CHAPTER 2

“Goeben Is Your Objective”

While Britain decided whether to go to war, France, which had no choice, prepared for the German blow. General Joseph Joffre, commanding the armies of France, urgently required the presence at the front of the XIX Army Corps, totaling 80,000 men. On the eve of war, these men were in North Africa and it became the imperative task of the French Mediterranean fleet to convoy them across the sea to Marseilles. To escort the troopships, one French dreadnought, six predreadnoughts, six armored cruisers, and twenty-four destroyers were available. Two other new French dreadnoughts, which might better have served France in the Mediterranean that month, were far away to the north on a mission of national gloire, escorting the president of the Republic on a state visit to St. Petersburg. Their absence created a potential danger: if the prewar Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy held firm, the combined fleets of these three powers would be superior to the French Mediterranean fleet and the safe passage of the XIX Corps would be in jeopardy.

The war plan of the Triple Alliance called for the three fleets to assemble on the outbreak of hostilities at the port of Messina in Sicily. From there, they were to steam out and wrest control of the Mediterranean from France. By August 1914, the Austrian navy, based at Pola, at the head of the Adriatic, possessed two dreadnoughts, along with three older battleships and a handful of cruisers and destroyers. The Italian fleet also had three new dreadnoughts, but only one was ready for war. Germany, with no naval base of its own in the Mediterranean, maintained just two warships in the inland sea. One of these, however, was the battle cruiser Goeben, a ruggedly constructed vessel of 23,000 tons whose ten 11-inch guns and design speed of 28 knots made her the most powerful fast warship in the Mediterranean. The other German vessel was Breslau, a new light cruiser of 4,500 tons, with a speed of 27 knots and twelve 4.1-inch guns. Goeben worried Britain’s First Lord, who had no doubt that war was coming and that Britain would become involved. Goeben, Churchill grimly predicted, “would easily be able to avoid the French . . . [battleships] and brushing aside or outstripping their cruisers, break in upon the transports and sink one after another of these vessels crammed with soldiers.”

To bar the passage of the French troopships was one of the purposes for which Goeben had been sent to the Mediterranean in 1912. A second mission, especially congenial to the kaiser, was to remind the people of the Mediterranean of the glory and long arm of the German emperor. When the big gray ship arrived in the Mediterranean, her ten 11-inch guns jutting from five turrets, her twelve 6-inch guns bristling from casements, her plain wardroom, with neither sofas, nor armchairs, nor pictures on the walls—all suggested a ship ready for war. But in reality, by the summer of 1914, Goeben was below peak efficiency. Two years of constant steaming without dry-docking had taken a toll. The ship’s bottom was fouled and her engines were plagued by worn-out, leaking boiler tubes, which reduced steam pressure and, therefore, speed. Even so, the two German ships constituted a formidable force. Their commander, Rear Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, was a short, dark-haired man, fifty years old, who sometimes wore and sometimes shaved off a thick black mustache. Of French Huguenot ancestry and, like many officers in the Imperial Navy, lacking the ennobling “von,” he appeared on first acquaintance a curious kind of sea dog. “A droop-jawed, determined little man in an ill-fitting frock coat, looking more like a parson than an admiral”: so an American diplomat in Constantinople described him.

Souchon and Goeben were visiting Haifa, in the eastern Mediterra-nean, when the the news of Sarajevo arrived. The assassination, the admiral knew, would agitate Europe; this quickly led him to worry about Goeben’s leaking boiler tubes. He telegraphed Berlin, asking that new tubes be sent to the Austrian base at Pola, then sailed from Haifa for the Adriatic. The ship arrived on July 10; for the next eighteen days, the crew worked to locate and replace defective tubes. The work was done while the sun burned down from a cloudless sky, creating almost unbearable heat inside the steel hull. The battle cruiser had twenty-four boilers; from them, 4,000 defective tubes had to be extracted and replaced. The work was still unfinished when a signal from Berlin warned that war was imminent.

While the crew cheered the news, waved their caps, and tapped their feet to marching music by the ship’s band, Souchon pondered his next move. Neither Austria nor Italy seemed ready for naval war, and Souchon rejected the thought of remaining in the Adriatic, subordinate to an Austrian admiral not inclined to fight Britain and France. Assuming that he was alone in the Mediterranean, Souchon considered steaming west, inflicting what damage he could on the French troop transports, then forcing his way past Gibraltar and into the Atlantic to attack Allied trade. If he could make it to the North Sea, he knew that Admiral Franz Hipper, commander of the High Seas Fleet battle cruiser force, would welcome his powerful ship. But the uncertain condition of Goeben’s boilers prohibited the sustained high speed that this move would require. By July 29, Souchon had made up his mind. Leaving Pola, Goeben sailed down the Adriatic, and on August 1—the day Germany declared war on Russia—anchored off Brindisi, on the heel of Italy. There, Breslau joined her. Souchon’s ships needed coal, but the Italians refused to bring colliers alongside, saying that the sea was too rough. Souchon accurately interpreted these excuses as evidence that Italy was about to renounce the Triple Alliance. He moved on to Taranto and then, his need for coal now acute, to Messina, in Sicily, where he could rendezvous with German merchant ships from which coal could be commandeered. During the morning, Goeben and Breslau steamed past the rugged cliffs of the Calabrian coast, jagged against the intense blue of the sky. At noon, they passed beneath the volcano of Mount Etna, its perpetual plume of smoke issuing from the summit. By midafternoon, they had anchored in Messina harbor, where the German East Africa Line passenger steamer General, bound for Dar es Salaam, and a number of other German merchant ships awaited them.

On the day Souchon reached Messina, Italy declared her neutrality. Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia on July 28 without consulting Rome, and it did not take the Italians long to remember that they had agreed to join in the Triple Alliance as a strictly defensive arrangement. The Italian government’s decision had the wholehearted support of the Italian navy; the Italian Naval Staff repeatedly had warned that the fleet could not protect Italy’s long coastline and seaboard cities from the French and British fleets. The news, justified or not, was a blow for Souchon. Italy’s neutrality eliminated the Triple Alliance, the naval assembly at Messina, and the prospect of any support for Goeben and Breslau.

The Italians at Messina were prompt to implement their new neutrality. Again, Souchon was refused coal. “Shameless” and “treachery” were Souchon’s words. He added defiantly, “We did not plead much. We simply helped ourselves.” His method was to order alongside all German ships in the harbor and then, “in the twinkling of an eye,” use axes and crowbars to destroy everything—decks, bulkheads, cabins, passageways—that obstructed the removal of their coal. This procedure produced two thousand tons—of poor quality, but it was better than none. Souchon also requisitioned General herself for use as an auxiliary naval tender.

Knowing that war was imminent, but lacking orders from Berlin, Souchon decided to position his ships to deliver the first blow. At midnight on August 2, he secretly weighed anchor and left Messina by the northern exit, which led to the Algerian coast. He hoped to catch the French troopships at sea; if not, he could at least attack the embarkation ports of the XIX Corps and make “the African coast . . . echo to the thunder of German guns.” The port of Bône was assigned to Breslau, the harbor of Philippeville toGoeben.Steaming west, Souchon learned the next day from his wireless that Germany was at war with France.

In August 1914, three dreadnought battle cruisers—Inflexible, Indomitable, and Indefatigable—were the core of the British Mediterranean Fleet. These early ships of Jacky Fisher’s revolutionary fast dreadnought design averaged 18,000 tons and a speed of 25 knots. They were inferior to Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty’s more modern British battle cruisers in the North Sea; they were also 5,000 tons lighter and several knots slower than Goeben. But with eight 12-inch guns apiece to the German ship’s ten 11-inchers, they were more heavily armed. And there were three of them, making the margin of battle cruiser heavy guns in the Mediterranean twenty-four British against ten German. Wishing to enhance this margin, on July 28 Churchill had suggested sending a fourth older battle cruiser, New Zealand, from the North Sea, but Prince Louis had refused to further diminish Beatty’s strength. The British Mediterranean Fleet also included four large armored cruisers—Defence, Warrior, Black Prince, and Duke of Edinburgh—all relatively new but already obsolete, made so intentionally by Fisher, who had decreed that in wartime, his faster, more powerful battle cruisers would gobble up armored cruisers “like an armadillo let loose on an ant-hill.” Four modern British light cruisers and a flotilla of sixteen destroyers made up the balance of the Mediterranean Fleet.

