Gallipoli (30 page)

The submarines in the second world war did far more damage than in the first, but they never re-created quite the same sort of helplessness, the sense of unfair lurking doom.
In 1915 there were no depth charges and no asdic, and unless the submarine surfaced and exposed itself to ramming or to gunfire there was no sure means of detecting or destroying it. The unwieldy
nets that were hung around the battleships were only a gesture of defence, and after the sinking of the
Lusitania
no merchantman ever felt safe, even in convoy, even at night.

Yet in 1915 the submarine service had still to prove itself. Everything about it was experimental, the size and armament of the vessel, its shape and speed, the way it should be used, and,
perhaps most important of all, the endurance of the crews. How much could the men stand of this unnatural and claustrophobic life beneath the sea? And beyond this there was thought to be something
ethically monstrous about the whole conception of submarines, a kind of barbarism which would end in the destruction of them all. The ‘Submariners’, in fact, were in much the same
position as the young men in the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe in 1940; they were apart from the rest of the serving forces, a minority group with a strange, esoteric
excitement of its own, and they were about to prove that they were capable of adventures which no one had ever dreamed of before. Far from cracking under the strain, they relished it; it was a new
brand of courage, a controlled recklessness, a kind of joy in the power of the inhuman machine. It was not really a question of how much these men could stand, but of how far you could meet their
demand for more speed, longer hours in action and more deadly gadgets.

But all this lay in the future in the early months of the first world war, and the submarine itself was still undergoing basic changes in design. The periscope, for example, was originally fixed
in one set position, and its mirrors produced an inverted image, so the commander was obliged to bring the whole vessel close to the surface before he attacked, and his outlook was upon a strange
world in which ships were for ever floating upside down. Even when the periscope became movable it was an unhandy device: as it rose upward the commander rose with it, beginning from a squatting
position and ending on the tips of his toes. By 1915, however, most of these primitive inconveniences had been overcome, and the British E class (whose dispatch to the Dardanelles had so angered
Lord Fisher) was a formidable instrument. It was a vessel of 725 tons, equipped with four torpedo tubes and oil engines which achieved a surface speed of about fifteen miles an hour. Submerged and
running on its electric batteries it was capable of proceeding at ten knots for an hour, or even for periods of twenty hours at more economical speeds. In deep waters it descended by flooding its
tanks until it had about a ton of buoyancy in hand, and the vessel, with its horizontal rudders depressed, was then driven down by its motors. Directly it stopped moving it rose to the surface
again.

In shallow waters—and the E Class could descend to over 200 feet—the commanders had no fear of flooding their tanks entirely and of lying on the bottom so long as the air in the boat
remained reasonably fresh—a period of some twenty hours. As they were
not then moving there was still enough power in their accumulators to drive them to the surface
again. The submarine’s time of greatest danger was, of course, during the three or four hours when it was obliged to cruise about on the surface to replenish its batteries.

At Gallipoli these submarines were faced with an objective which was entirely new and fantastically dangerous. If they could once get through to the Sea of Marmara they knew that they could do
pretty much what they liked with the Turkish shipping, more particularly with the vessels that were bringing down reinforcements and supplies to Liman’s army on the peninsula. But how to get
there, how to penetrate the Dardanelles?

The straits were swept all night by searchlights, and as soon as a submarine surfaced, as it was practically bound to do in the course of the forty-mile journey, it was not only fired on but ran
the risk of being caught by the various currents that set towards the shore. Ten lines of mines off Kephez Point had to be negotiated, and beyond these there were the Narrows, under a mile wide,
with guns on either side and patrol boats on the watch. There was another hazard: a stratum of fresh water about ten fathoms deep poured down the Dardanelles from the Sea of Marmara, and it was of
much lighter density than the salt water below. This made a kind of barrier in the sea, and as they passed through it the submarines were thrown violently out of control. It was not unlike the
experiences of the first supersonic aircraft when they met the sound barrier in the sky; no one could make out why this strange, deadly disturbance should occur, and the commanders were forced to
rise to the surface where they at once came under the fire from the enemy batteries on the shore.

