Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  A new commander had to be found quickly. Carden’s resignation left Rear Admiral Rosslyn Wester Wemyss, the commander of the base at Mudros, as the senior British naval officer in the eastern Mediterranean and, normally, Wemyss would have succeeded Carden. But with the fleet poised for attack, Wemyss generously and sensibly offered to step aside in favor of Carden’s deputy, de Robeck, who had commanded during the actual fighting in the Straits. De Robeck was a tall, heavily built seaman of phlegmatic courage and unremarkable imagination, “a real fine fellow—worth a dozen of Carden,” in the opinion of General Birdwell, who had observed both admirals during his visit to Mudros. Churchill was less impressed with de Robeck: “One could not feel that his training and experience up to this period had led him to think deeply on the larger aspects of strategy and tactics.” But de Robeck possessed, at that moment, an overwhelming qualification: he was on the scene. Accordingly, Churchill quickly accepted Wemyss’s offer and appointed de Robeck acting vice admiral. At noon on March 17, even as Carden was leaving Mudros, de Robeck hoisted his flag on Queen Elizabeth. That same day, the First Lord asked the new commanding admiral for a rapid judgment: “Personal and Secret from First Lord: In entrusting to you, with great confidence, the command of the Mediterranean Detached Fleet, I presume that you consider, after separate and independent judgement, that the immediate operations are wise and practicable. If not, do not hesitate to say so. If so, execute them without delay and without further reference at the first favourable opportunity. . . . All good fortune attend you.” De Robeck replied that he accepted completely Carden’s plan and that if he had good weather, the attack would begin the following day.

  CHAPTER 25 The Naval Attack on the Narrows

  Sunrise on March 18 promised a fine Aegean morning. The sky was clear and a light, warm, southerly breeze was blowing across a sea of the deepest blue. The fleet left its overnight anchorage under the white cliffs of Tenedos and cleared for action. What followed that day was a remarkable battle involving a number of large ships in a small area of water closely confined by land. Essentially, as Alan Moorehead has written, it was “a naval attack upon an army, or at any rate upon artillery. . . . There was no element of surprise . . . and the object of the struggle was perfectly obvious to everybody from the youngest bluejacket to the simplest [Turkish] private. All hung upon that one thin strip of water scarcely a mile wide and five miles long at the Narrows: if that was lost by the Turks, then everything was lost and the battle was over.”

  De Robeck’s armada of eighteen battleships steaming across the sunlit waters toward the Straits made one officer believe that “no human power could withstand such an array of might and power.” The admiral’s plan was to silence the Turkish forts and big guns at the Narrows by long-range bombardment. Once these guns were subdued, the battleships would advance up the Straits and engage the batteries protecting the minefields. As soon as the Narrows forts and the mobile batteries were suppressed, the minesweeping trawlers would advance and, in broad daylight, sweep a passage 900 yards wide. The battleships then would advance through this swept channel up to the Narrows forts and complete their destruction at close range. If, as the admiral hoped, he could batter the forts into silence by the evening of the first day, then his fleet might complete its other assignments and enter the Sea of Marmara the following day.

  De Robeck planned to begin his attack with his four most powerful British ships: Queen Elizabeth, Agamemnon, Lord Nelson, and Inflexible. They were to take position side by side across the Straits at a distance of 14,000 yards from the Narrows forts and open fire at the heavy guns situated there. They would not anchor, as it had been established that an anchored ship was too easy a target for the mobile howitzers. Instead, the battleships were to head upstream, maintaining position with their engines and propellers so that they could move quickly in response to enemy fire. These four heavy-bombardment ships—which de Robeck designated Line A—were accompanied by two predreadnought battleships, Prince George and Triumph, whose mission was to engage the howitzer batteries on either shore.

