From the Dardanelles to Oran: Studies of the Royal Navy in War and Peace, 1915–1914

Chapter One

The Dardanelles Revisited

Further Thoughts on the Naval Prelude

¹

(Chart 1)

THIS chapter is not concerned with the genesis of the Dardanelles campaign (although I consider it the one imaginative strategic idea of the war on the Allied side) or the preliminary moves. Its scope is the naval facets of the opening phase of the operation, from the initial bombardment of 19 February to 25 April, when the Army took over the principal role, with the thrust on what went wrong and why, and some second-guessing on what might have been done. The naval side of the Dardanelles is second only to Jutland in the longevity and passion of the controversy which it has aroused among naval historians. It must always be a fascinating subject, if a tragic one from the British point of view, for there are so many points and aspects on which there can never be any cast-iron verdicts.

Two fundamental errors preceded the actual commencement of the operation. The naval bombardment of the outer defences of the Dardanelles by the battle cruiser Inflexible on 3 November 1914 did scant damage, but it prompted the Turks immediately to accelerate their programme for strengthening the coast defences of the Straits by multiplying the gun defences, laying additional minefields, adding searchlights, and so forth. The second basic error was the conception that slow minesweeping trawlers could clear a passage up to and through the Narrows to enable the fleet to reach the Marmora. This will be treated in detail below. Many critics at the time and since have asserted that the gravest error of all was the conception of a purely naval enterprise, which stemmed from the badly worded War Council recommendation of 13 January 1915 (the Navy should ‘bombard and take the Gallipoli Peninsula, with Constantinople as its objective’), which was accepted by the Admiralty on 28 January. It is a fact that the Navy would have preferred to wait until troops were available and a combined assault could be mounted. ‘From Lord Fisher [First Sea Lord] downwards every naval officer in the Admiralty who is in the secret believes that the Navy cannot take [i.e. pass?] the Dardanelles without troops. The First Lord [Churchill] still professes to believe that they can do it with ships …’² But was there a need for troops? The essential purpose of this chapter is to show that the Navy might well have succeeded by itself in forcing the Straits and knocking the Turks out of the war. The first opportunity presented itself early in March, the second and more promising, in mid-April.

The Turkish defences at the Dardanelles consisted of four principal elements: the forts, the minefields (and minefield and mobile howitzer batteries), torpedoes, and floating mines. The last two were of secondary importance, though the moored mines exercised an influence on Vice-Admiral de Robeck’s decisions after 18 March. The torpedo defences of the Straits consisted of only three 18-inch tubes (two torpedoes available for each tube) housed in a shed on the pier at Kilid Bahr; only one of them could fire a torpedo across the mile width of the Narrows (the other two, barely half-way). ‘The tubes at Kilid Bahr were, however, never located by the seaplanes and reports were frequently being received that more torpedo tubes were being placed. There was, therefore, no certainty as to the strength of the torpedo defences and no apparent reason why, by the use of concrete under-water positions, numbers of hidden and completely protected torpedo positions should not have existed. Moreover, few ships had nets; these were at best an uncertain protection and a great danger to the propellers underway.’³ This uncertainty was not relieved by the fact that the Turks fired no torpedoes during the operation.

It was known that the Turks had about 35 Ramis-type floating mines (the explosive was 165 lb. of TNT). They sent 16 of them down on 1, 7, and 17 March without achieving any success. On 18 March a small steamer was standing by just above the Narrows with some 20 mines on board, but none was laid. The Navy had picked up a sample and discovered that a light surface sweep could deal with them by chopping off the float, and so sinking the mine. ‘It was considered quite possible that the Turks might wait until the Fleet was committed to a break through and then launch floating mines in large numbers…. It is difficult to estimate what would have been the effect of a hundred or so floating mines amongst the Fleet once committed to a break through.’⁴ It is, in fact, likely that they would all have been decapitated by the surface sweeps before they reached the battleships. The losses on 18 March, we shall see, were attributed to floating mines.

