To these natural hazards were added the skilfully laid Turkish defences. Anti-submarine nets were laid across the Narrows, there were numerous minefields, the finger beams of searchlights played over the waters all night, and there were ever-alert gunners ashore and on gunboats and other men o’war.
The first attempt to penetrate the straits predated the naval bombardment by many weeks. It was made by Lieutenant Holbrook on 13 December 1914 in the small, old, and relatively primitive B11. Holbrook entered the straits between Cape Helles and Kum Kale, worked his way up on the surface unobserved by the batteries, and submerged to attempt to navigate under the five known minefields before Chanak. His B-class submarine had a very short submerged endurance and a speed little more than that of the contrary current. It took him four hours of bumping and scraping to reach the relatively open water beyond. Holbrook brought his boat up to periscope depth and was rewarded with the sight of the 10,000-ton Turkish battleship Messudieh at a range of no more than 800 yards. He fired a single torpedo, lost trim in doing so, submerged and felt the concussion of a mighty explosion. When he next rose to the surface, the Messudieh was sinking. But her gunners opened fire as she went down, and the shore batteries joined in. B-11 crash-dived, and now lost the use of her compass.
The passage home was a nightmare’ of blind groping, humping and boring, flooding tanks, and near asphixiation for the crew. At one moment the submarine was stranded on a shoal, the target for every Turkish gun within range. Holbrook never understood why they were not blown to pieces there and then. But he managed to get her off: and he blindly continued his passage through and under the five minefields.
‘B11 arrived at the entrance to the Dardanelles at 2.10 p.m., [runs one account] and here she came to the surface. She had been diving for just over nine hours – nine of the most crowded hours which have ever fallen to the lot of man. So foul was the air in the tiny submarine that a match would not burn in her. Even the engine refused to start until the boat had been ventilated.”(17)
The Navy loved this unprecedented feat, which did much to balance the damaging effects on the service caused by the Scarborough raid, Holbrook was given the immediate award of a VC, his second in command received a DSO and the rest of the crew received a DSC or DSM according to rank.
Later, with the failure of naval bombardments, thoughts turned again to more ambitious raids up the straits, even as far as the Sea of Marmora, with the more modern E-class submarines which had now arrived from Britain. The first attempt ended in tragedy. E15, Lieutenant-Commander Theodore Brodie, used a novel and enterprising approach, penetrating on the surface, keeping the centre of the channel, and relying on a succession of seaplanes armed with small bombs to scout ahead and divert the attention of the gunners with sporadic attacks. But the current beat the E15, and she was thrown onto a shoal where Brodie and a number of his men were killed and the boat destroyed.
The Australian submarine AE2 was the next to try. With Lieutenant-Commander Henry Stoker in command, she succeeded in getting under all the minefields while the first landings were in progress, and to his own astonishment made it all the way to the Sea of Marmora, where he transmitted news of his success. After sinking a Turkish gunboat, his submarine developed a fault which forced him to remain on the surface. You could not expect to survive long in those waters deprived of the advantage of concealment, and a torpedo boat soon despatched her with gunfire.
Lieutenant-Commander Edward Boyle was the next volunteer to run the gauntlet of minefields and gunfire. According to an officer who served under him, ‘Boyle was tall and dark, with slightly greying hair, very reserved and immensely self-contained. Off duty, you would find him immersed in some technical book… He had a sense of humour, but it never ran away with him.’(18) In short, a typical submariner, with none of the flamboyance and all the sublime courage of a Francis Drake. Boyle took E14 past Cape Helles as soon as it was dark on the evening of 26 April 1916, remaining on the surface until gunfire and searchlights forced him to dive. It took E14 six hours before she was past Chanak and at last emerged into the comparatively open sea beyond. On the way she had come up once, observed a large Turkish gunboat and torpedoed her. ‘I just had time to sec a great column of water shoot as high as the gunboat’s mast,’ Boyle wrote in his report, ‘when I had to dive again as some men in a small steamboat were leaning over the side trying to catch hold of my periscope. We dived,’ he concluded formally this part of his account, ‘and proceeded as requisite.’