While the British government struggled with issues of war and peace, Admiral Sir Archibald Berkeley Milne, the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, awaited orders at Malta, his principal base. In the days just before the war, he had been given no clear instructions. War came to Europe in convulsive spasms: first Austria against Serbia, then Russia against Austria, then Germany against Russia, then Germany against France, and finally Germany against Great Britain. Military and naval planning was complicated by the fact that, on any given day, no one knew which nations were in the war, which were not, and which might or might not come in tomorrow. This was especially true of any consideration involving Great Britain, which did not itself know whether it was going to war until the day it did so. Amid this confusion, Winston Churchill, wielding the power of the the Cabinet at the Admiralty, personally drafted operational telegrams to Royal Navy admirals and ships. On Thursday, July 30, he told Admiral Milne that his primary mission would be to assist the French in covering the North African troopships. But the First Lord, his fertile imagination brimming with possibilities, embellished his message with further instructions, and the result was to swamp the conventional mind of Admiral Milne. This was the message Milne received:

Your first task should be to aid the French in transportation of their African army corps by covering and if possible bringing to action individual fast German ships, particularly Goeben, which may interfere with that transportation. . . . Except in combination with the French as part of a general battle, do not at this stage be brought to action against superior forces. The speed of your squadrons is sufficient to enable you to choose your moment. You must husband your force at the outset and we shall hope later to reinforce the Mediterranean.

Later, Churchill explained that the phrases “superior forces,” “the speed of your squadrons,” and “husband your forces” were meant to guide Milne in dealing with the Austrian fleet. But Churchill also could not take his eyes away from Goeben, and he had convinced himself that its destruction and Milne’s other assignments largely overlapped. The extent to which the German battle cruiser affected his thinking was displayed in subsequent signals flowing to Milne from the Admiralty. Following the original July 30 message, Churchill signaled again on August 2: “Goeben must be shadowed by two battle cruisers.” And on August 3: “Watch on mouth of Adriatic should be maintained but Goeben is your objective. Follow her and shadow her wherever she goes, and be ready to act on declaration of war which appears probable and imminent.” Again, on August 4, when informed that the British battle cruisers Indomitable and Indefatigable had Goeben in sight: “Very good. Hold her. War imminent.”

Milne did his best to obey this stream of orders. On August 1, after receiving Churchill’s first message, he concentrated his fleet beneath the sand-colored limestone ramparts of the ancient fortress of Valletta at Malta. Early on August 2, when he received the Admiralty order saying that “Goeben must be shadowed by two battle cruisers” and the Adriatic “watched,” Milne dispatched his second in command, Rear Admiral Ernest Troubridge, with Indomitable and Indefatigable, the four armored cruisers, the light cruiserGloucester, and eight destroyers to guard the mouth of the Adriatic. But Admiral Souchon had already left the Adriatic. On August 2, Goeben and Breslau had been seen at Taranto by the British consul, who urgently reported the sighting to the Admiralty. Suddenly, a thought troubled Churchill and his colleagues in London. Told that the two German ships had left Taranto, they decided that Souchon was headed into the Atlantic to attack British trade. To counter this threat, Admiral Troubridge’s two battle cruisers were ordered to detach from his command and proceed westward at high speed “to prevent Goeben leaving Mediterranean.” At nine o’clock that night, Indomitable and Indefatigable left, heading for Gibraltar at 22 knots.

Milne had now been assigned four tasks: he was to support the French in protecting the troop convoys in the western Mediterranean; he was to observe and bottle up the Austrians in the Adriatic; he was to find and sink Goeben wherever she was; and he was to prevent the German battle cruiser from breaking out past Gibraltar. Unfortunately, on the high seas, these objectives did not fit together with the same seamlessness they achieved in the mind of the First Lord. And the Churchillian stream of overlapping, frequently contradictory instructions was enough to bewilder a man far more astute than Admiral Milne.

Sir Archibald Berkeley Milne, known to the service as Arky-Barky, was a short, dapper fifty-nine-year-old bachelor who wore a white beard and a black mustache. He was descended from two admirals, his father and his grandfather. His own career had been fashionable; during long service on the royal yachts, he had won the friendship of the Prince and Princess of Wales, later King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. Milne, wreathed in smiles and heavy with gold braid, was always available to pose on deck for the queen, snapping away with her Brownie camera. He shot, fished, and collected rare orchids, and he had become a rear admiral by 1903. In 1912, Winston Churchill, the new First Lord, gave pleasure to the new king, George V, by recommending the king’s friend Arky-Barky as Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet.

Learning of the appointment, Jacky Fisher erupted. Milne had served under Fisher’s archenemy, Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, and once had offered to testify against Fisher in an Admiralty proceeding. Milne, Fisher raged, was a “backstairs cad,” a “sneak,” a “serpent of the lowest type,” and “Sir Berkeley Mean who buys his Times second-hand for a penny.” Milne had won his new post through social connections, Fisher roared. Milne “went to Balmoral and crawled. . . . Winston has sacrificed the country to the court. . . . Winston, alas! (as I have had to tell him) feared for his wife the social ostracism of the Court and succumbed to [Milne’s] appointment—a wicked wrong. . . . The mischief is done. Milne, an utterly useless commander . . . is now the senior admiral afloat.” Fisher’s wrath was so great that he broke temporarily with Churchill: “I fear this must be my last communication with you. . . . I am sorry for it, but I consider you have betrayed the navy . . . and what the pressure could have been to induce you to betray your trust is beyond my comprehension. You are aware that Sir Berkeley Milne is unfitted to be the senior admiral afloat, as you have now made him. . . . I can’t believe that you foresee all the consequences. [This will be] IRREPARABLE, IRREMEDIABLE, ETERNAL!”

Milne was neither wicked nor incompetent; he was ordinary. And he was far from solely responsible for the debacle that followed. The underlying cause of his flawed strategy and faulty dispositions was Britain’s unwillingness to commit absolutely to France. French uncertainty as to Britain’s role in the coming war continued right up to the afternoon of August 4, when, after the British ultimatum had been sent to Berlin, Churchill finally received a group of French admirals at the Admiralty. There, the First Lord, employing his broadly Anglicized French, declared in a burst of good fellowship, “Use Malta as if it were Toulon [the main French naval base in the Mediterranean].” Two days later, Prince Louis concluded an agreement that gave France, in the person of Vice Admiral Augustin Boue de Lapeyrère, general direction of naval operations in the Mediterranean.

None of this helped Admiral Milne. The two admiralties might be talking, but no arrangements had been made for communication between French and British commanders at sea. At 4:00 a.m. on August 3, Admiral de Lapeyrère put to sea with the entire French Mediterranean fleet, steaming south toward Algeria to provide protection for the troop transports of the French North African army corps. His battleships and cruisers, organized in three squadrons, were in sufficient strength, he believed, to deal with GoebenandBreslau. However, to make certain that the two fast German ships did not, as Churchill feared, “break in upon the transports . . . crammed with soldiers,” de Lapeyrère postponed for several days the date of the troopships’ sailing from Africa. Admiral Milne did not know this. Ordered by Churchill to give priority to the protection of the French transports, he focused diligently on that assignment, even though the French fleet itself was there to protect them and the transports themselves were not yet at sea. Not until August 2 was Milne given authority to communicate with the French. When he tried to do so, Milne could not raise the French admiral by wireless and was eventually obliged to send a light cruiser to Bizerte “in quest of his colleague,” de Lapeyrère.

