The Dandarnelles Disaster (18 page)

The First Lord's stated aim now was to have 50,000 troops within
striking distance of Gallipoli – but as a follow-up to the planned naval attack, not in combination with it. Churchill admitted that the fleet could guarantee the passage only of armoured ships up the straits, once they had broken through. If merchant ships were to follow, troops would have to go ashore to clear the peninsula. In a memorandum on 15 February, Admiral Jackson wrote: ‘The naval bombardment is not recommended as a sound operation unless a strong military force is ready to assist it, or at least to follow it up immediately the forts are silenced.' Kitchener however was beginning to waver about the 29th Division in view of recent Russian setbacks. No final decision was therefore taken on its deployment. Meanwhile Carden had received his orders on the 13th to go ahead with the purely naval assault.

The bombardment of the Dardanelles forts was postponed from 15 February to the 19th because of bad weather.

CHAPTER 6

The Battle of the Dardanelles

For those who believed in portents, 19 February 1915, the day finally chosen for opening the assault on the Dardanelles, was the 108th anniversary of Admiral Duckworth's advance (unopposed) into the strait. One week earlier Admiral Carden had received the news that the new super-dreadnought HMS
Queen Elizabeth
had stripped the blades of one of her turbines while trying out her guns off Gibraltar, and lost half her maximum speed of 25 knots. She would need a week to get to the Dardanelles.

Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, commander-in-chief of the Ottoman fleet, had been forced by political considerations to stay in the Sea of Marmara for ten weeks before he took the law into his own hands, burst into the Black Sea and provoked Russia into declaring war on Turkey by shelling her ports under the Turkish ensign. After that he was anything but idle. The Grand Vizier, Prince Said Halim, who had not been told in advance, tried to disown the raid of 29 October 1914 and suggested apologising to the Russians with an offer of compensation. He ordered Enver to recall the fleet, which he did. His message was immediately followed by another from Commander Humann of the German naval bureau in Constantinople, saying that Enver had told him to tell Souchon to ignore the recall. The admiral allowed the handful of Russian merchant ships still stuck in the straits to go home and ordered the lighthouses on Turkey's Black Sea coast to be extinguished before he returned to Constantinople on 31 October, his main task achieved.

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 attack 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.