Battle of Imbros

The Battle of Imbros was the last sortie of the battlecruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau out of the Dardanelles. Since 1914 both ships had sailed under the Ottoman flag as Yavuz Sultan Selim and Midilli, but they still had German crews and a German commander. On the morning of 20 January 1918 they surprised British ships at anchor off the island of Imbros and within roughly half an hour sank two monitors. An hour later, however, they ran into British minefields they knew nothing about. Breslau sank with most of her crew, and Goeben, struck by several mines, struggled back into the strait and ran aground. The sortie, which was meant to show that the Turkish fleet was still dangerous, cost it both of its most valuable ships.

Name and dates

In English-language literature the engagement is called the Battle of Imbros or the sortie of Goeben and Breslau. Polish Wikipedia speaks of the “battle near Imroz”, from the Turkish name of the island, which the Turks today call Gökçeada. This site uses the name “Battle of Imbros”, because that form was used in 1918 by all the belligerents and by British sources.

The engagement itself lasted one day, 20 January 1918. The ships weighed anchor on the afternoon of 19 January and reached the entrance to the strait before six in the morning of 20 January. In the wider sense the battle also includes the week in which British aircraft bombed the immobilised Goeben. We describe it below, but leave the page’s end date at 20 January. The main source for this page is the British official history of the naval war (Henry Newbolt, Naval Operations, vol. V), which also draws on Hermann Lorey’s German official history. Times are given according to Newbolt. Other accounts give somewhat different times and sequences of events.

Background

In August 1914 Goeben and Breslau escaped the British fleet into the Dardanelles. Fictitiously sold to Turkey, they became the core of the Ottoman fleet, and their commander, Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, took command of the whole Turkish navy. For more than three years they fought mainly against the Russians in the Black Sea. In the autumn of 1917 Souchon was recalled to Germany, and his successor was Vice-Admiral Hubert von Rebeur-Paschwitz. After the October Revolution and the armistice of Brest-Litovsk calm settled over the Black Sea, so the ships could be used elsewhere.

On land, meanwhile, the Turks were losing. In December 1917 the British entered Jerusalem. According to some historians Rebeur-Paschwitz wanted to draw British ships away from the coast of Palestine; according to others he also hoped to strike at troop transports from Salonika. The plan he prepared was bold. The ships were to leave the strait, destroy the British vessels guarding the exit from the Dardanelles off Imbros and, if that succeeded, sail on to Lemnos and bombard the British base at Mudros from the sea. A German submarine was already waiting off Mudros. Enver Pasha agreed to the sortie, but warned that the two ships were as valuable to Turkey as the Grand Fleet was to Britain.

The British Aegean Squadron was dispersed. Its commander, Rear-Admiral Sydney Fremantle, had divided his forces into six groups scattered from Crete to the Bulgarian coast. Their tasks were to escort convoys, fight submarines, blockade the Turkish coast and support the troops on the Salonika front. Fremantle assumed that the Germans would have to sweep the minefields for a long time before leaving the strait and that the British would notice this. He also expected that Goeben, if she came out at all, would try to break through to the Adriatic rather than attack British bases. He called such a strike a “desperate venture”, possible only as a last resort. At the beginning of January Fremantle left for London and command passed to Rear-Admiral Arthur Hayes-Sadler. On 16 January Hayes-Sadler sailed to a conference at Salonika aboard the pre-dreadnought Lord Nelson. The squadron’s other old battleship, Agamemnon, lay at Mudros. In Kusu Bay on the east coast of Imbros only two monitors were at anchor: the large Raglan, armed with two 356 mm guns but capable of little more than 6 knots, and the small M28 with a single 234 mm gun. The destroyers Lizard and Tigress were patrolling nearby.

The Germans did not know everything either. Their minesweepers had checked only a narrow strip of water west of Sedd el Bahr. They had no idea of the large system of minefields that the British had laid between Imbros and the Gallipoli peninsula. A few hours before setting out they received a chart captured from a British patrol vessel that had run ashore in the Gulf of Saros in December. Pencil lines on it suggested where the mines lay. The Germans treated them as precise data and plotted a course between them. They carried out no fresh reconnaissance, so as not to betray the plan.

Course of the battle

Goeben and Breslau, with four Turkish destroyers (Muavenet, Basra, Numune and Samsun), set out at four in the afternoon on 19 January and at 3.30 a.m. passed the net barrage at Nagara. At about 5.40 a.m. on 20 January they were at the exit from the strait off Sedd el Bahr. The destroyers turned back and the cruisers turned south-west. At 6.10 Goeben struck a mine. The damage seemed slight and Rebeur-Paschwitz ordered the ships to carry on. The morning was misty and no one at the British posts noticed the ships. Breslau went ahead to cut off the escape route of the ships in Kusu Bay.

