His brother in the Gloucester kept up the pursuit despite a close pass at him by the Breslau, though neither side opened fire, at a range of less than 4,000 yards. At 9.46 p.m. on the 6th the British light cruiser sent another electrifying message:
Urgent. Goeben altering course to southward.
The Germans were not entering the Adriatic after all: the north-easterly course had been a feint. John Kelly now calculated that he might be able to cross the enemy’s path just after midnight – his reward for getting a move on. Unfortunately evasive manoeuvres by the Germans prevented him from making an attack, despite a flow of information from his brother. He gave up just before three a.m.
Admiral Troubridge, on learning the Germans were apparently headed for the Adriatic, decided to make an attack, hoping to intercept them between 2.30 and 3 a.m. GMT, with luck in the confined waters north of Corfu, where he might hope to offset the Goeben’s advantages in armament, armour and speed. On hearing of Souchon’s change of course away from him he still hoped to cross the Germans’ path around three a.m. or later, though further south. Unable to sleep for tension on the way southward, Troubridge had doubts, which were encouraged by Captain Fawcet Wray of the Defence, his flag captain and a gunnery specialist. He argued that the Goeben was a force superior to the four heavy cruisers because she could pick them off at her leisure from outside the range of their own guns and move a good deal faster too. At 2.55 a.m. on 7 August Troubridge changed his mind, called off the hunt and sheered off to sheltered waters. It made no difference that he could have spread his cruisers out and sent in his fast destroyers to make torpedo attacks, thus offering Goeben a bewildering plethora of targets.
All he needed to do was to clip the Germans’ wings, to inflict enough damage for the British battlecruisers to catch up and finish them off: the enemy, once slowed down, had no refuge or source of extra ammunition.
One knows instinctively that a John or Howard Kelly would have ‘had a go’ in the not unreasonable hope that something would turn up. Troubridge however put discretion before valour, and paid a high price for it. A court of inquiry determined that he should be tried by court martial for negligence or default in his failure ‘to pursue … an enemy then flying’. He was acquitted, despite Milne’s best efforts to stab him in the back with his evidence, but never got another seagoing command and became a pariah in the navy. So at least did Milne, who was never charged over his part in the débâcle forever known as ‘the Goeben affair’. So did Wray.
John Kelly having missed the Germans and Troubridge having declined to take them on, there was now nothing between the Mediterranean Division and its goal, the Dardanelles, except for the open sea. The Gloucester, after an inconclusive exchange of shots with the Breslau, reluctantly abandoned the chase south of the Peloponnese. This was fortunate as Souchon had planned to spring a trap on the irritating contact-keeper by hiding behind a headland in the Goeben while using his other ship as a lure. Howard Kelly was rightly acclaimed for his bold and sustained pursuit. He had divined Souchon’s intentions and reported his manoeuvres: it was more than a great pity that Milne’s blunders and Troubridge’s defection had ensured his crew’s best efforts in keeping up speed and sending quick and clear signals were all in vain. The performance of the brothers Kelly, who both became admirals, showed up the contrast between the high quality of many individual ships’ captains and the indifferent performance of so many admirals of the time.
The unquestionably competent Souchon carried on, pausing to take up coal from two German colliers deployed for his benefit at Dhenousa among the Greek Aegean islands. The rendezvous duly took place on Sunday 9 August; the admiral found time to order a church service. After 12 more hours of sweated labour the Goeben had built her coal stocks up to just half a full load. On Monday 10 August at 4.45 a.m. Souchon ordered his ships to weigh anchor and steer north.
Urged on by Berlin and Commander Humann in Constantinople, the German ships arrived at a point five miles off the entrance to the Dardanelles. The flagship signalled by wireless, lamp and flag to the entrance forts: ‘Send me a pilot immediately.’ A Turkish torpedo-boat came out flying the flag-signal ‘Follow me’. Within minutes Admiral Souchon’s command passed Cape Helles and entered the Dardanelles, its mission apparently accomplished. Unbeknown to his new hosts, however, Souchon had been given another order which would change the course of world history – but would take ten weeks rather than ten days to execute.
