The Dandarnelles Disaster (2 page)

It does so without footnotes. I have managed to rub along without them in nine previous forays into naval history, convinced as ever of my belief that general readers, for whom this and all its predecessors are intended, are not interested in them. If they have anything in common with me, they may actually be irritated by having to interrupt what I hope is a good read by going to the back of the book, only to see such immortal notations as ‘op. cit.' or ‘ibid.'.

The Note on Sources, and the Select Bibliography at the end reveal the material and earlier works on which I drew to assemble this story.

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank the following for the support and assistance I have received over the many years I have explored the Dardanelles story, taking on other projects but always returning for another look at a subject which has fascinated me ever since I first took an interest in naval history 30 years ago.

The staffs of the British Library, the London Library and the libraries of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames; the staffs of the British National Archives (known as the Public Record Office when I started), and the German Federal Military Archives in Freiburg-im-Breisgau; the Turkish Naval and Army Museums in Istanbul and the Naval Museum at Çannakale.

I am no less grateful to Annette Boon for help with my non-existent Turkish; Rezan Muir and the Turkish Area Study Group; Dr Kenan Çelik, formerly of Çannakale Onsekiz Mart University and latterly battlefield guide, who took me on an invaluable personal tour of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli.

I could not have finished this book without the support through many vicissitudes of my former agent, Jonathan Pegg, late of Curtis Brown, and his successor, Shaheeda Sabir; and of Peter Mayer and especially Mary Morris of Duckworth Publishers. Further acknowledgements are in the note on sources.

None of these is responsible for any error, for which I alone am to blame.

Introduction

The Voyage of the
Nusret

The modest Turkish harbour of Nagara, on the Asian shore of the Dardanelles, lies less than four miles north of the Narrows, the most constricted section of the strait between the Sea of Marmara and the Mediterranean. It was from there that the minelayer
Nusret
set sail half an hour before midnight on 7 March 1915, under the command of Yuzbashi (Lieutenant) Hakki Bey of the Ottoman Navy. Alongside him on the open bridge stood Birindji-Yuzbashi (Lieutenant-Commander) Hafiz Nazmi Bey, leader of the naval minelaying specialists who had sown the Dardanelles minefields. He was accompanied by a German mine specialist called Bettaque; another German naval officer, Engineer Reeder, was in charge of the engines below. He had checked them and the boilers to enable the vessel to achieve silent running with minimal smoke output. Their unspectacular afterthought of a mission would change the course of the First World War and of world history: it was to be the most effective and devastating minelaying operation ever undertaken, and was to engender the turning-point of the Dardanelles naval campaign.

The 364-tonne vessel was that rarest of objects in the Turkish fleet of the period – a modern, purpose-built craft, ordered in 1910 from the Germaniawerft shipyard in Kiel in the far north of Germany and commissioned into the mostly decrepit Ottoman Navy in 1913. She was 40 metres long with a draught of 3.4 metres and capable of 15 knots. Her twin shafts, driven by two coal-fired, triple-expansion engines, made her suitably manoeuvrable, and she was armed with a pair of 47-millimetre quick-firing guns forward plus two parallel racks on her long, open afterdeck with a capacity of twenty mines each. Her single tall smokestack loomed abaft the bridge. Although the
Nusret
rated two inconspicuous lines in the 1914 edition of
Jane's Fighting Ships
, she was not even noticed by Mr James Stewart, who was leading the regeneration work on the Ottoman Navy on behalf of Armstrong and Vickers until forced to stop when Turkey and Britain went to war. At the behest of the Royal Navy in October 1914, he
had compiled an exhaustive, ship-by-ship report on the Turkish fleet, right down to tugs and motor launches, without bothering to mention Turkey's sole up-to-date minelayer.

The modern naval mine was first used by the Russians in the Crimean War (1854–6) to protect their harbours. The earliest types did not contain enough explosive to sink a ship: two British gunboats struck them but were only moderately damaged and did not sink. Essentially, until more sophisticated varieties were developed before and during the Second World War, the sea-mine was a moored, floating bomb, held in place just below the surface by a cable attached to a weight lying on the seabed and set off when a vessel struck one of its detonator ‘horns' – the contact mine.

Initially used defensively to protect harbours, mines were sown offensively for the first time by both sides in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. In April 1904 the Imperial Japanese Navy used mines to blockade the Russian Pacific Fleet in its Manchurian base of Port Arthur. When the Russians came out, two heavily armoured battleships struck mines: one, the flagship
Petropavlovsk
, sank within minutes; the other,
Pobeda
, was badly damaged and towed away. The rest returned to harbour and stayed there. Among the dead on the flagship was Admiral Makarov, Russia's best contemporary naval commander. A month later the Russians laid a minefield in their turn in the waters outside Port Arthur. Two out of six modern Japanese battleships hit mines: the
Yashima
succumbed in a few minutes while the
Hatsuse
sank a few hours later while under tow. None the less Admiral Togo's four remaining capital ships managed to defeat eight badly led Russian battleships in the decisive Battle of Tsushima at the end of May 1905. The unprecedented and spectacular success of a cheap and simple weapon against some of the period's most powerful ships, the strategic armaments of the day, shocked the world's leading navies, most of which had observers on both sides during the conflict. Whereas the transverse lines of mines in the Dardanelles can be seen as purely defensive, the
Nusret
's postscript of an eleventh line, in a separate area known to be used for manoeuvre by enemy battleships, was unmistakably offensive in character.

