The Dandarnelles Disaster

by Dan Van der Vat

  Routine administrative and informative signals were sent to his flagship and every other German naval detachment afloat or ashore. The admiral was in touch by wireless with the highly important naval Etappe (staging post), ably run by Commander Hans Humann in Constantinople, with some of the colliers the Imperial Navy had positioned in carefully chosen, out-of-the-way spots in the Mediterranean in case of need as well as other merchant ships such as the General, and of course with the Navy Office in Berlin. But he was sent only one brief order in the vital opening days of war and then left to get on with his work. He used his own discretion in deciding to carry out his predetermined first war-task, disrupting the French, regardless of the new instruction to go to Constantinople at once. By the moment he received it, very little extra time would be needed to obtain a rich dividend from confounding French movements: he saw no need to clear this with Berlin, even though there was a risk (not much of one as it turned out) that he might get involved in an action with French ships, which could have compromised his mission to Constantinople.

  Souchon wondered whether to dip his colours in salute, as peacetime courtesy decreed, to the two approaching British ships, which he assumed would be commanded by an admiral likely to be senior to him. He decided not to, in case the gesture was misread as hoisting a battle flag. The Goeben was cleared for action – guns manned and loaded, ready ammunition in place, rangefinders hard at work – but kept her guns aligned fore and aft. The British, who must have known the Goeben had an admiral aboard whereas they did not, also refrained from saluting. The eastbound Germans and the westbound British approached each other at a combined speed of well over 40 knots, passing each other, the Goeben to the south, at a distance of 9,000 metres (10,000 yards or five nautical miles), well within the range of the guns of both sides. The British big guns tracked the Germans but held their fire as the two battlecruisers turned in a wide arc to swing behind the Goeben, beginning what must stand as the most dramatic race in naval history.

  The British had no means of knowing that the Goeben was badly afflicted with boiler trouble. Had the ship been given more time to ‘shake down’ when first commissioned this might have been dealt with, but as it was some 4,500 boiler tubes had to be replaced at Pola just before the battle-cruiser was readied for war service. Even that did not solve the problem, which meant that the Goeben was probably some two knots short of her design speed of 27 knots.

  The two British battlecruisers also had their problems. Neither had a full complement for war service. Both needed maintenance; one had been forced to set sail from Malta in the middle of refitting. All this reduced their design speed of 25 knots by a similar margin. The Germans therefore crept inexorably ahead as the three big ships sent up towering columns of black smoke over the Mediterranean.

  But the price paid by the Germans for opening a gap was very high. Below deck every available man, including the off-duty watch, officers, even telegraphists, was roped in to help with trimming coal, feeding the insatiable furnaces and clearing hot ash as the Goeben piled on steam.

  Two hours in that hell below was all a man could stand [Telegraphist Georg Kopp recalled]. Smarting and irritating, the fine coaldust in the bunkers penetrated the nose and clogged the throat. Lungs laboured heavily as the men struggled at their work. A crust of coaldust would form in the throat and cause a racking cough. Coffee and lemonade were constantly and greedily gulped down. But the relief did not last …

  In silence, but pluckily and undismayed, the stokers stuck to their work – half naked … they served the fires … The sweat ran in streams down their gleaming torsos. The searing heat streamed from the furnaces, burning the skin and singeing the hair. And still the work went on in the torrid stokeholds.

  It was here that the issue was being fought out.

  The effort involved would have challenged a contemporary coal-miner. It was not just a case of shovelling coal out of a midships bunker into the furnaces close by; as this was being done, others were shovelling fuel along the sides of the hull from more distant bunkers towards midships, fighting to keep their balance on the shifting coals and gulping down dust in the filthy air. One Seaman Westphal died of asphyxiation on the run to Messina; before the Goeben reached her goal, Captain Ackermann would work another three men to death.