  Line B, steaming a mile behind Line A, was made up of the old French battleships Gaulois, Charlemagne, Bouvet, and Suffren—flanked by two more British predreadnoughts, Majestic and Swiftsure. These six ships were to wait until the Narrows’ big guns had been initially suppressed; then they were to pass through Line A and close to within 10,000 yards of the Narrows, adding their own heavy fire to that of the more modern ships. As Turkish fire diminished, Line B was to advance to within 8,000 yards of the Narrows, while behind them, Line A closed to 12,000 yards. The combined firepower of these ships would bring forty heavy guns—eight 15-inch and thirty-two 12-inch—to bear on the enemy forts. A third division, Line C, made up of four old British battleships, Vengeance, Irresistible, Albion, and Ocean, was assigned to wait outside the Straits until, on de Robeck’s signal, it was summoned forward to relieve Line B, bringing fresh guns and gun crews to grind down the presumably exhausted enemy artillerymen. Once this bombardment had silenced the forts, six trawlers would advance and sweep a passage along the Asian coast. The battleships would then come up this passage to approach and pulverize the Narrows forts at point-blank range. Two more old battleships, Cornwallis and Canopus, would accompany the minesweepers and assist by suppressing the mobile Turkish howitzers.

  At 10:30 a.m., Queen Elizabeth and the other eleven battleships of Lines A and B entered the Straits in brilliant sunshine, steaming slowly forward across the sparkling water. At 11:00 a.m., Line A reached its position, 14,000 yards downstream from the Narrows, and Queen Elizabeth trained the long barrels of her 15-inch guns at the Chanak forts, seven miles away. At 11:25 a.m., she opened fire while Agamemnon, Lord Nelson, and Inflexible bombarded the forts at Kilid Bahr on the opposite shore. All of the forts were hit repeatedly and at 11:50 a.m. a heavy explosion rocked one of the Chanak forts. De Robeck judged that the time had come to move closer and signaled Admiral Guépratte to bring the French battleships in Line B forward through the British line. Passing up the Straits, the French ships spread out in order to give the British ships, now astern of them, a continuing clear field of fire. The forts replied vigorously and a tremendous cannonade reverberated through the Dardanelles. It was a dramatic spectacle in this confined space: the earsplitting crash and earthquake rumble of scores of heavy guns; the rows of oncoming gray ships moving through calm, blue water with towering fountains of spray rising above them; the forts obscured in clouds of smoke and dust until the pall was rent by the flash and roar of the Turkish cannons; the stabs of light from the howitzers firing from the ridges and gullies—all this under an intense blue sky flecked with white clouds. Every ship inside the Straits was subjected to determined fire from the Turkish howitzers and field guns. These shells could not be decisive against the heavy armor of hulls and turrets, but lightly protected superstructures, funnels, and upper decks suffered. At 12:30 p.m., Gaulois was hit by a 14-inch shell below the waterline and, leaking badly, retreated and beached herself on a small island just outside the Straits. Agamemnon was struck twelve times in twenty-five minutes and Lord Nelson, Albion, Irresistible, Charlemagne, Suffren, and Bouvet were also hit. These blows, however much they pierced and bent and twisted the superstructure of the ships, scarcely touched the men behind the armor: in the entire Allied fleet, there were fewer than twenty casualties.

  Several of the men hit had not been shielded by armor. Inflexible’s fire control station, high on her forward mast, was a small platform with thin walls and a thin roof, connected by voice pipes and telephones with the bridge and the gun turrets. The gunnery officer was Commander Rudolf Verner, the same man who had watched the destruction of Admiral von Spee from this platform at the Battle of the Falkland Islands. Now, in the Dardanelles, Verner was using his binoculars to spot the effects of his ship’s gunnery when a shell suddenly exploded against a signal yard just above the fire control station. Steel fragments slashed down through the station’s roof and walls. Verner’s right hand was
partially severed, his right arm “pulped,” his left arm and left leg shattered, and his skull fractured. Three seamen in the station were killed and four others, along with the assistant gunnery officer, were wounded. Verner remained conscious, saying, “Thank you, old chap,” to a man who spread a mat for him to lie on. Then, remembering that he was still the officer in charge, he raised himself to the level of a voice pipe to report, “Fore-control out of action. We are all dead and dying up here. Send up some morphia.” Rescue was slow in coming. The ship’s bridge was in flames and the steel ladder up the mast was too hot for the ship’s surgeon—who attempted the climb—to touch. A few minutes later, Verner appealed again, urgently: “For God’s sake, put out the fire or we shall all be roasted.” Eventually, Inflexible’s second in command climbed up, burning his hands severely on the ladder. Verner and the other wounded men were lowered on bamboo stretchers and taken below. Inflexible resumed firing.