International conventions required mines to be constructed so as to defuse themselves if they broke free of their cables, and the use of free-floating mines was prohibited. These rules were soon broken in the opening months of the First World War. The humble contact mine as used in that
war proved capable of embarrassing the world's most powerful fleet, the US Navy, as recently as the late 1980s when Iran sowed them in the Strait of Hormuz: the Americans had no minesweepers in commission and had to rely on allies to provide some.

By 1914 mines were much more powerful than 60 years earlier, capable, as we have seen, of mortally wounding mighty battleships by exploding under their hulls, undermining the main belt of armour around a heavy ship's vitals. A typical German ‘Carbonit' mine contained 80 kilograms of explosive. Thousands of mines were sown by both sides in 1914, not only defensively to protect ports but also offensively, to inhibit enemy fleets and shipping. Mines were usually laid by fast purpose-built or converted ships, destroyers and also, a little later in the war, by submarines. Aircraft were not yet strong enough for the task.

The Turks and their German allies predictably began laying mines, ultimately in ten lines, across the Dardanelles, mostly south and west of the Narrows, on 3 August 1914. There is some confusion in the records about whose inspired idea it was to lay an eleventh line of mines
parallel
to the shore of Erenkeui Bay, on the Asian side of the Dardanelles and about two miles south of the last of the ten transverse lines – the mission of the
Nusret
on 7–8 March. Credit for the decisive idea is usually given to a Lieutenant-Colonel Geehl, described as a Turkish mining expert. Research for this book established that Geehl, whose name is rather more obviously German than Turkish, was one of hundreds of German officers serving in the Ottoman forces. German naval sources spell his name as Gehl and give his rank as ‘Torpedist-Captain' – roughly equivalent to a lieutenant-commander RN. As the Dardanelles defences were assigned to the Turkish Army, German naval officers working on them wore Ottoman Army uniforms. Mine specialists belonged to the same branch of the Imperial German Navy (IGN) as torpedo experts.

But in a post-war ‘debriefing' interview with Brigadier-General C. J. Perceval of the British Army in 1919, the Turkish Major-General Cefat Pasha, in charge of the Dardanelles defences at the beginning of the war, said: ‘I had a special line of eight [
sic
] mines laid in a line parallel to the Erenkeui Bay on the south side of the channel. I considered these would be less likely to be detected, owing to their being parallel to and not across the channel, and that they might catch a ship keeping to the south …' The interview is in the records of the Dardanelles Committee of officers from all three British armed services, who investigated every aspect of the campaign in great detail (as distinct from the Dardanelles Commission,
which conducted the official inquiry into the defeat in 1917–18). Other Turkish sources give Commander Nazmi the credit for the idea of the eleventh line of mines. General Cefat spoke of eight mines; others mentioned 20 and 24.

The German sources refer to 26, and ascribe the idea to Admiral Guido von Usedom, the German flag officer appointed inspector-general of the defences of the straits by the Turks and given the rank of general in their army for the purpose. The mines had been handed over to Usedom's ‘special command' by Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, appointed head of the Ottoman fleet soon after he evaded a British chase and brought the Mediterranean Division of the IGN into Turkish waters on 10 August 1914. His message to Usedom said: ‘Fleet [command] recommends mines to be kept in reserve for the time being, and to lay them as a tactical barrier when specific enemy movements can be predicted.' They were delivered to the fort at Chanak, the main bastion on the Asian side of the Narrows. During the heavy Anglo-French naval bombardments of 19 and 25 February the defenders observed that the attacking battleships used Erenkeui Bay, in the broadest part of the strait south-west of the Narrows, to manoeuvre out of the firing line, reverse course and return to their anchorage at Mudros on the island of Lemnos. It seemed safe therefore to predict that in the next attack they would do the same.

Having sailed close to the Asiatic shore the couple of miles from Nagara to the fort, the engines held to 140 revolutions, the crew of the
Nusret
stopped to collect their mines. They weighed anchor again at about five a.m. and crossed over to hug the European coast as far as possible and thus obtain some shelter from the rough weather coming from the north-west over the Gallipoli peninsula. Conditions were less than stormy but had proved unpleasant enough to lead the British to forgo their usual night destroyer-patrol in the area south of the Narrows, a fact noted by the defenders and Commander Nazmi. He seized the opportunity of carrying out his mission, as planned some days before, undetected by the enemy. Dawn was breaking over Erenkeui Bay as the minelayer arrived.

After Hakki had crossed the strait again towards the Asian shore, Nazmi laid his mines in a row that ran from north-east to south-west, in line with the shore of the bay and about one and a half miles out. They were laid at intervals of some 100 metres – considerably less than the length of a battleship – and set to float at a depth of five metres. The sailors let a weighted mine slip into the water every 15 seconds. The sowing lasted less than seven minutes. Smaller ships, such as destroyers, could sail over the
mines with impunity, their crews blissfully unaware of their presence in such an area, whereas a battleship with its deeper draught was highly likely to strike a mine while manoeuvring. The
Nusret
, still rolling in the heavy weather, returned to harbour undetected by the Allied besiegers.

The stratagem worked perfectly. On 18 March 1915, the day of the climactic Allied bombardment of the Dardanelles forts, the French battleship
Bouvet
, 12,200 tonnes, coming out of the firing line, turned to leave the strait at 1.45 p.m. She hit a mine, exploded, keeled over and sank in two minutes, with the loss of some 640 men. Fewer than 40 survived.

And that was only the beginning …