This left the forts and the minefields. The intention at first was to overcome the forts with naval gunfire, then sweep up the mines, and thereby open the way for the fleet to reach Constantinople. A naval bombardment on 25 February silenced the forts at each side of the entrance to the Straits. Then came the bombardment of the intermediate defences in the first days of March: the thirty-six mobile howitzers (mainly 5.9-inch) and twenty-four mortars (mostly 8.2-inch). Incapable of hitting a moving target, their function was to hit any anchored ships they could reach, thus keeping them on the move. They were not intended to protect the minefields, which task was assigned to the minefield batteries (see below). Although the bombardment of the intermediate defences was not decisive, on 5 March the fleet initiated the next phase, whose objective was the silencing of the forts at the Narrows with their fixed batteries of heavy guns. The most modern were 35-cal. hand-loaded Krupp guns of 1885: two 14-inch and six 9.4-inch on the European side, and three 14-inch and eight 9.4-inch on the Asiatic side. They took 4–5 minutes to load by hand, compared to 45 seconds for the 12-inch guns of the battleships, loaded by hydraulic machinery, and 10 seconds for their 6-inch. The ships had the further advantage that, whereas the elementary fire-control system of the forts was not designed to hit a moving target, the ships accurately allowed for the current and their movement between salvoes. In short, the improved gun-power in recent years was entirely to the advantage of the fleet in a duel with these forts.

At the same time the Fleet, which had concentrated before the war on gunnery and torpedo practices for a fleet action, worked under certain disadvantages, as it had never practised firing at shore targets (and did not do so until the 1920s). Also, although the fire of the Turkish mobile howitzer batteries from concealed positions on both sides of the Straits, abreast of the ships, was never more than an irritation, by preventing the ships from anchoring it made accurate fire more difficult. This, in turn, necessitated the expenditure of more ammunition than could be spared. In the next place, only direct hits could destroy the guns of a fort: the possibility of achieving this at 12,000 yards was estimated by the Mitchell Committee at no better than 2 to 3 per cent. This, too, pointed to the need for a plentiful supply of ammunition that was not available before April. Finally, the capital ships themselves, apart from the dreadnought Queen Elizabeth and the battle cruiser Inflexible, were old, pre-dreadnought units, not fitted with the most modern gunnery appliances, and with crews composed mainly of reservists and young ratings.

The Narrows forts could have been silenced by ships attacking from inside the Straits by direct fire.⁵ The gunlayers could see the target but required air spotting to correct the range, which was not possible from a ship, or ground position, at right angles to the line of fire. The alternative was to attack the forts by ships firing over the Gallipoli peninsula–that is, indirect fire–with a flank-spotting battleship inside the Straits, in sight of the forts, to spot for range, and an aircraft to spot for direction. (Using a battleship inside the Straits to spot for range was a refinement, but it was not necessary, as an aircraft could give both range and direction corrections.) Firing over the peninsula was the more promising way, since the weaknesses of the gun defences at the Narrows lay in their vulnerability to indirect fire over the peninsula, though only the flagship, the Queen Elizabeth, had sufficient range for this. Firing from the direction of Gaba Tepe, she could bombard the forts with accuracy, given efficient aircraft spotting and sufficient ammunition, since she could anchor outside the range of the howitzers. The guns of the forts, designed on the expectation of attack from inside the Straits, would present almost a broadside target to indirect fire over the peninsula. This was ‘about four times as favourable as the end on target presented when attacking from inside the Straits. The forts were further unprotected against an attack of this description from the rear.’⁶ The European forts were particularly vulnerable.

With indirect firing, as in the case of a ship off Gaba Tepe firing over the peninsula, air spotting for direction was highly desirable. The gunlayer could not see the target, and had to lay his gun on some object believed to be in the right direction, and then shift by sight-setting to right, or to left, as necessary, when he received corrections from the spotting aircraft. This elementary consideration must have been well known to any competent gunnery specialist, yet no tests or practices of battleships firing with aircraft spotting were carried out during the seventeen days between the arrival of the seaplane carrier Ark Royal at Tenedos on 17 February with six seaplanes and the time of the Queen Elizabeth firing over the peninsula on 5 March. Group-Captain Williamson stresses that the detachment of a battleship or two and a few gunnery officers to carry out essential spotting tests on a shore target, for which an unoccupied Aegean island could have been used, would not have impaired fleet efficiency or operations in any way. Such exercises were all the more necessary because the seaplanes were so few and could be used only in favourable weather. (They were generally unable to rise in any but smooth water.) The Aegean weather in March was a definite limitation, although, as it happens, four of the first five days of the month had perfect flying weather. The heavy and cumbersome floats over-taxed the low-powered engines, and we were constantly pre-occupied with keeping our machines in the air’, writes Williamson. Also, the wireless gear was somewhat unreliable. But such disadvantages were largely counterbalanced by the enemy having no aircraft and no antiaircraft guns, whereas usually the seaplanes were able to fly at sufficient height to be untroubled by rifle fire. In addition to tests it was equally important to conserve flying hours for the all-important bombardment of the Narrows forts, especially in view of the many warnings of the limitations of the seaplanes. Machines were not getting off, or were unable to reach a satisfactory altitude, or were being forced to return with engine trouble.

