The Dandarnelles Disaster (23 page)

Hamilton spent the night at Tenedos on HMS
Phaeton.
She left there for Mudros harbour, Lemnos, at four a.m. on 18 March, the day appointed for the great naval attack. The general inspected the shore facilities at daybreak – and found them gravely wanting for a force of 50,000 or more men. Offshore, however, ‘I never saw so many ships collected together in my life.' He sent a message to Kitchener, saying that Alexandria would have to be the army's main base: the RN Division transports ‘have been loaded up as in peacetime and they must be completely discharged and every ship reloaded in war fashion'. Lemnos could not cope with such a task. The cruiser then took Hamilton on a fast 60-mile run along the Aegean coast of
the peninsula so he could see the terrain and possible landing sites. He noted the tangle of trenches already dug at key points on the coast before the ship put about:

Sailing southwards we are becoming more and more conscious of the tremendous bombardment going on in the straits … everyone excited and trying to look calm.

Captain Cameron of the
Phaeton
took his ship as close as he dared to the bombarding ships:

We found ourselves on the outskirts of – dream of my life – a naval battle! … The world had gone mad … the elephant and the whale of Bismarckian parable were at it tooth and nail! Shells of all sizes flew hissing through the skies. Before my very eyes the graves of those old gods whom Christ had risen from the dead to destroy were shaking to the shock of Messrs Armstrong's patent thunderbolts!

A less exalted recollection of the Allied bombardment, probably the loudest noise heard in the Aegean since the volcanic explosion on the island of Thera (Santorini) in 1500 BC, was provided by Marine William Jones of the battleship
Prince George
to the Sound Archive of the Imperial War Museum in London. His ship, of the seventh subdivision, was flanking the French battleships as they attacked the forts:

We got part way up the Dardanelles; the first ship that got sunk was the French …
Bouvet
– she got struck by a mine, turned over and within minutes she was sunk.

Carrying on further up the Dardanelles, we were getting shot at, missed quite a lot engaging guns, batteries and the like on the European and the Asiatic side. Further ahead of us was the
Ocean
, and the
Irresistible
…

All of a sudden, and ahead of us, there was this big explosion which caused the
Ocean
and the
Irresistible
to sink.

Marine Jones's memory tended to accelerate and telescope events, as we shall see. Engine Room Artificer Gilbert Adshead served aboard the
Lord Nelson
(he was below deck in the aft dynamo room which supplied the ship's electricity, but it had a ventilation shaft with an internal ladder
leading up to the quarter-deck and was topped with a ‘mushroom' cap offering slits to look through):

To see that bombardment, never having seen demolition like that before, well, it seemed terrible to me at any rate because the forts seemed to be knocked completely down and we did silence most of the guns. And on our last operation when they had an all-out attack – every ship available – to see if we could definitely finish off the forts and make them surrender, we carried on but we lost about half a dozen ships that day. We lost … the
Bouvet
– I actually saw that, it was a terrible sight …

We made very good progress and we stopped the forts firing, and we were astonished when … the Admiralty said that the naval ships were to no longer attack in the Dardanelles because we'd lost too many ships on this final operation … If we'd only carried on for a little while longer the Turks with their German assistants would have run up a white flag because we'd put so many guns out of action and they were very short of ammunition and they couldn't have carried on for much longer.

The future Captain Henry Mangles Denham, RN, was a newly promoted sub-lieutenant aboard HMS
Agamemnon
. He told one of the most bizarre stories of the bombardment: how Commander St Clair, the battleship's executive officer, ordered ratings to descend on ropes to paint the side of the ship facing away from the direction of fire.

They were quite safe, the men who were painting, because they were on the disengaged side and they couldn't be hit, and at the time we didn't think it particularly unusual. We had to take the opportunity, and we only wanted half the armament manned, so it was quite logical for the other half, the safe side of the ship, to be painted.

Denham thought that Keyes, rather than Carden or even de Robeck, had been the driving force during the campaign. The 18-year-old was on the lookout in the crow's nest on 18 March and felt the impact of the hits on the ship below; he was profoundly shocked to witness the sudden death of the
Bouvet.

