Текст книги "Gallipoli"

Автор книги: Alan Moorehead

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But all this lay in the future in the early months of the first world war, and the submarine itself was still undergoing basic changes in design. The periscope, for example, was originally fixed in one set position, and its mirrors produced an inverted image, so the commander was obliged to bring the whole vessel close to the surface before he attacked, and his outlook was upon a strange world in which ships were for ever floating upside down. Even when the periscope became movable it was an unhandy device: as it rose upward the commander rose with it, beginning from a squatting position and ending on the tips of his toes. By 1915, however, most of these primitive inconveniences had been overcome, and the British E class (whose dispatch to the Dardanelles had so angered Lord Fisher) was a formidable instrument. It was a vessel of 725 tons, equipped with four torpedo tubes and oil engines which achieved a surface speed of about fifteen miles an hour. Submerged and running on its electric batteries it was capable of proceeding at ten knots for an hour, or even for periods of twenty hours at more economical speeds. In deep waters it descended by flooding its tanks until it had about a ton of buoyancy in hand, and the vessel, with its horizontal rudders depressed, was then driven down by its motors. Directly it stopped moving it rose to the surface again.

In shallow waters – and the E Class could descend to over 200 feet – the commanders had no fear of flooding their tanks entirely and of lying on the bottom so long as the air in the boat remained reasonably fresh – a period of some twenty hours. As they were not then moving there was still enough power in their accumulators to drive them to the surface again. The submarine’s time of greatest danger was, of course, during the three or four hours when it was obliged to cruise about on the surface to replenish its batteries.

At Gallipoli these submarines were faced with an objective which was entirely new and fantastically dangerous. If they could once get through to the Sea of Marmara they knew that they could do pretty much what they liked with the Turkish shipping, more particularly with the vessels that were bringing down reinforcements and supplies to Liman’s army on the peninsula. But how to get there, how to penetrate the Dardanelles?

The straits were swept all night by searchlights, and as soon as a submarine surfaced, as it was practically bound to do in the course of the forty-mile journey, it was not only fired on but ran the risk of being caught by the various currents that set towards the shore. Ten lines of mines off Kephez Point had to be negotiated, and beyond these there were the Narrows, under a mile wide, with guns on either side and patrol boats on the watch. There was another hazard: a stratum of fresh water about ten fathoms deep poured down the Dardanelles from the Sea of Marmara, and it was of much lighter density than the salt water below. This made a kind of barrier in the sea, and as they passed through it the submarines were thrown violently out of control. It was not unlike the experiences of the first supersonic aircraft when they met the sound barrier in the sky; no one could make out why this strange, deadly disturbance should occur, and the commanders were forced to rise to the surface where they at once came under the fire from the enemy batteries on the shore.

Up to the time of the landing every attempt to force the Narrows had failed, and even the Australian E2 was to last only a few days before she was caught on the surface and sunk. A French submarine, the Joule, was destroyed before she even reached Chanak. Yet the exploit still seemed possible, and the young commanders of the E Class submarines who came out from England during April were eager to try again. Many of them had fought under Roger Keyes’s command in the North Sea during the early months of the war, and their morale was very high. They believed they had only to try new tactics and they would get through.

For the German U-boats the problem at Gallipoli was quite different. Their target – and it was a superb target, almost a sitting duck – was the British battle fleet cruising along the shore of the peninsula in the open Ægean, and they were withheld from it not by the Narrows but by the wide expanse of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. In April there was no German U-boat at Constantinople and none in the Mediterranean. The only way for the Germans to reach the scene of action was to sail round northern Europe and enter the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar; and this meant running the engines until almost the last ounce of fuel was gone. There was, it was true, a scheme for sending small U-boats in section by rail to Pola on the Adriatic coast, but nothing had come of this as yet.

And so at the opening of the campaign both sides were baulked in their undersea offensive. Each could see the prize plainly before it: for the British it was the helpless Turkish shipping in the Marmara, for the Germans the unprotected Allied battleships in the Ægean; and neither so far had been able to strike.

But now, at the end of April, there began a series of events which were to alter the whole character of the campaign. On April 25, the very day of the landing, Lieut.-Commander Otto Hersing, in the German U-boat 21, set out from Ems on the long journey around the north of Scotland for the Mediterranean. Two days later at Gallipoli, Lieut.-Commander Boyle, in the British E 14, slipped quietly into the Dardanelles and headed for the Narrows. From this moment both the Allied Fleet and the Turks on Gallipoli were in extreme danger.