But, as noted, there were no spotting tests to see what the seaplanes could do for the ships, and to ensure that their spotting would be reliable by correcting any problems that might be uncovered.⁷ And instead of expending flying hours in essential work and reaching top efficiency in spotting, there were reconnaissance flights which contributed nothing to the success of the campaign. This policy culminated on 4 March, when, on the Admiral’s instructions, the Ark Royal (she had moved up to the Dardanelles entrance) had aircraft flying for seven hours of precious flying time over the demolition parties, supported by marines, which had been put ashore after the outer forts had been silenced. This resulted in most of the aircraft being temporarily out of action when most required. It was ‘an unnecessary and useless job’, Williamson claims. ‘The whole affair was a waste of time and effort’, and the result was fiasco on the crucial day.⁸

That very evening (4 March), the Ark Royal received orders that an aircraft would be required to spot for the Queen Elizabeth the next morning, when she was to fire over the peninsula at the forts defending the Narrows. Williamson regards the mismanagement of the spotting for the Queen Elizabeth on 5 March as a crucial point–that, had, say, four aircraft been prepared days before and held in constant readiness ‘for the one job on which everything depended’, anything would have been possible. The morning of the 5th was a disaster. The Ark Royal joined the Queen Elizabeth off Gaba Tepe. Lieutenant-Commander Williamson was to do the spotting, and his Captain told him to take any machine and any pilot he liked.⁹ He took the best one available; his own special machine had been hit and damaged on the ‘useless job’ on the 4th. (Contrary to Admiralty regulations, on the way out from England he had altered this machine, exchanging the positions of pilot and observer to give the latter the best possible view for spotting.) Had they not ‘wasted’ those seven hours the day before, he would have had his own good aircraft. At the appointed time on the 5th the aircraft was hoisted out. Williamson has recorded:

It was a perfect day, with just the right amount of wind for taking off from the water, and we were soon in the air. It was an exhilarating moment. There below was the Queen Elizabeth with her eight 15-inch guns ready to fire and trained on the coast. The conditions were ideal; stationary ships and stationary target, only eight miles apart, and perfect visibility. I believed that there was every prospect of destroying the Forts, and that the Fleet would be able to go through the Straits and accomplish the object of the campaign by appearing off Constantinople. Few junior officers have ever been in a position so favourable and of such importance, and I was thrilled with confident expectation. We soon reached 3,000-ft. and were ready to cross the peninsula to the target … Then it happened. In a moment the machine was out of control and we were hurtling towards the sea.

The propeller had broken up (the cause remains a mystery); the machine hit the water and practically disintegrated. Williamson and his pilot miraculously survived and were picked up by a destroyer. Another machine was sent up, but the pilot, unable to gain much altitude, was wounded by a rifle bullet and had to return. A third machine was able to signal only one spotting correction.

The negligible assistance of the seaplanes in spotting fall of shots was the immediate cause of the failure of the Queen Elizabeth’s indirect fire at 14,000 yards range, since her gunlayers, unable to see the forts, were wholly dependent on aircraft for direction spotting. Seventeen shells out of thirty-three fired landed inside the forts and did some damage, but no guns were hit. (With only seventeen shells on target nobody could expect a gun to be hit, owing to the inevitable Scatter’ for range.) The fire had, however, taken the Turks by complete surprise and had, as a Turkish captain of artillery testified after the war, ‘a very great moral effect on gun crews as the batteries were quite unprotected from this direction’.¹⁰ This was not known to the fleet. On 6 March the indirect firing was continued, with the Queen Elizabeth having to move out to 20,000 yards from her objective and use full charges because of the fire from the Barbarossa. There was no seaplane spotting, only spotting by a battleship inside the Straits. It was ineffective and was abandoned on account of bad light. The difficulty of indirect-fire bombardment of the Narrows forts led to a resumption of a direct bombardment of the forts by battleships inside the Straits on 7 and 8 March. No damage of military importance was inflicted, although the forts were apparently silenced. There were no further daylight bombardments of any consequence until 18 March.

