them a letter in which he offered generous concessions to Bulgaria if it attacked Turkey. But this did not correspond to the general policy of the government. She was careful not to alienate Serbia and Greece. What could affect Sofia was a decisive military success somewhere in the Balkans.

As early as September 3 – before the intervention of the Ottoman Empire – Churchill developed a plan to capture Gallipoli and Constantinople with the help of the Greeks. But they were in no hurry to offer it. In a letter to Gray, he wanted an agreement with Bulgaria, giving her the right to immediately occupy Eastern Thrace. Years later, she wrote in her memoirs that it was at this moment that Kavala and part of Macedonia should have been offered to her. A belated epiphany!

In November, quite unexpectedly, Sir Gray announced to the Russian ambassador in London that the time had come for the realization of Russian ambitions in the Straits. In other words, the realization of the centuries-old Russian dream of an exit to the Mediterranean. But here again Bulgaria stood in the way of Russian ambitions.

Throughout November, various plans were discussed in London to attract her. None of them were realistic, since both Serbia and Greece showed no inclination to return at least part of the territories occupied by them in 1913, inhabited by Bulgarians. And the treaty countries did not trust each other, and no one wanted its allies, who could turn into enemies at a certain moment, to seize unilateral advantages.

The turning point came around the new year of 1915. There was a lull on the Western Front – the so-called “war of position”. In the east, however, there was a turning point. The Turks gathered a huge army and advanced into the Caucasus. The Russian troops, surprised, began to bend. They asked for help from London. It turned out that the request was premature. The Turks were routed and tens of thousands froze to death in the Caucasus. Russian activism, however, begat British activism.

Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George was a pragmatist. According to him, the Entente had something to offer the Balkan countries. “There would be a certain difficulty in the preliminary distribution of the booty – the future prime minister would later write with disarming cynicism in his memoirs – but this was by no means an insurmountable obstacle. There was enough fair booty for the looters…” He proposed a strike against Austria -Hungary or Turkey. Churchill’s aides proposed a combined operation in Gallipoli with the forces of the navy and the army. They did not expect special resistance from the Turks – rather actions in the spirit of the glorious tradition of colonial wars – much glory, much booty, few victims. A historian would later write: “Thus, thanks to Churchill’s over-imagination, his layman’s ignorance of artillery matters, and the fatal ability of youthful enthusiasm to persuade older and slower-working minds, the tragedy of Gallipoli was born “.

Churchill may have been profane in artillery matters, but it was clear to him that the attraction of ground forces – whether from Bulgaria or Greece, would mean a quick success for the operation. The British hinted in Serbia that concessions might be imposed in favor of Bulgaria. The answer was unequivocal: Serbia “would rather not win Bosnia than give Macedonia to Bulgaria”. To crush the Turkish defenses of the Dardanelles, the British assembled the largest fleet ever seen in the Eastern Mediterranean – eleven battlecruisers, four light cruisers, sixteen squadron destroyers, seven submarines, minesweepers and other smaller units. The shelling began on February 19, 1915, and almost immediately Churchill demanded that Bulgaria be given the right to occupy Thrace up to the Enos-Media line.

The shelling failed to penetrate the Turkish defenses.

Moreover, the English ships hit minefields and suffered serious losses. The conclusion was to send land units to the Dardanelles and make a landing. So Australian and New Zealand troops arrived here. On April 25, the first Allied units set foot on the rocky shores of Gallipoli. A military chaplain wrote in his diary: “A great slaughter will fall.” So it happened. Furious attacks were met by fierce defenses of the Turks. Seeing that his intended operation was failing, Churchill redoubled his efforts to attract Bulgaria. “She, not Greece, should be our goal,” he wrote in one of his memoranda. But he was not supported by either the foreign minister or the prime minister.

The failure of the operation was also a failure for Churchill’s career. In a reorganization of the government he was given the modest post of “Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster”, a well-paid sinecure suitable for an elder statesman or a young one just starting his career. He continued to write memoranda in which he claimed: “I am all in favor of playing the game so that we get Bulgaria… She is the real prize. Bulgaria is worth as much as the rest put together, and she will bring the rest.” In his characteristic style he summed up: “We have always sent two-thirds of what was required a month later.”

No one heard him. At the beginning of July, he had lunch with the Bulgarian Minister Plenipotentiary, along with the Minister of Colonies and the Minister of the Interior. They left in disbelief. Bulgaria insisted on sure guarantees, which London did not want to give.

In one of his last memoranda, Churchill summed up: “We must win Bulgaria now. Bulgaria is strong, her army is ready… her territorial claims are just… in itself the oppression exercised by the Serbs in the Bulgarian areas of Macedonia , is a great evil”.

At the end of 1915, a month after the Bulgarian intervention, Churchill resigned and went to the front as a lieutenant colonel. The treaty troops withdrew from the peninsula. The operation was a total failure.

The shadow of the Dardanelles failure would hang over Churchill for years. He continued to circulate in the high circles of politics, but his influence was far from that at the beginning of the world war. At political meetings, his opponents chanted: “Tell me what happened to the Dardanelles.” The eminent English historian A. Taylor notes that if Churchill had died in 1939, his fate would have been no more than a footnote in historical writings, in which he would have been regarded as a promising but failed politician.

From this whole story, Sir Winston Churchill remained with a lasting dislike for the Bulgarians. And this was evident in World War II, when he threw them into Stalin’s hands without hesitation.