The Dandarnelles Disaster (11 page)

The British were soon forced to rely on food imported from North America. This recourse opened up their transatlantic shipping to the eventually catastrophic depredations of the German U-boat campaign, which came closest of all factors to knocking the United Kingdom out of the war. The closure of the Dardanelles amounted to an inverted blockade: the Allied naval forces waiting outside were not conducting such a procedure against officially neutral Turkey but were notionally watching for the enemy German ships to come out. They were legally entitled to stop and search a warship in case it was carrying enemy German sailors, just as they would have been entitled to stop a merchant ship carrying supplies meant for the Germans, in order to prevent their delivery. But when the Turks accepted Weber's action, it was as if they also accepted that they would soon be under siege and might as well raise the drawbridge in their own time before the inevitable attack came.

The dread consequences of the Turco-German treaty and the arrival of the Mediterranean Division eight days later were not so obvious at the time. The closure was an act of war by, or on behalf of, a supposedly neutral power, but the British and French, their attention naturally focused on the burgeoning impasse on the Western Front, showed little immediate inclination to do anything about it. There was as little activity in the Aegean for the whole of October as there had been for most of September and indeed
since Souchon's arrival. It was a different story in the Sea of Marmara, the Black Sea and the Bosporus strait which links them.

The impatient Souchon had been pressing the Turks for permission to exercise in the Black Sea since early September; this was reluctantly granted in mid-month, initially for two ships at a time, excluding the ‘purchased' German pair for the time being. At this point, on 16 September, Admiral Limpus took his rejected men out of Constantinople and sailed away to Malta. Enver and his political supporters told Souchon there were to be no naval ‘demonstrations' off the coasts of Bulgaria and Romania for fear of causing unnecessary alarm. Once General Weber had closed the Dardanelles on the 26th, events in the Turkish fleet gathered pace. On 3 October Souchon sent the
Goeben
and
Breslau
into the Black Sea for the first time, to exercise with two Turkish battleships. On the 8th
Breslau
was sent there again to scout for the Russian Black Sea Fleet, which however the Russians had prudently confined to port in their main base of Sevastopol, to avoid provoking the Turks. On the 12th Souchon risked sending his entire serviceable fleet into the Black Sea on manoeuvres, receiving a metaphorical slap on the wrist from a complaisant Enver.

German and Turkish naval staff were hard at work on operational plans and orders. A German ‘soft loan' at this juncture helped to underpin a nascent pro-war majority in both the CUP leadership and the Cabinet: the Turks were now confident enough to demand, from all the warring powers, an end to the demeaning ‘capitulations' conferring extra-territorial status on privileged foreigners. The Entente powers were no less keen than the Central powers to comply.

Although the anti-war faction was slowly dwindling, Enver felt from about the middle of October that in the absence of a smashing new triumph on the part of the Germans and their allies and/or a decisive step by Turkey, the rising tide of support for war would peak and begin to ebb. On 22 October he drew up a plan for Turkish intervention in the war and put it up to the German General Staff for comment: it included a move to seize the initiative in the Black Sea complete with military moves against Russia, against Britain in Egypt and in the Balkans, depending on developments there. The General Staff approved and politely looked forward to early delivery. Two days later Enver personally presented Souchon with his orders to enter the Black Sea in strength, attack the Russian coast and seize maritime supremacy, whenever he was ready. Individual orders went to Turkish naval officers to follow the German admiral's instructions.

On 26 October Souchon signalled to Berlin that he was ‘entering Black Sea with fleet under guise of fleet exercise, with intent to attack …'. The next day a Turkish fleet entered the Black Sea from the Bosporus intent on war for the first time in 36 years. The ships, including
Yavuz
and
Midilli,
both sporting the red and white Ottoman flag, formed groups to bombard four Russian naval bases – Sevastopol, Odessa, Feodosia and Novorossiysk – and to lay mines along the Russian Black Sea coast. Souchon ended his fleet order with the pseudo-Nelsonian envoi, also hoisted in flag form on the
Goeben/Yavuz
as she turned away for Sevastopol
:
‘Do your utmost: the future of Turkey is at stake.' Never was truer word spoken.