‘Had aeroplane observation been possible,’ the Mitchell Report judged (speaking of the indirect bombardments of 5 and 6 March), ‘there is little doubt that great damage would have been done to the forts, and that, with sufficient expenditure of ammunition, every gun might have been smashed. The forts were quite unprotected from this direction and each gun and mounting presented a maximum target…. Without aeroplane observation, little except moral effect would be expected, and this moral effect could be discounted unless the attack were accompanied by a simultaneous break-through of the Fleet. ‘¹¹ The Report points out that it was not only on 5 and 6 March that the seaplanes ‘entirely failed to meet the main requirement of the Fleet, which was accurate spotting’. Spotting results throughout had proved generally unsuccessful, and it was evident that aeroplanes, with trained observers for spotting, were a necessity. But these did not arrive until 24 March. (They had been ordered out several weeks earlier after complaints about the inefficiency of the seaplanes.) Not till then was the importance of the Dardanelles operation considered to be sufficient to justify the removal of aeroplanes from other areas. The Report draws this conclusion: ‘The lack of aeroplane observation was throughout the [naval] operations found to be the heaviest handicap.’ Again, ‘the importance of good aerial spotting for correction of ships’ fire cannot be overestimated, and the lack of this … was one of the three main causes of the failure of the naval attacks on the Dardanelles’.¹² The other two were ‘the lack and unsuitability of ammunition’ (‘The ammunition reserve available at this time and the necessity of preserving ammunition for operations in the Sea of Marmora made economy in expenditure essential’) and the ‘lack of adequate sweeping material and personnel’, to the latter of which we will turn in a moment.

These comments on air spotting need qualification. A popular view concerning the opening phase of the campaign (enshrined in the Mitchell Report) attributes much of the failure to the unreliability of the Ark Royal’s aircraft. This is misleading. It stems from the fact that Admiral Carden was never questioned by the Dardanelles Commissioners or the Mitchell Committee on how many hours were actually flown by his aircraft and what he did with those flying hours. Between 17 February and 5 March, though not less than 50 hours were placed at his disposal, most, if not the whole, of the flying time had been expended in tasks none of which could have influenced the operation in any important way.

Even had things gone better, would the spotting of the Ark Royal’s pilots have been of much use, given their lack of experience? Group-Captain Williamson replies:

It was, of course, true, that at that time neither I, nor anyone else, had ever spotted for ships firing at a shore target. (A good reason for doing a little practice before attacking the forts.) But it had never struck me that the spotting required would present any difficulty. With good visibility, no hurry, no interference by enemy aircraft or anti-aircraft guns, and a target which was stationary, in no wise camouflaged and very conspicuous, it would have interested me to know in what way it was thought that I would go wrong. This point is connected with an obsession which was strong in the Flagship. A conviction that they wanted aeroplanes and not seaplanes. I do not know whose idea this was, but it was so strong that within a few hours of the Ark Royal joining the Fleet a party from the Flagship, including the Flag Captain, came to us in a picket boat wanting an opinion on the suitability of a landing ground which they had chosen on Tenedos Island.¹³

I can almost visualize the sailors saying, ‘those ruddy seaplanes, they are no damned good!’ and can therefore understand their feeling that land aircraft were likely to prove a better bet. In certain respects indeed aeroplanes would have been more efficient than seaplanes for the work of the fleet. Their great advantages were that on several days they could fly from a land base when seaplanes were unable to rise from the sea, and they could fly higher and so out of rifle range. But it is not clear why aeroplanes should have been better for observing. It was not wheels versus floats that mattered, but the way the aircraft were used. In any case, aeroplanes were not available, and one wonders, therefore, why the Admiral’s staff had not given a modicum of thought to using the seaplanes available efficiently, instead of grieving all the time at not having aeroplanes. The same attitude in an extreme form appears in the Mitchell Report.