The fleet had got on the move from Mudros from 8.15 a.m. It was a perfect early spring day with a gentle breeze, a little early haze that soon cleared and a cloudless sky. The minesweepers reported finding nothing new in
the cleared zone up to four miles short of the Narrows. At 10.30 the
Agamemnon
, behind a destroyer screen, led the way for the First Division, which was flanked by the seventh subdivision,
Prince George
and
Triumph
on either side. Half an hour later the first Turkish howitzers opened up from north of Kum Kale on the Asian side. At 11.30 the battleships took up their initial firing positions seven miles short of the Narrows and started the bombardment. By this time mobile guns and howitzers were blazing away at the heavily armoured ships, which were in line abreast:
Queen Elizabeth
(flag) with de Robeck aboard nearest the European shore, next
Agamemnon
, then
Lord Nelson
and finally
Inflexible.
The flagship first targeted the fort Hamidieh I on the Asian shore, firing across her partners, which attacked various positions on the European side. All four were in action within ten minutes, laying down a deliberate fire, the forts apparently remaining silent while the hidden and movable guns did their irritating worst. At Çemenlik just below Chanak at the Narrows there was a great explosion at about noon as an ammunition store was hit. The fort was abandoned for the time being, as was Dardanos near by, a seaplane pilot reported.

Stand on the ramparts of the Çemenlik fort (now incorporated into an excellent naval museum) today and look across the Narrows and you are bound to see a few of the ships that make a total of about 60,000 passages per year through the straits – one every ten minutes. Many of them are huge tankers, sailing in ballast high out of the water towards the Black Sea or lying low as they return fully laden with oil or liquid gas towards the Mediterranean. The tankers, the bulk carriers for grain or minerals, the ugly container ships and the like are often much bulkier than any First World War battleship, yet they look manageably small at a distance of a mile or less against the cliffs on the European side. The bombarding warships four or more miles to the south-west therefore may not have appeared particularly fearsome as clouds of black smoke were thrown up by their funnels and their guns – until the shells roared in with a noise like an express train and detonated, usually harmlessly in earth but occasionally to more dramatic effect. Within the fort there lies an undetonated heavy naval shell, rusting away in front of the hole it bored into the stone of a thick wall. Many of the guns used in the defence are also on display, some with their breeches blown out.

At sea the gunnery directors and gunlayers found their view obscured by their own smoke, blown back upon them by the north-easterly breeze. But
just after noon de Robeck called on the French squadron to pass through Line A as planned, to fire on the forts and batteries at closer range. By this time
Agamemnon
had taken a dozen hits from a six-inch howitzer battery of four guns firing accurately from the Asian shore behind her. The superstructure was badly damaged, causing the ship to turn full circle to throw off the Turks' aim, but she did not withdraw. At the other end of Line A the
Inflexible
was also taking half a dozen hits from a battery of four six-inch cannon, losing her wireless and suffering fierce fires in her upperworks all the way up to the foretop. So as not to throw out the French Line B as it passed by, the battlecruiser remained in position and maintained fire. De Robeck then ordered her out of the line.

Meanwhile the French
Suffren
and
Bouvet
moved up the Asian side, with
Gaulois
and
Charlemagne
advancing up the European, leaving the British in the middle of the strait, still firing at 14,000 yards. The French soon came under heavy fire in their turn as they advanced to 10,000 yards, then 9,000. By now the forts had joined in and were scoring hits on the French squadron: the
Gaulois
was badly damaged by an armour-piercing shell near her bow, causing Guépratte to ask a British light cruiser to stand by her. She slowed down, listed to starboard and started to go down by the bow but withdrew under her own power. The
Bouvet
had targeted the Namazieh fort opposite Chanak on the European side until the battered French flagship
Suffren
led her back out of the line at about 1.40 p.m.

Five minutes later the
Bouvet
was rocked by a great explosion that threw up a column of ochre and black smoke. Moments later there was another explosion aboard, presumably from a magazine. Destroyers raced to the rescue but she listed heavily, then turned turtle and sank out of sight within two minutes. More than 600 men were lost;
Agamemnon
took two score survivors aboard. Both British and French assumed the ship had succumbed to a lucky shot from a heavy shell, or even a shore-based torpedo. The forts were clearly not disabled; from time to time they fired, then ceased fire, then fired again, as if taunting their attackers. Several mines were spotted in the waters, some swept by the trawlers, two probably released by the
Bouvet
explosions, others apparently free-floating. Like periscopes in faraway northern waters, they seemed to be everywhere. Still the trawlers could not press forward under the hail of mobile artillery fire.