For three weeks, Boyle led a charmed life in the Sea of Marmora, chased and harried night and day and himself creating disorder and dismay. After he sent the Turkish transport Gul Djemal to the bottom, with 2,000 troops and a battery of artillery destined for the front line on board, all further Turkish sailings ceased. When the submarine’s torpedoes were exhausted. she held up small boats with the only armament left to her, .303 rifles.
Boyle was recalled on 17 May. The return passage was as incident-filled as the rest of the voyage. ‘Diving under the first barrier near Nagara,’ wrote the same fellow officer, ‘she rose to periscope depth again off Chanak, followed the wake of any enemy patrol through the minefields, passed a yacht, a battleship, and a number of tramps, ran through the Narrows under the fire of the Chanak forts, dived under the Kephez minefields as before, and came to the surface near a French battleship.’(19) Asked to identify himself Boyle gave his name, and received a huge accolade. He also received a VC. ‘It really is a great feat of persistent gallantry’,(20) Keyes wrote home proudly to his wife.
Martin Nasmith now proceeded to carry out two of the most successful and daring of all the Gallipoli operations in the same boat, E11. Nasmith was less reserved than his fellow submariner, Boyle, who possessed ‘a delicate sense of the incongruous and an almost ferocious insistence on efficiency’. These two characteristics were exhibited at one stage in his astonishing three-month-long stay in the Sea of Marmora when supplies of torpedoes ran low and he set them to float at the end of their run if they should fail to hit their target. Then, like a wasp replacing its sting, he swam out recovered it, unscrewed the firing pistol (an operation as delicate as defusing a bomb), and with the aid of a working party of swimmers, reloaded it into the tube and reprimed it.
Another ruse omitted from the book of instructions was the capture of a sailing dhow and its use as a camouflage for E11’s conning tower to which it was securely lashed. Nasmith captured at rifle point a store ship with great quantities of ammunition on board and sent her to the bottom with a demolition charge. He even went through the straits into the Golden Horn, the first enemy ship to do so for five hundred years, firing two torpedoes at Constantinople harbour (one circled madly, adding to the panic) and calmly taking a snapshot through the periscope of a munition ship blowing up.
Not satisfied with the paralysis of shipping he had created, Nasmith set about halting the railways. On this second operation he had the advantage of a 12-pounder gun, and a fresh supply of ammunition brought up by another submarine. He bombarded a railway viaduct in the Gulf of Ismid, and later put his second in command ashore on a one-man demolition enterprise. Lieutenant Guy D’Oyly-Hughes had already learned the art of defusing spent torpedoes in the water from his captain, and now, armed with a bayonet and pistol, pushed ashore a raft heavy with explosive. The night’s work included cliff-climbing, pursuit by armed guards and the final successful explosion of his charge under the railway line. By the end of this second voyage, Nasmith had added a battleship to his list of ships sunk, making up a total achievement worthy of being described as ‘a modern talc of the Arabian Nights’.
Boyle and Nasmith are the most memorable names in the roll of Dardanelles submariner heroes, but there were others whose score and record of courage were almost as great. With the benefit of experience, the E-boats were able to make the passage up the straits with relative safety and regularity. By the time the last was recalled on 2 January 1916 the seven boats participating in the operations had run up a sco
re of two battleships, a destroyer, five gunboats, seven ammunition ships, nine transports, and more than 200 steamers and sailing ships; all at a cost of three submarines.
If the skill, efficiency, and devotion to duty of these few submariners had been matched in the land operations and Admiral Carden’s early bombardments, the toll of lives of the Gallipoli fiasco need never have occurred.
The presence of one or two submarines halted all sea traffic in the Sea of Marmora, even more effectively than Max Horton and his fellow commanders dislocated communications in the Baltic. The first months of the war confirmed the most extravagant claims of the submarine proponents. But a second and even newer sea weapon was also gaining its wings. The Gallipoli campaign provided a marvellous opportunity for enterprise, novelty, and experiment because of the unusual problems facing the attackers and the relatively small geographical dimensions to which the fighting was restricted.