The fleet command allowed the whole of 28 October for preparation, rehearsal, final training and detailed orders to the crews, and for the task groups assigned to each target to get into position for the concerted series of attacks at dawn on Thursday 29 October. The pair of torpedo-boats assigned to shell Odessa, displacing a mere 160 tonnes each, jumped the gun in the most literal sense by opening fire early. Panicky wireless messages in plain language were quickly broadcast from Odessa, alerting all Russian naval stations in the Black Sea: ‘War has begun … war has begun …'

Soon afterwards a Turkish gunboat appeared off Novorossiysk on the north-east coast of the Black Sea, east of the Crimean peninsula, under a white flag. A cutter brought a Turkish officer ashore with a warning: the port's oil tanks and corn silos, and ships in harbour, would come under shellfire in four hours' time. This gesture was made in order to enable the authorities to evacuate civilians. At 10.50 a.m. the modern, four-funnelled light cruiser
Midilli
duly appeared and fired no fewer than 308 rounds of ten-centimetre ammunition at Novorossiysk in salvo after salvo. The oil tanks blazed fiercely, sending streams of burning fuel downhill into the town and forcing people to flee for their lives; 14 ships were sunk or damaged. A vast pall of smoke hung over the harbour like a funeral pyre. A Turkish cruiser appeared off Feodosia and also delivered a warning, well before opening fire on the town.

Alerted by the wireless warnings from Odessa, the forts of Sevastopol opened a fierce shellfire as soon as the long grey shape of the
Goeben
with her five gun turrets, each showing two long 28-centimetre guns, appeared in the light haze about four miles offshore as the sun came up at about 6.30. She was accompanied by two small Turkish escorts. The whole city shook to the tremors from the defensive barrage. Considering that the coastal artillery had not fired a shot in anger in 60 years, the Russian gunners
performed well, even though much of their ammunition fell short. Some of it did not: the attacking trio were seen to move backwards and forwards in an attempt to put them off their aim. Two ten-inch shells passed through the
Goeben
's after-funnel, her wireless antennae were damaged, a searchlight destroyed and a boiler-room was also hit. One of the flagship's treacherous boilers failed. Only 47 rounds of 28-centimetre shells were fired, along with a dozen shots from the battlecruiser's secondary 15-centimetre armament – a light barrage that could only have been a tribute to the spirit of the defenders (and quite possibly evidence of a shortage of German 28-centimetre shells). Little damage was done to the city, and unaccountably no Turkish or German shell came near the bulk of the Black Sea Fleet moored in harbour.

On the way back to the Bosporus, the flagship came across a Russian steamer which had been converted into a minelayer – the
Prut.
Captain Ackermann signalled her to stop, lower her lifeboats and abandon ship. He then ordered her sunk by gunfire, sending her with her 700 mines to the bottom. Some of the crew, including the captain, were taken prisoner, the rest allowed to row to safety. A Russian Orthodox naval chaplain refused to leave the doomed ship, standing at the stern by the Russian flag, beard flowing in the breeze, with a holy book in one hand and crossing himself with the other: he went down with the blazing wreck. Shortly afterwards three small but modern and fast Russian destroyers tried a torpedo attack, which took more than 130 rounds of 15-centimetre shell to drive off. A Russian collier was also seized. Mines were laid by the attackers in several parts of the northern Black Sea, including the Kerch Channel leading to the Sea of Azov (by the
Midilli
) and off Sevastopol. The mines would soon claim victims. The Turkish warships also sank a Russian gunboat and three steamships.

Inevitably, as a result of all this unprovoked aggression, Russia declared war on Turkey. The other members of the Triple Entente, Britain and France, followed suit. Rear-Admiral Wilhelm Souchon of the Imperial German Navy was now fully entitled to say: ‘Mission accomplished.'

CHAPTER 4

Councils of War

The first three months of war in Europe had already thrown up a series of spectacular events from which only one clear conclusion could be drawn: the war could not ‘be over by Christmas' and might well last very much longer. The Germans, having decided to knock out France, Russia's ally, so that they could deal with Russia herself, the main enemy, at their leisure, violated Belgium's internationally guaranteed neutrality in strength on 3 August in order to outflank the French Army, thus ensuring that Britain would enter the war on France's side, in defence of Belgium. This heavily weighted right hook was intended to swing round the French armies positioned close to the German border and take Paris – the Schlieffen Plan. The Germans also brought up formidable siege artillery, including their new heavy howitzers, against the Belgian fortress complex centred on Liège, which fell on 17 August, opening the way for the main attack on France.