Lack of communication with the French caused difficulties, but Milne’s situation was made worse by the fact that communication between his flagship and the First Lord at the Admiralty was all too rapid. This was the first naval war in which admiralties could intervene directly to control ship movements by means of cable and wireless radio. This new technology, enabling orders to be dispatched from London night and day, offered a powerful temptation to the restless First Lord. Frequently ignoring the First Sea Lord, whose proper role was the operational control of warships, Churchill began sending orders directly to admirals and ships at sea. Milne was merely the first to feel this forceful and articulate presence looming over his shoulder.

Milne guessed correctly that, after Taranto, Goeben might call at Messina, and he sent the light cruiser Chatham from Malta to investigate. Chatham passed through the strait at 7:00 a.m. on August 3, examining the anchorage. She found nothing; GoebenandBreslau had sailed six hours earlier. All through Sunday the third, the German ships steamed westward, avoiding normal shipping lanes and showing no lights at night. At 2:35 a.m. on August 4, as Souchon was nearing the Algerian coast, an unexpected signal arrived from the Naval Staff in Berlin: Souchon was to reverse course and make for Constantinople. On August 2, Germany and Turkey had signed a defensive alliance against Russia. The Turks were reluctant, however, to take the actual step into war and the German embassy in Constantinople was recommending application of pressure on the grand vizier and his Cabinet. The sight of Goeben anchored off the Golden Horn was thought likely to offer formidable persuasion.

Souchon, then approaching the climactic moment of firing live ammunition at an enemy, ignored the order. “The idea of turning about, so short a time before that moment so ardently desired by us all, before opening fire—my heart could not accept that,” he later wrote. He continued west; soon the jagged contours of the Algerian coast, tinted red by the rising sun, came into view. Slowly, Souchon approached the harbor at Philippeville, first running up the Russian flag to deceive his enemies. As he came closer, a watchman waved from the harbor lighthouse, and vendors in boats loaded with bananas, pineapples, and coconuts put out from shore. Suddenly, the Russian flag came down, the German war flag ran up, and Goeben’s 5.9-inch guns lashed out, “sowing death and panic,” in Souchon’s words. After ten minutes, during which only fifteen shells were fired, the Germans withdrew. They had hit neither troops nor troopships, but had managed to damage the railway station, blow up a magazine, and knock over the hospitable lighthouse. “Our trick succeeded brilliantly,” said a member of the crew.

It was a token bombardment, but Souchon was satisfied. The admiral now intended to obey his orders to go to Constantinople, twelve hundred miles to the east. First, however, he needed more coal, which meant a return to Messina. By midmorning, the two German ships were steaming east. A splendid Mediterranean day, with the sky arching overhead “like a giant azure bell and a gently ruffled sea, glittering to the horizon,” added to the cheerfulness of the German sailors.

Until German shells began exploding in Philippeville, Admiral Milne at Malta had no idea where Goeben was. Thirty-six hours earlier—that is, at 12:50 a.m. on August 3, just as Souchon was leaving Messina to raid the African coast—a message from the First Lord had brought Milne the instruction to find Goeben “and shadow her wherever she goes.” That evening, Indomitable and Indefatigable had been stripped away from Troubridge and ordered westward. The result, on August 3, was that the German battle cruiser, steaming west from Messina to bombard the Algerian ports, was being followed by two powerful British ships. On the morning of the fourth, after the bombardment of Philippeville, they found her.

At 10:34 a.m., Captain Francis Kennedy of Indomitable, the senior officer of the two British battle cruisers, sighted Goeben 17,000 yards ahead, coming east in his direction at 20 knots. His own speed was 22 knots, which meant that the British and German ships were rushing toward each other at an effective speed of almost 50 miles per hour. Although, because the two nations were still at peace, Goeben’s main turret guns—like his own—were trained fore and aft, Kennedy observed that the German crew—like his own—was at action stations. On opposite courses 8,000 yards apart, the warships passed one another in silence.

Officers on Goeben’s bridge had sighted the columns of smoke directly ahead, then seen them evolve into the shapes of two broad-beamed “giant grey monsters” moving toward them at high speed. Even from a distance, Souchon himself immediately recognized that these were “not French ships with a big freeboard, but English tripod mast capital ships of the Indomitable class. . . . I don’t dare to open fire as I don’t know whether England is our enemy. I am astonished that they don’t fire.” The British ships, once pastGoeben, grew smaller in the German battle cruiser’s wake. Then, to their dismay, Souchon and his officers saw Indomitable and Indefatigable turning. With thick black smoke pouring from their stacks, Kennedy’s ships began to follow, 10,000 yards astern. By urgent wireless, Kennedy informed Milne, and Milne informed the Admiralty.

Souchon, aware that war might come at any moment and worried that the British ships might get the news before he did, ordered full speed. Gradually, the shadowing exercise escalated into a chase and Goeben’s speed climbed to 24 knots. In the engine rooms of the German battle cruiser, the heat became excruciating. “The overheated air affected lungs and heart,” said a crew member. “We worked in air forced down by ventilators. . . . The artificial draft roared and hissed . . . [and] drove into open furnace doors, fanning the glowing coal, and swept roaring up the smokestacks. In the engine room, there was the whir of the turbines, revolving at ever increasing speed; the whole ship trembled and quaked [and] the long grey hull shot through the glistening, foaming waters.” White spray rolling back from her bow, black smoke staining the sky for miles astern, Goeben raced eastward; slowly but perceptibly, the distance between the pursuers and their prey increased. The Indomitable class had been designed for 25 knots, and six years earlierIndomitable herself had surpassed 26 in trials; but after long overseas service, the hulls of both British battle cruisers were fouled. Their engines needed overhaul and the ships were short of wartime crew, particularly the stokers required to feed the boiler furnaces by shoveling coal. Nevertheless, for six hours, Kennedy kept station astern, determined to stay within range.

Meanwhile, even as the Admiralty was learning that Goeben had been found and that two battle cruisers were shadowing her, the British Cabinet was deciding whether to send an ultimatum to Berlin. Churchill, exultant at the news that the Goeben was in sight, sent his message “Very good. Hold her. War imminent.” But because Milne had forgotten to mention in which direction the German ships were going, Churchill wrongly assumed that Souchon was still steaming west to attack the French transports. On this basis, he sent an urgent memorandum to the prime minister and the foreign secretary: “Goeben . . . is evidently going to interfere with the French transports which are crossing today.” He asked that he be permitted to add to his signal to Milne and Kennedy the following: “IfGoeben attacks French transports, you should at once engage her.” Asquith and Grey agreed, but the prime minister suggested that first the matter should be put before the Cabinet, which was about to meet. Churchill, his blood high, ignored the prime minister and sent off the authorization to attack before going to meet his fellow ministers. At the meeting, Asquith scribbled to Venetia Stanley, “Winston with all his war paint on is longing for a sea fight to sink the Goeben.”

[Between 1912 and 1915, H. H. Asquith, the British prime minister, was passionately in love with a young woman named Venetia Stanley. In August 1914, when Asquith was sixty-two and Venetia was twenty-seven, she dominated his thoughts. He wrote to her two or three times a day, often while Cabinet meetings were in progress around him. To Venetia, he not only expressed his intense desire for her company and approval, but he also divulged the most secret British diplomatic and military information. Curiously, the relationship always remained platonic.]

The Cabinet, however, refused to allow the Royal Navy to start sinking ships before the war had begun; at 2:05 p.m. Churchill was forced to send to Milne and Kennedy a retraction. The ultimatum to Germany had been sent and would expire at midnight, he said, and “no act of war should be committed before that hour. . . . This cancels the authorization to Indomitable and Indefatigable to engage Goeben if she attacks French transports.”

For the remainder of the afternoon, Churchill and the War Staff, waiting at the Admiralty, “suffered the tortures of Tantalus. . . . At any moment, the Goeben could have been smitten at under ten thousand yards range by sixteen 12-inch guns firing nearly treble her own weight of metal. At about five o’clock, Prince Louis observed that there was still time to sink Goeben before dark.” Churchill, bound by the Cabinet decision, was silent and sulky, “unable to utter a word. . . . We hoped to sink her the next day,” he wrote. “Where could she go? Pola seemed her only refuge. According to international law, nothing but internment awaited her elsewhere.”

