Submarine B11 sinks the battleship Mesudiye

On 13 December 1914 the British submarine B11, commanded by Lieutenant Norman Holbrook, entered deep into the Dardanelles, passed under five lines of mines and torpedoed the old Turkish battleship Mesudiye. The battleship capsized and quickly sank. It was the first success of an Allied submarine in the straits, and for it Holbrook received the first Victoria Cross of this war awarded to a naval officer.

An old battleship guarding the mines

Mesudiye was one of the oldest ships of the Ottoman fleet. She was built in London, at the Thames Ironworks yard, and launched in 1874. At the turn of the 20th century she underwent a thorough reconstruction at Genoa in Italy, but she never received the heavy guns intended for her. Wooden dummies were mounted in the turrets, and her only real armament was her medium-calibre artillery. From September 1914 she lay at anchor in Sarısığlar Bay, south of Çanakkale, as a floating battery covering the minefields that closed the straits.

B11 was not a modern vessel either. This small B-class boat, built in 1906 for coastal defence, belonged to the flotilla that had been watching the entrance to the Dardanelles since November. Before the operation the boat was fitted with guards meant to push mine mooring cables away from the hull. When, even before the first line of mines, one of them turned out to be damaged, the crew removed it and Holbrook continued on his way.

The attack

On the morning of 13 December B11 dived at the entrance to the straits and, submerged, against the current flowing from the Sea of Marmara, passed under successive lines of mines. The passage took several hours. At about 11.30 a.m. Holbrook sighted the anchored Mesudiye through the periscope. From a range of several hundred metres he fired a torpedo, which struck the battleship’s stern. Mesudiye heeled over, capsized and sank within about 10 minutes. She was, however, lying in shallow water and part of her hull remained above the surface, so most of her crew of more than 600 men were saved. According to the most commonly cited figures, 37 people were killed.

The return proved just as difficult. Turkish batteries fired at every periscope that broke the surface. The glass of B11’s compass misted over so badly that it was impossible to steer by it, and Holbrook had to navigate from memory, glimpsing the shore through the periscope. B11 passed under the minefields again and returned to her own side. In all she spent about nine hours under water.

A submariner’s first Victoria Cross

On 22 December 1914 Holbrook was awarded the Victoria Cross. He was the first submariner to receive this decoration and the first naval officer to be awarded it in this war. His second-in-command, Lieutenant Sydney Winn, received the Distinguished Service Order, and the other members of the crew received medals. The exploit also made a great impression in Australia. In 1915 the small town of Germanton in New South Wales, wishing to rid itself of its German-sounding name, was renamed Holbrook.

The B11 operation showed that submarines could pass under the Dardanelles mine barrages, and it foreshadowed the operations of British and Australian submarines in the Sea of Marmara in 1915. The Turks, for their part, recovered guns from the wreck of Mesudiye, which were later set up on the shore of the straits as a coastal battery.