PART II
THE ALLIED RESPONSE
CHAPTER 3
Blockade
Admiral Sir Berkeley Milne, having learned from several signals on the night of 5–6 August that the German ships had returned to Messina after their raid on the Algerian coast, was as convinced as ever that they were bound eventually to head westward for home. He therefore decided to block their presumed route, which as we have seen meant heading very briefly north out of Messina before sailing west along the lengthy northern coast of Sicily. He had taken his ships to Bizerta, in French Tunisia, to enable some of them to take on coal; by 6.30 a.m. on the 6th he reached the north-western tip of Sicily for a slow sweep eastward. Lacking any further intelligence of the enemy, he resolved to guard the northern exit from the Strait of Messina. He sent the light cruisers Weymouth and Chatham ahead of the two battlecruisers in company, his flagship Inflexible and the Indefatigable (Captain Kennedy of the Indomitable was still coaling in Bizerta, having wasted 12 hours looking for a suitable French official to authorise access to a loaded collier already in port).
By failing to divide his forces so as to block the strait with firepower superior to the Germans’ at each end, summoning reinforcements from Troubridge at the mouth of the Adriatic if necessary, Milne made his first major error. Hindsight enables us to see that it was also his biggest tactical mistake, with strategic consequences out of all proportion; but it should have been obvious to him at the time that if he was strong enough to block both ends at no added risk to himself or his fleet, he should have done so. While it might not have seemed remotely likely to him that Souchon would seek to link up with the Austrians, thus locking himself up in the Adriatic, Milne could not have known what orders the German admiral had received and should have catered for the possibility. Had he done so, he would coincidentally have frustrated the Germans’ real purpose, of which he was entirely ignorant through no fault of his own, by a happy accident.
Urgency was not uppermost in Milne’s mind after Souchon’s second departure from Messina: he took his two battlecruisers to Malta to stock up on coal, although their bunkers contained enough to get them to the eastern end of the Mediterranean and back, even at high speed. Souchon would doubtless have given his eye-teeth for such copious coal capacity. This was Milne’s second major blunder. He took 17 hours at an average speed below 15 knots to reach Valletta, where Indomitable and her three destroyers rejoined his flag from Bizerta. On his way west at about ten a.m. on the 6th, Milne, ironically, received the following redundant message:
If Goeben goes south from Messina, you should follow through the Straits, irrespective of territorial waters.
As Captain John Kelly in the Dublin had left Malta with two destroyers at two p.m. on the 6th to join Troubridge, Milne diverted him to chase and attack the Germans with torpedoes. Both Kelly brothers coaxed more than their design speed out of their respective light cruisers. It has proved impossible to establish exactly how close John Kelly came to the Goeben that night before breaking off the chase, even as his brother Howard maintained contact with the Germans from astern. The Dublin sighted smoke – but it could just as well have been the Gloucester’s. Now the Royal Navy’s only chance to catch the Goeben lay with Rear-Admiral Troubridge in the Adriatic. But, as we saw, he sheered off his interceptive course – at about the moment the Dublin gave up the hunt, 2.55 a.m. GMT on the morning of 7 August. Shortly after dawn Gloucester was ordered by Milne to fall back to avoid capture. Howard Kelly reported later:
… as it was essential to kn
ow if the enemy were making for Egypt or for the Aegean Sea, it was considered permissible to continue shadowing.
The Gloucester therefore showed a rare initiative by carrying on against orders, and even engaged in an inconclusive exchange of fire with the Breslau. Just before that was broken off, Kelly received the order from Milne to abandon the pursuit due south of Cape Matapan, the southern extremity of Greece. This time he obeyed. At least one commander in the sorry saga of the Royal Navy and the Goeben had shown initiative and a Nelsonian fighting spirit. Souchon, although he did not know it yet, now had a clear run to Turkish waters.
