The Dandarnelles Disaster

by Dan Van der Vat

  Souchon was not impressed by the performance of his Turkish sailors, despite their exuberance after the raid. He initiated new programmes of training and repair because he not only anticipated having to help defend the Dardanelles but was also determined to take on the Russian Black Sea Fleet in what became a protracted private war.

  The Russians had five old battleships and supporting vessels (including nine new 33-knot destroyers) in the Black Sea, led by the competent

  Vice-Admiral Eberhard. Three super-dreadnoughts were under construction in Black Sea yards, two of them due to enter service in autumn 1915. They would have ten 12-inch guns, 12 inches of armour and a speed of 24 knots. The Goeben/Yavuz could outrun them, boiler tubes permitting, but she was the only modern capital ship under Souchon’s flag: a single mine, torpedo or lucky shell could deprive him of the only ace in his hand. Souchon was determined to do as much damage as he could before the odds against him worsened.

  The Russians for their part lost no time in striking back at sea. They shelled the northern coast of Anatolia in the opening days of November, sinking three unescorted troopships with heavy Turkish losses. At the same time, the Breslau/Midilli sailed to the eastern end of the Black Sea to shell Poti on the Georgian coast. On 17 November the bulk of the Black Sea Fleet bombarded Trebizond (Trabzon), prompting Souchon to set out in pursuit. He sighted two Russian cruisers in patchy fog off Balaclava on the Crimean coast but as he turned towards them his ships came under heavy fire from battleships at 5,000 yards. The two sides exchanged quite accurate broadsides as they sailed in parallel lines; one 12-inch shell from the flagship Ievstafi hit the side of the Yavuz, blowing a whole armoured casemate containing a 15-centimetre gun into the sea and setting off an explosion of its ready ammunition. Only rapid flooding below deck prevented a disaster. It was nearly the lucky shot that was all the Russians needed to cripple Turkey’s new-found sea power. After ten minutes Souchon ordered a withdrawal. On the way back to the Bosporus, the Turkish fleet paused and sank two Russian schooners. Their disembarked crews were taken prisoner and revealed to a satisfied Souchon and his staff the extent of the panic unleashed by the 29 October raid. Other prisoners taken in various actions towards the end of the year by the Midilli told how the Yavuz had become the subject of wild stories: she was a devil-ship, she had a doppelgänger (presumably the Midilli when they were sighted from a distance sailing together), and Russian crews were under orders to remain on the spot for 24 hours should they witness the sinking of the German battlecruiser – in case she returned to the surface!

  At Christmas 1914 the two German ships with Turkish escorts were sailing along the north Anatolian coast on their way back to the Bosporus. Field Marshal Colmar Baron von der Goltz, one of the German commanders of the Ottoman armies, was a guest aboard the Yavuz when she struck a mine on her starboard side, causing her to list alarmingly. The list was soon corrected – by another mine under her port side, as another 600 tonnes of water poured in. The Russians had tethered the mines in a record 600 feet of water off the mouth of the Bosporus. The field marshal’s tunic was scorched by escaping steam. The flagship limped home under her own power. As Constantinople had no dock capable of handling such a large vessel, Souchon ordered temporary repairs with wooden beams and sent for materials and equipment for coffer dams to be built round the two holes, each of which was about as large as a double-decker bus. The whole affair was almost a disaster: the battlecruiser was not repaired until late March and was unable to intervene in the Allied bombardments of the Dardanelles, although she raised steam during the final naval attack in case her 28-centimetre guns were required for a last-ditch stand. All she could do meanwhile was to unship some of her 11 remaining 15-centimetre guns and lesser cannon for coastal defence and send her machine-gun teams to contest hostile landings.

  On other seas, all five available German battlecruisers under Rear-Admiral Franz von Hipper shelled Whitby in North Yorkshire and Hartlepool, Co. Durham, on 16 December 1914 for half an hour, causing more than 700 casualties. Although Room 40 had been able to give advance warning of the sortie, a counter-move by Beatty’s battlecruisers was foiled by the usual poor signalling as well as bad visibility. This failure was on balance a good thing, because Hipper was trailing his coat, trying to lure Beatty on to the bulk of Admiral Ingenohl’s High Seas Fleet, which had come out in the hope of picking off a vital part of the Grand Fleet, just as Tirpitz had envisaged.

