British naval mission leaves Turkey

The British chronology of the war records under 17 September 1914 the departure of the British naval mission from the Ottoman Empire. It was headed by Vice-Admiral Arthur Limpus. According to most studies, the British officers had left the country by 15 September at the latest, and the date in the chronology may mark the moment the news reached London. Either way, it was the end of several years of the presence of British Royal Navy officers in Constantinople.

The British in the Turkish fleet

From 1909 Great Britain sent successive naval missions to Turkey, which were to reform the outdated Ottoman fleet. Limpus took charge of the third of them in May 1912. Like his predecessors, he was at the same time formally commander of the Ottoman fleet. The British trained crews and advised on the purchase of warships and the modernisation of the dockyards. The powers then shared out influence in Turkey: the British were responsible for the navy, and the Germans, represented from the end of 1913 by the mission of General Otto Liman von Sanders, for the army.

The requisitioned battleships

The great hope of the Ottoman fleet was two modern battleships being built in Great Britain: Reşadiye and Sultan Osman I. They had been paid for largely by a public subscription, to which savings and jewellery were given across the whole country. At the turn of July and August 1914, as Europe prepared for war, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had both ships seized. Taken into the Royal Navy as Erin and Agincourt, they became a symbol of British betrayal and provoked a wave of outrage in Turkey.

A few days later the German warships Goeben and Breslau entered the Dardanelles. The Ottoman government announced that it had bought them, and in mid-August it terminated the agreement on the British naval mission. The British officers were removed from the ships, and their places were taken by the Germans of Rear-Admiral Wilhelm Souchon.

End of the mission

There was no longer any point in the British staying in Constantinople. On 9 September Churchill sent Limpus a telegram in which he thanked him for his work and ended the mission, because the Turkish fleet was “paralysed by German intrigues”. In September Limpus became Admiral Superintendent of the naval dockyard at Malta.

The admiral knew the Dardanelles better than almost anyone in the Royal Navy. Yet when a few months later the British were preparing an attack on the straits, command was given not to him but to Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden. After the mission’s departure German influence in Constantinople no longer had a counterweight, and less than a month and a half later the Ottoman fleet under Souchon’s command attacked Russian ports on the Black Sea.