  Breslau reached Messina at four a.m. on 5 August, Goeben almost three hours later. The larger ship was escorted for the last 90 minutes of her run by five Italian destroyers, three ahead and two astern, as a courtesy. Ackermann was able to stop briefly to bury Seaman Westphal at sea. The battlecruiser was down to her last few hundred tonnes of coal, but the General and four other German merchant ships were waiting in the roads and the exhausted sailors were put to work again on the dispiriting task of taking coal aboard. Sicily in August was not cool, but the crew of the Goeben performed the herculean labour of loading 1,600 tonnes in little more than

  12 hours. They were plied with drinks and music from the ship’s band and those who collapsed from heat and exhaustion were allowed a few hours off in the comfortable bunks of the liner General, followed by a bath. Souchon reluctantly stood the men down when his flagship had loaded some two-thirds of her coal capacity, about 2,100 tonnes. The light cruiser acquired 495 tonnes for a total of 920. The Germans even managed to buy the cargo of a British collier that happened to be in port.

  With the Italians officially neutral, Souchon and his men had every reason to feel rather lonely in a sea dominated by France and Britain. The German admiral therefore appealed to Admiral Haus, the Austrian naval chief, to send supporting ships to escort him from Messina. As Austria was not yet at war with the British or French, Haus declined, and Berlin warned Souchon that Austria was unlikely to help anyway, urging him to press on eastwards. The Italian authorities told him he would not be allowed to coal in their harbours again. And an overnight signal from Berlin to Souchon received early on 6 August told him that ‘Entry to Constantinople [is] not yet possible at present for political reasons’. The Turkish Cabinet was as divided as ever about the alliance with Germany; once again Enver acted behind the backs of the sceptics by ensuring that the German ships would at least be allowed into the Dardanelles when they got there. But Souchon must have wondered whether he was about to put his head in a noose when Turkish attitudes were so equivocal. Even so he suppressed his doubts and signalled:

  I shall break through to the east.

  Meanwhile Admiral Milne had done very little. He had sent the two battlecruisers westward to block the Strait of Gibraltar because he believed the Germans were bound to try to run for home, especially after their bombardment of the Algerian coast. He ordered the light cruiser Dublin, visiting Bizerta (see below), to join up with the battlecruisers. Once the Germans were in Messina they ostensibly still had two options (Turkey did not yet figure at all in British or French naval calculations): to run for home or to join the Austrians in the Adriatic. If westward-bound from Messina, a ship must leave northwards and then turn west; if heading east she must run southward first and turn eastward round the ‘toe’ of Italy.

  On 30 July 1914, Milne had received the following message, personally drafted by Churchill and so important in the light of subsequent events that it needs to be cited in some detail:

  Should war break out and England and France engage in it, it now seems probable that Italy will remain neutral … The attitude of Italy is, however, uncertain, and it is especially important that your squadron should not be seriously engaged with Austrian ships before we know what Italy will do. Your first task should be to aid the French in the transportation of their African Army by covering, and, if possible, bringing to action individual fast German ships, particularly Goeben who [sic] may interfere with that transportation. You will be notified by telegraph when you may consult with the French admiral. Do not at this stage be brought to action against superior forces, except in combination with the French, as part of a general battle … We shall hope later to reinforce the Mediterranean, and you must husband y
our forces at the outset [author’s emphases].

  The significance of this verbose message, quoted at length but still not in full, will become clear; suffice it to say here that wireless was in its infancy in 1914, which meant that signals, transmitted in cipher and Morse code, had to be relayed, often contained garbles which necessitated repeats, and might take half a day or a lot longer to get through, whereupon they had to be deciphered. Churchill’s text looks more like a draft of a parliamentary speech than an operational message to an admiral about to go to war. The above text is copied verbatim from Admiralty signal records in the British National Archives. This is part of how it was reproduced in Churchill’s history of the war of 1914–18, The World Crisis:

  It now seems probable should war break out and England and France engage in it, that Italy will remain neutral … Except in combination with the French as part of a general battle, do not at this stage be brought to action against superior forces … You must husband your forces at the outset and we shall hope later to reinforce the Mediterranean.