  A foretaste of the future in maritime warfare was provided by three British seaplane-carriers on Christmas Day, when they launched aircraft to bomb the Zeppelin sheds near Cuxhaven on the German North Sea coast. No damage was done to them; some bombs were ineffectually dropped near by. The one casualty on the German side was a battlecruiser, which ran aground and was badly damaged when she over-hastily removed herself from the scene. In a counter-attack, two Zeppelins and German seaplanes tried but failed to hit the raiding force in the first air attack ever made on warships at sea. A British destroyer hit one Zeppelin with no noticeable effect: it drifted away safely.

  The menacing potential of submarines was demonstrated once again in the Adriatic on 21 December, when the Austrian U12 scored a hit on the new French fleet flagship, the dreadnought Jean Bart: damage was not serious but the crew were upset by the fact that the torpedo had destroyed the on-board wine store. The ship proceeded under her own power to Malta for repairs. On New Year’s Day 1915, the 1898 battleship HMS Formidable was sunk by the German U24 in rough weather in the western Channel, a stark reminder of the threat from enemy boats newly based at Zeebrugge. Only some 200 men out of a crew of 780 were saved. The Germans were also busy assembling small, fast torpedo-boats to operate off the Flanders coast from Belgian ports.

  Before a reorganisation of the Grand Fleet was completed in February, the first action in history involving dreadnoughts on both sides took place in the North Sea, on 24 January. Room 40 had discovered a few days earlier that two German battlecruisers were already at sea and other preparations for a sortie appeared to be taking place on the German North Sea coast. The Harwich Force, supported by Beatty, made sweeps but found nothing. On the night of 19–20 January two Zeppelins dropped bombs on King’s Lynn, Yarmouth and Sheringham in Norfolk, killing 4 civilians and injuring 17 in the first ever aerial bombardment of non-military targets on land. On the 23rd German fast vessels consisting of a destroyer flotilla and four light cruisers, supported by Hipper’s battlecruiser force, gathered for a sweep of their own in the direction of the Dogger Bank. Forewarned by Room 40, Beatty’s five battlecruisers on hand and escorting light cruisers, as well as Commodore Tyrwhitt’s destroyers from Harwich, set out for the Dogger Bank while Jellicoe’s battleships came out from Scapa Flow in distant support 150 miles to the north. All this was according to a new plan to trap major units of the High Seas Fleet when they next came out to bombard the English coast, a mirror image of German tactics.

  Just after dawn on the 24th, a British and a German light cruiser sighted each other and opened fire. The German force turned for home with Beatty in pursuit of Hipper’s three battlecruisers and the slower hybrid, not-quitedreadnought SMS Blücher. Beatty’s flagship HMS Lion opened fire at about 22,000 yards. A confused action followed, in which once again poor signalling led to individual British battlecruisers concentrating on the wrong targets so that the unfortunate Blücher was unnecessarily pulverised while Hipper’s three other ships managed to escape. But there was very substantial damage to his flagship, the Seydlitz, whose stern was almost blown off by internal explosions. On the British side, Beatty’s flagship was severely damaged by 17 hits and reduced to 12, later 8, knots, falling out of the line. The Blücher was a burning wreck by the time she struck her colours. British ships were moving in to rescue her crew when she suddenly turned over and sank; 250 German sailors were saved, but nearly 1,000 were lost in the battle. The Lion was taken in tow by the Indomitable and the other British ships present formed a screen round the two battlecruisers against submarine attac
k as the pair crept into the safety of the Firth of Forth. It was later established that the British had scored 73 hits with 958 shells (all but 3 on the Blücher) while the Germans scored 25 (17 on the Lion) from 1,276 fired in what became known as the Battle of the Dogger Bank, a missed opportunity for the British.

  It was however a useful victory for the Royal Navy, if not much of one given that five battlecruisers with the advantage in guns and speed had been in play against three and a half. But Hipper’s squadron had lost a ship, suffered considerable damage to all three others and had fled the scene, lucky to escape: for the time being, pending extensive repairs, the Germans had no battlecruiser ready for sea (they only ever built seven, including the Goeben).