Boyle had the idea of going through the Dardanelles on the surface under the cover of darkness, and he set off at two in the morning. He had not gone very far, however, before the Turkish searchlights and guns drove him down to a depth of ninety feet, and he continued there until he judged that he had passed under the Kephez minefield. Then he came up to twenty-two feet, intending to make the actual passage of the Narrows with his periscope raised. The disadvantage of this manœuvre was that the periscope made a distinct wash on the sea, and there was a desperate half-hour when the enemy guns around Chanak got his range. At one stage the crew of a Turkish patrol boat were grabbing at the periscope whenever Boyle brought it to the surface for a few seconds to see where he was going. Yet he got away, and soon after dawn came up unscathed in the Sea of Marmara. The passage had taken six hours.

For the next three weeks the E 14 cruised about at will. Her greatest success was the sinking of an old White Star liner that was bringing down from Constantinople 6,000 troops who were to join in the battle on the Cape Helles front. There were no survivors. It was a bigger victory than anything that had yet occurred on land, and there was immense elation in the Allied Fleet when Boyle came safely out again into the Ægean on May 18. Now at last they had found a way through. Admiral Guépratte had in the meantime lost a French submarine in the mysterious barrier in the straits, but that did not prevent him from congratulating the British; he sailed his flagship round the E 14 with his band playing Tipperary and the British national anthem.

Another submarine, the E 11, was waiting to take the E 14’s place in the Marmara, and her young captain, Lieut-Commander Nasmith, dined aboard the flagship on the night of May 18 with de Robeck, Keyes and Boyle. It was an animated party. Boyle had been recommended for an immediate award of the Victoria Cross. Keyes, who was still chafing at the withdrawal of the Queen Elizabeth and at the latest refusal of the Admiralty to allow the Fleet to resume its attack on the Narrows, thought he had begun to see a ray of light at last. Having heard Boyle’s story, Nasmith set off that same night, and sixteen hours after leaving the Admiral’s dining-table he was resting on the bottom of the Sea of Marmara. Unknown to anyone he had formed a plan which was more daring than anything which had been attempted before: a direct attack on Constantinople itself.

His first act on coming to the surface near the town of Gallipoli was to seize a Turkish sailing vessel and lash her to the E 11’s side, so that she would act both as a disguise and a decoy. When after several days no target appeared he cast off this Trojan sea-horse and steamed directly up the Marmara.

On May 23 he sank a Turkish gunboat and several other smaller craft, and then on the following day he fell in with the Nagara, a transport that was making its way down to the Dardanelles. There was an American journalist on board the Nagara, Raymond Gram Swing of the Chicago Daily News, and he says he was on deck that morning chatting to a Bavarian doctor. Boyle’s exploits of the previous weeks had become known in Constantinople, and Swing had just remarked to the doctor, ‘It’s a fine morning for submarines,’ when he paused, gazed out to sea in astonishment, and added, ‘And there’s one.’ E 11 broke the calm surface very gently about a hundred yards away, and four men appeared on the conning tower. One of them in a white sweater (it was Nasmith), used his cupped hands as a megaphone: ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Swing of the Chicago Daily News.’

‘Glad to meet you, Mr. Swing, but what I mean is what ship is that?’

‘The Turkish transport Nagara.’

By now the ship’s crew were in a state of extreme alarm, some coursing about the deck, others, with their fezzes still on their heads, jumping into the sea.

‘Are those marines?’ Nasmith asked.

‘No, they’re just sailors.’

‘Well, I’m going to sink you.’

Swing asked, ‘Can we get off?’

‘Yes, and be damned quick about it.’

The confusion in the Nagara had now reached the point where everyone had begun to scramble over the sides, and the lifeboats were lowered so clumsily that they half filled with water. The Turks were frenziedly baling with their fezzes. As Swing appeared to be the only calm man on board, Nasmith directed him in launching the last boat and in picking up the sailors and passengers who had jumped or fallen into the sea. Nasmith then closed the ship, and an immense orange flame went up as he sank her: she was filled with ammunition.

