The Dandarnelles Disaster

by Dan Van der Vat

  Unfortunately for Troubridge, his trial began just one week after Souchon had taken his command under the Ottoman flag into the Black Sea to shell the four Russian naval ports. The 5th of November was the day on which, in consequence, Britain and France formally declared war on Turkey, three days after Russia and Serbia; on 9 November, the final day of the court proceedings, the Sultan of Turkey declared a jihad, or holy war, against the Entente. The dreadful consequences of Souchon’s preventable escape into the Dardanelles were at last appallingly clear for all to see three months after the event, and Troubridge now faced condemnation by hindsight.

  Yet he was acquitted. The court accepted, however reluctantly, that in the absence of the battlecruisers Troubridge was entitled in the particular circumstances to regard the Goeben as a superior force which he had been ordered not to engage, and that he had been right to give priority to the watch on the Adriatic, as also ordered. The members of the Board of Admiralty were invited, in reverse order of seniority, to minute their comments on the verdict. Nearly all were hostile; the most penetrating came from the Third Sea Lord, Rear-Admiral Frederick Tudor: ‘That the … Cruiser Squadron stood a chance of being severely punished … can be accepted, but that they [sic] could have been destroyed, or nearly destroyed, before the Goeben had expended all her 11-inch ammunition appears to me to be out of the question.’

  There was one tragic, if indirect, consequence of the Goeben affair half a world away. Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, a man already possessing a record of exceptional courage, took on the formidable heavy and light cruisers of Admiral Graf Spee off the coast of Chile at the Battle of Coronel on 1 November 1914 with a scratch squadron, as we saw. Spee’s heavy cruisers, the only modern ships of their type in the German Navy, were superior in speed, protection and number of guns to British armoured cruisers. Expressly determined to avoid the ignominy heaped on Troubridge’s head by the Goeben affair (‘I will take care I do not suffer the fate of poor Troubridge’, he wrote to a brother-officer shortly beforehand), Cradock could have avoided action without disgrace – an 1897 battleship that should have been with him had fallen 300 miles behind – but he deliberately took on an obviously much stronger force. Two British heavy cruisers (similar to Troubridge’s) were sunk with the loss of all hands, including Cradock; one auxiliary cruiser and one light cruiser escaped. Cradock, in preserving his honour and avoiding Troubridge’s fate, incurred something rather worse; unfortunately so did more than 1,600 men of the Royal Navy, lost with him. At the Admiralty Cradock was criticised for not falling back on his sole battleship, HMS Canopus, which at least had four 12-inch guns (Spee reported after the battle that he would not have expected to overcome the British had she been on hand; as it was, his victory had cost him half his ammunition). It was the worst British naval defeat in more than a century, since the American victory at Lake Champlain in the War of 1812. Lord Fisher wrote to his most celebrated protégé, Admiral Beatty: ‘Steer mid-way between Troubridge and Cradock and all will be well. Cradock preferred …’

  When war broke out in August 1914, the Committee of Imperial Defence, whose pre-war ruminations on what to do in the event of war with Turkey were considered in detail in Chapter One, became the War Council. It was now a war Cabinet in all but name (the term was not used before 1939) and had the same overall membership as the CID: the Prime Minister in the chair; the Secretaries of State for Foreign Affairs, War and India; the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the First Lord of the Admiralty, supported by the former premier, Arthur Balfour, and advised by the First Sea Lord and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. A few other key officers such as the Director of Naval Intelligence attended when needed. As with the CID, the secretary was Maurice Hankey, whose personal note of the proceedings is the main source of what took place at the War Council’s meetings.

  The official reaction in London to events at the Dardanelles and beyond, apart from a short bombardment of the entrance forts by Carden’s squadron on 3 November 1914, was remarkably lethargic. It is inconceivable that the humiliating escape of the German ships into Turkish waters and the potential implications thereof were not discussed, at least informally: Churchill and Kitchener met at the end of August, for example, to consider what action to take in the event of war with Turkey. They debated the idea of an attack on the Dardanelles by the Royal Navy in conjunction with a landing by the Greek Army on Gallipoli as a combined threat to Constantinople. The Prime Minister of neutral Greece, Eleutherios Venizelos, was well disposed towards the Entente; the King of Greece, Constantine I, however, related by marriage to the Kaiser’s House of Hohenzollern, was not. This was an interesting variation on the generally accepted belief on the Allied side that an attack on the Dardanelles should take the form of a combined operation, on land as well as water, something to which Churchill at this time subscribed as unquestioningly as the admirals and generals did.

  But the minutes of the War Council contain no mention of Turkey before 25 November 1914. At that time there was concern about defending Egypt and the Suez Canal against a possible Turkish attack from Syria. The First Lord, Churchill, argued that the best way of defending Egypt was to attack the Gallipoli peninsula: ‘This, if successful, would give us control of the Dardanelles, and we could dictate terms at Constantinople.’ It was, however, a ‘very difficult operation requiring a large force’, he said. Fisher, the First Sea Lord, suggested persuading the Greek Army to attack Gallipoli. Churchill said that at this juncture one battlecruiser and one light cruiser were stationed off the Dardanelles, with three British and three French submarines; France had been asked to send three battleships. Although the French had the leading naval role in the Mediterranean, they were content to leave the command in the Aegean Sea at its eastern end to a British admiral, while retaining responsibility for guarding the Adriatic against any Austrian naval initiatives.