The British Expeditionary Force (BEF), initially of just four divisions, was safely transported across the Channel to take up its place, as agreed in pre-war staff talks, on the French left – just in time to be attacked by the German First Army at Mons in Belgium. The Allied left wing conducted a fighting retreat that lasted for two weeks until French reinforcements arrived from further east and the German advance was halted at the Battle of the Marne in the early days of September. The Germans fell back on the River Aisne, broadly the line they were to hold, with only minor adjustments, for the next four years.

The Belgian Army was dug in at the western end of its exiguous national territory and the BEF, augmented to six divisions, moved up alongside on its right. The Germans, trying to rescue the Schlieffen Plan that had been botched by their own generals and halted at the Marne, threw fresh troops into the right of their line and launched a fierce new outflanking attempt, which became the First Battle of Ypres, on 30 October. After enormous losses they fell back on 11 November, frustrated by the machine-guns and unmatched musketry of the flower of the British regular army, which also suffered heavy casualties. The German strategy of a breakthrough on their
right was permanently frustrated, but the Germans did capture the main Belgian ports, including Antwerp and Zeebrugge – a headache for the Royal Navy when German light naval forces, including U-boats, began to operate from them.

In mid-August Winston Churchill, who wanted, and sometimes seemed to manage, to be ‘everywhere at once' (he had, for instance, gone far outside his naval brief to persuade Kitchener in the first hours of the war not to return to his command in Egypt and then persuaded Prime Minister Asquith to make him Secretary of State for War), had used spare naval manpower to form a Royal Naval Division (RND), initially of 8,000 men who had volunteered for service at sea. When the Germans laid siege to Antwerp on 26 September, once again deploying their giant howitzers, the First Lord of the Admiralty volunteered to lead the fight for the great port on the Scheldt when it appeared about to fall. This offer, regarded as ‘mad' by his political and naval contemporaries, was not taken up, but he did throw in the half-trained RND to support the hard-fought defence of the city (BEF units arrived too late to save it). He also made a brief visit to the front there. Some 1,500 RND men were interned in neutral Holland while nearly 1,000 surrendered. Antwerp fell on 10 October. Perhaps the strongest impression Churchill carried away from the lost battle was the awesome power of the German heavy siege-guns. They certainly worked in Flanders …

On Germany's eastern front, only a few divisions had been left to hold off the Russians in East Prussia pending the fall of France. A smashing Russian victory at Gumbinnen was a false dawn; the Russians were outgeneralled by the newly appointed team of Hindenburg (army commander) and Ludendorff (chief of staff), suffering a shattering defeat in East Prussia at Tannenberg and another at the Masurian Lakes. But the Russians fared better on their Austrian front, where the Habsburg armies lost over two million men in a series of inconclusive or bungled battles, despite German reinforcements. By Christmas the war of movement for which the great European powers had prepared was effectively over; but there was stalemate on all fronts as the belligerents, trying to cope with terrible losses, began to train up new armies and dug in for the long haul. The trench line on the Western Front soon stretched from the Channel to the foothills of the Alps and the border of neutral Switzerland. Further to the south-east, the Austrians confronted the Serbians and Russians in the Carpathians and the Balkans; and to the north-east, the Germans faced the Russians in East Prussia and Poland.

At sea in the first three months the Royal Navy and the Imperial Navy confronted each other warily, an approach that led to several skirmishes and incidents but not the great knock-out blow of a second Trafalgar that the admirals on both sides were half-expecting and purportedly wanted (there were private misgivings in both camps). The Kaiser ordered the High Seas Fleet to remain on the defensive for the time being. On the British side, with the whole country looking to its navy for salvation and triumph, Churchill and his more discerning admirals came close to despair as one piece of bad news followed another. Only hindsight would show just how decisive was the Royal Navy's first strategic move, which happened before war broke out: the order to the Grand Fleet, handily mobilised in full for a royal review, to sail direct to Scapa Flow, its designated main base against Germany, on 29 July without standing down the reservists. The guardian of the nation, manned by 60,000 sailors, formed a grey steel line over 18 miles long as it steamed 800 miles up the east coast of the United Kingdom, taking two days to arrive. The Grand Fleet was the ultimate guarantor of the traditional British naval strategy against a continental European enemy: blockade, now silently directed against Germany, albeit from an unprecedented distance for fear of mines and the unproven but feared submarines. The Grand Fleet in Scottish waters barred the northerly route from Germany to the broad Atlantic; the southerly route via the Channel was blocked by the destroyers of the Harwich Force and the Dover Patrol, supported by submarines and ultimately by the 15 pre-dreadnoughts of the Channel Fleet, stationed along England's south coast.