At the root of the failure to make the most of the seaplanes, according to Williamson, was the fact that no one in the fleet at the Dardanelles had any real appreciation of what these aircraft could do in the way of spotting. ‘But to be fair, there was no one [in the whole Navy] who had had any experience, and no doubt they would have learnt sooner, if we had not had such very bad luck.’ He cites these instances of ‘bad luck’ which worked against the pilots in the Ark Royal, who understood the importance of air spotting, being given many chances to show what they could do: (1) In the first bombardment of the outer forts on 19 February, when he was up to spot for HMS Cornwallis and could have made a practical test of air spotting for battleship fire, the Admiral ordered her to stop firing as soon as Williamson’s plane was at 2,000 feet and ready. (The Cornwallis was ordered to anchor in deep water, but could not owing to a defective capstan and so had to swop places with the Vengeance.) (2) When Keyes, who was COS to the Admiral, wanted a particular spotting job done, Williamson looked forward to showing what the seaplanes could do. ‘While I was in the Flagship my pilot (I was doing the observing) had to get his aircraft ready and then come over to pick me up. He was a capable officer, but unfortunately in the excitement of his first day of actual war he forgot to fill up with petrol–result, fiasco!’ (3) The wastage of no less than seven hours on 4 March in doing ‘an unnecessary and useless job’. (4) Williamson’s experience on 5 March. He concludes: ‘This was a sorry record, and it is understandable that the senior officers, who knew nothing of our difficulties, formed a poor view of aircraft.’¹⁴ One should mention the inexperience of ships’ personnel as regards co-operation with aircraft. In these four cases, the air was definitely to blame for the second; but it was the least important. The first and third failures were directly due to the Admiral’s orders. Had he used the full air-spotting capability at his disposal on the 4th and 5th, the fourth failure might not have happened, and if it did, it would have been of minor importance.

To sum up, had Admiral Carden concentrated the air resources he had on what should have been the obviously vital job, instead of squandering them as he did, and had there been ample ammunition, it is at least arguable that naval gunnery would have destroyed the Narrows forts in the first days of March and have permitted the fleet to destroy the minefield batteries and go through into the Sea of Marmora before the fateful line of mines was laid on 8 March (see below). As matters developed, however, good aerial spotting was not the crucial consideration.

We have to remember that these were the very early days of military aviation. Nowhere in the Navy at this time had naval gunners contemplated, let alone tried out, air spotting to assist in the attack of ships on shore targets. All gunnery thinking was concentrated on ship-to-ship gunnery. The gunnery specialists in the fleet at the Dardanelles can therefore not be blamed for not foreseeing immediately the importance of air spotting when the Ark Royal arrived with her six low-performance seaplanes on 17 February. Furthermore, the fleet would not have been impressed with their capabilities or potential when they started co-operating with the ships. Would a fully developed and reasonably competent Naval Staff, before the outbreak of the war or in its first months, have made a thorough investigation of methods of aircraft spotting, as well as of minesweeping and of the ammunition required to attack shore defences successfully and have given the fleet special training in such matters? Perhaps this is too much to expect of a Staff which had only come into existence in 1912 and which shared the Navy’s obsession with the big-gun duel between lines of dreadnoughts.

*      *      *

By themselves the Narrows forts, owing to their obsolete guns and fire-control system, could not have prevented the fleet rushing the Straits. The Turkish minefields had the most important function in the defence of the Dardanelles: ‘to form an obstruction sufficiently formidable to prevent the rushing of the Straits’. Responsible for the efficiency of the minefields was the able German Admiral Merten, the chief technical adviser at the Straits. By the end of February 1915 there.were five lines of mines across the Narrows and five more across the Straits just below Kephez Point, the southernmost about 8,000 yards from the Narrows forts.¹⁵ Seventy-four guns, mostly 3-inch and 4-inch, and six 90-cm. searchlights protected the minefields. The minefield batteries were partly fixed, like Dardanos (no. 8), and partly mobile field artillery. Having no fire-control system, they were useless against fast-moving targets. NID had moderately accurate intelligence on these minefields.