  Churchill recognised as clearly as anyone at the meeting that the ‘ideal method’ of defending Egypt was a combined operation against the Dardanelles and the Gallipoli peninsula which overlooked the straits. Not for the first time, still less the last, Kitchener, as Secretary of State for War, said that there were no British or imperial troops available; they were all needed on the Western Front. This view was naturally supported by Sir John French, commanding the BEF, and the French Army, which wanted all the help it could get. There was also a shortage of shells, which were being expended at an alarming rate in France and Flanders. The admirals, most of the politicians on the War Council – the Chancellor, Lloyd George, to the fore, and not least Hankey, its secretary, who may well have thought of it first – were in favour of Churchill’s idea, which amounted to outflanking the Central Powers: such a move could knock Turkey out of the war and persuade Italy and the Balkan neutrals to join the Entente. In the end, Kitchener’s flat insistence that no troops could be spared for a major initiative in the Near East was decisive. In matters of grand strategy his word was law. There the matter rested as, after five months of war in Europe, 1914 drew to a close.

  The Royal Navy managed to deliver a sensational piece of good news from the other end of the world in December. It came from the south Atlantic. Acting with unusual dispatch and determined to avenge Admiral Cradock, Fisher detached Vice-Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee from his duties as Chief of Naval Staff and ordered him to take a squadron led by two battlecruisers, Invincible (flag) and Inflexible, with three heavy and two light cruisers, to find and destroy Graf Spee’s squadron. A third battlecruiser, HMS Princess Royal, armed with six of the latest 13.5-inch guns and supported by an armoured cruiser, provided distant cover by guarding the central Atlantic in case Spee tried to run home (as indeed he planned to do after one last stroke against Britain).

  Sturdee arrived off the Falkland Islands, a British dependency in the south Atlantic, on 7 December 1914. HMS Canopus, which had avoided Coronel because her chief engineer, Commander William Denbow, RN, terrified of a battle, had faked engine trouble (he was certified by three doctors and sen
t home on a cargo ship even before battle was joined), was already there. Captain Heathcoat Grant, RN, had beached her so she could serve as a coastal battery, part of the defences arranged by Grant in case Spee came calling. Just before dawn on the 8th, lookouts sighted two German ships, Gneisenau (heavy cruiser) and Nürnberg (light), off Port Stanley; they had been detached to make the port unusable for the British and further to damage their morale. Spee never acknowledged repeated warnings from Berlin, relayed by the German transmitter at Valparaiso, Chile, that a British heavy squadron was after him. The message may never have reached him. His two detached ships soon sighted the unmistakable tripod masts of the battlecruisers in harbour and reported them to Spee. The British ships were busy coaling, to such effect that warning visual signals from Canopus were not seen amid the coal dust (she had no telephone connection with Sturdee). The old battleship however opened accurate fire on the Germans, who retired southward on their admiral.

  This gave Sturdee a couple of hours to finish coaling and raise steam for full speed. Two heavy cruisers and the two battlecruisers, with the battered light cruiser Glasgow, survivor of Coronel, as scout, moved out in line ahead into remarkably calm south Atlantic waters to meet Spee as he headed northward, also in line ahead, consisting of Scharnhorst (heavy cruiser and flagship), Gneisenau and three light cruisers. The battlecruisers opened fire at nine miles, one more than the German heavy cruisers’ biggest, 21-centimetre guns could manage. But the British shooting was abysmal; the Germans were far more accurate as Spee dispersed his light cruisers and turned to face the battlecruisers. But there was only one way the action could end, even though it was the first director-controlled (i.e. centrally synchronised) gunnery engagement in British naval history. The 12-inch guns began to strike home as the range closed, and after expending more than 1,100 12-inch shells the British saw Spee’s graceful pair of heavy cruisers sink (the shattered Gneisenau scuttled herself only when her last gun was immobilised) with the loss of some 2,200 men, including Spee and his two lieutenant-sons. Only one of his three light cruisers, the Dresden, got away from the scene (to be caught and sunk only in March 1915). Sir Christopher Cradock and his men were well and truly avenged. In Britain Churchill and the Admiralty were grimly satisfied even as they acknowledged the gallantry and proficiency of Graf Spee and his ships and crews. The press and the public were delighted: this, at last, was what they had longed for and expected from the Royal Navy.