Meanwhile Hayes-Sadler in
Ocean
led the third subdivision of four battleships to relieve the withdrawing French. He took the right-hand station towards the Asian side, the
Vengeance
the left-hand, European side with
Albion
and
Irresistible
between them.
Swiftsure
and
Majestic
moved up
on the flanks to relieve
Prince George
and
Triumph.
At about 3.15 p.m., however, an explosion was heard and seen alongside
Irresistible
, which began to list slowly. The third subdivision may have sailed too close to the Narrows and struck the last transverse line of mines, the tenth, or she may have been caught by the same, last-minute parallel line, the eleventh, laid by the
Nusret
, which accounted for the
Bouvet.
Hayes-Sadler pulled his line back; at just after four p.m. the
Inflexible
, still manoeuvring in her place at the right of Line A, struck another of
Nusret
's mines in Erenkeui Bay with her starboard bow and began quite quickly to go down by the head. She made for Tenedos under her own power, the wounded taken off in a cutter. Ten minutes later the helplessly drifting
Irresistible
, dead in the water, hit a moored mine and began to list to starboard and go down by the stern. De Robeck ordered
Ocean
to stand by her as the bulk of the crew were rescued by a destroyer and a picket boat, Captain D. L. Dent, RN, having issued the order to abandon ship. Despite an unrelenting hail of fire, the destroyer
Wear
(Captain Christopher Metcalfe, RN) lifted 610 officers and men and delivered them to the flagship. Admiral de Robeck sent the
Wear
back with a message to Hayes-Sadler on the
Ocean
: he was to withdraw if he could not get a tow-line aboard the
Irresistible.
This failed, so the ship was left to drift in the hope she could be towed away after dark. De Robeck issued the general recall just after 5.30 p.m.

Obeying under heavy fire from the Asian forts, HMS
Ocean
hit a
Nusret
mine when she was about one mile from the hulk of the
Irresistible.
Water poured in through the hole on the starboard side and her steering jammed. A shell from shore also struck the starboard side, compounding the damage. An attempt to return to an even keel by flooding compartments on the port side failed to forestall or correct a list of 15 degrees to starboard. Three destroyers closed in, ignoring the shelling from both shores, and rescued the crew. The
Ocean
too was now abandoned. After dark, Hayes-Sadler returned to his crippled ship to rescue four men still trapped aboard and left her to float in mid-channel. Later in the evening the destroyers and minesweepers went back to try to clear a path and take the two old battleships in tow. Keyes went with them. No trace of either was found.

The tally for the day was 6 battleships knocked out of a fleet of 18 – a startling loss rate of 33 per cent, even higher if regarded as a part of the total of 16 battleships that had actually gone forward to bombard. The
Bouvet
,
Irresistible
and
Ocean
were sunk. The
Gaulois
was beached in a sinking condition. The
Suffren
, the gallant Guépratte's flagship, was badly damaged
by shellfire and definitely
hors de combat
for the foreseeable future; the French
Charlemagne
had also been damaged by gunfire but needed no immediate help. The
Inflexible
, patched up by her crew as best they could, made it to Tenedos thanks to the brilliant seamanship of Captain R. F. Phillimore, RN. She was pumped out and more temporary repairs were effected before she limped to a shipyard at Malta under escort for a complete overhaul. This was surely a remarkable harvest for a last-minute afterthought of a minefield laid ten days before the great naval attack. ‘It changed the course of history,' said Keyes. The six trawlers sent forward to sweep towards the Kephez Point line under the guns all turned and fled; only two managed to get their sweep out. The Allies had no idea what had done the main damage. Nor did they realise until after the war how little significant damage they had done themselves: two 14-inch guns and perhaps three other large guns had been knocked out; not one howitzer or mobile field gun of the minefield defences was damaged.