Up to the time of the landing every attempt to force the Narrows had failed, and even the Australian E2 was to last only a few days before she was caught on the surface and sunk. A French
submarine, the
Joule
, was destroyed before she even reached Chanak. Yet the exploit still seemed possible, and the young commanders of the E Class submarines who came out from England
during April were eager to try again. Many of them had fought under
Roger Keyes’s command in the North Sea during the early months of the war, and their morale was very
high. They believed they had only to try new tactics and they would get through.

For the German U-boats the problem at Gallipoli was quite different. Their target—and it was a superb target, almost a sitting duck—was the British battle fleet cruising along the
shore of the peninsula in the open Ægean, and they were withheld from it not by the Narrows but by the wide expanse of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. In April there was no German U-boat
at Constantinople and none in the Mediterranean. The only way for the Germans to reach the scene of action was to sail round northern Europe and enter the Mediterranean through the Straits of
Gibraltar; and this meant running the engines until almost the last ounce of fuel was gone. There was, it was true, a scheme for sending small U-boats in section by rail to Pola on the Adriatic
coast, but nothing had come of this as yet.

And so at the opening of the campaign both sides were baulked in their undersea offensive. Each could see the prize plainly before it: for the British it was the helpless Turkish shipping in the
Marmara, for the Germans the unprotected Allied battleships in the Ægean; and neither so far had been able to strike.

But now, at the end of April, there began a series of events which were to alter the whole character of the campaign. On April 25, the very day of the landing, Lieut.-Commander Otto Hersing, in
the German U-boat 21, set out from Ems on the long journey around the north of Scotland for the Mediterranean. Two days later at Gallipoli, Lieut.-Commander Boyle, in the British E 14, slipped
quietly into the Dardanelles and headed for the Narrows. From this moment both the Allied Fleet and the Turks on Gallipoli were in extreme danger.

Boyle had the idea of going through the Dardanelles on the surface under the cover of darkness, and he set off at two in the morning. He had not gone very far, however, before the Turkish
searchlights and guns drove him down to a depth of ninety feet, and he continued there until he judged that he had passed under the Kephez minefield. Then he came up to twenty-two feet, intending
to make the actual passage of the Narrows with his periscope raised. The disadvantage of this manœuvre was that the periscope made a distinct wash on the sea, and there
was a desperate half-hour when the enemy guns around Chanak got his range. At one stage the crew of a Turkish patrol boat were grabbing at the periscope whenever Boyle brought it to the surface for
a few seconds to see where he was going. Yet he got away, and soon after dawn came up unscathed in the Sea of Marmara. The passage had taken six hours.

For the next three weeks the E 14 cruised about at will. Her greatest success was the sinking of an old White Star liner that was bringing down from Constantinople 6,000 troops who were to join
in the battle on the Cape Helles front. There were no survivors. It was a bigger victory than anything that had yet occurred on land, and there was immense elation in the Allied Fleet when Boyle
came safely out again into the Ægean on May 18. Now at last they had found a way through. Admiral Guépratte had in the meantime lost a French submarine in the mysterious barrier in the
straits, but that did not prevent him from congratulating the British; he sailed his flagship round the E 14 with his band playing Tipperary and the British national anthem.

Another submarine, the E 11, was waiting to take the E 14’s place in the Marmara, and her young captain, Lieut-Commander Nasmith, dined aboard the flagship on the night of May 18 with de
Robeck, Keyes and Boyle. It was an animated party. Boyle had been recommended for an immediate award of the Victoria Cross. Keyes, who was still chafing at the withdrawal of the
Queen
Elizabeth
and at the latest refusal of the Admiralty to allow the Fleet to resume its attack on the Narrows, thought he had begun to see a ray of light at last. Having heard Boyle’s
story, Nasmith set off that same night, and sixteen hours after leaving the Admiral’s dining-table he was resting on the bottom of the Sea of Marmara. Unknown to anyone he had formed a plan
which was more daring than anything which had been attempted before: a direct attack on Constantinople itself.