Soon after this E 11 was driven away from the coast by a detachment of Turkish cavalry, but she managed to chase and sink another transport, and a third ship beached herself on the shore. By now the survivors of the wrecks had raised the alarm in Constantinople, and from early morning on May 25 the Turkish artillery on both sides of the Bosphorus were standing to their guns. In order to calm the population in the event of an action taking place, an announcement was made that there might be firing practice during the course of the day.

The submarine surfaced at 12.40 p.m., and Nasmith saw before him a large freighter, the Stamboul, berthed alongside the arsenal. His first torpedo ran in a circle and on its return narrowly missed the E 11 herself. His second, however, struck home, and he dived, heading through the city into the Bosphorus, while a barrage of artillery crashed over his head.

The panic that now broke out in Constantinople gives an indication of what might have happened had the Allied Fleet appeared there in March. While the Goeben hastily shifted her anchorage into the shelter of her attendant ships, a mob fled through the streets and everywhere the shops ran up their shutters. On the docks all activity ceased, and a contingent of soldiers which was embarking for Gallipoli was precipitately ordered back to the shore again. Now, in one moment, the powder factory on the wharves and the crowded wooden houses on the slopes above seemed utterly exposed, and it was apparent to everyone that there was very little that the fire brigade could do if this was to be the prelude to a serious attack.

Meanwhile, Nasmith and his men were struggling for their lives. The current in the Bosphorus was even stronger than in the Dardanelles, and for some twenty minutes the submarine was out of control, bumping from shoal to shoal along the bottom as far as Leander’s Tower. She was righted eventually, and with great skill Nasmith turned back through Constantinople. ‘The next day,’ here-ported later, ‘was spent resting in the centre of the Sea of Marmara.’

Then on May 27 he resumed his attack, sinking ship after ship in the approaches to the Golden Horn. A terror spread through the Sea of Marmara, for it was thought that at least half a dozen submarines were operating. No vessel of any size was allowed to leave port without an escort of destroyers and gunboats, and these repeatedly tried to ram the E 11 whenever she rose to the surface to attack. Nasmith paused in his operations only when the air in the submarine became so foul that he was obliged to surface in order to allow the crew to come on deck and bathe.

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.

Nasmith, Boyle and the others were not deterred; they continued to pass through, and by the end of the year the net was so damaged by their repeated rammings it had almost vanished altogether. Up to the last, however, the passage through the Narrows remained an ordeal of the most frightening kind, and perhaps from that very fact it acted as a psychological stimulus on the crews. One seems to have read the story in some boyhood book of sea adventure: the pirates’ cave with its treasure lies hidden in the cliffs, but one has to make a dangerous dive beneath the sea to reach it. And some get through and some get trapped halfway.

There is an almost dolphin-like air, a precise abandon, in the way the E-boats frisked about at times. On seeing a convoy, the commanders would deliberately surface and pretend to be in difficulties so as to entice the protective gunboats away. Then, diving deep, they would turn back and demolish the boats of the convoy one by one. They shot up the caravans of camels and bullock carts making their way down the Bulair isthmus with loads of barbed wire and ammunition. When they were short of fresh food they surfaced beside the Turkish trading caiques and provided themselves with fruit and vegetables. Wherever they could they saved their torpedoes and their ammunition by boarding enemy ships and simply opening the sea-cocks or placing a charge on the keel. Sometimes prisoners were carried around for days on end before they could be put ashore, and these were often very strange people – Arabs in their desert robes, sponge-divers and Turkish Imams, and once a German banker, wearing only a short pink vest, who complained that 5,000 marks in gold had just been sent to the bottom.

When more than one submarine was operating the commanders would make a rendezvous, and with their vessels tied up together far out in the Sea of Marmara they would exchange information for an hour or two, while their crews bathed in the sunshine; and then perhaps they would go off on a hunt together. Once there was a disaster. The French Turquoise ran aground and was captured. Enemy intelligence officers found in the captain’s notebook a reference to a meeting which he was to have at sea in a few days’ tine with the British E 20. It was a German U-boat that kept the rendezvous, and she torpedoed E 20 directly she came to the surface. Only the British commander and eight of the crew who were on deck survived.

In August Nasmith sank the battleship Barbarossa Harradin. Expecting that she would come south to take part in a new battle on the peninsula, he lay in wait for her at the top of the Narrows – having, on the way through, scraped heavily against a mine. The battleship appeared in the early dawn escorted by two destroyers, and she was taken utterly by surprise. She capsized and sank within a quarter of an hour.