During the afternoon, the weather in the central Mediterranean turned hazy, and the deep blue of the sea changed to gray. At 3:00 p.m., the two British battle cruisers were joined in the chase by the light cruiser Dublin, which Kennedy posted out of gun range onGoeben’s starboard beam. Kennedy then attempted to increase speed in order to keep Goeben within range; for a few minutes, he appeared to be overtaking her. This effort notwithstanding, however, certain British institutions were not be trifled with: “Sent hands to tea at 3:30 with Indefatigable to go to tea after us,” Kennedy recorded in his action report. By 3:45 p.m., Goeben and Breslau were pulling away into a misty haze; at 4:00, Goeben was only just in sight against the horizon. Dublin held on, but at 7:37 p.m. the light cruiser signaled, “Goeben out of sight now, can only see smoke; still daylight.” By nine o’clock, the smoke had disappeared, daylight was gone, and Goeben and Breslau had vanished. At 9:52 p.m., on Milne’s instructions, Dublin gave up the chase. At 1:15 a.m., a signal from Malta informed the Mediterranean Fleet that war had begun.

Souchon, having outrun the British battle cruisers, returned to Messina at dawn on August 5 with his crew exhausted. Even in port, however, there could be no question of rest. His enemies, the German admiral assumed, would be coming up and waiting for him just outside Italian territorial waters. Nor could Goeben stay for long without risking internment. Indeed, before the end of the day, a group of the same Italian naval officers whom Souchon had counted on to be his allies came aboard to grant him permission to coal “for the last time” and to tell him that he was allowed to remain in their neutral port no longer than the twenty-four hours permitted under international law. Souchon replied that he would reckon the twenty-four hours from the time they had given him their message.

The morning went by with the two German warships lying motionless in the heat. Souchon had ordered coal from Italian suppliers, but by midday no coal had appeared. Early in the afternoon, he began collecting coal from German merchant ships in the harbor. Then, toward evening, the first collier sent by the Italian government arrived; others followed, and soon the long gray hull of Goeben was surrounded: colliers on one side, the liner General on the other. Not only the navy crews shoveled coal: Souchon enlisted four hundred German civilian volunteers from the merchant ships. Through the night, sacks of coal were swung across to the warships and clattered down on the steel deck, where shovels began to ply. In the heat, the men began to falter. Souchon tried beer, coffee, lemonade, band music, exhortation, and the example of officers who stripped off their shirts and worked beside the crew. Nothing could keep the men on their feet. In groups they were sent off to sleep in passenger bunks on board General, where, black with grime and sweat, they passed out on snow-white sheets.

By noon of her second day at Messina, Goeben had loaded 1,500 tons of coal and her crew was exhausted; men lay collapsed on deck, shovels still gripped in their blistered hands. “With a heavy heart, for there was still much coal to be transferred,” Souchon halted the coaling—“It was essential,” he said, “to have at least some rest before preparing for battle”—and gave the order to raise steam for departure at five o’clock. Meanwhile, everyone in Messina knew that the German battle cruiser was preparing to meet its doom. “Numerous Sicilians, avid for sensation, besieged us night and day,” Souchon recorded.

People in rags offered to sell fruit, tidbits, postcards, and keepsakes of every kind; singers with mandolins, mouth organs and castanettes; policemen, girls, monks, soldiers, . . . [nuns] and even some well-dressed people, tried untiringly to grapple with our half-naked, coal-blackened men, to steal everything that was not riveted or nailed down, from their jumper buttons to shovel handles, in memory of “those about to die.” The noise of coaling, the whistle of steam, the din of windlasses, the grinding of shovels mingled with the dust, the smell of oil and sweat, and finally the cries of paper sellers with special posters: “Into the Jaws of Death” . . . “The Last Departure” . . . “Disgrace or Death” . . . “The Perilous Leap to the Peak of Glory” . . . “All Day to Die” . . . “Shame or Defeat” . . . “Voyage to Death or Glory.”

In his cabin, amid the noise of the coal scuttles, Souchon considered what to do. A defensive alliance had been concluded between Germany and Turkey, and he had been ordered to proceed to Constantinople. But in the three days since that order arrived, a diplomatic hitch had developed, making the earlier message from Berlin premature. Passage of the German battle cruiser through the Dardanelles would violate the neutrality that Turkey was still attempting to maintain. A majority of the Turkish Cabinet was insisting that permission for Goeben to enter the Dardanelles must be withdrawn, and the grand vizier had not yet made up his mind. This resulted in a new wireless from the German Naval Staff, which Souchon received at Messina at 11:00 on the morning of August 6: “At present time your call Constantinople not yet possible for various reasons.”

The same message from Berlin bore the additional bad news that Austria had refused to give Souchon active naval assistance. There were several reasons. First, Austria, although Germany’s ally against Russia, was not yet at war with France. Second, Admiral Anton Haus, the Austro-Hungarian naval commander, considered his new, untried fleet inferior to France’s and did not wish to do battle without help from the Italians. Once Italy had declared its neutrality, Haus decided that it would be foolhardy to rush out of the Adriatic to Souchon’s rescue, exposing his ships to the French fleet. In addition, the Austrian government was anxious to avoid conflict with Great Britain and had told Haus that it did not want his ships engaging British warships. As a result, Souchon was informed that the Austrian fleet would not be coming south to support him.

Under these circumstances, Berlin authorized Souchon himself to decide where he should go. The admiral chose Constantinople, despite previous orders. “It was impossible for me to remain in the Mediterranean in face of the crushing superiority of the enemy and total lack of means of subsistence,” he said. “I did not want to enter the Adriatic and be dependent on the Austrians. Thus, I firmly decided to enter the Dardanelles, if necessary against the will of the Turks, to carry the war into the Black Sea. I hope to carry the Turks with me in a war against their traditional enemy, the Muscovites.”

His decision made, Souchon gave orders: Goeben would weigh anchor at five o’clock that afternoon. Breslau would follow 10,000 yards behind. If there was no battle outside the harbor, he would steer north toward the Adriatic. After dark, he would make a wide, surreptitious turn to the southeast, hoping to elude pursuers, and then make for the Aegean Sea, where a chartered Greek collier had been ordered to meet him. Success, Souchon reckoned, depended on the enemy’s uncertainty as to his destination, on their ignorance of his damaged boilers and reduced capacity for speed, and on his own ability to shake off pursuit and meet the collier. But success was far from certain: before departing, Souchon wrote his will and sent it ashore. Then, at five o’clock on the afternoon of August 6,Goeben and Breslau steamed out the southern exit of the Messina Strait. The ship was cleared for action, the men were at the guns, and on deck the band was playing.

Admiral Milne was not waiting outside the harbor. Once Goeben had outrun Indomitable and Indefatigable and gone into Messina, Milne had fallen back on what he understood to be his primary mission: protecting the French transports. To achieve this, he positioned his force to block any attempt by Goeben to break westward toward the north-south sea-lanes between France and North Africa. Now aware that Goeben was capable of bursts of speed superior to his own fastest ships, Milne considered that the only sure way to accomplish his mission was to concentrate his battle cruisers west of Sicily. There, given sufficient warning of the enemy’s approach, he could intercept and confront Goeben with his more numerous heavy guns. Accordingly, Milne waited withInflexible andIndefatigable (Indomitable, which had burned most of her coal in the chase, had gone into Bizerte to refill her bunkers) for Goeben to come out the northern exit to the Messina Strait and head to the west. The light cruiser Gloucester was assigned to patrol the southern exit, which was the path to the east. The Admiralty, informed of these arrangements, approved.

