In the early hours of New Year’s Day 1915, HMS Formidable, which was returning from gunnery exercises in the English Channel, became the first pre-dreadnought battleship casualty of the Great War lost to enemy action, when she was sunk by torpedoes from the German submarine U24 off Portland Bill, drowning more than 500 of her crew.[1] The next five months would account for another five ships of this type, revealing the vulnerability of these Victorian-era battleships to submerged weapons, the torpedo and the mine. These pages reflect on events in the eastern Mediterranean between February and May 1915, which saw the final combined use of such antiquated warships with disastrous consequences.
Turkey’s decision to enter the Great War on the side of the Central Powers, while the result of complex geopolitical and diplomatic factors, was undoubtedly influenced by naval actions. On 10th August 1914, two German warships in the Mediterranean, the battle-cruiser Goeben and light cruiser Breslau, having managed skillfully to evade a British shadowing force, had passed through the Dardanelles Strait, the waterway which links that sea with the Black Sea, and arrived at Constantinople. Six days later, these ships and their German crews had been formally incorporated into the Turkish navy, ostensibly to avoid a Turkish breach of neutrality by harbouring foreign combatants.
Alarmed by this development, the British government had swiftly ordered the seizure of two dreadnought battleships then being built in British yards for the Turkish navy. In fact, the Turkish government had already entered into a secret alliance with Germany on August 3rd, but not without some dissenting voices, and this confiscation, coupled with the Royal Navy’s failure to destroy the German squadron before it reached the Golden Horn, appears to have stifled these dissenters and made war with Britain inevitable. Nevertheless, Turkish neutrality was preserved until 28th October when the two formerly-German ships, renamed Yavuz and Midili respectively, bombarded the Black Sea ports of Britain’s ally, Russia. A week later, both nations along with France declared war on the Ottoman Empire.
The Allied decision to try and force the Dardanelles was another one based on a multiplicity of factors. Chief among them was the fact that by December 1914 the armies of the Western Front had already ground to a halt. A naval thrust up the Narrows and into the Sea of Marmara promised, however chimerically, a return to a more mobile form of warfare; a smash and grab raid on the Turkish capital with invaluable strategic consequences. Secondly, the Eastern Mediterranean was the site of the British Empire’s vital route to its jewel in the crown, India. The Ottoman Empire posed a threat not just to the Suez Canal but also other British colonial possessions such as Egypt and Palestine. Thirdly, the Dardanelles itself was a vital trade route for Britain and her allies, as 90% of Russian grain exports to the West were directed through the Black Sea. These had been effectively stopped after the Turks closed the Straits to allied shipping at the end of September.[2] Finally, Turkey was seen as the Central Powers’ weakest link, the perennial ‘sick man of Europe’, a nation described by Winston Churchill as ‘scandalous, crumbling, decrepit, penniless.’
As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill was the chief architect of the Gallipoli campaign’s infamous naval prelude. Long a fan of amphibious operations, the recently revived First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher had proposed a combined army and navy assault on the target. Chief of the army Kitchener supported this idea too but was extremely reluctant to countenance the diversion of any troops from the Western Front for this purpose. Churchill used the latter’s resistance as a justification to remodel the former’s plan as a purely naval operation. If the army weren’t prepared, their own Jack Tars would do the job by themselves.
Such an endeavour offered greater political rewards as well as greater risks, a potential masterstroke that might significantly shorten the war. The truth was that naval operations in the opening months of the war had not gone well for Churchill’s navy boys. Three armoured cruisers had been sunk at the hands of a single German submarine in the North Sea in September 1914, drowning almost 1,400 sailors. This ignominy had been followed by the destruction of two more large cruisers by German forces at the Battle of Coronel in November, the Royal Navy’s first defeat at sea in more than a century. Even though this defeat had been avenged before the year was out, the First Lord of the Admiralty’s account book was still very much in the red.
What Churchill most needed to sell his creditworthy plan to the government’s Council of War was the affirmative opinion of an expert on the ground, the Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Sir Sackville Carden. To this end, Churchill craftily cabled the following telegram: ‘Do you consider the forcing of the Dardanelles by ships alone a practicable operation?’ Such a dichotomous question, containing a coda that read ‘Importance of results would justify severe loss.’ allowed a career-minded admiral only one possible answer. Although Carden hedged as best he could by stating that ‘they might be forced by extended operations with large numbers of ships’, he in effect said yes. In fact, Churchill had answered his own question only a couple of years previously in a cabinet memorandum. ‘Nobody would expose a modern fleet to such peril’ he had written [1]; a conclusion Fisher had himself reached a decade earlier, describing such a ‘mightily hazardous’ operation as one ‘much to be deprecated’ [1].
More than a hundred years earlier, a British fleet had successfully fought its way up the Dardanelles. Admiral Duckworth’s achievements are long forgotten today, partly because having reached the Sea of Marmara, the inland sea on which Constantinople lies, he was unable to press home any advantage before a shortage of supplies forced him to retreat. Owing to vast improvements in the range and accuracy of gunnery over the 19th century, any attempted repeat of Duckworth’s feat was held to be suicidal in a waterway that is only a mile wide at its narrowest point. However, Churchill, it seems, better remembered events of 1807 than his own words of 1911.
