The Dandarnelles Disaster (14 page)

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 lucky 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.

The wrong lesson was learned from both exemplars: the sieges in Flanders were won by howitzers that lobbed their shells into the air in a high, curving trajectory, which meant they struck home like aerial bombs, from a great height. The trajectory of the big naval guns of the day was as near flat as possible except at extreme range: the armour-piercing shells had
surprisingly little effect unless they scored a very rare direct hit, and were quite capable of burying themselves deep in the earth without exploding. The latest guns' long range, ten miles or more, meant that capital ships could open fire with impunity, beyond the reach of the artillery in the entrance forts, but also implied that if shelling was to be effective, pinpoint accuracy was needed, which meant that the fall of shot had to be closely observed, something that local conditions seldom allowed, as we shall see. Even 30 years later, shattering naval bombardments by Allied navies in the Pacific and off Normandy had remarkably little effect on coastal defences except when rare direct hits were scored.

The Turks admittedly were prompted by this first bombardment to speed up the programme, already begun, to strengthen the defences: the fixed gun-batteries were linked by field telephones, extra searchlights were set up, German rangefinders, the world's best, were introduced and buoys placed out to sea to assist the gun crews in ranging their fire. Most important of all, more mobile batteries of field guns, light and medium howitzers were deployed, not only to support the cannon emplaced in the forts but also to protect the all-important lines of mines, whose number in the Narrows area was gradually increased after November from five to ten. No new large-calibre artillery could be obtained for the forts, but some of the
Goeben
's secondary 15-centimetre guns were unshipped and set up on land and new artillery pieces were shipped down the Danube and the western Black Sea coast to the Bosporus from Czech factories, then within the Austrian Empire. In the end, however, the defenders had all the time in the world to prepare for the next attack and did not exert themselves unduly: it was to be more than three months before the Anglo-French fleet tried again.

Towards the end of November 1914 the Admiralty was considering handing over the blockade of the Dardanelles to the French Navy, which by pre-war agreement was responsible for the Mediterranean naval theatre overall. The French fleet was using British Malta as its base for operations in the eastern basin, where its main task was to guard the mouth of the Adriatic against the Austrian fleet. As in the North Sea, the blockade was a distant one, a precaution against submarine attack. The British naval presence off the Dardanelles had for the time being been reduced to a force just sufficient to deal unaided with the unlikely event of a breakout by the German ships: one battlecruiser (
Indefatigable
), one light cruiser (
Dublin
), six destroyers and three submarines. But also recently arrived to join

Carden's flag was a French heavy squadron commanded by Rear-Admiral Émile Guépratte, consisting of the
Gaulois
(flag) and three other pre-dreadnoughts, plus six destroyers and three submarines. Rear-Admiral John de Robeck was Carden's deputy, and Commodore Roger Keyes (previously based at Harwich in command of submarine forces) was chief of staff; both were competent officers.

The destruction of Graf Spee's squadron on 8 December brought not only a boost to naval and national morale but also a useful strategic dividend. Only very few, isolated German light cruisers and auxiliary cruisers were left at large (but not for long), which meant there was no longer any need to keep groups of heavy ships scattered across the broad oceans to protect merchant shipping against an attack by an enemy squadron. No such formation now existed outside German home waters. The Germans would run a dangerous handful of disguised merchant cruisers, much better armed and more dangerous than mere auxiliary cruisers, with some success for most of the rest of the war, but each one operated alone, with effects that were hardly noticeable once the U-boat campaign got into its stride. Meanwhile dozens of Allied cruisers and other vessels could be redeployed to such areas as the Mediterranean. Vice-Admiral R. H. Peirse, for example, left his Bombay base and the East Indies station and moved his flag to Suez, to reinforce the naval protection of Egypt with patrols off the Syrian coast. The Russian light cruiser
Askold,
temporarily attached to his flag, explored as far north as Alexandretta (Iskanderun) and was followed by the British light cruiser, the misleadingly gentle-sounding HMS
Doris
.

The latter's commander, Captain F. Larken, RN, appears to have come from the same mould as the brothers Kelly, his light-cruiser colleagues. As the official naval historian, Sir Julian Corbett, noted, ‘Captain Larken at once went north and proceeded to interpret the Admiralty instructions in a liberal manner.' He conducted a series of pinprick raids along the coast, bombarding coastal defences, cutting telegraph wires and blowing up railway tracks and equipment, particularly at Alexandretta, where many Turkish troops were based. Information from
Doris
prompted the thought at the Admiralty of making Alexandretta, at the northern end of the Syrian coast, a target for a substantial military and naval intervention against the Turks. It was an easier target than the Dardanelles and would involve not only less risk but also fewer resources. A landing there could inflict permanent damage to the strategic Baghdad and Hejaz railways and bolster Britain's positions in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and Egypt. It could be
attacked instead of the Dardanelles, or if an assault on the straits were frustrated.

Another example of the contrast between the mostly uninspired admirals and the gumption of individual British commanders was provided by Lieutenant Norman Holbrook in the primitive submarine
B11
on 13 December 1914. Carden's Captain (D), C. P. R. Coode, RN, commanding the six destroyers and also the three submarines with the squadron (
B9, B10
and
B11
), chose Holbrook for a mission he had had in mind for some time. Holbrook's boat was built in 1905 (ancient in submarine terms), was 135 feet long, displaced just 280 tonnes (315 submerged) and was armed with only two torpedo tubes. Her maximum underwater speed was eight knots and she had a crew of 16. Holbrook was ordered to enter the Dardanelles to look for a target to sink. The boat was specially fitted with mine ‘bumpers' – metal fenders at the bow which were intended to push aside the anchoring cables of mines like curtains, without setting off the explosive charges. As yet there were still only five completed lines of mines across the strait and Holbrook passed under them unscathed, making slow headway against the eternal current.

Just short of Chanak at the Narrows he sighted an old 10,000-tonne battleship, which he proceeded to hit fair and square with a single torpedo fired from 800 yards. A large explosion ensued and the unfortunate ship, the
Messudieh,
turned over and sank in ten minutes. She had been commissioned in 1874, though rebuilt in 1902, and had a main armament of two 9.2-inch guns. She had been moved to her exposed position by the Germans, against Turkish protests, as a floating battery to defend the Narrows. Only 10 officers and 27 men were killed; a dramatic rescue operation involving the cutting of holes in the upended hull rescued more than 600 of her crew.