But on 8 March, no. 11 line, ‘those mines of destiny’, was laid in Eren Keui Bay. On this date there were 344 mines in place in the eleven lines. They were all contact mines, mostly German Carbonit (Company) mines, and were reliable as regards holding their depth–13 to 15 feet. Though not of the most powerful type (the weight of explosive was 180–220 lb.), they proved effective against the older battleships in the 18 March assault. The minefields were of such density (generally, spaced 44–55 yards apart, except for no. 11, where the mines were 110–165 yards apart) that the mathematical chances against effecting the passage to Nagara, beyond the Narrows, past the ten lines of mines, were greater than 100 to 1; that is, not one of 100 ships could expect to reach Nagara. ‘It is, therefore, clear that the minefields did in reality constitute a formidable barrier against the Fleet and the above facts effectively dispose of the contention that the Straits might have been forced without sweeping the minefields.’¹⁶

It was the original intention of the Admiralty that battleship fire should destroy the forts and silence the minefield batteries before an attempt to sweep the minefields. But this plan had been reversed when the battleship fire had proved ineffective. After the fleet bombardment of 25 February, which had reduced the outer defences, the minesweepers were given the task of clearing the minefields by night sweeping. If successful, this would have permitted the battleships to destroy the forts at close range.

The minesweepers were a failure. On 10 March, at the seventh attempt, they actually reached the Kephez minefield (above line 8), but after one trawler had hit a mine and blown up, the others abruptly turned back. The following night they withdrew as soon as the first shells exploded nearby. Keyes harshly criticizes the fishermen, whom he all but accuses of cowardice.

The less said about that night [11 March] the better. To put it briefly, the sweepers turned tail and fled directly they were fired upon. I was furious and told the officers in charge that they had had their opportunity, there were many others only too keen to try. It did not matter if we lost all seven sweepers, there were 28 more, and the mines had got to be swept up. How could they talk about being stopped by a heavy fire if they were not hit. The Admiralty were prepared for losses, but we had chucked our hand in and started squealing before we had any.¹⁷

The sweepers faced certain handicaps which explain their miserable failure to do the job. (1) The minefields and the associated gun and searchlight defences appeared formidable, although the fire of the minefield batteries, even at short range, was more bark than bite–even the slow trawlers escaped, except on 13 March; but they did have a psychological effect on the trawler crews. Cruiser and destroyer attacks on the minefield batteries and searchlights during sweeping operations had little success, particularly since they could do nothing when the sweepers were actually in the minefield without adding to the dangers of the sweepers, owing to the difficulties of laying, ranging, and spotting at night. ‘The minefield batteries had shown themselves to be so strong that the life of a trawler in a minefield was most precarious, and it was most doubtful, however determined and persistent the attacks made, whether any effective sweeping could be carried out in this area unless the batteries were first dominated.’¹⁸ And yet no trawler was ever sunk by gunfire. The one badly hit had her engines stopped. The casualties were trivial compared to one attack on an enemy trench by the Army later on. How do we explain the timidity of the trawlers’ crews?

(2) The sweepers themselves were quite unsuitable for the task. These were 21 small North Sea fishing trawlers (17 or 18 were available on 18 March), but owing to repairs and rest leave to the personnel, the maximum operating at one time was 7. And their speed was a mere 5 knots when working in formation, less the 2-to-4-knot current of the Dardanelles down the Straits. The slow speed prevented the sweepers from making much progress against the current with sweeps out. This necessitated their getting above the minefield, joining sweeps under fire, and sweeping with the current. Moreover, the steel plating fitted to their bridges rendered the trawlers’ compasses useless. There was no way of fixing position and, even, at times of steering a course.

(3) The human material left something to be desired: raw fishermen from the north-eastern ports, trained in minesweeping, manned the trawlers. They were ‘Hostilities Only’ ratings, mostly of poor physique and lacking in discipline. Their commander, moreover, was a retired officer without sweeping experience. Awareness that the draught of the trawlers was greater than the depths of the mines did not improve the morale of the crews.

(4) The basic cause of the minesweeping failure was that the system of sweeping developed in British coastal waters was never intended for use in narrow waters under fire; it was indeed impracticable in such conditions–unless the minefield batteries were first mastered. Pairs of trawlers, 500 yards apart, towed a 2½-inch sweep wire (kept at the desired depth by two kites) between and behind them. On catching a mooring wire, the trawlers towed the mine into shallow water for sinking by rifle fire. In the Dardanelles this procedure would have to be worked directly under Turkish guns, and for this the crews were not prepared. ‘The fact that their contract of service only insured them against the danger of exploding mines,’ Vice-Admiral K. G. B. Dewar has pointed out, ‘shows that exposure to shell fire was not even contemplated by experienced officers.’ De Robeck observed after the 18 March attack: ‘In some cases their crews appear to have no objection to being blown up by mines, though they do not seem to like to work under gunfire, which is a new element in their calling.’¹⁹ There is indeed no earthly reason why they should have been expected to clear the minefields in the face of constant gunfire at short range. Nothing in their experience had prepared them for such an ordeal.