  By 2:00 p.m., according to the Turkish General Staff account, the situation of the artillerymen in the forts had become “very critical. All telephone wires [between spotters and gunners] were cut. . . . Some of the guns had been knocked out, others were half-buried, still others were out of action with jammed breech mechanisms.” The gunners were demoralized and their fire grew increasingly spasmodic.

  De Robeck now ordered the French squadron in Line B to withdraw and Line C, the four old British battleships waiting outside the Straits, to advance. At 1:54 p.m., Suffren began turning in an arc to starboard, leading her three sisters out of the action through a bay on the Asian shore. They were passing downstream, almost abreast of Queen Elizabeth, when Bouvet, the second ship in line, was rocked by a tremendous explosion. Still traveling through the water, she heeled over, capsized, and vanished—all within sixty seconds. Watchers could not believe what they had seen: at one moment the ship was there; the next, she was gone. Her captain and 639 men were drowned; sixty-six men were rescued, having saved themselves, said a Lord Nelson officer, by running “down her side and across her bottom as she went over, like squirrels on a wheel.” As his ship rolled over, the captain’s final command had been “Sauvez-vous, mes enfants!”

  No one knew what had happened to the ship. At first, observers on both sides believed that a heavy shell had exploded her magazine and Turkish gunners redoubled their fire on other ships. The loss did not deter de Robeck and for the next two hours the bombardment continued. Two by two, Ocean and Irresistible, Albion and Vengeance, Swiftsure and Majestic approached to within 10,000 yards and fired. Some of the heavy guns at the Narrows began firing again, but by 4:00 p.m. they had stopped. Keyes called for the minesweepers. Later he said: “I did not think the fire from the concealed howitzers and field guns would ever be a decisive factor. I was wrong. The fear of their fire was actually the deciding factor . . . that day.” Four trawlers passed Queen Elizabeth, heading upstream. The trawlers got their sweeps out and three mines were fished up and exploded. But then, as the trawlers came under howitzer fire, their progress wavered and, despite the attempts of their navy captains to rally the crews, they turned and ran back out of the Straits.

  This embarrassment was followed by something worse. At 4:11 p.m., the battle cruiser Inflexible, still firing despite the damage to her foremast, suddenly struck a mine near the Asian shore. The explosion tore a hole in her bow, flooding a forward compartment and quickly drowning twenty-nine men. The tremendous shock of the explosion slammed the wounded Rudolf Verner against a bulkhead, further injuring his head. He began to bleed heavily again. As the ship was settling by the bow, Captain Phillimore ordered all men not engaged in engineering or damage control to come up to the comparative safety of the after deck. The battle cruiser then made her way slowly back down the Straits and headed for Tenedos; there she anchored in shallow water, her forward deck almost level with the sea. Verner, never losing consciousness, was moved to the hospital ship Soudan, where his shattered arm was taken off. “Tell my people that I played the game and stuck it out,” he said to the surgeon. Two hours later, he died. Eventually, Inflexible was towed backward (to minimize pressure on the bow interior watertight bulkheads now keeping out the sea) to Malta, where she spent six weeks in dry dock.

  Fifteen minutes after Inflexible limped away, Irresistible also struck a mine. Both engine rooms quickly flooded, leaving the ship without propulsion. The captain, not knowing what had hit his ship, ran up a green flag on his starboard yardarm, indicating that he thought his ship had been torpedoed on that side. Irresistible was on the extreme right of Line C, close to the Asian shore; as she drifted closer, Turkish gunners enthusiastically blasted her with shells. De Robeck promptly sent the destroyer Wear, which gathered more than 600 men of Irresistible’s crew, including eighteen dead and wounded, onto her narrow deck.

  At this point, with Bouvet sunk, Inflexible creeping toward Tenedos, and Irresistible drifting without a crew toward the Asian shore, de Robeck decided to break off action for the day. He was appalled by what was happening to his ships, the more so as he did not know the cause. The area in which they had been operating had been swept for mines before the operation began, and just the day before, a seaplane, flying over, had reported that the water was clear. This report seemed reliable because tests near Tenedos had shown that aircraft could see mines moored as far down as eighteen feet below the surface of the clear Aegean water. What, then, was responsible? Someone on Queen Elizabeth suggested that perhaps the Turks were releasing mines at the Narrows and floating them down on the current.

