The Dandarnelles Disaster

by Dan Van der Vat

  At sea the gunnery directors and gunlayers found their view obscured by their own smoke, blown back upon them by the north-easterly breeze. But just after noon de Robeck called on the French squadron to pass through Line A as planned, to fire on the forts and batteries at closer range. By this time Agamemnon had taken a dozen hits from a six-inch howitzer battery of four guns firing accurately from the Asian shore behind her. The superstructure was badly damaged, causing the ship to turn full circle to throw off the Turks’ aim, but she did not withdraw. At the other end of Line A the Inflexible was also taking half a dozen hits from a battery of four six-inch cannon, losing her wireless and suffering fierce fires in her upperworks all the way up to the foretop. So as not to throw out the French Line B as it passed by, the battlecruiser remained in position and maintained fire. De Robeck then ordered her out of the line.

  Meanwhile the French Suffren and Bouvet moved up the Asian side, with Gaulois and Charlemagne advancing up the European, leaving the British in the middle of the strait, still firing at 14,000 yards. The French soon came under heavy fire in their turn as they advanced to 10,000 yards, then 9,000. By now the forts had joined in and were scoring hits on the French squadron: the Gaulois was badly damaged by an armour-piercing shell near her bow, causing Guépratte to ask a British light cruiser to stand by her. She slowed down, listed to starboard and started to go down by the bow but withdrew under her own power. The Bouvet had targeted the Namazieh fort opposite Chanak on the European side until the battered French flagship Suffren led her back out of the line at about 1.40 p.m.

  Five minutes later the Bouvet was rocked by a great explosion that threw up a column of ochre and black smoke. Moments later there was another explosion aboard, presumably from a magazine. Destroyers raced to the rescue but she listed heavily, then turned turtle and sank out of sight within two minutes. More than 600 men were lost; Agamemnon took two score survivors aboard. Both British and French assumed the ship had succumbed to a lucky shot from a heavy shell, or even a shore-based torpedo. The forts were clearly not disabled; from time to time they fired, then ceased fire, then fired again, as if taunting their attackers. Several mines were spotted in the waters, some swept by the trawlers, two probably released by the Bouvet explosions, others apparently free-floating. Like periscopes in faraway northern waters, they seemed to be everywhere. Still the trawlers could not press forward under the hail of mobile artillery fire.

  Meanwhile Hayes-Sadler in Ocean led the third subdivision of four battleships to relieve the withdrawing French. He took the right-hand station towards the Asian side, the Vengeance the left-hand, European side with Albion and Irresistible between them. Swiftsure and Majestic moved up on the flanks to relieve Prince George and Triumph. At about 3.15 p.m., however, an explosion was heard and seen alongside Irresistible, which began to list slowly. The third subdivision may have sailed too close to the Narrows and struck the last transverse line of mines, the tenth, or she may have been caught by the same, last-minute parallel line, the eleventh, laid by the Nusret, which accounted for the Bouvet. Hayes-Sadler pulled his line back; at just after four p.m. the Inflexible, still manoeuvring in her place at the right of Line A, struck another of Nusret’s mines in Erenkeui Bay with her starboard bow and began quite quickly to go down by the head. She made for Tenedos under her own power, the wounded taken off in a cutter. Ten minutes later the helplessly drifting Irresistible, dead in the water, hit a moored mine and began to list to starboard and go down by the stern. De Robeck ordered Ocean to stand by her as the bulk of the crew were rescued by a destroyer and a picket boat, Captain D. L. Dent, RN, having issued the order to abandon ship. Despite an unrelenting hail of fire, the destroyer Wear (Captain Christopher Metcalfe, RN) lifted 610 officers and men and delivered them to the flagship. Admiral de Robeck sent the Wear back with a message to Hayes-Sadler on the Ocean: he was to withdraw if he could not get a tow-line aboard the Irresistible. This failed, so the ship was left to drift in the hope she could be towed away after dark. De Robeck issued the general recall just after 5.30 p.m.