Milne had learned on the morning of August 6 that Goeben and Breslau were at Messina. At that point, a different admiral—a Nelson at Copenhagen, or a Cunningham at Mers el-Kébir—might simply have ignored Italian neutrality and gone in after the German ships. But this would have meant flouting specific Admiralty orders. At 6:00 p.m. on August 4, even as Goeben was outdistancing her two pursuers and before Great Britain officially went to war, Milne had been told that the “Italian government have declared neutrality. You are to respect this neutrality rigidly and not allow any of His Majesty’s ships to come within six miles of Italian coast.” The policy had originated in the Foreign Office; at this delicate moment, with Italy backing away from the Triple Alliance, Sir Edward Grey did not wish to affront Italian sensibilities. The sinking of a single enemy ship, even the most powerful ship in the Mediterranean, could not take precedence. After the war, Churchill regretted the refusal to authorize British warships to followGoebeninto the Messina Strait. He did not mention Grey; rather, he said that neither Prince Louis nor Vice Admiral Frederick Sturdee, the Chief of the Admiralty War Staff, had mentioned the matter to him. “Had it been put to me, I should at once have consented. The prize was well worth the risk of vexing the Italians.”

But if Milne was not to pry them out, why did he not simply bottle them up? He might have abandoned his distant deployment west of Sicily, posted a strong force including a battle cruiser at either end of the strait, and simply waited for Goeben to emerge. This would have been thoroughly in accord with Churchill’s August 3 instructions: “Goeben is your objective. Follow her and shadow her wherever she goes and be ready to act on declaration of war.” Churchill himself later declared that this was what Milne should have done: “Certainly, if . . . [Milne] had in reliance on these dominant and reiterated instructions, managed to put one battle cruiser [on] each side of the Straits of Messina, instead of all on one side, and in consequence had brought Goeben to action as would have been inevitable, and if he had thus protected the French transports in the most effectual manner by fighting Goeben, no one could have found fault with him on the score that he had exceeded his orders.”

The question of Austria’s role added to Milne’s troubles and responsibilities. Britain was at war with Germany, but what about Germany’s ally? “Is Austria neutral power?” the admiral asked the Admiralty on August 5. The reply, like almost every message coming from London, was ambiguous: “Austria has not declared war against France or England. Continue watching Adriatic for double purpose of preventing Austrians from emerging unobserved and preventing Germans entering.” This message created further confusion. Having first advised that Goeben would attack the French transports, then having supposed that she might make a dash for the Atlantic, the Admiralty now speculated that Souchon could, after all, be thinking of returning to the Adriatic to link up with the Austrians. Milne, still focusing on the French transports, kept his fleet divided: the three battle cruisers remained with him off Sicily in the west, while Admiral Troubridge and his four armored cruisers continued to guard the Adriatic. Milne at this point specifically warned Troubridge not to take on the entire Austrian fleet: “First Cruiser Squadron and Gloucester . . . are not to get seriously engaged with superior force.”

Under a rich blue afternoon sky, Goeben and Breslau left Messina on August 6 and steamed south over a gently rolling sea. Increasing speed to 17 knots, the two ships were scarcely out of neutral waters when the smoke and masts of the waitingGloucesterappeared. At a discreet interval, the British light cruiser fell in behind, trailing her quarry along the coast of Calabria through the twilight and into a bright, moonlit night. From his bridge, Souchon watched Gloucester take up her shadowing role, but did not interfere. Had he done so, the contest would have been over quickly: Gloucester possessed two 6-inch guns, which outmatched Breslau, but stood no chance against Goeben, which could destroy her with a single salvo of 11-inch shells. Aware of this, Captain Howard Kelly of Gloucester hung back, keeping the Germans in sight and regularly reporting their position, course, and speed. Brilliant light from an enormous moon hanging over the sleeping Calabrian mountains both aided and threatened Kelly: he could keep watch easily, but the clear visibility would speed his doom if Goeben chose to turn on him. Through the night, despite Goeben’s efforts to jam his transmitter, Kelly’s radioman continued to tap out signals to Milne and Troubridge.

At first, Souchon was content with this arrangement. Then, after five hours of this game of the mouse chasing the cat, and unwilling to take the time to turn and devour his enemy, the admiral decided that he must stop pre-tending that he was headed for the Adriatic. Observed or not, if he was to reach the Aegean on the coal in his bunkers, he must change direction. At 10:46 p.m., Gloucester signaled Milne and Troubridge: “Goeben altering course to southward.” Just before midnight, Goeben and Breslau altered course again, this time to the southeast. Troubridge then signaled Milne, “Goeben is going towards Matapan.” Beyond Cape Matapan lay the Aegean, the Dardanelles, and Constantinople.

At this point, Admiral Troubridge, patrolling south of Corfu at the entrance to the Adriatic, commanded the only British force that might interrupt Goeben’s voyage. Individually, the armored cruisers Defence, Warrior, Duke of Edinburgh, and Black Prince were smaller, slower, and weaker than the German battle cruiser, but there were four of them, they averaged 14,000 tons, and, in combination, their twenty-two 9.2-inch guns fired a heavy broadside. Troubridge also had eight destroyers armed with torpedoes. Thanks toGloucester’s reporting, Troubridge knew Souchon’s course and speed. Informed at first that Goeben was headed north for the Adriatic, Troubridge had placed himself in a position to fight her in darkness and relatively confined waters, where his weaker ships would have a chance to get in close and neutralize the German advantage in range and gun caliber. After midnight, when it became clear that Souchon was heading away from the Adriatic, Troubridge realized that if he steamed south at once, he still might be able to intercept Goeben. Unable to contact Milne, he decided on his own to attempt to do this. For four hours in the bright moonlight, the quartet of big British armored cruisers steamed south at 19 knots, their maximum speed, with the prospect of action at daybreak. No one in the Royal Navy who knew Troubridge, the man and the admiral, could doubt that this decision would lead to a rewarding display of professional skill and courage.

Ernest C. T. Troubridge was a genial, rugged, fifty-two-year-old seaman whose thick mane of white hair had earned him the sailors’ nickname the Silver King. His navy pedigree, like Milne’s, was impeccable: his great-grandfather, a comrade of Nelson’s, had been at the Battle of the Nile. Troubridge himself had become a close friend of Prince George, later King George V, when the two were young lieutenants and when Troubridge was known as “the handsomest officer in the navy.” As an observer with the Japanese fleet during the Russo-Japanese War, he had seen from Admiral Togo’s bridge the devastating effectiveness of long-range, heavy-caliber naval guns. Fisher liked Troubridge and, writing to the younger officer, said that he had “met Mrs. Troubridge in the Abbey and lost my heart.” In 1911, he became Winston Churchill’s private naval secretary; in 1912, the First Lord appointed him chief of staff of the newly created Naval War Staff. When Troubridge came to the Mediterranean to take over the armored cruisers and serve as deputy to Admiral Milne, his relationship with the Commander-in-Chief was correct but not warm. By August 1914, Troubridge already had been designated to command the British Mediterranean Fleet once Admiral de Lapeyrère had assumed the supreme Allied naval command and Milne, his tour of duty concluded, had returned to England.

Despite his reputation, Troubridge worried as his ships steamed south. Before he left Malta, Milne had shown him Churchill’s July 30 message declaring “you must husband your force at the outset” to avoid “being brought to action against superior forces.” These instructions, Troubridge knew, had been addressed to Milne and referred to any possible engagement between the three British battle cruisers and the twelve slower but more heavily armored Austrian battleships. But the fact that Milne had shown Churchill’s message to Troubridge gave it application to him, too. After this meeting and before sailing on August 2, Troubridge had called his captains together and warned them that “they must not be surprised if they saw me with the squadron run away.” In addition, Milne had specifically warned him not to seriously engage a superior force. Here, again, Milne was referring to the Austrian fleet—but, again, Troubridge applied the admonition more generally. He had no doubt that in daylight Goeben, with her speed and the size and range of her guns, was a force superior to his own and that therefore his instructions not to engage applied. He also had to consider that his destroyers were seriously short of coal and had been falling behind the squadron; by daylight, only three of the original eight would still be in company. Nevertheless, he still believed that he might succeed if he could meet and attack Goeben at dawn, when poor light might partially nullify the advantage of the greater range of the German vessel’s guns.