  On 30 January U20 sank two British ships off Le Havre by torpedoes fired from underwater without warning – the first time such a tactic had been used against merchantmen. Within a week Germany declared the waters round Britain to be a war zone in which any vessel, including neutrals, could be sunk without notice. This fateful step was, according to an official announcement, to take effect on 18 February but was postponed to the 22nd.

  The naval battle for the Dardanelles opened at last on 19 February 1915. The seaplane-carrier Ark Royal had arrived two days before, her aircraft earmarked for reconnaissance and observation. Only one of the first four attempts to reconnoitre the entrance forts succeeded in adverse winds. Admiral Carden returned from Malta on the 18th to take command in the battlecruiser Inflexible (flag), still bearing the scorch-marks of her broadsides against Graf Spee’s squadron at the Falklands. At his disposal were 12 heavy ships, which he organised into three divisions: the first included his strongest ships – the flagship as well as the Agamemnon, a recent pre-dreadnought, and the super-dreadnought Queen Elizabeth, ready for action after repairs to her turbines. All three had arrived on the eve of the attack. The Second Division consisted of five older British battleships, commanded by Admiral de Robeck in HMS Vengeance; and the Third, of four French pre-dreadnoughts led by Admiral Guépratte on the Suffren (flag). Carden also had 4 light cruisers, 16 destroyers, 5 submarines and 21 minesweeping trawlers, all British; the French provided, or were about to provide, 14 minesweepers, 6 destroyers, 2 submarines and a seaplane-carrier.

  Carden’s plan was straightforward and deliberate, in seven phases, starting with the reduction of the entrance forts on either side of the strait. Then the minesweepers with escort were to sweep up to the Narrows, where more forts would come under heavy bombardment in their turn. Next the main minefields at the Narrows would be cleared, enabling the battleships to move on and bombard the inner forts immediately beyond. The bulk of the fleet would enter the Sea of Marmara, where the final phase, including general clearing operations against the Turkish fleet, would be carried out.

  The first-phase attack on the outermost forts would be in three stages: bombardment at long range (including indirect fire across the Gallipoli peninsula) by the heaviest guns, then at medium range with secondary armament, and finally at 4,000 yards or less with all guns that could be brought to bear. A battleship from the Second Division, Albion, with a light cruiser and seven minesweepers, was briefly detached and sent up the Aegean coast of the peninsula to clear an area off Gaba Tepe so that the Queen Elizabeth could bombard the Narrows forts ‘over the top’ from there in phase three. Other ships were assigned various forts as targets in phase one: Inflexible for example took on the main fort at Sedd el Bahr on the European side while the Suffren attacked its opposite number on the Asian side, Kum Kale. From their various positions individual ships were expected to observe each other’s fall of shot.

  At 9.51 on the morning of 19 February HMS Cornwallis of the Second Division, a 1901 battleship with a main armament of four 12-inch guns, fired the first shot, at Orkanie, a secondary fort on the Asian shore, from a position where she could not be hit by the Kum Kale guns. The French flagship started shooting at Kum Kale itself at 10.32. It was a curiously desultory, not to say hesitant, bombardment. Carden, apparently inhibited by a shortage of ammunition (as also experienced at this time by the British Army on the Western Front), ordered all bombarding ships to drop anchor so as to maximise the precision of their shooting. Cornwallis had a broken capstan and could not comply, so was replaced for a while by the Vengeance. The flagship Inflexible initially opened fire on the fort at Cape Helles, adjacent to Sedd el Bahr, at 11.50 a.m. – just two rounds at 15,000 yards, which fell short. She moved 2,000 yards closer and started again at 12.20. The battleship Triumph of the Second Division fired 14 shells from her ten-inch guns at the same target between ten and 12.15, or one about every ten minutes. Each one missed. At one p.m. the Inflexible switched targets from Cape Helles to Sedd el Bahr. A seaplane went up that afternoon and reported that all the guns at Sedd el Bahr, Kum Kale and Orkanie were intact.