Leadership could do something towards correcting this situation. On 12 March it was arranged that each trawler was to be given an officer, a petty officer, and a signalman from the fleet, all volunteers, to stiffen the morale of the trawler crews. We hear of one officer carrying a revolver and ‘determined to threaten the trawler skipper with it if he showed any sign of running away!’ On the night of the 13th–14th a really determined attempt was made. This time the trawlers, though under hot fire, did not turn until they were above the Kephez minefield. The first pair made a successful sweep, but this was all that was accomplished. All seven trawlers received hits, some of their sweeping gear was shot away, and they were forced to retire.

The upshot was that the minefields and their defences remained more or less intact. Churchill has summed up the obstacles this way: ‘The minefields blocked the passage of the Straits and kept the Fleet beyond their limits. The minefield batteries prevented the sweeping of the minefields. The forts protected the minefield batteries by keeping battleships at a distance with their long guns. The mobile howitzers kept the battleships on the move and increased the difficulty of overcoming the forts. So long as all four factors stood together, the defences constituted a formidable obstruction.’²⁰ On 15 March Carden decided to revert to the original strategy of first destroying the forts with the battleships, then dominating the batteries, before attempting to sweep the minefields. But the next day he gave up his command for reasons of health. It was time he went. Carden was a charming man and an ideal peacetime admiral, but he had none of the qualities needed for an admiral at war in the technical age.

I Aboard HMS Triad at the Dardanelles, 17 October 1915.

Left to right: Commodore Roger Keyes (Chief of Staff to de Robeck), Acting Vice-Admiral Sir John de Robeck (C-in-Q Eastern Mediterranean Squadron), and General Sir Ian Hamilton (C-in-C3 Mediterranean Expeditionary Force).

IIa Admiral Sir Ernie Chatfield, C-in-C, Atlantic Fleet, 1929–30

IIb Admiral Sir William Fisher, C-in-C, Mediterranean Fleet, 1932–36

Carden was succeeded by his Second-in-Command, Vice-Admiral J. M. de Robeck-a ‘fighting leader’, an officer on his staff called him. A journalist on the spot described him as ‘a most delightful man, a perfect replica of the courteous type of the old English sportsman and country gentleman of bygone days’. ‘His character, personality and zeal inspired confidence in all’, Churchill has remarked. But within a fortnight of de Robeck’s appointment, Churchill was not to be numbered among his admirers. The Admiral’s plan of attack called for a simultaneous ‘silencing’ of the Narrows forts and the batteries protecting the Kephez minefield, so as to enable sweepers to clear a passage through the minefields. ‘It is not expected to destroy the forts even at 8000 yards, but it is expected that ships will dominate the forts to such an extent as to make it impossible for them to interfere with the sweeping operations.’²¹

A telegram Carden had received from the First Lord on the 14th boded well for the coming attack. They had

information that the Turkish forts are short of ammunition, that the German officers have made despondent reports and have appealed to Germany for more. Every conceivable effort is being made to supply ammunition, it is being seriously considered to send a German or an Austrian submarine, but apparently they have not started yet…. All this makes it clear that the operation should now be pressed forward methodically and resolutely at night and day. The unavoidable losses must be accepted. The enemy is harassed and anxious now. The time is precious as the interference of submarines is a very serious complication.²²

There came the day of the attack, 18 March, which saw the heaviest and last naval bombardment of the forts. The results of the attack were: (1) 14 old battleships (10 English, 4 French) and the Queen Elizabeth and Inflexible attacked the Narrows forts with direct fire, putting out of action 4 of the 19 heavy guns, though only temporarily. De Robeck believed that Although the principal forts remained silent for considerable intervals, only a portion of their armaments can be considered disabled’.²³ (2) Four battleships attacked the minefield batteries, and when the Turkish fire let up, six minesweepers were ordered up. They did not get within 2 miles of the Kephez minefield, still less commence to sweep it, before the gunfire sent them back, although none was hit. The minefields and their defences remained practically intact. (3) The loss through unswept mines of line 11 of two old British battleships (Irresistible, Ocean) and severe damage to the battle cruiser Inflexible, as well as the loss of the old French battleship Bouvet, which led to the abandonment of the attack. ‘Though the Squadron had to retire without accomplishing its task it was by no means a defeated force, and the withdrawal was only necessitated owing to the mine menace, all ranks being anxious to renew the attack.’²⁴ The basic cause of the failure on the 18th was the old story: the battleships needed to close the forts to silence them, but they could not do this until the mines had been swept; the mines could not be swept until the minefield defences had been smashed–unless fast sweepers were used.