These thoughts were turning in Troubridge’s mind when, at 2:45 a.m., he found himself confronted in the flagship chart room by Defence’s captain, Fawcett Wray.

“Are you going to fight, sir?” asked Wray, who, as Flag Captain, was also Troubridge’s second in command. “Because, if so, the squadron ought to know.”

“Yes,” Troubridge replied. “I know it is wrong, but I cannot have the name of the whole Mediterranean Squadron stink.” Troubridge then signaled his ships: “I am endeavoring to cross the bows of Goeben by 6 a.m. and intend to engage her if possible. . . . If we have not cut him off . . . [I intend] to avoid a long-range action.”

Wray, a gunnery expert, went away disturbed by this answer. Forty-five minutes later, he came back determined to express his opinion. He found Troubridge lying on his bunk in his cabin. The lights were out but the admiral was awake. “I don’t like it, Sir,” said Wray. “Neither do I, but why?” asked Troubridge.

Wray knew that Troubridge had orders not to engage “a superior force,” and he shared Troubridge’s opinion that, at a range greater than 16,000 yards, Goeben was such a force. Wray explained to the admiral how Goeben, using her superior speed, could circle the squadron “at some range outside sixteen thousand yards which her guns would carry and your guns will not. It seems likely to be the suicide of your squadron.”

Troubridge asked whether Wray was certain that the cruisers could not get in close before Goeben opened fire. Wray said that he was convinced of this, but that he would ask for confirmation from his ship’s navigator. Before Wray left to find this officer, Troubridge said, “I cannot turn away now. Think of my pride.” Wray replied, “Has your pride got anything to do with this, Sir? It is your country’s welfare which is at stake.”

When Defence’s navigator appeared, Troubridge asked whether, on its present course and speed, the squadron would have any chance of bringing Goeben within range of the British 9.2-inch guns before daylight. The navigator replied that there was no chance. A few minutes after 4:00 a.m., Troubridge called off the interception. When Wray went back to see him, he said, “Admiral, that’s the bravest thing you have done in your life.” Later, Wray added, “I think he was in tears.”

At 4:05 a.m., Troubridge signaled Milne: “Being only able to meet Goeben outside the range of our guns and inside his, I have abandoned the chase with my squadron. Goeben evidently going to Eastern Mediterranean. I had hoped to meet her before daylight.” He asked for instructions, giving Milne a chance to overrule him and order battle at all costs. For six hours, according to Troubridge, he received no reply. Then Milne signaled, “Why did you not continue to cut off Goeben? She’s only going seventeen knots.” (Milne knew this from Gloucester’s reports.) By then, however, Troubridge had turned back; at 10:00 a.m., he entered the port of Zante to coal his destroyers before returning to watch the Adriatic.

Later that morning in a long message to Milne, Troubridge attempted to explain his decision: “With visibility at the time, I could have been sighted from 20 to 25 miles away and could never have got nearer unless Goeben wished to bring me to action which she could have done under circumstances most advantageous to her. . . . I had hoped to have engaged her at 3.30 in the morning in dim light. . . . In view of the immense importance of victory or defeat at such an early stage of a war, I would consider it a great imprudence to place a squadron in such a position to be picked off at leisure and sunk while unable to effectively reply.”

Meanwhile, unaware that a battle with four British armored cruisers had been in the offing and had been called off, Souchon continued eastward. When the red ball of the sun rose out of the sea—about the time the British cruisers might have opened fire—the blue Ionian Sea was empty. Then, far astern, a column of smoke appeared. It was Gloucester. Souchon, of course, was unaware that the three British battle cruisers, the only antagonists whose speed and power truly menaced his force, were far away to the west; for all he knew they were just behind Gloucester, straining to overtake. Once again, every spare man in Goeben’s crew went below to the coal bunkers and boiler rooms. Inside these steel compartments, where the temperature was 125 degrees Fahrenheit, half-naked men, sweat streaming down their bodies, flung coal into the furnaces. Black coal dust penetrated their noses, clogged their throats, inflamed their eyes. Every two hours, the men were rotated up to the relative paradise of the open deck, where they lay insensible until summoned to return below. As the day progressed, it grew worse. The ship’s boiler tubes began to burst and spouts of steam and boiling water spurted onto bare bodies. Four men were scalded to death.

On his bridge, Souchon paced. He was afraid to turn and engage Gloucester, as, for all he knew, British battle cruisers might be just over the horizon. At the same time, he could not meet his collier and coal with Gloucester in view. Desperate to rid himself of this shadow, he signaled Breslau to scare her away by pretending to lay mines in her path.

On his own bridge, Captain Howard Kelly of the Gloucester was equally anxious to delay Goeben until—as he assumed was imminent—Milne arrived. All day, Kelly had been ignoring Milne’s command to “gradually . . . drop astern to avoid capture.” WhenBreslau turned back, Kelly decided to attack her and thereby force the battle cruiser also to turn and deal with him. At 1:35 p.m., Gloucester’s forward 6-inch gun opened fire at a range of 11,500 yards. Splashes rose in the sea astern of Breslau. The German light cruiser immediately replied, first with ranging shots, then with rapid, accurate salvos, one grouping landing only thirty yards from the British ship. Kelly responded by increasing speed, closing the range to 10,000 yards, and turning sufficiently to fire his full broadside.

This scuffle finally provoked Souchon. From Gloucester’s bridge, Goeben, a distant smudge in the haze over the bow, was seen to turn. Bright glows marked the flash of her guns; seconds later, tall white columns of water, produced by 11-inch shells, appeared in the sea. Kelly, having achieved his purpose of forcing the battle cruiser to arrest her progress, broke off and fell back. Souchon, who could not afford to spend precious coal chasing a light cruiser, resumed his course. Gloucester resumed shadowing. At 2:45 p.m., Kelly signaled Milne: “Have engaged at long range with Breslau and retreated when Goeben turned. I am now following again.” Gloucester, firing eighteen rounds of 6-inch and fourteen rounds of 4-inch, had hit Breslau at the waterline, but this inflicted no casualties and failed to affect her speed. For another three hours, Kelly trailed his enemies. Then, at 4:40 in the afternoon, when the mountains of Cape Matapan, the central southern promontory of the Peloponnesian Peninsula, appeared on his port bow, with his coal nearly exhausted and with stern orders from Milne forbidding him to go beyond Matapan, Kelly broke off. He had done his best, had hung on tenaciously and only relinquished the chase under explicit orders. Free at last, Goeben and Breslau rounded the cape and entered the Aegean Sea.

Through the long day during which Gloucester with her two 6-inch guns and ten 4-inch guns had pursued Goeben and attacked her consort, Admiral Milne had kept his three battle cruisers with their combined total of twenty-four 12-inch and forty-eight 4-inch guns at Malta. When the Commander-in-Chief finally cleared Valletta harbor at 1:00 a.m. on August 8, he set an easterly course for Cape Matapan, where the German force had last been seen by Gloucester eight hours before. Milne’s speed was a leisurely 12 knots; still convinced that Souchon’s course was an elaborate feint and that eventually Goeben would turn back for the western Mediterranean, the British admiral was saving his coal for battle. At 2:30 the next afternoon, an urgent signal from the Admiralty upset this stately progress: “Commence hostilities at once against Austria.” Milne’s original war orders dictated that in the event of war with Austria, he should concentrate near Malta and keep watch on the Adriatic. Obediently, he turned north to merge his three battle cruisers with Troubridge’s four armored cruisers and to prepare to engage the Austrian fleet. Goeben was forgotten.