It had also been part of Fisher’s proposal to use the navy’s older warships for the operation. Like Kitchener, the First Sea Lord wished to concentrate his best units; the two dozen ‘dreadnoughts’ of the Grand Fleet; in close proximity to the German enemy. Pre-dreadnought’s; those battleships whose design preceded that of the world’s first all-big-gun battleship HMS Dreadnought, are invariably described in the same breath as ‘obsolete’, but as events in the Great War proved, they were only comparatively so. With a broadside of eight 12-inch guns and its ability to train half of these fore and aft, Dreadnought had double the offensive power of its mixed calibre predecessors. This advantage was compounded by improvements in speed and armour protection. For this reason, pre-dreadnoughts were removed entirely from the front line of the Grand Fleet by 1914, no such units participating at Jutland. However, British pre-dreadnoughts compared favourably with their counterparts in foreign navies, which in most cases still formed the bulk of their fleets. This was particularly the case with the Mediterranean fleets of France, Italy, Greece and Turkey.
Early in 1915, Churchill approached Carden for a plan of attack and an estimate of the number of vessels needed to execute it. The Admiral outlined a ‘linear scheme of slow progress’ [2] up the Straits, alternating the bombardment of forts with the clearing of minefields. For this, the Admiral specified the need for a dozen battleships, in addition to destroyers, minesweepers, and other support craft. Prime Minister Asquith’s War Council, which included Fisher, voiced no strong objection to this at a meeting on 13th February, when it was determined for the navy to ‘bombard and take the Gallipoli Peninsula with Constantinople as its objective’ [2]. Only at a subsequent meeting did the First Sea Lord make known his extreme misgivings about the plan. Dissuaded by Churchill and Asquith from immediately resigning his post, Fisher subsequently authorised the commitment of several more modern warships to the venture including HMS Queen Elizabeth, then the world’s most powerful battleship and so new its main armament of eight 15-inch guns hadn’t even been calibrated.
Celebrating an earlier long-serving monarch, Queen Elizabeth was clearly not a Victorian-era warship. Neither was HMS Inflexible, one of the Royal Navy’s first ‘battlecruiser’ variants of the ‘dreadnought’ design, commissioned in 1909. Launched before HMS Dreadnought but completed afterwards, HMS Lord Nelson and Agamemnon; were of a transitional design, lacking the all-big-gun armament but having heavier secondary guns than previous pre-dreadnought classes and a sleeker proto-dreadnought appearance. Aside from these four Edwardian-era units, however, all the British capital ships involved in the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns were of a design fixed some 25 years earlier; very much an armada of Victorian vintage.
It is certainly the case that in a less bellicose era most of these ships would have already gone to the scrap-yard. This is especially true of HMS Majestic and Prince George, the two oldest ships to see combat in the Eastern Mediterranean theatre. Part of the largest class of battleships ever built by the Royal Navy, and the benchmark for succeeding classes, these two vessels had been state-of-the-art when participating in the Spithead ‘Diamond’ naval review of 1897, which had marked Queen Victoria’s 60th year on the British throne. By the outbreak of war, most of the Majestic Class had already been consigned to reserve tasks such as guarding ports, or serving as depot and accommodation ships.
All six units of the succeeding Canopus Class were to serve at Gallipoli. The Canopuses were equally powerful but slightly longer and lighter variants of the Majestics. All were either complete or nearing completion at the time of Victoria’s death in January 1901. Also forming a sizable portion of the Gallipoli armada were the six remaining battleships of the Formidable Class. These ships, which exceeded 15,000t in displacement, were considered improvements on the two aforementioned classes, being slightly faster and better protected. This class was the last to be designed by Sir William White, Director of Naval Construction for the Victorian navy from 1885 until 1902, and the man responsible for the design of more than 40 of its battleships. Ships of the subsequent Duncan and King Edward VII Classes also participated in Gallipoli operations. Although not directly the work of White, the design of these units could still be traced directly to that of the Majestics.
Finally, HMS Triumph and Swiftsure had been laid down for the Chilean navy in 1902. The ships had been designed by the other influential architect of the Victorian Navy, Sir Edward Reed. In office from 1863 to 1870, Reed had been responsible for the Royal Navy’s first sail-less ocean-going warship, HMS Devastation. After a highly-publicised falling out with the Admiralty, Reed took to designing warships for export.[3] Of a somewhat unique design, these weakly armed and protected ‘second-class’ battleships were nevertheless pre-dreadnought in appearance and regressive in their overall performance, the Royal Navy having sanctioned their purchase from Chile principally through the fear of their falling into the hands of the Russians.
[1] Her sister HMS Bulwark had been lost to an internal explosion at Sheerness the previous month.
[2] This was partly in response to British sailors having violated Ottoman neutrality by boarding a Turkish destroyer.
[3] This included the Ottoman ironclad Mesudiye, built by Thames Ironworks in 1875; another Victorian-era ship that would play its own part in the Gallipoli campaign.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 