  Obeying under heavy fire from the Asian forts, HMS Ocean hit a Nusret mine when she was about one mile from the hulk of the Irresistible. Water poured in through the hole on the starboard side and her steering jammed. A shell from shore also struck the starboard side, compounding the damage. An attempt to return to an even keel by flooding compartments on the port side failed to forestall or correct a list of 15 degrees to starboard. Three destroyers closed in, ignoring the shelling from both shores, and rescued the crew. The Ocean too was now abandoned. After dark, Hayes-Sadler returned to his crippled ship to rescue four men still trapped aboard and left her to float in mid-channel. Later in the evening the destroyers and minesweepers went back to try to clear a path and take the two old battleships in tow. Keyes went with them. No trace of either was found.

  The tally for the day was 6 battleships knocked out of a fleet of 18 – a startling loss rate of 33 per cent, even higher if regarded as a part of the total of 16 battleships that had actually gone forward to bombard. The Bouvet, Irresistible and Ocean were sunk. The Gaulois was beached in a sinking condition. The Suffren, the gallant Guépratte’s flagship, was badly damaged by shellfire and definitely hors de combat for the foreseeable future; the French Charlemagne had also been damaged by gunfire but needed no immediate help. The Inflexible, patched up by her crew as best they could, made it to Tenedos thanks to the brilliant seamanship of Captain R. F. Phillimore, RN. She was pumped out and more temporary repairs were effected before she limped to a shipyard at Malta under escort for a complete overhaul. This was surely a remarkable harvest for a last-minute afterthought of a minefield laid ten days before the great naval attack. ‘It changed the course of history,’ said Keyes. The six trawlers sent forward to sweep towards the Kephez Point line under the guns all turned and fled; only two managed to get their sweep out. The Allies had no idea what had done the main damage. Nor did they realise until after the war how little significant damage they had done themselves: two 14-inch guns and perhaps three other large guns had been knocked out; not one howitzer or mobile field gun of the minefield defences was damaged.

  Such was the turning point of the struggle for the Dardanelles.

  CHAPTER 8

  Heads Roll

  The Turks and Germans assumed that the attack had merely been broken off for the night. Proud, dazed yet relieved that they had almost all survived, the defenders surveyed the spectacular but militarily mostly ineffectual damage – the craters, the mounds of earth, the battered ramparts, the smashed buildings – caused by the unprecedented bombardment and wondered what the next day would bring. They immediately started work on shoring up and repairing such defences as they could. Ammunition was short, but almost certainly not as deficient as British naval intelligence liked to think at the time. The armour-piercing shells most capable of doing damage to ships were more depleted than other categories. The various historical sources – British, German, Turkish – disagree on how much was left. The widely accepted ironic legend that, had the Allied ships renewed their bombardment within hours or days, the Turks and Germans would soon have been completely out of armour-piercing ammunition is clearly false. Many ashore however believed it was only a matter of time, perhaps days, before the fleet came back and broke through. They also believed that it was the batteries that had inflicted the brunt of the damage on the attackers (true for two of the three French casualties): hardly anyone knew of the Nusret’s decisive contribution.

  Major-General Jevad Pasha, Turkish commander of the straits forts, said shortly after the war:

  The morale of the troops was excellent after the bombardment of March 18. They were prepared for and expected another attack. If the fleet had got through, I do not consider they [sic] could have done any good. They could have got through to Constantinople but we had an army there and we could have closed the straits behind them.

  Just before the great bombardment, morale in Constantinople had been rather
lower. A British informant in the city reported early in March that the government was preparing to move to Konya, a town on the Baghdad

  Railway, some 250 miles (400 km) south-east of Constantinople in central southern Anatolia. Ministry archives had been transferred there. The Ottoman and German commercial banks evacuated their gold and cash reserves. Rich Turkish families had left the city or sought protection from German or Austrian friends. The Central Powers’ ambassadors sent the families of their staff home by rail. Special trains and boats were on standby to evacuate the Sultan, ministers and other key officials. Ambassador Wangenheim had a plan to withdraw to Berlin if the Dardanelles were forced. In the other direction new guns and ammunition were pouring into the city by train from Germany via neutral Romania and Bulgaria and the Danube from the Czech munitions factories. The German crews of Yavuz and Midilli were confined to their ships, which were on short notice to move against an intrusion into the Marmara, despite the mine damage to the former. Two torpedo-boats nervously patrolled the Bosporus and the waters round the city for submarines.