In fact, war between Britain and Austria did not come for another four days. The erroneous war telegram was a product of the misplaced initiative of an Admiralty clerk who, discovering a draft of the contingency coded war message lying in a tray on a colleague’s desk and wishing to be helpful, sent it off. Four hours later, the mistake was corrected and Milne was told by an embarrassed Admiralty, “Negative my telegram hostilities against Austria.” Nevertheless, for nearly twenty-four hours, Milne kept his fleet concentrated; then, leaving Troubridge to guard the Adriatic, he again turned to the east. Still in no hurry, still waiting for Goeben to turn, he reduced his speed to 10 knots. Goeben had gone into the Aegean? Splendid! Now to devise a plan to keep her bottled up. If all went as Milne planned, the German battle cruiser would never come near the French transports.

Souchon, at last free of surveillance, still needed coal. He signaled his collier, coming from Piraeus, to meet him at Denusa, a remote, sparsely inhabited island on the far side of the Aegean. Through the daylight hours of August 8, Goeben cruised furtively among the Greek islands and, at dawn on the morning of August 9, slid quietly into the bay of Denusa, which was deserted except for a few fishermen. While the sun rose higher and heat radiated from the sheer rock walls of the surrounding cliffs, Goeben andBreslaucoaled simultaneously, one warship made fast to each side of the collier. Both ships were cleared for action and prepared to get under way in thirty minutes. Coaling continued through the night by candlelight; the searchlights normally used to illuminate the decks remained switched off lest beams or glow be seen far out to sea. Day and night, lookouts posted on the summit of a cliff swept their binoculars across the horizon. The first signs of danger, however, were reported from Goeben’s wireless room: beginning at nine on the evening of the ninth, the ship’s radio operators began picking up signals from British warships. The signals grew louder. At 3:00 a.m. on August 10, Milne and three battle cruisers entered the Aegean.

While his men shoveled coal, Souchon thought about what he should do. It was essential to communicate with Constantinople; despite his earlier bravado, he had come to believe that an attempt to enter the Dardanelles without Turkish permission risked naval and diplomatic disaster. To avoid revealing his whereabouts by using Goeben’s radio, he sent the liner General, now in the Aegean operating under his orders, to the island of Smyrna to forward a message to the German embassy in Constantinople: “Indispensable military necessity requires attack on enemy in the Black Sea. Go to any lengths to arrange for me to pass through the Straits at once with permission of Turkish government if possible; without formal approval if necessary.” The hours passed and Souchon waited for an answer. The sun set and the moon rose, but there was no reply. At 3:00 a.m. on August 10, learning that the British had entered the Aegean, he decided that, with an answer or without one, he must leave at dawn for the Dardanelles; there he would enter or fight whoever he had to: British or Turkish. Finally, he received an ambiguous message forwarded from Constantinople by General: “Enter. Demand surrender of forts.” Souchon did not know whether he was being told to force his way into the passage or was being requested to save face for the Turks by staging a charade of battle. Not knowing, he still had to sail.

At first light on August 10, clouds of black smoke poured from Goeben’s funnels, anchor chains rattled in, and Goeben followed by Breslau glided out of the harbor. Across a flat, silvery sea, the two ships steamed north at 18 knots toward the Dardanelles. By noon, stifling heat crushed down from a white sky; the only animation came from blue water foaming back from the ships’ bows and washing along the gray steel sides. At five that afternoon, when the sun was lower and the western sky blazed in fiery splendor, watchers on Goeben’s bridge could see the island of Imbros and the plains of ancient Troy. Coming closer, they observed the coast of Asia Minor dividing itself from the narrow tongue of the Gallipoli peninsula with the gleaming water of the Dardanelles, the fabled Hellespont, in between. Off Cape Helles at the mouth of the Dardanelles, Goeben and Breslau halted. The German officers stared at the the water flowing smoothly out of the Narrows and looked up at the brown heights on both sides of the entrance. They could see clearly the outer forts of Kum Kale on the Asiatic side and those of Sedd el Bahr on the European side. Behind, farther up the historic passageway, lay the massive fortress of Chanak with its heavy guns. Over all of these fortifications, the green crescent flag waved in the evening breeze. Motionless, the two ships lay before the entrance. An uncanny hush filled the air. Then came the signal “Action Stations.” Slowly, Goeben’s turrets swung around until the muzzles of the 11-inch guns were trained on the forts. The 5.9-inch guns in their casements also swiveled into position. There was a responding movement in the forts, and the long, menacing barrels of the coastal guns were trained on the two German ships.

Souchon had to make a decision. Should he attempt to fight his way through? He knew that the British were coming up behind; already his lookouts reported distant columns of smoke behind him on the horizon. From the signal bridge, he signaled Cape Helles: “Request pilot.” Two dark shapes emerged from the small harbor at Cape Helles; they were Turkish destroyers coming at full speed. Uncertain of their mission, Goeben’s secondary guns trained on the approaching ships. Then the Turkish leader hoisted flags signaling, “Please follow me.” The delay had been caused by uncertainty in Constantinople. The commander of the Chanak fortress had reported that the German warships had requested permission to enter the Straits. Enver Pasha, the Ottoman war minister, who controlled the forts and the minefields, pondered the risks to Turkey and to himself and then declared, “They are to allow them to enter.” Asked whether the British warships following the Germans should be fired on, Enver paused and then said, “Yes.”

Goeben and Breslau moved slowly into the Narrows, passing a shoreline, now hilly, now flat, lined with villages and vineyards. Along the way, the Germans could see numerous fortifications, many of them obsolete, lying half concealed beneath the heights. Twilight came as they glided past Chanak, the old, rust-colored fortified castle, and turned into a little creek where they anchored peacefully. Supper arrived with the crews still standing by the guns. Later that night, Souchon was told, a British warship had appeared off the entrance to the Dardanelles and had been refused permission to enter.

For three days, Goeben lay quietly at anchor. Then the battle cruiser and her consort steamed out into the Sea of Marmara, with the green coastline shimmering in the distance across a light blue sea. A few hours later, the German sailors saw at last the imperial city of Constantinople glittering in the sunlight. Before their eyes lay its chain of hills, its giant domes and soaring minarets, the ancient castles, the white palaces and villas, the massive, crumbling city walls, the rows of dark cypresses, the flowering gardens along the water. Their voyage was over.

Ironically, the Goeben’s arrival at the Dardanelles brought great satisfaction in Britain. Goeben, apparently so quickly hounded out of the Mediterranean into what seemed ignominious internment, was depicted as a hunted animal scurrying for cover; her escape became part of a glorious “sweeping of the seas” by the Royal Navy. Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley that the news was “interesting,” but that “as we shall insist that the Goeben should be manned by a Turkish instead of a German crew, it doesn’t matter much. . . . The Turkish sailors cannot navigate her—except onto rocks or mines.”

The Turks were unsure whether to be pleased or frightened by this turn of events. A nervous proposal that the Germans disarm Goeben and Breslau, “temporarily and superficially only,” was scornfully rejected by Souchon. No one knew what to do next, until the German ambassador suggested that perhaps the ships could be “sold” to Turkey. This would not only solve the immediate problem but also serve as retribution on the British for their “requisition” of the two Turkish battleships. The idea was quickly accepted by both countries. On August 16, a solemn ceremony took place off the Golden Horn. The crews were mustered on deck and informed that their ships had been bought by Turkey. The German flag was lowered, the crescent was raised, and the Turkish naval minister officially received the Jawus Sultan Selim (the former Goeben) and the Midilli (the former Breslau) into the Ottoman navy. The following morning, fezzes were brought out to the ships and distributed to the men. The day of worship aboard the two ships was advanced from Sunday to Friday. At about this time, the pro-Allied Turkish minister of finance met a distinguished Belgian to inform him sadly that the Germans had captured Brussels. The Belgian pointed to Goeben lying at anchor off the Golden Horn and said, “I have even more terrible news for you. The Germans have captured Turkey.”

