Sinking of Breslau

On 20 January 1918, at about nine in the morning, in the Aegean Sea between the island of Imbros and the entrance to the Dardanelles, the light cruiser Breslau sank; since 1914 she had sailed under the Ottoman flag as Midilli. She ran into a British minefield and within half an hour struck five mines. Most of her crew were killed. A few hours earlier Breslau and the battlecruiser Goeben had sunk two British monitors, Raglan and M28, in Kusu Bay. Goeben also struck mines and, badly damaged, ran aground in the strait. This one day ended the story of the famous pair of ships which in 1914 had helped to draw Turkey into the war.

A ship from Stettin

Breslau was one of four modern light cruisers of the Magdeburg class. She was built by the AG Vulcan yard in Stettin and was named after the Silesian city that is today Wrocław. She entered service in 1912 and was sent straight to the Mediterranean. In August 1914, together with Goeben, she escaped the British into the Dardanelles. Both ships were fictitiously sold to Turkey but kept their German crews, who merely put on fezzes.

For more than three years Midilli fought in the Black Sea. In October 1914 she took part in the attack on the Russian ports that settled Turkey’s entry into the war. After that she laid mines off the Russian coast, shelled ports, and escorted transports of coal and troops for the army in the Caucasus. Several times she fought Russian warships, and in 1915 she struck a mine and was out of service for half a year. She was the fastest large ship of the Ottoman fleet, and the German admirals liked to use her for fast raids. After the October Revolution and the armistice on the Eastern Front, the war in the Black Sea died down. The new fleet commander, Vice-Admiral Hubert von Rebeur-Paschwitz, therefore decided to send both cruisers into the Aegean.

The last sortie

Breslau, commanded since August 1917 by Captain Georg von Hippel, set out with Goeben on the afternoon of 19 January. Before dawn on 20 January the ships left the strait. While Goeben was shelling the signal station on Cape Kephalo, Breslau went ahead to Kusu Bay, drove off the British destroyer Lizard with her fire and opened fire on the monitor Raglan. According to the British official history, it was her first accurate salvoes that destroyed the monitor’s fire-control positions. Shortly afterwards Goeben joined the bombardment. Both monitors sank before the British ships at Mudros could raise steam.

Rebeur-Paschwitz then headed south to bombard the base at Mudros. An earlier mine, however, had damaged Goeben’s compasses, and the navigator was fixing the position by points on the shore. The ships strayed from the safe course and entered a dense minefield. British aircraft from Imbros were already circling above them. According to the British air history, Goeben’s anti-aircraft shells were falling close to Breslau, so the cruiser was ordered to move ahead of the flagship. At about 8.30 she struck the first mine, which wrecked her stern. The sailors could see mines around the ship in the clear water. Goeben came up to take Breslau in tow, but at 8.55 she herself struck a mine. Breslau, still moving forward, struck four more. The crews of the British destroyers Tigress and Lizard saw a series of explosions around the cruiser, which was rapidly going down. Some British accounts also speak of a hit by an aircraft bomb, but it was the mines that decided the ship’s fate.

The survivors

Rebeur-Paschwitz decided that he could no longer risk the flagship and left Breslau to her fate. Goeben turned back towards the strait. Turkish destroyers came out of it to rescue the survivors, but Tigress and Lizard drove them off with gunfire. When they themselves came under fire from the coastal batteries, they returned to the place of the sinking and picked up from the water, according to the British official history, 14 officers and 148 men. German returns state that only 133 men survived. About 330 members of the crew were killed. The rescued men became British prisoners. Some of them stated that German submarines had laid mines off Mudros. British airmen searched the waters around the base but found no mines.

At 9.48 Goeben struck a third mine, and at about 11.30 she ran aground off Nagara Point in the Dardanelles. British aircraft began bombing her that same day.

Significance

For the Ottoman fleet the loss of Breslau was a blow that could not be made good. Turkey lost her most modern cruiser, and the only ship that could match her, Goeben, was badly damaged. According to the British official history, based on the account of the German historian Hermann Lorey, the news of the sinking caused indignation in Constantinople. The Turks considered that the Germans had recklessly risked ships sailing under the Ottoman flag. Already while the sortie was being planned, Enver Pasha had warned that the two cruisers were as precious to Turkey as the Grand Fleet was to Britain.

The British lost two monitors and about 140 men, but they were rid of a ship that since 1914 had forced them to keep forces at the mouth of the Dardanelles. Breslau went to the bottom less than four years after she and Goeben had slipped past the whole British Mediterranean Fleet and become one of the symbols of the German presence in Turkey.