  Churchill thus tidied up the punctuation, reconstructing the three sentences quoted here (he also changed ‘Goeben who’ to ‘Goeben which’!). He commented: ‘So far as the English language may serve as a vehicle of thought, the words employed appear to express the intentions we [Churchill and Fisher, the First Sea Lord] had formed.’ There can be no denying that the revised version changes the emphasis in the original text, which is badly drafted and therefore open to more than one interpretation. To take one example, was Milne not supposed to engage German ships unless they were ‘individual’ and ‘fast’ and interfering with the French transports? Was he not to cover them if the German ships (there were after all only two) were sailing together? Nor is there any definition of ‘superior forces’, which turned out to be a tragic omission.

  Milne, not unreasonably, read the message as meaning that his absolute priority was to protect the French transports, a task which rightfully belonged to the much bigger French fleet. He relayed the gist of the message to Troubridge, in his sailing orders issued at Malta on 2 August, ending with the words: ‘I am to avoid being brought to action against superior force. You are to be guided by this should war be declared [author’s emphasis].’ On the same day the Admiralty told Milne:

  Goeben must be shadowed by two battlecruisers. Approach to Adriatic must be watched by cruisers and destroyers. Remain near Malta yourself.

  That evening Troubridge took his squadron of four heavy cruisers, the light cruiser Gloucester and eight destroyers to watch the mouth of the Adriatic. The two battlecruisers were temporarily placed under his command as well. Milne, told he could link up with the French fleet as war was imminent, asked if he could now open his secret war orders, which contained the Anglo-French cipher to be used in wartime – even though his standing orders, issued in May 1913, specifically called for this in the circumstances. The affirmative reply took more than 12 hours to reach him, so there was a total of 24 hours’ delay before Milne on the afternoon of 3 August offered his support to Lapeyrère. Reply came there none. Milne now sent the light cruiser Dublin to Bizerta – the wrong direction – to look for Lapeyrère and to hand over a letter he had written repeating his offer of help; it was never delivered.

  Sir Archibald Berkeley Milne inherited his title from his baronet father, an admiral of the fleet. From the age of 27 he entered upon a series of postings to royal yachts, culminating in his appointment as flag officer commanding all of them, in the rank of rear-admiral, in 1903. He was 48. Though both a dandy and a ladies’ man, and a close friend of Princess Alexandra, frequently wronged wife of the Prince of Wales who became King Edward VII in 1901, Milne never married. Lord Fisher, the former and future First Sea Lord of humble origins, detested him. The lower deck called him Arky-Barky, but Fisher, in retirement in 1912 when Milne was given the plum Mediterranean command, protested strongly to Churchill as First Lord: ‘I consider you have betrayed the navy,’ he wrote, and much more. He called Milne many names, the shortest of which was Sir B. Mean; after the Goeben scandal Fisher called him Sir Berkeley Goeben. His main base was Malta, and in 1914 he flew his flag on the battlecruiser HMS Inflexible.

  Milne’s second-in-command and flag officer of the First Cruiser Squadron was of an entirely different stamp. Affectionately known to the lower deck as the ‘Silver King’ for his mane of white hair, Ernest Charles Thomas Troubridge was descended from one of Nelson’s close associates and a distinguished naval and military family. Strongly built, with a ruddy face and a bluff, jovial manner, he got on well with both his juniors and his seniors. Like Milne and so many other senior naval officers, he came from an upper-class background, but unlike Milne he was no courtier. In 1888, at the age of 26, he won a Royal Humane Society award for diving into the sea at night to save a sailor who had fallen overboard from a torpedo-boat. A captain by 1901, he was an official observer during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, producing important reports that influenced future tactics in the Royal Navy. The gifted seaman and leader of men was also good at staffwork, becoming Naval Secretary to Churchill’s predecessor as First Lord and rising as a rear-admiral in 1912 to naval chief of staff, the first man to hold this new post. Fisher was one of his greatest admirers, though this would change …