Milne however had not quite given up the idea of going after him: the three battlecruisers and the light cruiser Weymouth set out from Malta in the first hour of 8 August, albeit at a stately 14 knots. At about noon the hapless admiral, in common with all other British naval commands and ships at sea, received a short message: ‘Commence hostilities at once against Austria.’ Three hours later came another: ‘Negative my telegram hostilities against Austria.’ A signals clerk had blundered; Austria was not yet at war with the Entente (though it would be, soon enough). Milne’s entirely correct reaction to this false alarm was to alter course northward to link up with Troubridge, so as to prevent the Austrian fleet from coming out of the Adriatic and getting between his eastbound ships and their base at Malta. The ever-cautious admiral also lost more time awaiting an answer to his querulous (but in the circumstances entirely justifiable) signal asking for confirmation of the cancellation. It took half an hour to arrive. Another half-hour after that there was a further message from the Admiralty: ‘With reference to the cancellation of telegram notifying war on Austria, situation is critical.’ Milne had thus received three gratuitous answers to the unasked question as to whether he had to reckon with the Austrian fleet: Yes; No; and finally, Maybe! None of them should have been sent. All this embarrassing confusion took more than seven hours to resolve. Milne finally got round to resuming the ‘chase’ of the Germans at lunchtime on 9 August, and then only on the direct order of the Admiralty: ‘Not at war with Austria. Continue chase of Goeben which passed Cape Matapan early on 7th steering north-east.’
But by now the trail was stone cold. The pusillanimous decisions of Milne and Troubridge had been compounded by extraordinary ineptitude at the Admiralty, for which Churchill, with his penchant for prolix signals and interference in matters of operational detail, must bear the lion’s share of responsibility. The British Mediterranean Fleet was now 59 hours behind the German Mediterranean Division. Even so, for a while Milne positioned his battlecruisers between the Peloponnese and Crete to block a westward move by Souchon, still Milne’s idée fixe despite the mounting evidence to the contrary.
On the morning of the 10th, however, he led his three battlecruisers and two light cruisers on a sweep of the Aegean Sea with its myriad islands and hiding places, finding nothing. At 9.30 a.m. German wireless traffic was intercepted, indicating that the Goeben could not be far away; but radio direction-finding did not yet exist. Milne’s search continued for more than 24 hours until he received a message from London, relayed via Malta, saying that the German ships had reached the Dardanelles, as had been reported by a local British vice-consul 15 hours earlier, and adding:
You should establish a blockade of Dardanelles for the present, but be on the lookout for mines.
Once again the master-quibbler Milne sought confirmation, and once more he was justified, as the Admiralty reply shows:
No blockade intended … carefully watch the entrance in case enemy cruisers come out.
The same slapdash drafting of signals prevailed at the Admiralty, unfazed by the premature declaration of war against Austria. Blockade is an act of war; Turkey had, however duplicitously, declared herself neutral and London had no reason yet to believe otherwise. Milne was quite right to wonder aloud whether he was really meant to open hostilities against the Ottoman Empire. Twenty-four hours after the Germans entered the Dardanelles, HMS Weymouth (Captain W. D. Church, RN) had approached the entrance, on the afternoon of 11 August. Two Turkish torpedo-boats came out and signalled by flag: ‘Heave to.’ When Church disingenuously allowed his ship to ‘drift’ towards the entrance, two blank warning shots were fired and the guns of the entrance forts swung towards the light cruiser. He then asked for a pilot and was refused. Church took up a position on the three-mile limit. On the morning of the 12th a torpedo-boat brought a Turkish Army lieutenant, who boarded the British watchkeeper with a message: the two German ships were in Turkish waters and had been purchased by the Ottoman government. The Goeben was now the Sultan Yavuz Selim and the Breslau had become the Midilli, he explained in halting English. Church asked if he might sail up the straits as far as Chanak, the town overlooking the Narrows from the Asian shore, and was flatly refused. The stable door was firmly closed in the face of the Royal Navy – after the horses had bolted safely inside.
For the time being the Germans dropped anchor off Chanak. Souchon was still well over 100 miles from his objective of Constantinople; Enver was still unsure of his Cabinet colleagues’ resolve, although he felt with some justification that things were moving his way. The German admiral on 12 August received a message, dated the 10th, from the Admiralty in Berlin, urging him to go on to Constantinople as soon as possible ‘in order to press Turkey to declare for us on basis of concluded treaty’. It was followed by another signal containing orders to be carried out if he was not allowed to stay in Constantinople. There were, it seemed, two possibilities:
(1) With tacit consent or without serious opposition from Turkey, breakthrough [into] Black Sea to attack Russia, or
(2) Attempt breakthrough [to] Adriatic Sea. Report as soon as ready to sail out, so that Austria [can] make move [on] Otranto …
Otranto is at the mouth of the Adriatic, where the French fleet assembled a blockading force soon after Austria joined in the war against the Entente on 12 August. Souchon, assuming a heavy British presence outside the Dardanelles, could only have regarded such a breakout as suicidal and dismissed it out of hand. Instead he told Berlin: ‘I intend to move forward against the Black Sea as soon as possible.’ Taking on the Russian Black Sea Fleet, even though it was not inconsiderable, must have seemed the better bet. Besides, his real mission was to exploit the alliance with Turkey against Russia, Germany’s main enemy, by provoking a new war between the two ancient rivals.