  CHAPTER 5

  ‘We have no troops’

  The dread news of Coronel had reached London on 4 November. The day before, Admiral Carden, commanding what was now styled the East Mediterranean Squadron, led a bombardment of the forts guarding the entrance to the Dardanelles. At that time his command consisted of the battlecruisers Indomitable and Indefatigable, two old French battleships (Suffren and Vérité), the Kelly brothers’ light cruisers, Dublin and Gloucester, a few destroyers and six submarines (three British, three French). Churchill ordered the bombardment as an early response to Souchon’s attacks on the Russian Black Sea ports. As the First Lord wrote to the First Sea Lord on 30 October, ‘Admiral Slade should be asked to state his opinion on the possibility and advisability of a bombardment of the sea-face forts of the Dardanelles. It is a good thing to give a prompt blow.’ Vice-Admiral Sir Edmond Slade was a former Director of Naval Intelligence who advised the Admiralty on oil supplies and shipping during the war. He wrote to Churchill, ‘The forts are difficult to locate from the sea at anything like the range at which they will have to be engaged … It may be possible to make a demonstration to draw the fire of [the] guns and make them disclose themselves … A little target practice from 15 to 12 thousand yards might be useful.’

  Churchill’s consequent order to Carden of 1 November is worth quoting extensively because it is a small but perfect example of how the First Lord verbosely interfered in matters of detail. Even allowing for the admiral’s lack of initiative or talent, Churchill abused the tortuous, two-edged invention of wireless to state the obvious:

  Without risking the Allied ships a demonstration is to be made by bombardment on the earliest suitable day by your armoured ships and the two French battleships against the forts at the entrance of the Dardanelles at a range of 24,000–12,000 yards.

  The ships should keep underway. Approaching as soon after daylight as possible.

  A retirement should be made before the fire from the forts becomes effective. The ships’ guns should outrange the older guns mounted in the forts.

  Latest information about guns herewith.

  First Sea Lord concurs.

  ‘Bombard entrance forts at long range as demonstration only. Do not risk your ships’ would probably have sufficed. Be that as it may, Carden divided his squadron in two: the British heavy ships concentrated on the fort at Sedd el Bahr, next to Cape Helles at the southern extremity of the Gallipoli peninsula, while the French pair fired at Kum Kale, the fort on the opposite, mainland or Asian, shore. The four heavy ships approached in line ahead at dawn. The British opened fire from the safe distance of 13,000 yards (six and a half nautical miles); the guns of the French pre-dreadnoughts had less range, forcing them to move close enough to shore to come within the reach of some of the Kum Kale guns. The defenders’ shooting was erratic at first, but soon became sufficiently accurate to drive the French back amid high columns of water thrown up by the exploding near-misses. The engagement lasted about ten minutes before Carden withdrew; there were no casualties and no noticeable damage was sustained on the Allied side, which expended a modest total of 76 heavy shells. The brevity of the engagement was attributed in Constantinople to the spirited shooting of the defenders, apparently driving off the Allies who were too downcast or simply afraid to return.

  The short bombardment provoked much debate and even anger at the Admiralty in London, despite the fact that three German battlecruisers had caused alarm on the east coast of England on the same day, when they briefly shelled Great Yarmouth as they covered a mine-laying operation off the Suffolk coast. Jellicoe, commanding the Grand Fleet, called Carden’s foray an ‘unforgivable error’. Other admirals used words like ‘lunacy’ and ‘irresponsible’ to describe it, because they believed, at the time and later, that the manoeuvre had alerted the Turks and Germans to the need to strengthen the defences of the strait. David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, also complained that the only result was to alert the Turks.

  There are two good reasons for dismissing this as an over-reaction: we know from the previous chapter how Souchon was appalled by the state of the defences as soon as he saw them, nearly three months earlier, and immediately urged Berlin to send experts and supplies to remedy the deficiencies as a matter of urgency, to which the German General Staff (which also controlled the Imperial Navy) responded at once. Obviously he anticipated an attack, or at least regarded it as essential to be ready for one, something he would not have failed to mention to his Turkish allies. More pertinently, it cannot be seriously suggested that the defenders would have been surprised by a major attack on the straits once Turkey became involved in hostilities with the Entente. Why else was a strong Allied squadron sitting off the entrance to the Dardanelles if not to attack? The only real question, surely, was when. But while the Germans had already shown the necessary sense of urgency, the short bombardment did have the effect of dispelling traditional Ottoman inertia for long enough to prompt an acceleration in defensive preparations on the part of the Turkish Army, which was officially responsible for the fortifications. The defences of the Bosporus, the passage between the Black Sea and the Marmara, were being reinforced at the same time against the no less obvious possibility of an attack by the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Britain’s ultimatum on 31 October had demanded that the Turks send the German crews of the Goeben and Breslau, along with all their compatriots in Turkish service, back home. It was of course refused.

  The brief shelling of 3 November had one other consequence of considerably greater importance. A couple of l
ucky shots from the British battlecruisers scored direct hits on an ammunition dump at Sedd el Bahr. Some 300 artillery shells blew up, creating a column of smoke 500 feet high, causing 150 Turkish casualties, destroying the fort and blasting all its guns off their mountings. The ground on which it stood remains flattened to this day. This huge explosion, the like of which never happened again at the Dardanelles despite a great deal of heavy shelling later on, engendered a belief in the Royal Navy that the latest naval guns were indeed capable of destroying defensive strongpoints and their armament, in defiance of the received wisdom about ships versus forts. It was one of the reasons behind the eventual decision to try to overwhelm the straits by warships alone, unsupported by a major military landing on the Gallipoli peninsula. Another reason was Churchill’s own observations of the effect of the German heavy shells on the Belgian forts.