Mudros in the First World War

Mudros is a large bay on the Greek island of Lemnos, in the northern Aegean Sea, about 50 kilometres from the mouth of the Dardanelles. In 1915 it became the base of the fleet and the troops who attacked the strait and fought on the Gallipoli peninsula, and camps and hospitals sprang up on its shores. British warships were stationed here until the end of the war. On 30 October 1918, aboard a battleship anchored in Mudros harbour, the Ottoman Empire signed the armistice by which it left the war.

A disputed island (1912–1915)

The Greek navy took Lemnos on 8 October 1912, during the First Balkan War. In February 1914 the great powers awarded the island to Greece, but Turkey never recognised the decision. When the war broke out, Greece was neutral. In August 1914 the Russian minister Sergei Sazonov was ready to give Lemnos to the Turks in return for their neutrality, but the British Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, refused, because the island lay right at the entrance to the straits.

Half a year later the British needed it themselves. The prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, who was well disposed towards the Entente, withdrew the Greek garrison from the island, and on 23 February 1915 battalions of British marines arrived in Mudros bay. Athens demanded an explanation, and London replied that, being at war with Turkey, it could treat the island as Turkish territory. On 20 March, however, it guaranteed Greece that after the war Turkey would renounce Lemnos in its favour.

The expedition’s port (1915)

The bay could hold a whole fleet, but it had no quays, warehouses or water. The task of building the base was given to Rear-Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss. Until water was piped in from the hills, the island could support at most 10,000 men. In March an Australian brigade, the Royal Naval Division and a French division arrived here, but at the end of the month the French and part of the British moved to Egypt.

After the failed naval attack of 18 March the bay became the concentration point before the landing. By mid-April dozens of warships and more than a hundred transports and merchant ships lay there, and the Australians practised on the water climbing into boats and landing. From here General Ian Hamilton’s army set out, and on 25 April it landed at Gallipoli.

After the German submarine U-21 sank two battleships in May, Admiral de Robeck sheltered most of his heavy ships in Mudros. Short of water, Lemnos was unsuitable as a large base, so the island of Imbros, closer to the peninsula, became the army’s main base. Mudros remained the rear base, with reinforcement camps, depots and hospitals.

Hospitals

From March and June 1915 two Australian stationary hospitals worked on Lemnos, in August the 3rd Australian General Hospital was added, and alongside them there were Canadian and British hospitals. They stood on both sides of the bay. Patients and staff lived in tents, in the summer heat and the winter wind.

The August offensive brought especially heavy work: in the two months to October 57,000 sick and 37,000 wounded were brought here from Gallipoli. According to an Australian committee commemorating Lemnos, by October 1915 there were about 9,000 beds on the island.

In early September 1915 Hamilton visited the hospitals in West Mudros. He wrote in his diary that the Australian and Canadian nurses were the first white women he had seen for half a year. The dead were buried in cemeteries at Portianos and Mudros. The East Mudros cemetery, begun in April 1915, holds 885 graves of soldiers of the British Empire.

A base until the end of the war

In early October 1915 the first ships carrying troops meant to help Serbia sailed from Mudros for Salonika. In November Lord Kitchener came here to decide on the spot the fate of Gallipoli. After the evacuation of the peninsula the hospitals left the island, and in January 1916 the headquarters moved to Egypt.

The port remained the base of the British squadron in the Aegean. In April 1916 aircraft from Mudros bombed Constantinople, and hospital ships took sick men from other fronts from here. In January 1918 the Goeben and the Breslau were to shell the base after their sortie off Imbros, but they ran onto mines.

The armistice

On 11 October 1918 the British Vice-Admiral Somerset Gough-Calthorpe arrived at Mudros, and on 26 October the Turkish delegates, led by the navy minister Rauf Bey. The talks were held aboard the battleship Agamemnon, and on 30 October at 9.40 p.m. the armistice was signed. Fighting on the Ottoman fronts stopped at noon on 31 October, and the Allied fleet sailed through the Dardanelles to Constantinople. The status of Lemnos was finally settled by the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923: Turkey recognised Greek sovereignty over the island, which was to remain demilitarised.