First bombardment of the Dardanelles

Early in the morning of 3 November 1914 British and French ships shelled the outer forts guarding the entrance to the Dardanelles. The fire lasted only a dozen or so minutes, but one of the shells hit the magazine of the fort of Sedd el Bahr, which blew up. It was the first Allied attack on the strait, for which one of the bloodiest campaigns of the war was fought in 1915.

Churchill’s demonstration

War between the Ottoman Empire and the Entente was hanging by a thread. After the Ottoman fleet’s attack on the Russian ports, on 31 October the Admiralty ordered its ships to begin operations against Turkey, although war had not yet been declared. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, wanted to strike a quick blow. Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden, who commanded the squadron watching the exit of the strait, where Goeben and Breslau had taken refuge in August, was instructed to carry out a demonstration. He was to shell the forts from long range and not put his ships at risk.

Two British battlecruisers were assigned to the operation, Indefatigable, which flew Carden’s flag, and Indomitable, together with two older French battleships, Suffren and Vérité. The battlecruisers took as their targets the batteries on the European side of the entrance, at Sedd el Bahr and on Cape Helles. The French shelled the forts on the Asian side, at Kum Kale and Orhaniye.

The explosion at Sedd el Bahr

The ships fired from a range of just over 7 nautical miles, about 13 kilometres, beyond the reach of the Turkish guns. Each group made one run, lasting about 10 minutes according to most accounts and 20 minutes according to others. The British fired 46 shells of 305 mm calibre, the French about 30. One of the British shells hit the magazine of the old fort of Sedd el Bahr, built in the 17th century at the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula. The explosion wrecked the fort and knocked most of its heavy guns off their mountings, 10 according to frequently cited figures. 86 Turkish soldiers were killed. Some sources state that the defenders’ total losses reached 150 men, including several dozen Germans.

A warning to the Turks

From a military point of view the bombardment was a success, but many historians regard it as a serious mistake. It showed the Turks and their German advisers that the Entente might attack the strait. The commandant of the Dardanelles fortifications, Cevat Pasha, decided to strengthen the defences urgently. The German admiral Guido von Usedom, inspector-general of coastal defence and mines, based them above all on minefields in the narrow part of the strait and on the batteries that were to cover them. The outer forts, as the bombardment had shown, were easy to destroy from the sea. At the beginning of November the Turks laid further lines of mines, and by March 1915 there were already ten.

Some scholars point out that the defences of the strait did not change all that much before the spring of 1915, because the Turks were short of guns, mines and ammunition. In the view of many historians, however, the easy success of 3 November contributed to the belief in London that the forts on the Dardanelles could be destroyed by the fire of the fleet alone. When the fleet tried to force the strait on 18 March 1915, three battleships sank on Turkish mines, and the Dardanelles had to be fought for in the hard Gallipoli campaign.