The particular spoiler on the 18th was line 11 of the minefields. Lieutenant-Colonel Gheel, a Turkish mining expert, had had an inspiration. Noting that the enemy’s ships, when inside the Straits, sometimes manoeuvred in the still water on the Asiatic side, off Eren Keui Bay, he thought it might be worth while to moor a line of mines there. Twenty were laid from the small minelayer Nousret in the night of 8 March in Eren Keui Bay, about 2½ miles south of the permanent minefields and parallel to the Asiatic shore. Four of the twenty mines had been exploded in trawler sweeps of the bombarding area on the nights of the 15th and 16th; yet on the morning of the 18th the commander of the minesweepers reported the area clear. It is a serious reflection on the competency of this officer that the sixteen other mines were not discovered and swept before the 18th.²⁵ Captain Boswell suggests that the cause of this failure might have been any one of these:

(a) No. 11 line, having been laid at right angles to all the other lines, the sweepers may have been looking for the rest of the mines in the wrong place. [Anyone, except perhaps a reliable augur, when dealing with minefields blocking a narrow strait would assume that the lines of mines would be at right angles to the strait.]

(b) The sweepers may have thought that the mines were strays dislodged from the Kephez lines which had drifted down with the current. This was in fact impossible as the area was out of the current.

(c) Inside the Dardanelles there were no lighthouses, beacons, or buoys by which a trawler could fix her position, and so it was impossible to return exactly to a suspicious area.

(d) The officer in charge and the trawler skippers were completely inexperienced in night sweeping of this type.²⁶

Two pairs of trawlers had exploded three of the Nousret mines at about 3 p.m. on the 18th before they turned tail and fled. This was reported to de Robeck the next day! If reported at once, it might well have saved the three British ships that were to be mined in the same area (the Bouvet had already been mined).

Though little damage was done to the Narrows forts on the 18th (what there was was quickly repaired), the shortage of ammunition was of concern to the Turks. Having fired nearly 2,000 shell, the Narrows forts were down to twenty-seven armour-piercing shell, the only kind effective against battleship armour. There was no shortage of ammunition for the medium and light guns. The morale of the defenders of the Straits, despite the ammunition shortage for the heavy guns, was high. There was confidence that their defences would hold, were another naval attack mounted, and that their fleet would deal with any ships that did pass the Narrows. The view of the officers, Turkish and German, was not so sanguine, a number of them believing that a second naval attack would force the Straits or stand a good chance of doing so. There is evidence that responsible Turks and their advisers regarded the situation as desperate. An Associated Press correspondent, who spent 18 March at the Dardanelles, was told that evening by Admiral Merten: ‘We expect that the British will come back early to-morrow morning, and if they do we may be able to hold out for a few hours. I should advise you to get up at six o’clock tomorrow morning and take to the Anatolian Hills. That’s what we are going to do.’²⁷ The official Turkish view (1919) was that a naval ‘break through’ was regarded as ‘not beyond expectation’, and that the Ottoman Government and public were in a state of excitement.²⁸

Neither de Robeck nor the Admiralty was aware of the state of Turkish morale, though, as pointed out, they were aware of the ammunition factor. The War Council authorized the Admiralty on the 19th to instruct de Robeck to continue the assault ‘if he thought fit’. This they did the next day, informing him that he would be reinforced by four old battleships and that ample supplies of 15-inch shell were now available for indirect fire across the peninsula by the Queen Elizabeth. It was the C-in-C’s first intention to renew the attack as soon as practicable. His spirits were temporarily buoyed up by his staff, notably by Keyes and Major W. W. Godfrey, of the Royal Marines. The latter has been described as ‘the hard core of the Admiral’s staff … He was heart and soul for continuing the naval attack on the forts with the object of breaking through the narrows and demonstrating off Constantinople. He believed that the naval operation, given well trained fleet minesweepers, was feasible, and that the Turks would collapse if we appeared off Constantinople. He was a very determined, hard-working and persistent staff officer. He and Keyes never wavered