Gallipoli (31 page)

Soon the shortage of torpedoes became the E 11’s chief concern, and those that remained were set to run on the surface so that whenever they missed their targets Nasmith could dive into
the sea and recover them. By June 5 a serious defect had developed in the port main motor, the starboard intermediate shaft had cracked, only two torpedoes were left, and Nasmith judged it time to
go home. He entered the Dardanelles and steamed down as far as Chanak hunting for the Turkish battleship
Barbarossa Harradin
, upon which he had made an unsuccessful attack a few days
before. He saw nothing, however, except a large transport anchored above Nagara. The E 11 was now in the most dangerous part of the Narrows, and in her crippled state was quite likely to be washed
ashore. But it was unbearable to Nasmith that he should leave with two torpedoes still intact; he turned back up the Dardanelles, sank the transport, and then returned for the crucial dive through
the Narrows. Off Chanak the trim of the boat became violently affected by the change in the density of the water, and Nasmith dived to seventy feet. About an hour later he heard a scraping noise
which seemed to indicate that the keel was hitting the bottom, and since he knew this to be impossible he rose up to twenty feet below the surface to investigate. He saw then that about twenty feet
ahead of the periscope a large mine had been torn from its moorings by the port hydroplane and was being towed along. Saying nothing to his crew, Nasmith continued for another hour until he was
outside the entrance to the straits. He then went full speed astern with the bows of the submarine submerged and the rush of water from the screws carried the mine away.

There was another dinner aboard the flagship that night, and at the end of it Boyle in E 14 set off again for the Marmara, while Lieut.-Commander Nasmith, V.C., sailed the
E 11 to Malta for repairs.

An extreme crisis had overtaken the Allied Fleet while Nasmith had been away, and it was every bit as serious as the alarm which he had created in Constantinople. Towards the
middle of May news had come through that a U-boat (it was Hersing in the U 21) had been sighted passing through the Straits of Gibraltar. It had been fired at but had got away, and was then
presumably headed for Gallipoli.

During the next week, when Nasmith in the E 11 had vanished into the silence of the Sea of Marmara, there had been a growing depression in the Fleet. The
Queen Elizabeth
had been
something of a symbol for the whole expedition, and it had seemed to the soldiers on shore as well as the sailors at sea that a good few of their hopes had gone with her when she sailed away. De
Robeck had transferred his flag to the
Lord Nelson
, and had remained off the peninsula with the other battleships, but it was not the same thing. The Fleet had an apprehensive air. Each
day the tension increased, and the men on watch kept seeing periscopes on every side. A gambolling porpoise was enough to raise the alarm, and so were the dead and bloated mules that floated out to
sea from the battlefield on shore, their legs projecting to the sky.

In the very early dawn of May 24 a genuine emergency occurred: the old battleship
Albion
ran her bows on to a sandbank off Gaba Tepe and the Turks fired more than a hundred shells into
her while the British tried to tow her off. Eventually the ship lightened herself by firing off all her heavy guns together, and in the recoil she got away. This incident had nothing to do with
submarines, and there were under a dozen casualties, yet it was one more addition to the general feeling of insecurity.

Then on the following morning—at the very moment that Nasmith was gliding into the wharves at Constantinople—the
Vengeance
reported that a torpedo had passed across her bows
while she was steaming between Anzac and Helles. It was true enough. Hersing had managed to get into the Austrian port of Cattaro before his oil ran out, and when he had
refuelled he came straight through to Gallipoli.

A commotion spread through the Allied ships. De Robeck in haste transferred his flag again from the
Lord Nelson
to the
Triad
, a large yacht which had once been a pleasure-going
ship along the Bosphorus, and all the more valuable battleships and transports were ordered to retire at once to Mudros. There was a feeling of desolation in the Army as the ships vanished over the
horizon leaving behind them an unfamiliar, almost empty sea. Those few of the larger vessels that remained could not disguise the atmosphere of tension in which they waited, hour by hour, for the
hidden attack which now seemed bound to come.

