Goeben is refloated

At about 3.45 p.m. on 26 January 1918 the old Turkish battleship Turgut Reis, formerly the German Weissenburg, pulled the battlecruiser Goeben, sailing under the Ottoman flag as Yavuz Sultan Selim, off a sandbank in the Dardanelles. This time is given by the British official history, following the German naval history. By the morning of 27 January Goeben was already at Constantinople. The British chronology of the war records her refloating under the date of 27 January. For almost a week the British had tried to destroy the stranded ship, and their efforts came to nothing.

Goeben had run aground on 20 January, the day of the Battle of Imbros. Together with the cruiser Breslau she had sunk two British monitors, but then both ships ran into a minefield. Breslau sank, and Goeben, struck by three mines, turned back into the strait. At about 11.30 a.m. she ran onto a sandbank near Nagara Point, not far from the narrowest part of the Dardanelles. According to the British official history her captain mistook the buoys marking the passage through the net barrage, while according to other studies the ship was deliberately beached so as not to sink. The listing battlecruiser lay in the shallows, within reach of British aircraft from Imbros and Lemnos.

The Admiralty ordered her destroyed at all costs. Airmen of the Royal Naval Air Service attacked from 20 January, by day and by night. Aircraft of the Royal Flying Corps flew in from Salonika to help them, Greek airmen also took part in the attack, and on 24 January the seaplane carrier Empress arrived. The weather, however, was dreadful: low cloud, mist and a strong wind. The ship was defended by anti-aircraft guns and Turkish seaplanes. On 23 January the guns shot down a Greek pilot. According to the British air history, about 15 tons of bombs fell on the ship over those few days. There were few hits, and those there were did no serious damage. The bombs weighed 65 or 112 pounds, that is about 30 and 50 kilograms, and were too light to pierce the armoured deck of a battlecruiser. On the evening of 24 January a monitor tried to shell Goeben with indirect fire directed from an aircraft, but mist hid the target. On 25 January the carrier Manxman reached Mudros with two seaplanes adapted to drop torpedoes. On 26 January, however, the sea was too rough for them to take off. That same afternoon Goeben came off the sandbank.

The British did not yet know it. On the night of 27/28 January the submarine E14 entered the strait to torpedo the battlecruiser. She got through the barrages, but where Goeben had lain she found nothing. On the way back she was damaged by depth charges, and when she was forced to surface she was sunk by Turkish batteries. Most of the crew were killed, including her commander, Lieutenant-Commander Geoffrey White, who was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. Only on 28 January, when the weather cleared, could the airmen confirm that the ship had gone. The failed operation showed that aircraft without heavier bombs and effective torpedo planes were unable to destroy a large warship.

Goeben survived, but she was badly damaged and the Turkish dockyard could not repair her properly. From August to October 1918 one of the holes in her hull was enclosed in a concrete cofferdam, while the others were not repaired until the 1920s. The ship did not go out into the Aegean again before the end of the war. On 2 November 1918, after the Armistice of Mudros, the Germans formally handed her over to Turkey. As Yavuz she served in the Turkish navy until 1950, and she was broken up for scrap only in the 1970s.