His first act on coming to the surface near the town of Gallipoli
was to seize a Turkish sailing vessel and lash her to the E 11’s side, so that she would act both
as a disguise and a decoy. When after several days no target appeared he cast off this Trojan sea-horse and steamed directly up the Marmara.

On May 23 he sank a Turkish gunboat and several other smaller craft, and then on the following day he fell in with the
Nagara
, a transport that was making its way down to the
Dardanelles. There was an American journalist on board the
Nagara
, Raymond Gram Swing of the
Chicago Daily News
, and he says he was on deck that morning chatting to a Bavarian
doctor. Boyle’s exploits of the previous weeks had become known in Constantinople, and Swing had just remarked to the doctor, ‘It’s a fine morning for submarines,’ when he
paused, gazed out to sea in astonishment, and added, ‘And there’s one.’ E 11 broke the calm surface very gently about a hundred yards away, and four men appeared on the conning
tower. One of them in a white sweater (it was Nasmith), used his cupped hands as a megaphone: ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Swing of the
Chicago Daily News
.’

‘Glad to meet you, Mr. Swing, but what I mean is what ship is that?’

‘The Turkish transport
Nagara
.’

By now the ship’s crew were in a state of extreme alarm, some coursing about the deck, others, with their fezzes still on their heads, jumping into the sea.

‘Are those marines?’ Nasmith asked.

‘No, they’re just sailors.’

‘Well, I’m going to sink you.’

Swing asked, ‘Can we get off?’

‘Yes, and be damned quick about it.’

The confusion in the
Nagara
had now reached the point where everyone had begun to scramble over the sides, and the lifeboats were lowered so clumsily that they half filled with water.
The Turks were frenziedly baling with their fezzes. As Swing appeared to be the only calm man on board, Nasmith directed him in launching the last boat and in picking up the sailors and passengers
who had jumped or fallen into the sea. Nasmith then closed
the ship, and an immense orange flame went up as he sank her: she was filled with ammunition.

Soon after this E 11 was driven away from the coast by a detachment of Turkish cavalry, but she managed to chase and sink another transport, and a third ship beached herself on the shore. By now
the survivors of the wrecks had raised the alarm in Constantinople, and from early morning on May 25 the Turkish artillery on both sides of the Bosphorus were standing to their guns. In order to
calm the population in the event of an action taking place, an announcement was made that there might be firing practice during the course of the day.

The submarine surfaced at 12.40 p.m., and Nasmith saw before him a large freighter, the
Stamboul
, berthed alongside the arsenal. His first torpedo ran in a circle and on its return
narrowly missed the E 11 herself. His second, however, struck home, and he dived, heading through the city into the Bosphorus, while a barrage of artillery crashed over his head.

The panic that now broke out in Constantinople gives an indication of what might have happened had the Allied Fleet appeared there in March. While the
Goeben
hastily shifted her
anchorage into the shelter of her attendant ships, a mob fled through the streets and everywhere the shops ran up their shutters. On the docks all activity ceased, and a contingent of soldiers
which was embarking for Gallipoli was precipitately ordered back to the shore again. Now, in one moment, the powder factory on the wharves and the crowded wooden houses on the slopes above seemed
utterly exposed, and it was apparent to everyone that there was very little that the fire brigade could do if this was to be the prelude to a serious attack.

Meanwhile, Nasmith and his men were struggling for their lives. The current in the Bosphorus was even stronger than in the Dardanelles, and for some twenty minutes the submarine was out of
control, bumping from shoal to shoal along the bottom as far as Leander’s Tower. She was righted eventually, and with great skill Nasmith turned back through Constantinople. ‘The next
day,’ here-ported later, ‘was spent resting in the centre of the Sea of Marmara.’

Then on May 27 he resumed his attack, sinking ship after ship in the approaches to the Golden Horn. A terror spread through the Sea of Marmara, for it was thought that at
least half a dozen submarines were operating. No vessel of any size was allowed to leave port without an escort of destroyers and gunboats, and these repeatedly tried to ram the E 11 whenever she
rose to the surface to attack. Nasmith paused in his operations only when the air in the submarine became so foul that he was obliged to surface in order to allow the crew to come on deck and
bathe.