Commander Hersing struck at mid-day. He saw the old battleship
Triumph
near Gaba Tepe with a ring of destroyers circling round her, waited for his chance, and fired. The torpedo passed
easily through the
Triumph
’s nets and the ship at once took a heavy list. For eight minutes, while the destroyers came rushing in to the rescue, she remained at an angle of
forty-five degrees, spilling her crew into the sea. Then she capsized and floated for a time with her green bottom upwards in the sunlight. The crews on the neighbouring ships stood to attention as
she made her last plunge down to the bottom through clouds of smoke and steam. All this took place in full view of the two opposing armies on the shore, and while the Anzac soldiers watched in
dismay a cheer came up from the Turkish trenches. This was the finest sight the enemy had seen since the campaign began, but they had no wish to be vindictive; after a few opening shots no further
attempt was made to fire on the wreck or her survivors.

The
Triumph
was a twelve-years-old ship of 11,800 tons, and only seventy-one men had gone down with her, but this was the end of the security of all battleships at Gallipoli. De Robeck
gave orders for a further retirement, and presently the
Majestic
, the oldest battleship of them all, was left alone with a screen of destroyers off Cape Helles. Admiral Nicholson, the
commander of
the flotilla there, came aboard her from the
Swiftsure
during the course of the afternoon. So eager were Nicholson and his staff to let the
Swiftsure
get away that they did not wait to pack their belongings; baggage, bedding, tinned preserves and an assortment of wines were dumped in a trawler and ferried across in a matter of
minutes.

Few believed that the
Majestic
would survive, and the soldiers in their dugouts kept watching her all afternoon as she cruised along the shore. By nightfall, however, nothing had
happened, and the old battleship went back to Imbros in the darkness. Some fishing nets had been erected across the mouth of the open harbour there, and these she carried away on her first attempt
to enter; but otherwise no harm came to her through the night. Keyes went out in the destroyer
Grampus
hoping to ram the enemy submarine if she surfaced, but he saw nothing.

In the morning half a gale was blowing, and although the submarine scare was still at its height de Robeck felt that the Navy could not leave the Army entirely in the lurch. The
Majestic
was ordered back to Helles again, and she remained off-shore all through that day and the following night. A half-cynical fatalism prevailed on board; in the officers’
wardroom the last of the champagne and the port was drunk on the grounds that it would have been a pity to see it go to the bottom.

At 6.40 the following morning the cry ‘Torpedo coming’ went up, and the sailors ran for the boats. The strike was made so low down on the port side there was scarcely a tremor on
deck, but immediately afterwards a loud explosion shook the ship and she heeled over to port. The crew were given just fifteen minutes to get off before she sank bottom upward, her bows resting on
a sandbank by the shore and exposing a fraction of her keel above the surface. A moment before the end a sailor ran the full length of the keel with the sea closing in around him. He reached the
exposed bows just in time, and sat astride there until presently a boat came by and took him off. Forty-eight of his shipmates were lost. For the rest of the campaign the upturned hulk of the
battleship remained there, like some stranded whale washed up on the shore.

For a few minutes it looked as though they were going to catch the U 21. Air Commodore Samson was circling overhead, and he dropped his bombs on the U-boat through the
clear water. But Hersing dived under the French battleship
Henri IV
, and when Samson picked him up again, steaming up the Dardanelles in the sunshine, all his bombs were gone. But he
permitted himself a gesture: he swooped and emptied his rifle on to her hull. The U 21 was last seen moving into the Narrows, and at some point in the Sea of Marmara must have passed Nasmith
returning from Constantinople.

Thus on this one day, May 25, almost in one hour, two submarines, the German U 21 and the British E 11, brought an entirely new element into the campaign, and it was almost as important as the
twenty Turkish mines which had been sown so fortuitously in Eren Keui Bay when the Allied Fleet attacked in March.