The British sighted the enemy only after seven. The destroyer Lizard sent the agreed signal “Goblo”, meaning that Goeben was out. At about 7.40 Goeben opened fire on the observation and wireless station at Cape Kephalo, while Breslau fired on Lizard and drove her off to the north. Then both cruisers turned their guns on the monitors. Raglan replied with her 152 mm gun and her turret, but Breslau’s first salvoes wrecked her fire-control positions and later ones hit the engine room. According to some accounts a shell from Goeben then pierced the turret barbette and set the charges alight. Raglan settled on the bottom of the shallow bay, and M28, hit within a few minutes, burst into flames and, according to some accounts, soon blew up. Fishing boats guarding the nets tried to screen the monitors with smoke, but the fire was too heavy. By the time the destroyer Tigress reached the scene, Raglan was already sinking.

Rebeur-Paschwitz decided to carry out the second part of the plan and headed south, towards Lemnos. The mine had, however, wrecked Goeben’s compasses, and the navigator was fixing the position with a sextant from landmarks on the coast. The ships drifted east of the intended course, straight into the minefield between Kephalo and Sedd el Bahr. British aircraft from Imbros had already appeared over the cruisers. At about 8.30 Breslau, which was just moving ahead of Goeben, struck a mine. The sailors could see mines all around them in the clear water. Goeben tried to take Breslau in tow, but at 8.55 she herself hit a second mine. Breslau ran onto four more and sank quickly. Rebeur-Paschwitz abandoned the attack on Mudros and turned back towards the strait.

Turkish destroyers came out to rescue the survivors, but Lizard and Tigress drove them off with gunfire until they themselves came under fire from the shore batteries. Then the British destroyers picked 162 survivors of Breslau out of the water. At 9.48 Goeben struck a mine for the third time and listed to port, but kept going. An air battle broke out over the strait. The Greek pilot Aristidis Moraitinis, escorting two British seaplanes in a Camel fighter, forced down three enemy machines according to the British official air history. One of the British seaplanes went down in flames. At about 11.30, near Nagara Point, Goeben suddenly turned towards the shore and ran aground. According to Newbolt the ship’s captain mistook the buoys marking the passage through the net barrage and gave the helmsman a wrong order. Some accounts say the ship was deliberately beached to keep her from sinking.

Goeben under the bombs

Over the following days British naval aviation (the Royal Naval Air Service), supported by Royal Flying Corps aircraft from Salonika and by the Greeks, bombed the immobilised ship without a break. Mist, low cloud and heavy anti-aircraft fire hampered the attacks. According to the British air history about 15 tons of bombs were dropped in all, but they weighed at most 112 pounds and could not penetrate a battlecruiser’s armour. Only a few hits were recorded. An attempt to shell Goeben from a monitor on the evening of 24 January came to nothing because of mist. Two seaplanes adapted for dropping torpedoes reached Mudros on 25 January, but did not manage to take off in time.

On the afternoon of 26 January the old Turkish battleship Turgut Reis pulled Goeben off the shoal, and the ship returned to Constantinople. The British did not learn of this at once. On the night of 27–28 January the submarine E14 entered the strait to torpedo the cruiser. She no longer found her, and on the way back she was sunk by Turkish batteries. Her commander, Lieutenant-Commander Geoffrey White, was killed and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

Losses

According to British nominal casualty lists about 125 men were killed on Raglan and 11 on M28. Among the survivors was Raglan’s wounded commander, Commander Viscount Broome. The British also lost one seaplane with its pilot. Polish Wikipedia gives a higher figure, about 170 killed. On Breslau about 330 men died according to German returns, and 162 were picked out of the water, according to the British official history. Goeben had struck three mines. The Turkish dockyard was unable to repair her, so the holes in the hull were merely enclosed with concrete cofferdams.

Significance

Rebeur-Paschwitz achieved the first aim of the sortie, but paid a very high price for it. The Ottoman fleet lost its most modern light cruiser, and its only battlecruiser was out of action for a long time. The Turks were indignant that German officers had so recklessly risked ships sailing under their flag. Enver and his circle decided that Goeben would never again take part in a similar venture. Until the end of the war the ship did not come out into the Aegean again.

For the British the battle was at once a defeat and a victory. It showed how dispersed the squadron was and how poorly prepared it was for a sudden sortie. Had one of the two battleships been near the Dardanelles, Goeben might not have returned. The engagement was decided, however, by British minefields of which the Germans knew nothing. After the battle the commander of the Mediterranean fleet, Admiral Somerset Gough-Calthorpe, ordered them to be strengthened. The failed bombing of Goeben also showed that the light aircraft bombs of the time could not sink a heavy warship. Goeben survived the war and, as Yavuz, served in the Turkish navy until 1950.