  As the fleet withdrew, Keyes was instructed to take Wear and, with the aid of the battleships Ocean and Swiftsure, attempt the salvage of Irresistible. As Keyes approached, the old ship was out of the main current, still drifting slowly toward shore. Determined to save her, he signaled Ocean, “The admiral directs you to take Irresistible in tow.” The captain of Ocean replied that the water was too shallow for his ship to come in that close. Keyes then ordered the captain of Wear to ready two torpedoes to sink the derelict ship before she could go ashore and fall into Turkish hands. Before firing, however, he wanted to make certain that the water was, in fact, too shallow for Ocean to attempt a tow. Accordingly, Wear ran straight into enemy fire to take soundings. The destroyer was not hit and Keyes was able to signal Ocean that for half a mile inshore of Irresistible there was ninety feet of water. Ocean, steaming back and forth, “blazing away at the shore forts . . . to no purpose,” did not respond to Keyes’s repeated order to take the crippled ship in tow. Keyes then signaled Ocean: “If you do not propose to take Irresistible in tow, the admiral wishes you to withdraw.”

  Meanwhile, the situation aboard Irresistible had stabilized. She was down by the stern, but no lower in the water than she had been an hour before. Keyes decided that she would neither sink nor drift ashore for some time and that he would return to de Robeck and suggest that trawlers come in after dark to tow her back into the main current, which might then carry her out of the Straits. As he was leaving, he approached Ocean in order to repeat his order for her to withdraw. At just that moment, 6:05 p.m., Ocean hit a mine. There was a violent explosion and the old battleship listed to starboard. At almost the same moment, a shell hit her steering gear and she began to turn in circles. As Turkish gunners now pounded this second helpless target, destroyers raced in to remove her crew.

  Bringing details of these disasters, Keyes returned to de Robeck in Queen Elizabeth outside the Straits. Following his report, he proposed that he go back and torpedo both of the abandoned battleships, Irresistible and Ocean. De Robeck gave permission and Keyes returned in the destroyer Jed. Creeping into every bay, he found nothing. Now believing that both battleships were at the bottom of the sea, Keyes went back to the flagship, where he found Admiral de Robeck enormously depressed. The day, said the admiral, had been a disaster: Bouvet was lost, Gaulois was beached, Suffren’s injuries were so great she had to go into dry dock; of the French squadron, only Charlemagne remained capable of further action. In addition, Irresis
tible and Ocean were gone and Inflexible, counted on to engage Goeben, needed to go to Malta for extensive repair. De Robeck was sure, he said to Keyes, that having suffered three battleships sunk and three more put out of action, he would be dismissed the following day. Keyes, who had more experience of the First Lord than de Robeck did, replied that Churchill would not be discouraged; that, instead, he would respond by sending reinforcements. Apart from the 639 men lost in Bouvet, casualties had been moderate: sixty-one men in the entire fleet. The three lost battleships had been due for the scrapheap, and, even with three more out of action, the fleet remained powerful. De Robeck’s spirits rose and he and Keyes discussed how to deal with the minefields. The civilian trawler crews would return to England to be replaced by regular navy seamen from the lost battleships. Sweeping apparatus would be installed on destroyers. And then, when everything was ready, the navy would attack again. On this optimistic note, the admiral and his Chief of Staff ended the long day and night. Later, Keyes would write of his thoughts that night: “Except for the searchlights, there, seemed to be no sign of life [inside the Dardanelles]. I had a most indelible impression that we were in the presence of a beaten foe. I thought he was beaten at 2 p.m. I knew he was beaten at 4 p.m.—and at midnight I knew with still greater certainty that he was absolutely beaten. It only remained for us to organize a proper sweeping force and devise some means of dealing with the drifting mines to reap the fruits of our efforts. I felt that the guns of the forts and batteries and the concealed howitzers and mobile field guns were no longer a menace.” De Robeck was bolstered by Keyes’s optimism. “We are all getting ready for another go and are not in the least beaten or down-hearted,” he declared the next day to General Sir Ian Hamilton, who had just arrived from London.