First ship sunk by a torpedo from a seaplane

On 12 August 1915 a British Short 184 seaplane, flown by Charles Edmonds, an officer of naval aviation, that is of the Royal Naval Air Service, dropped a torpedo on a Turkish ship lying close to the shore of the Sea of Marmara, near the Bolayır isthmus. The torpedo hit, and the ship settled on the bottom. It was the first combat attack in history on an enemy ship carried out with a torpedo dropped from an aircraft. Many chronologies of the war speak of the first ship sunk in this way, but that wording needs a qualification: the target had most probably already been disabled earlier by a British submarine.

The aircraft took off from the seaplane carrier Ben-my-Chree. She was a fast passenger steamer which before the war had run between Liverpool and the Isle of Man. At the beginning of 1915 the Admiralty chartered and converted her, and in June the ship reached the Aegean to support the Gallipoli operation. She brought two prototypes of the Short 184 seaplane, designed to carry a torpedo. The British had carried out trials of dropping torpedoes from seaplanes as early as the end of July 1914, and the Italians had made similar experiments. Weak engines and the heat, however, meant that an aircraft carrying a torpedo barely got off the water. For a combat flight the pilot had to go alone, without an observer, and with his fuel tanks only partly filled.

On 11 August airmen from Ben-my-Chree spotted a large ship by the northern shore of the Sea of Marmara, near the Bolayır lines. The next day the carrier moved deep into the Gulf of Saros, on the other side of the narrow isthmus, and lowered onto the water Edmonds’s aircraft with a fourteen-inch torpedo weighing about 370 kilograms. Edmonds flew over the isthmus at a height of about 450 metres and saw the target west of Cape İnce Burnu. The torpedo had to be dropped from a height of no more than a few metres, so he glided down to just above the water and released it at a range of several hundred metres: according to the British official history about 300 yards (275 metres), according to other sources as much as 800 yards. Climbing away under fire from the shore, he saw the torpedo strike the ship amidships. The ship lay too close to the shore to sink, but she settled on the bottom.

The British official history of naval operations admits that Edmonds most probably finished off a ship that had already been immobilised. The ship was said to be of about 5,000 tons and lay between Doğan Arslan and İnce Burnu, so she was most probably the same transport that on 8 August had been torpedoed by the submarine E14 of Lieutenant-Commander Edward Boyle. The sinking ship had then managed to beach herself, and gunfire from two submarines had set her on fire. On the same 12 August Boyle, after 68 days spent on three patrols in the Sea of Marmara, was returning through the Dardanelles. In the Narrows he became entangled in a net, but according to the British official history he broke through it in twenty seconds and safely reached base.

Edmonds’s success marked the birth of a new weapon. A few days later, on 17 August, Edmonds torpedoed another Turkish ship, this time, as British sources stress, with no doubt as to who had sunk it, while a second pilot from Ben-my-Chree, George Dacre, forced by engine failure to come down on the water, taxied his aircraft up to a Turkish tug and sank it with a torpedo. In Dardanelles conditions, however, the torpedo-carrying Shorts proved too underpowered and were soon used mainly for reconnaissance and bombing.