  Vice-Admiral de Robeck was understandably depressed on the evening of 18 March; he had lost three capital ships and another three had been incapacitated. He expected to be dismissed at once. After describing the day’s events in his first report to the Admiralty on 19 March he wrote:

  It therefore appears damage inflicted was due to drifting mines.

  With the exception of ships lost and damaged, squadron is ready for immediate action but the plan of attack must be reconsidered and means found to deal with floating mines …

  But: British casualties were fewer than 150 men (50 killed) out of some 15,000 engaged; two more old battleships, HMSs Queen and Implacable from the Channel Fleet, superior to the lost ships they would replace, were already on their way, approaching Malta; two more veterans, London and Prince of Wales, would follow; the French were sending the Henri IV, already at Suez, to replace the Bouvet. The Admiralty, Churchill to the fore, was still optimistic, even though (or perhaps even because) Fisher had once predicted the loss of a dozen battleships if the navy acted alone. Churchill sent the First Sea Lord a comforting message saying, ‘As long as the crews are saved, there is no cause for serious regret.’ Keyes still believed a breakthrough was possible. The ‘only’ obstacle was the minefield, which could surely be dealt with by a reorganisation of sweeping and more powerful and suitable sweepers – specifically adapted destroyers.

  But Generals Hamilton and Birdwood, both of whom had witnessed the naval assault, were less sanguine about the navy’s prospects. Hamilton telegraphed to Kitchener on the 19th:

  I am being most reluctantly driven to the conclusion that the straits are not likely to be forced by battleships as at one time seemed probable and that, if my troops are to take part, it will not take the subsidiary form anticipated. The Army’s part will be more than mere landings of parties to destroy forts, it must be a deliberate and progressive military operation carried out at full strength so as to open a passage for the Navy.

  Churchill reported on developments at the Dardanelles to the War Council on 19 March, on the basis of the first telegram from de Robeck. It was too soon for a final assessment, he said, but he was willing, if the Council agreed, to instruct the admiral ‘to use his discretion in continuing the operations’. He had been informed that the Turks were running out of ammunition and mines, he added. The 29th Division was due in Alexandria on 2 April.

  Kitchener summarised what he had been told by Hamilton. He agreed with his commander on the spot that Alexandria would have to be used as the British Army’s main base as it had all the facilities lacking at Mudros. The French division could use the facilities of Port Said on the Suez Canal before being shipped to Mudros. All this implied a wait of at least a month for the army to get ready. The meeting agreed that Churchill should inform de Robeck that he could continue the operations at the Dardanelles if he thought fit. The admiral’s subsequent telegrams on the 20th and as late as the afternoon of the 21st showed him willing, even eager, to renew the assault as soon as possible, weather permitting. The weather however was not in permissive mood as persistent north-easterly gales blew from the 19th every day to the 24th.

  On the morning of 22 March de Robeck and his staff invited Hamilton and his staff to a conference in his stateroom on the Queen Elizabeth. Hamilton recalled:

  The moment we sat down de Robeck told us he was now quite clear he could not get through without the help of all my troops … So there was no discussion. At once we turned our faces to the land scheme.

  As the army needed time to prepare and reorganise at Alexandria, and pending the arrival of the 29th Division at the beginning of the month, there could be no full-scale land operation before 14 April.

  Why had de Robeck changed his mind overnight? According to his evidence to the Dardanelles Commission, there were two factors behind his decision: the mines; and Hamilton’s uncompromising advice on 22 March that success would simply not be possible unless by means of a combined operation. It is fair to add that he was profoundly affected by the losses of ships under his flag. He reported his decision to the Admiralty on 23 March: ‘Having met General Hamilton … I consider a combined operation essential.’

