British occupy Lemnos

On 23 February 1915 transports carrying two battalions of British marines, from Plymouth and from Chatham, sailed into Mudros Bay on the island of Lemnos. They were commanded by Brigadier-General C. N. Trotman. Lemnos, lying in the north of the Aegean Sea, about 50 kilometres from the entrance to the Dardanelles, became the advanced base of the fleet that for four days had been attacking the forts at the entrance to the Straits.

An island of a neutral state

The matter was not simple, because Lemnos belonged to Greece, which was neutral in the war. The Greek fleet had occupied the island in October 1912, during the First Balkan War, but the Ottoman Empire had never recognised its loss. The future of the islands of the northern Aegean remained unsettled. The Prime Minister of Greece, Eleftherios Venizelos, who favoured the Entente, found a way to help the British without openly breaking neutrality. The Greek garrison would simply withdraw from the island, and the Allies could then treat it as enemy territory. According to the British official history, Venizelos also let it be understood that the Greek batteries would be left in place for the British to look after. The government in London learned of this promise on 9 February.

The Admiralty at once sent two battalions of marines to Lemnos; they had already sailed from England on 6 February. They were to guard the base and support the fleet in minor operations ashore, above all covering the demolition parties destroying guns in captured forts. This was not yet an army capable of occupying the Gallipoli peninsula, but it was a first step towards committing land forces.

A harbour without quays

Mudros Bay was one of the largest natural harbours in the Aegean. It could hold a whole fleet, but apart from that it lacked almost everything. There were no quays for landing men and cargo, no warehouses, no adequate supplies of drinking water and no labourers.

The organisation of the base was entrusted to Rear-Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss, who had until then commanded the patrol at the western entrance to the English Channel and was well versed in co-operation with the French. He arrived on the island at the end of February, without a staff, as senior naval officer on the spot. He was often called the governor of Lemnos. He had to organise from scratch a port which within a few weeks was to receive tens of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of ships.

Base of the expedition

The marines from Lemnos soon went into action. On 4 March two companies of the Plymouth battalion landed at Kum Kale and Sedd el Bahr to cover sailors destroying guns in the forts at the entrance to the Straits. They met strong Turkish resistance and returned to the ships the same day, having lost several dozen killed and wounded. On the same day the 3rd Australian Brigade arrived at Mudros from Egypt. In March it was joined by the Royal Naval Division and a French division.

After the failed naval attack of 18 March, Mudros Bay became the place where troops concentrated before the landing on the Gallipoli peninsula. In April 1915 it teemed with warships and transports, and camps and field hospitals sprang up on its shores. Lemnos remained an Allied base until the end of the war. On 30 October 1918, in the harbour of Mudros, aboard the British battleship Agamemnon, the armistice that ended the war with the Ottoman Empire was signed.