  Even so, Carden was sufficiently satisfied with the apparent accuracy of the first-stage shooting to order stage two to begin at two p.m. – bombardment of the entrance forts at closer range, the ships to keep on the move this time in case they were fired upon by the defence. The forts however remained silent. Kum Kale appeared to be in ruins, especially after the French flagship stepped up her rate of fire at 4.10 p.m. Half an hour later Carden ordered de Robeck to sail in the Vengeance to examine the condition of the forts. The old battleship made for the entrance at her best speed – and was taken aback when the subsidiary forts at Orkanie and Helles, which had been silent all day, suddenly emitted a hail of shot. De Robeck did not turn tail but headed towards Helles, firing salvoes from his forward-facing armament, to the admiration of the French, whose ships came up in support; they even fired shots over the top of Vengeance at the forts on the European side while maintaining their bombardment of Orkanie, which stoutly kept up its lively barrage. Agamemnon and Inflexible, the fleet flagship, also came up in support. At the end of a slow day the expenditure of ammunition by both sides reached a crescendo in the last half-hour, before Carden issued the general recall in the fading light at 5.20 p.m. De Robeck appealed for permission to initiate stage three, especially as no ship had been hit, but Carden refused, not wishing to sustain casualties at the end of the first day, when the ships at sea made much clearer targets than the defences; he was now also more concerned about his ammunition supply. ‘Cease firing’ was signalled at 5.30. Only Orkanie was still shooting back as the fleet retired unscathed.

  There was much food for thought on Carden’s part: he was beginning to realise that even heavy naval guns could not make much of an impression on static defences such as earthworks, and also that direct hits were too rare, yet essential if the guns of the defence were to be knocked out. Indirect ‘over-the-top’ fire was ineffective without close spotting, which was not available. The best shooting came from anchored ships, but this was clearly risky at anything but long range. Both Carden and the Admiralty were however cautiously optimistic on reviewing the course of the first day of bombardment, their only reservation being the conclusion that battering down the defences was going to take even longer than the cautious admiral had predicted. He believed however that another hour of full daylight would have seen the complete destruction of the entrance forts.

  In London, meanwhile, consideration was being given to sending more troops to support the navy at the Dardanelles (as distinct from mounting a combined operation). Two more battalions of Royal Marines were ordered to Lemnos to reinforce the two already there. Churchill, changing his mind, decided to send the only other troops at his disposal, the convalescent and still not fully trained RN Division of ten battalions, as well, on 27 February; his aim now was to have 50,000 troops available within striking distance of the Dardanelles, to be ready to exploit and consolidate a breakthrough by the navy. The First Lord openly acknowledged that if the fleet broke in, only armoured ships could go up the straits. If thin-skinned supply ships were to follow, troops would have to be landed to eliminate shore-based enemy artillery and snipers. At the War Council meeting of 16 February it was provisionally d
ecided to send the 29th Division of experienced British troops to the Aegean rather than France: but only in case of emergency, and not yet. Kitchener still had reservations and would not commit himself because the Russians were once again in difficulties, especially facing the Germans, which meant the latter might soon be free to switch many divisions from east to west. The first of Kitchener’s ‘new armies’ would not be ready for France until April.

  With the threat of a Turkish invasion of Egypt removed, however, the 39,000 men of ANZAC were also available; without them there would still be more than 40,000 men left to garrison Egypt, largely from the Indian Army. The Admiralty was instructed to speed up the assembly of transports and lighters to carry and land 50,000 troops. This could not be done in less than three weeks. ANZAC plus RND plus RM made about 50,000; but there were no seasoned troops among this number. Yet the French seemed prepared to send a division of 15,000 men; with the 29th and possibly 10,000 or more from Russia, perhaps even a corps, around 100,000 troops would be available.

  The ill-defined Dardanelles plan was now in danger of falling between two stools. The original concept was a purely naval diversion at the straits to distract the Turks as a means of relieving some of the pressure on the Russians in the Caucasus – a purely tactical ‘demonstration’. As time went by and Souchon made the most of his arrival in the Sea of Marmara, the stalemate on the Allied fronts west of Russia prompted Churchill and others to regard a serious attack on the Central Powers at their weakest point – Turkey – as a highly attractive, indeed the only, possibility of outflanking the enemy, a strategic shift in the conduct of the war, exploiting Britain’s overwhelming but underemployed naval strength to force the straits and threaten Constantinople.