British squadron leaves Smyrna

On 15 March 1915 the British Admiralty ordered Vice-Admiral Richard Peirse to send the battleships Triumph and Swiftsure from Smyrna to the base at Mudros and to return to Egypt himself. So ended the operation against Smyrna that had been under way since 5 March. It had brought neither the destruction of the forts nor an agreement with the Turkish governor, but the port had nonetheless ceased to be a danger to the Allies. The British chronicle of the war recorded the day as the withdrawal of the squadron blockading Smyrna. In reality the blockade continued, only it was now conducted by smaller ships.

A truce without agreement

The talks with the vali, Rahmi Bey, begun on 9 March under a flag of truce, produced no result. The American ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, reported to Washington on 14 March that the governor had rejected the Allied terms. Turkish accounts attribute to Rahmi the words that he would sooner burn the city than surrender it. According to them, the governor had paraffin distributed among the guard posts and offices in case of a landing, and women and children sent inland by train. These stories, however, cannot be verified precisely.

The British were also alarmed by an incident at sea. At about 2 a.m. on 11 March, before the truce had ended, the seaplane carrier Anne Rickmers, lying furthest from the shore, was hit by a torpedo. The hold that it struck was filled with timber, which saved the ship from sinking. Peirse believed at the time that it was the work of a small steam launch that had fired a torpedo or towed a mine under the ship’s bow. In fact the attacker was the old Turkish torpedo boat Demirhisar, a small vessel with German officers on board. A few days earlier she had slipped out of the Dardanelles and was cruising the Aegean, hiding among the islands by day. The admiral took this as proof that the vali had no control over the military, and sailed with the squadron to Lesbos to await orders.

An envoy of the governor appeared once more with the assurance that the attack had not been a breach of the truce but the work of a torpedo boat acting on its own. The talks were continued by a staff officer sent by General William Birdwood, according to Turkish sources the intelligence officer Wyndham Deeds. After meeting the vali he concluded that the military were too strong for any agreement to be possible.

A blocked port

The main aim of the operation had nevertheless been achieved, though in an unexpected way. After British minesweepers began clearing a channel through the minefields, the Turks scuttled two steamers in the narrows below Fort Yeni Kale, and later three more. The channel leading to the port was completely blocked, and Smyrna could no longer serve as a submarine base. Peirse concluded that without large land forces further operations made no sense.

The recall of the squadron, however, was decided by the Dardanelles. The Admiralty and Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden were just preparing a great attack on the Narrows, the narrowest point of the strait, and needed every battleship. That same day the Admiralty ordered the thirty fastest trawlers to be sent to the Aegean for minesweeping. From 16 March the whole fleet intended for the assault on the strait was assembled off the Dardanelles.

The blockade continues

The entrance to the gulf was guarded from then on by the destroyers Wear and Welland, supported by the cruiser Minerva. Demirhisar, which had taken refuge in Smyrna after the attack on Anne Rickmers, waited there for a month. On the night of 15–16 April she slipped through the blockade and attacked the transport Manitou, carrying British troops, but missed. Pursued by British ships, she ran aground off the Greek island of Chios and was destroyed. Smyrna remained in Turkish hands until the end of the war.