When the decision was made to send out, first a submarine force from Britain, and then a seaplane-carrier, with all their youthful and zestful crews, it became certain that their presence would lead to adventurous and pioneering events. Flight Commander Williamson and Lieutenant-Commander Boyle were only two of the bright and fearless figures who brought fame and distinction to their relatively new branches of the Royal Navy.
No Ark Royals had served in the Fleet since the Armada ship of that name of 1588. It scarcely seemed appropriate that such an honoured and historical name should be perpetuated by a half completed tramp steamer late in 1913. Nor was she to carry the distinction of being the Royal Navy’s first seaplane-carrier. She was, however, the first vessel to be commissioned in any navy that could be called an aircraft carrier because she was equipped with a flight deck from which machines could take off, although the deck was not large enough for them to land on again. They were expected to fly to an aerodrome and only land in the sea alongside in extremis.
When the Ark Royal was ordered out to the eastern Mediterranean within a few weeks of commissioning, she carried six seaplanes and four land-planes in her hangar, the former with wings folded. The process of launching was elaborate and not very quick. A crane hoisted up a seaplane, swung it round and placed it on the ship’s forecastle. Here its wings would be spread, its engine started and warmed up. Then, with engine switched off, the machine swung out and lowered into the water, where the pilot took over.
The 7,500-ton Ark Royal arrived off the Dardanelles two days before the first bombardment. The ship had behaved impeccably on the voyage out from Harwich, but, to say the least, her ship’s crew and flight crews were raw and quite untrained for the operations assigned to them. They were further handicapped by their aircraft which, with the exception of the single two-seater Short seaplane flown by Williamson, were quite inadequate. The other seaplanes could not cope with the prevailing choppy seas, and when the wind from time to time died, they could not get enough lift to become airborne. However, in the words of the official historian, ‘In view of the disadvantages under which the carrier worked, her achievement was a remarkable one.’(21)
During March further aircraft of a more suitable kind were shipped out, and No.3 Naval Squadron established an airfield on the island of Tenedos. Besides spotting for the guns and reconnaissance work, the Ark Royal’s seaplanes and the land-based squadron, reinforced by a French squadron, carried out much useful and effective bombing work, spotted minefields and guided submarines. A German airfield at Chanak was bombed and knocked out on 18 April, and for several months the Allies had complete control of the air. A second and faster carrier, the Ben-My-Chree, arrived on 12 June, and the air contribution to the operations became substantial. Names like Squadron Commander Richard Bell Davies, Flight Commanders C. R. Samson and Hugh Williamson became as closely associated with daring achievement in the air during those early days of hope and enterprise in the Dardanelles operations as Noel Laurence and Edward Boyle under the waters of the straits and Sea of Marmora.
The primitiveness of the equipment with which these early Naval Air Service pilots flew can be judged by some of the instructions Samson, now a wing commander, issued to No. 3 Squadron: ‘Pilots always to be armed with a revolver or pistol; to carry binoculars; some safety device, either waistcoat, patent life-belt or petrol can. Observers always to carry rifle; proper charts for journey; binoculars; life-saving device or petrol can; watch if not fitted to the aeroplane. At all times the pilot should carry out independent observations and note down what he sees (noting the time). Nail a pad of paper on the instrument board for this purpose.’
On several occasions the role of the aircraft in the Dardanelles operations closely resembled that of the submarines, and co-operation between the two branches was close. At one time, learning of a submarine’s need for a spare periscope, arrangements were made for a seaplane to fly one in to the Sea of Marmora. Unfortunately, at the last minute it was discovered there were no spares. Adaptation combined with initiative led to more fruitful and long-lasting result early in August. Several ingenious members of the Ben-My-Chree’s crew, notably a warrant officer (Carpenter) and a senior torpedo rating working under Lieutenant-Commander Barber, a navigator, rigged up a device for carrying a 14-inch torpedo under the belly of a Short seaplane. On 14 August 1915 Flight Commander C. H. K. Edmonds succeeded in taking off with his ‘tin fish’.