Nasmith’s raid was, perhaps, the more telling of the two, for it caused the Turks to issue an immediate order that for the time being no further reinforcements were to be sent to the
peninsula by sea. Instead of a short overnight voyage the soldiers were now faced with a roundabout train journey of 150 miles to Uzun Keupri on the Adrianople line. Thence a single road led down
into the peninsula, another hundred miles away—a march of at least five days for the men, and of considerably more for the bullock carts and the camels that were now obliged to bring in their
equipment. Other supplies had to be sent down the Sea of Marmara by small boats which hugged the coast and travelled only by night. All this meant a drastic slowing down of Liman’s line of
supply. ‘Had the British managed to increase their undersea offensive,’ he says in the study of the campaign which he wrote after the war, ‘the Fifth Army would have
starved.’ And the German naval historian adds: ‘The activity of the hostile submarines was a constant and heavy anxiety, and if communication by sea had been completely severed the Army
would have been faced with catastrophe.’ At one point the Turks on the peninsula were down to 160 rounds of ammunition per man.

Liman is a little tart about the activities—or rather the lack of activity—of the German Navy. The story was spread in Germany, he says, that the
Goeben
and the German submarines carried the main burden of the defence at Gallipoli; but the
Goeben
never took part at all, and the U 21, having got safely through to
Constantinople and been much fêted there, emerged only once again. She came out of the straits on July 4 and sank the French transport
Carthage.
Finding that his return route was
blocked, Hersing turned west and steamed for the Adriatic, to be seen no more. Yet he had achieved his purpose. The mere threat of his presence off Gallipoli had scattered the Allied battle fleet,
and his two sinkings were enough to keep it in harbour in the islands ever afterwards.

For the British submarines, however, the situation was rather more difficult; in order to make good the work that had already been done by Boyle and Nasmith they had to keep up the pressure in
the Sea of Marmara and if possible increase it; and indeed, in all the records of the Royal Navy there is hardly anything that quite compares with the undersea offensive that now began. In a world
that has since grown used to the unearthly courage of young men with fantastic machines it is still difficult to credit some of the things that happened. Six-pounder guns were fitted to the decks
of the submarines to help them eke out their supply of torpedoes, and two new arrivals, the E 12 and the E 7, ran up to Constantinople, where they bombarded the powder mills, put a torpedo into the
arsenal, cut the railway line and chased the trains along the shore. Soon the commanders learned to handle the changing density of the water, and they even turned it to advantage; by lying on top
of the layer of heavier specific gravity when they wished to hide or rest they saved themselves the danger and difficulty of diving great depths to the ocean floor.

It was on Boyle’s third trip into the Marmara, on July 21, that a new hazard was discovered. As he passed through the Narrows he saw an obstruction under the water, and he reported this to
Lieut.-Commander Cochrane in the E 7, when he met her in the Marmara next day. On July 24 Cochrane came out and he confirmed
Boyle’s report: the Germans were building a
net. He himself had been entangled in it for half an hour, ninety feet down.

This was a much more formidable obstacle than anything the submarines had encountered before. By the end of July it was completed—a vast steel mesh of two-and-a-half-inch wire stretching
entirely across the straits, and reaching 220 feet down to the floor of the channel. A line of buoys painted alternately red and black supported it on the surface, and one end was secured on the
peninsula about a mile north of Maidos, the other on a steamer anchored near Abydos on the Asiatic side. Turkish motorboats loaded with bombs patrolled the surface like spiders waiting at the edge
of a web. Specially sited guns were set up on either bank.

There was a gate in the middle of the net, and unless the submarines were lucky enough to strike it their only way of getting through the wire was to ram it at full speed underwater and hope for
the best. Boyle described this experience: ‘I missed the gate and hit the net. I was brought up from eighty feet to forty-five feet in three seconds, but luckily only thrown fifteen degrees
off my course. There was a tremendous noise, scraping, banging, tearing and rumbling, and it sounded as if there were two distinct obstructions, as the noise nearly ceased and then came on again,
and we were appreciably checked twice. It took about twenty seconds to get through.’

But Cochrane on his next trip did not get through. Hopelessly entangled, he fought the net for twelve hours on the bottom of the straits while bombs exploded about him, and it was only when the
hull was leaking and the lights had failed that he burned his papers and rose to the surface to surrender.