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technology, including high explosives, rangefinders and massive long-range guns of a new standard of accuracy, but all agreed that large military and naval forces would be needed and heavy casualties were inevitable. War Office and General Staff studies in 1908 and again in 1911 reached the same conclusions.
    The CID’s ninety-sixth meeting in February 1907 had concluded: ‘The Committee consider that the operation of landing an expeditionary force on or near the Gallipoli Peninsula would involve great risk, and should not be undertaken if other means of bringing pressure to bear on Turkey were available.’ The subject did not come up again at the CID itself in peacetime, even when Turkish territorial ambitions in the Persian Gulf appeared to threaten British interests in the region. Both the Admiralty and the War Office consistently took it as read that should it be necessary or advisable to attempt to force the Dardanelles in order to coerce the Ottoman government, a full-scale, combined naval and military operation was the only strategy. There could be no question of the Royal Navy attempting the task unaided.
    Thanks to its intervention on Turkey’s side in the Crimean War, the underlying motive for which was, as ever, to frustrate Russian ambitions in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, Britain enjoyed lasting prestige and even popularity in Turkey. This endured despite British inroads on Ottoman territory in Egypt, Persia, the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean plus loud public criticism of Turkish oppression of its minorities (Turkey’s cavalier approach to human rights was still a bone of contention a century later). Until almost the end of the nineteenth century Turkey looked toBritain and its navy for protection from Russian expansionism, but in the last quarter German influence began to gain ground at Britain’s expense.
    Yet the British naval mission, while hardly hyperactive during this period, was still in place in Constantinople. Rear-Admiral Arthur Henry Limpus led it in his official capacity as naval adviser to the Ottoman government and was personally popular among the Turks. Soon after his appointment by Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, in 1912, Limpus displayed energy in trying to revive the Turkish fleet, as part of British efforts to help the Turks recover from their setbacks in the Balkan wars. In this he was encouraged by his political chief, who was virtually alone among British ministers in favouring an alliance with Turkey. Churchill was enthusiastically supportive of the ‘Young Turks’, especially when they brought down Sultan Abdul Hamid, ‘the Damned’, who was personally responsible for the persecutions. Churchill met Enver, then briefly military attaché in Berlin, while officially observing German Army manoeuvres in 1909, when the Turk was aged just 27. Enver called on Churchill in London in 1910, the year he became First Lord. In September they met again when Churchill spent five days in Constantinople.
    Turkey had already ordered a dreadnought battleship in 1911, to be built on Tyneside and named Reshadieh . The ship was launched in September 1913. There was no dock big enough for such a large vessel in Constantinople, so in December 1913, as the ship , 23,000 tonnes and armed with ten 13.5-inch guns, was being fitted out, the Turks concluded another deal with Armstrong’s and Vickers, the two shipbuilders whose close co-operation would one day lead to a merger, for shore facilities for her. The two companies were also commissioned to regenerate the neglected ships of the Ottoman fleet but had made little progress when the war broke out. In the same month Turkey successfully made an offer for another battleship, the Rio de Janeiro, nearing completion on Tyneside. The ship, 27,500 tonnes with 14 12-inch guns, at the time the world’s longest dreadnought, had been commissioned by Brazil, which then found it could not afford