I climbed to 1500 feet [ran Edmonds’s report] and crossing the Isthmus of Bulair over the low land one mile to the East of Bulair, arrived over the Sea of Marmora and shaped course along the coast towards the North East…
Approaching Injeh Burnu, I glided down and fired my torpedo from a height of about 14 feet and range of some 300 yards, with the sun astern of me. I noticed some flashes from a tug so presumed she was firing at me and therefore kept on a westerly course, climbing rapidly. Looking back, I observed the track of the torpedo, which struck the ship abreast the mainmast, the starboard side. The explosion sent a column of water and large fragments of the ship almost as high as her masthead.’
Edmonds repeated this feat three days later, while a fellow pilot, adapting further this exercise, actually torpedoed a ship successfully while taxying on the water after his engine had lost power. Pursued by defensive fire, Flight Lieutenant G. B. Dacre taxied out of range, when, relieved of his burden and discovering that his engine was running better, took off and flew close enough to the Ben-My-Chree to glide alongside when his engine finally packed up.
In his report on these first-ever torpedo-bomber sorties, Squadron Commander C. L’E. Malone, commanding the seaplane carrier Ben-My-Chree, wrote that ‘One cannot help looking on this operation as being the forerunner of a line of development which will tend to revolutionize warfare.’
These early torpedo attacks were only one contribution to the portentous operations of the Naval Air Service. Already, by the autumn of 1915, the bombing offensive was having a marked influence on the campaign. A more urgent and substantial effort by seaplanes and land-planes at the earliest stages could have swung the outcome of the whole campaign. Instead, as the official historian recorded, the RNAS carried out successfully the crucial task of covering the Army’s retreat and disembarkation. ‘There is, perhaps, something of pathos in the fact that the air service, as the year wore on, became so strong that it was able to deny to the enemy any sight of an intention to withdraw from the peninsula.’(22)
Considering the primitiveness of the aircraft employed, casualties were relatively light and mostly from accidents. Only in the very last days of the campaign were any aircraft shot down by enemy pilots, three being accounted for by a newly arrived flight of German Fokker monoplanes. The Ben-My-Chree was sunk by Turkish shellfire during the last days of the campaign, the Ark Royal survived into the Second World War as the Pegasus, her service spanning that epochal period of naval history when the aircraft-carrier displaced the battleship as the Fleet’s capital ship.
Considering the remarkable promise, and achievement, of air power at the Dardanelles it is a poor reflecti
on on Admiralty policy that the Royal Navy Air Service was not more urgently developed and exploited in 1916. It was almost as if the distance of the events and the fog of shame that developed about the whole Gallipoli operation obscured the vision of the Naval War Staff. The Air Department was reorganized in the spring of 1916, and divided into two, but the first preoccupations were administration and discipline. ‘From the very beginning,’ wrote the official historian, ‘the Naval Air Service had set their heart on the fitting out of big bombing raids against distant German centres.’(23)
In a secret joint War Air Committee paper on 3 March 1916, there was a clearly identifiable note of disdain in references to RNAS personnel who ‘will have a naval training and will be attached only to the Royal Navy Air Service for certain periods, returning to their sea duties at intervals. Thus close touch will be kept with naval customs and methods and the latest developments in naval warfare.’ The list of duties laid clown for the RNAS was drawn up as if no one had informed the committee that bombs as heavy as 500 pounds had been successfully used against Turkish ships, that ships had been sunk by airborne torpedoes.
1. To attack the enemy’s fleets, dockyards, arsenals, factories, air sheds, &c., from the coasts, whether the coasts be the enemy’s or our own (i.e. long-distance bombing).
2. To patrol our own coasts to look out for enemy’s ships and submarines, and to meet and repel enemy’s aircraft. Possibly also to discover minefields.
3. Observation of fire during ship’s bombardments of enemy’s coasts. Destruction of enemy’s coast batteries, means of communication thereto, and material in connection therewith.
The Great War at Sea: 1914-1918 Page 25