  Predictably Keyes, who missed some of the meeting because he was visiting the minesweepers, was distraught. He implored his chief to renew the attack as soon as the minesweeping had been reorganised around eight ‘Beagle’-class coal-burning destroyers (which however would not be ready for their new role until 4 April). There were volunteers aplenty from the crews of the lost battleships. The trawlermen were being sent home. He thought the mines could be swept on or about 4 April, whereupon the Allied fleet could enter the Sea of Marmara, destroy the Turkish fleet, stop the seaborne supplies to the forts and artillery (there being no roads worthy of the name on the peninsula) … The fiery commodore did not indicate how the navy could dispose of the mobile batteries at the Narrows that had been covering the minefields so effectively. De Robeck had concluded that he could not safely land troops in enough strength inside the strait to tackle the peninsular artillery directly: this would have to be done from the southern and western coasts of the peninsula by an advance overland. But the admiral was generous enough to allow Keyes to return to London as late as October to plead for a renewed naval attack, even though the two men had disagreed fundamentally about the way forward after 18 March.

  Back in London in March, Churchill, still calling for a continuation of the navy-only assault, was all but isolated. The fact that the men on the spot – admiral and general – regarded a combined operation as the only way to proceed was decisive for everyone at the Admiralty except the First Lord (and his loyal Naval Secretary, Commodore Charles de Bartolomé). Fisher, the admirals in the War Group, the Sea Lords and the staff were now totally and outspokenly opposed to the continuation of the unsupported naval assault. Even Asquith, who knew nothing at all about strategy or naval warfare, and the other ministers were opposed. Kitchener of course now supported his man Hamilton and the latter’s plan for a combined operation with the army in the lead.

  Churchill tried to persuade de Robeck to press ahead without waiting for the army, but his notorious overbearing style did not work as well by wireless as it did in person. (Fisher, not a shy figure, complained that he would take a clear, well-buttressed opinion into a meeting with Churchill and emerge with his mind changed, a fact which he usually rued afterwards. In his Room 40 Patrick Beesly cites a revealing anecdote from Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, Director of Naval Intelligence in 1914–18, about Churchill’s power of persuasion, so extraordinary ‘that again and again tired Admiralty officials were hypnotised … into accepting opinions which differed vastly from those they normally held’. Hall dealt with this as follows: ‘I began to mutter to myself, “my name is Hall, my name is Hall …”’ Challenged by Churchill to explain, Hall replied: ‘I am saying to myself that my name is Hall because if I listen to you much longer, I shall be convinced
it’s Brown.’)

  Hall had taken a direct hand in the Dardanelles campaign by sending two agents to Bulgaria in January 1915 to try to bribe Talaat Bey, the CUP Minister of the Interior and close ally of Enver, through intermediaries to break the German connection and give the Royal Navy free passage through the Dardanelles. The agents were empowered to offer £3 million, with leeway to go up to £4 million (multiply by about 65 for today’s values). The Turks politely strung the agents along and made encouraging noises; but when Hall told Churchill and Fisher what he was doing, Fisher ordered him to desist. After the defeat of 18 March the Cabinet suggested Hall try again, but Albion, thief of dreadnoughts, was now classified as incurably perfidious by the Turks and it was too late.

  The First Lord wrote a lengthy memorandum to de Robeck which amounted to an order to continue, rather than an argument in favour, but given the general opinion of the War Council, the unanimous opposition of both commanders on the spot and all senior naval officers concerned (except Keyes), he did not send it. On 28 March Churchill (unintentionally prophetic) asked de Robeck what would happen if the army failed. The admiral had no answer beyond saying that the fleet would still be very much in being and could mount another attack: he could not however afford to let the strait be closed behind him by the Turks and therefore needed the army to keep it open by suppressing enemy artillery.