In accord with the Turkish lieutenant’s statement to Captain Church of the Weymouth, Souchon told his two ships’ crews that ‘Turkish government [is] declaring, with knowledge of German government, that Goeben and Breslau have been sold to Turkey. For political reasons it is necessary not to counter these rumours. Ships of course remain German’ [author’s emphasis]. This was a neat ruse, agreed with Enver, which annoyed the British: Turkey had decided to ‘buy’ the two German ships, purportedly to replace the two dreadnoughts commandeered by the Royal Navy. Preparing his detailed report to Berlin about the run east, Souchon made an interesting but understandable miscalculation. He attributed HMS Gloucester’s lack of support while shadowing his ships to the success of his own telegraphists in jamming her wireless. Obviously he could not understand how he had been able to elude the attentions of the rest of the British Mediterranean Fleet so easily after having been so energetically chased by two of its battlecruisers. Captain Howard Kelly was fully aware of the jamming, signalling at one point, ‘I am deliberately being interfered with’ (the future admiral was addicted to the feeble double entendre: when his ship returned to Malta after her long chase, Captain Wray signalled from the flagship of the Cruiser Squadron: ‘Congratulate you on your splendid feat.’ Kelly replied, ‘Yes, they are very large’). The efficiency of his wireless operators was just one of the attributes of a well-run ship.
Meanwhile the Germans’ most pressing practical problem was the serious dilapidation of the Goeben’s boiler tubes, exacerbated by the exertions of the run east, during which four of the battlecruiser’s crew had been worked t
o death. Captain Ackermann reported that no fewer than 8,000 tubes were blown and 50 boilermakers would have to be brought from Germany with replacements to repair them. But at least by 13 August the ship’s bunkers were full with 3,000 tonnes of coal for the first time in weeks. Souchon and his flag captain realised that if the battlecruiser had to sail, she could not expect to exceed 18 knots as the unavoidable running repairs were made on three or four boilers at a time. Until that process was complete, the ship would forfeit one-third of her design speed.
Souchon left this headache behind, sailing to Constantinople in a dispatch boat for talks with Enver. The German commander was alarmed by what he had seen of the defences of the Dardanelles as he entered them and almost immediately signalled Berlin with a shopping list. He suggested sending two admirals, ten seaman-officers plus technical experts as reinforcements for his division and for the Turkish defence as soon as possible. More communications equipment, guns, ammunition, torpedoes and mines were badly needed. His sense of urgency about the defences make it clear that he anticipated the need to prepare for a British attack on them sooner rather than later from the moment he entered Turkish waters. Enver explained that so long as the attitudes of as yet neutral Bulgaria and Romania were in doubt, many of his Cabinet colleagues remained hesitant about activating the still-secret alliance with Germany. Souchon, having agreed with Enver that he should take over the command of the Ottoman fleet, next met Jemal, the Navy Minister, and demanded that the British officers and technicians of Admiral Limpus’s naval mission be removed from all Turkish warships and naval installations. Reluctantly Jemal agreed.
Souchon also called on Ambassador Wangenheim to discuss the political situation in Constantinople. The admiral was impatient to carry out his mission against Russia while the diplomat urged understanding of Turkish hesitation so long as the position of their Balkan neighbours remained unclear. The Bulgarians and Romanians were clearly waiting to see how the Central Powers progressed against the Triple Entente in the campaigns to the north and west. The two German officials agreed fully in principle on the objective of exploiting their hard-won advantage, gained from the alliance and boosted by the arrival of the navy: the only issue between them was the timing.
The Dandarnelles Disaster Page 7