We know that April 25, 1915, the Allies and particularly the British tried to conquer the peninsula of Gallipoli in the Dardanelles and they suffered a failure, after months of fruitless fighting. It’s the landing that the Turkish government is preparing to commemorate the centenary, shifting from a day to coincide with the April 24, one wonders why …

But this attempt was only following the failure of the Franco-British naval attack on March 18, whose objective was the capture of Constantinople, and whose success would, in my view, prevented the implementation of the Armenian genocide. Unfortunately, following the loss due to undetected mines, some old ships that had been purposely placed in the squadron head, panic won the English Admiral John de Robeck appointed to this position only two days earlier and he decided to withdraw its ships.

It was Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, that is to say, Minister of Marine, who was the main instigator of this strategy, the failure was wrongly attributed to him, despite a commission investigation which exonerated completely. What were the motives of such a project?

In early 1915, Russia was already weakened by the blows of the German armed and lacked ammunition and even simple rifles to equip its new troops. The Caucasian front was threatened by the Turks (this was just before the defeat of Enver to Sarikamich), as the Grand Duke Nicolas, Commander in Chief of the Russian armies, asked the British to act against the Ottoman Empire to relieve their burden (much like Stalin demanded the same thing to the same English 1941-1943).

All the more so since the entry into Turkey war in November 1914, Russia was completely isolated and above all, she could not export wheat with financial consequences that could “erase crescent Russia as main factor, “wrote Churchill. This required him at any cost reestablish the connection with his allies and this could be done by deviating Turkey conflict with a bold and decisive blow.

The success of this project would have decided the Balkan states hesitant (Greece, Bulgaria, Romania) to join the Allies in the war and the rapid defeat of the Ottoman Empire, already defeated in 1912, would inevitably followed.

The capture of Constantinople, from the beginning of the conflict, would have dealt a severe blow to the morale of German states, already shaken in their convictions by the battle of the Marne and the resistance of Serbia. (Ludendorff, the main German strategist, admitted afterwards that it could shorten the two-year war)

The side of the main front in France, the situation was blocked. Any attempt to break was doomed to failure, despite the obstinacy of Allied generals that cost unnecessarily the lives of hundreds of thousands of French and British soldiers, and, to the 1917 riots due to this stupid strategy. It was therefore necessary to attack the “soft underbelly” of the Central Powers, ie Turkey and especially the peninsula of Gallipoli which protected the capital of the Mediterranean side but was then defended by two divisions.

And from the outset, we envisioned a combined land and naval attack, but the War Minister of the United Kingdom, the prestigious Lord Kitchener, declared that he had no troops available, and then gave a division, the 29th, ready to go in February, ships to transport dock. Then he changed his mind and canceled everything. Churchill then found an alternative in getting the agreement of Venizelos, the Greek Prime Minister to land several divisions of Gallipoli, and therefore go to war against the Ottoman Empire. Deportation by the Young Turks of hundreds of thousands of Greeks from Asia Minor in 1914 was not forgotten. But then that the Tsar wished to prevent at all costs the entry of Greeks in Constantinople, vetoed this intervention. Indeed, the Allies had promised that at the end of the conflict, he would get the annexation of the “Second Rome”, an old Russian dream … And then Churchill, in his memoirs of the Great War written in twenty years (and which have just been published in French) was a cry from the heart: “Was there then no finger to write on the wall, no grandfather spectrum to appear before this unfortunate prince, the image of the fall of his house, for the destruction of his people – the bloody basement of Yekaterinburg? “. Yekaterinburg is the city in which the imperial family was murdered in 1919 by the Bolsheviks, but by his short-sighted decisions including the one discussed here, Czar has sawed the branches on which he sat sadly by practicing with him millions of victims and indirectly the Armenian people.

And following the failure of 18 March (“do not persevere – there was the crime,” wrote Churchill and the general strategy expert Sir Basil Liddell Hart expressed the same opinion) the Young Turk government, which was preparing to flee the capital, shouted victory the most powerful world fleet had turned back! The consequences were fatal for Armenians: the extermination plan prepared in previous months, was implemented. In his latest book written with Yves Ternon, historian Raymond Kevorkian time this decision between 22 and 25 March, less than a week after the retreat of allied ships! And in late March, the Turks “tested it” the feasibility of the deportation plan, starting with the town of Zeitun, which order their valiant people submitted themselves at the behest of Catholicos of Cilicia, which hoped to preserve the life of Armenians in the province an illusion … Now if Constantinople was conquered in March as possible, the flight of the Young Turk government would inevitably disrupted the implementation of the criminal plan. Massacres would probably products, even if only to pay the Armenians the fall of their capital so hard won in 1453, but the organization of the genocide would probably have been stopped. Such an act can not commit a few days, and the Turks in hands free, precisely because of the retreat of March 18, yet began months to complete their crime, which continued until 1916.

Conversely, the Allied invasion of April 25 fell too late. The roundup of the Armenian elite dated from the day before, with all that ensued. And anyway, the failure of this “Plan B” was predictable, the Turks and their German military officers, accused of the attack had strengthened their defense and tripled the number of divisions in the peninsula and they kept them very steep hills.

As for the Allies, the consequences of this ill-organized campaign from the start, were the exact opposite of the aim: we wanted to extend a helping hand to Russia, it failed completely, and it ended with the Revolution and the withdrawal of Russian battlefield; and secondly, after this failure, Bulgaria entered the war in September 1915 the German-Turkish side, which caused the collapse of Serbia and especially the territorial junction between Germany and Turkey, which could and be rescued with arms and ammunition and to continue the war until 1918. Not only fails to link the Allies, but it is ultimately the Central Powers which found themselves in one piece, from Brussels to Mecca .

For that genocide “successful” as is the case in accident, you need a combination of causes. For the Armenian people, the last of these cases was the failure of the March 18, 1915, the evil sign of Destiny.