  In 1914 Troubridge commanded a squadron of four heavy cruisers from one of their number, HMS Defence. Significantly, the Imperial German Navy, the Royal Navy’s upstart rival whose fleet, ship for ship, was the best in the world in many respects, deployed only two of this type on front-line service in 1914, in Graf Spee’s squadron: they were the last built by the Germans (in 1904). Displacing about 14,000 tonnes, the heaviest armament of the British ‘armoured cruisers’ was the 9.2-inch gun and their maximum armour six inches thick while their top speed was barely 23 knots. A heavy cruiser was no match for a capital ship, which it could not even outrun, slower and less nimble than a light cruiser, and of no value in a fleet action, as the Battle of Jutland in 1916 would prove: Defence was sunk there. None was laid down in Britain after 1905.

  The Germans entered Messina from the north. Milne had been ordered not to enter Italian waters for fear of upsetting neutral sentiment; as the strait is only two miles wide at its narrowest, there could be no question of a chase down the channel. British warships, including the Dublin (Captain John Kelly, RN), stayed the requisite three miles offshore as the Germans took on supplies in full view. Milne ordered Troubridge to detach the light cruiser Gloucester (Captain Howard Kelly, RN, brother of John) to watch the southern exit of the strait.

  Sicilians and Italians lined the shore on both sides as a powerful sense of impending drama spread. While the small vessels fed the large grey ones with coal, enterprising local traders from Messina sailed out to them, offering food and drink. Other boats were crowded with sightseers; musicians came out to serenade the sweating German sailors; local newspapers pulled out all the stops in their headlines: ‘Into the jaws of death’, one paper proclaimed; ‘Towards death and glory – the bold venture of Goeben and Breslau’, shouted another. There would not be another scene like it until 1939, when the German ‘pocket battleship’ Admiral Graf Spee prepared to leave Montevideo on the River Plate after taking refuge there following a fight with three British cruisers. Thousands of locals watched avidly and the scene was broadcast live round the world by radio. There are other parallels with this later drama, as will become clear. After a five-hour respite for the crews, the two German ships quietly began to raise steam for full speed. Some 36 hours after their second visit to Messina inside a week, the Goeben and the Breslau weighed anchor and moved off.

  At 5.10 p.m. on 6 August there was an urgent message from HMS Gloucester on her lonely patrol at the southern exit of the Strait of Messina: the Goeben had just come out, ‘steering east’. Ten minutes later the Breslau appeared. Both ships were careful to hug the coast, within the three-mile Italian territorial limit, as they rounded the Italian foot and headed northeast towards the Adriatic.
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  Howard Kelly’s light cruiser was three knots slower than the Breslau (28 knots), and her heaviest guns were a pair of six-inchers, one fore, one aft. She also had ten four-inch guns and two torpedo tubes. By keeping contact with the Germans in dangerous conditions the Gloucester was able to discover, at considerable risk, where Souchon was actually going, and only gave up the pursuit on a direct order from Milne, when it was clear that the Germans had outpaced the rest of the British fleet and would get away. The conduct of the ship was a beacon of courage and competence in a sorry saga of ineptitude and hesitation, salvaging some honour for an embarrassed Royal Navy.

  When Kelly’s report reached him, Milne was about one-third of the way along the north coast of Sicily, heading east. Mindful of the order not to enter Italian waters, he saw no alternative but to turn about and take the long route round the great island, which meant he could never hope to catch the Germans. That this did not interest him overmuch is shown by the fact that he took his ships at a far from urgent speed back to Malta – to collect coal which the capacious British battlecruisers did not need. By the time an Admiralty message not to worry about territorial waters reached him it was too late to be relevant. Dublin and two destroyers had left Malta at two p.m. to join Troubridge; Milne diverted them to seek the Germans and make a torpedo attack on them. John Kelly worked out that he would not catch up until mid-morning the next day; but at least he put his foot down, on the practical principle that you never know what may turn up – perhaps one of Souchon’s ships might break down.