When the British ambassador protested what had happened, he was informed that Goeben and Breslau were now Turkish ships. If so, the ambassador contended, the German crews should immediately disembark and be repatriated to Germany. Ah! but they were no longer Germans, Enver told him; they were Turks: they wore fezzes and worshiped on Fridays. In any case, Enver pointed out, the best native Turkish sailors were still in England, waiting to man the two British-built dreadnoughts; nothing could be done until these men returned. Churchill, who had explained the confiscation of the Turkish battleships by saying, “We could not afford to do without these two fine ships,” now rumbled that Turkey’s behavior in the acquisition of the Goeben and Breslau was “insolent,” “defiant,” and “openly fraudulent.”

On September 23, Admiral Souchon was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Ottoman navy, but Turkey remained at peace. She did not close the Dardanelles to Russian trade or take any other action violating her own neutrality. In the German embassy and in Berlin, consternation grew; it began to seem that the Ottoman empire might never actually enter the war as an ally. From Turkey’s perspective, there seemed to be no need to go to war: no one had attacked her; no one, neither the Russians nor the British, even posed a serious threat. Indeed, the unexpected entry into the war of Great Britain, whose fleet and diplomacy had always been a buttress of Ottoman power, raised serious doubts and hesitations in Constantinople. While trying to sort out the situation and calculate who might win this war, Turkey’s ministers smiled and prevaricated.

This state of affairs continued for ten weeks. Ultimately, Admiral Souchon saw his duty: it was to precipitate war. On October 27, with Enver’s collaboration, he took his fleet—Goeben, Breslau, a Turkish cruiser, and four Turkish destroyers—into the Black Sea for “maneuvers.” Once at sea, he steamed to the Russian coast and, on the morning of October 29, with no declaration of war and no warning, bombarded Odessa, Sevastopol, and Novorossisk. Russian civilians were killed, oil tanks were set on fire, and a Russian gunboat, a minelayer, and six merchant ships were sunk. “I have thrown the Turks into the powder keg and kindled war between Russia and Turkey,” Souchon wrote to his wife.

The rest happened quickly. The grand vizier, protesting that he not been consulted, threatened to resign, and a majority of the Cabinet wished to disavow the violent act, but Enver prevailed. He had only to point to Goeben, with her German crew—fezzes notwithstanding—and her 11-inch guns, lying off the Golden Horn. On October 30, the British ambassador presented an ultimatum to Turkey, demanding that the German crews be removed within twelve hours. There was no response. The British still hoped to prod the Turks back from the brink by a demonstration of sea power; on November 3, Indomitable and Indefatigable with two French battleships bombarded the forts at the entrance to the Dardanelles. The British ships fired forty-six 12-inch shells at Fort Sedd el Bahr on the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula, blew up a magazine, and raised huge clouds of dust. Still the Turks did not respond. On November 4, Russia declared war on the Ottoman empire, and the following day Britain and France followed suit.

Thereafter, the iron gates of geography closed on Russia. With access barred, first to the Baltic, and now to the Black Sea, the tsar’s empire was left dependent for imports and exports on the White Sea port of Archangel, icebound for many months. Ninety percent of Russia’s grain exports had come out through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. The closure of that passageway had an even greater choking effect on imports; now cannons, rifles, shells, and other essentials of war had no route by which to travel from Western arsenals to Russian armies. In time, this would contribute to Russia’s collapse. Turkey’s entry into the war also critically affected Britain’s strategy, leading to the bloody failure of the Gallipoli campaign and the diversion of manpower into the campaigns of the Middle East and Mesopotamia. Ultimately, Turkey paid for her choice with the breakup of the Ottoman empire. After the war, Winston Churchill himself wrote a grim epitaph to this historical episode. When Goeben arrived at the Dardanelles, he said, she brought with her “more slaughter, more misery and ruin than has ever before been borne within the compass of a ship.”

At the Admiralty, early satisfaction that the Mediterranean had been “cleansed” quickly soured into mortification that Goeben had been allowed to escape. Admiral Milne was recalled on August 18, came home, and retired. Sensitive to criticism, he argued that he had successfully carried out his primary orders to defend the French troopships. Battenberg backed Milne on this point; indeed, no one could argue that the transports had been attacked. As for Goeben, Milne declared accurately that the Admiralty had given him no hint that Turkey was a possible destination for the German ship. Why should he, a sea officer with his own pressing naval concerns, have been expected to fathom a secret diplomatic arrangement of which the Foreign Office, the Cabinet, and the Admiralty had no knowledge? Milne put the blame for Goeben’s escape equally on the Admiralty’s failure to give him guidance and on Troubridge for his failure to intercept. On August 30, a Court of Inquiry announced that after “careful examination” of Milne’s behavior and decisions, “their Lordships approved the measures taken by him in all respects.”

Troubridge’s career at first seemed unaffected. On September 8, once Admiral de Lapeyrère’s French battleships had taken over responsibility for containing the Austrians in the Adriatic, Troubridge’s force, again buttressed by Indomitable and Indefatigable,was posted at the entrance to the Dardanelles. “Your sole duty,” Churchill told him, “is to sink Goeben and Breslau, under whatever flag, if they come out of the Dardanelles.” But there was much talk in the navy about the failure to fight Goeben, and someone—if not Milne, then someone else—had to be held responsible. Troubridge was chosen. Surprisingly, the most vehement of his critics was the normally mild-mannered First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg. Troubridge was guilty of “amazing misconduct,” Battenberg wrote to Milne. Troubridge, Prince Louis continued elsewhere, had “signally failed in carrying out the task assigned to him. . . . Not one of the excuses which Admiral Troubridge gives can be accepted for one moment. . . . The escape of Goeben must forever remain a shameful episode in this war. The flag officer . . . responsible . . . cannot be trusted with any further command afloat and his continuance in such command constitutes a danger to the state.”

Troubridge returned to England to face a Court of Inquiry. The court judged that he had “had a very fair chance of at least delaying Goeben by materially damaging her,” and passed the case up to a court-martial convened on board the battleship Bulwark at Portland on November 5. The Admiralty did not dare charge Troubridge with cowardice; his reputation for physical courage was too high. Rather, the charge was brought that Troubridge “did, from negligence or through other default, forbear to pursue the chase of His Imperial German Majesty’s ship Goeben, being an enemy then flying.” Troubridge based his defense on the instructions from the Admiralty and from Milne not to engage a superior enemy force. Churchill’s July 30 message to Milne, shown to Troubridge at Malta, was exhibited: “Do not be brought to action against superior force.” Troubridge also cited Milne’s signal to him on August 5: “First Cruiser Squadron and Gloucester . . . are not to get seriously engaged with superior force.” The Admiralty prosecutor responded that the term “superior force” in both messages clearly referred to the Austrian fleet; Troubridge argued that under certain conditions the term also applied to Goeben. For a number of years, he told the court, it had been his “fixed and unalterable opinion that the advent of battle cruisers had killed the armored cruiser.” Milne, he contended, was thoroughly familiar with his opinion; in 1913, the Commander-in-Chief had asked him to lecture on the subject to officers of the Mediterranean Fleet. Indeed, according to Troubridge, their most recent discussion had come during the interview between Milne and himself at Malta on August 2:

Troubridge: “You know, sir, that I consider a battle cruiser a superior force to a cruiser squadron, unless they can get within range of her.”

Milne: “That question won’t arise as you will have Indomitable and Indefatigable with you.”

When Troubridge sailed that evening, of course, Indomitable and Indefatigable sailed with him. But on the following day, on Admiralty orders, Milne had stripped away the two battle cruisers and sent them charging toward Gibraltar, leaving Troubridge with only his armored cruisers. The Court of Inquiry had expressed regret that Troubridge had not made it clear to Milne that “he had no intention to engage Goeben in open water in daylight with his squadron unless supported by a battle cruiser.” In fact, Troubridge had done so repeatedly.

Troubridge also claimed that at the same Malta interview, Milne had conceded that the man on the spot must be the final arbiter as to what constituted a “superior enemy” (in court, Milne reluctantly conceded that he had said this). Once the battle cruisers were taken away, Troubridge contended, his squadron was obviously inferior in gun power and speed: his armored cruisers had never registered hits at over 8,000 yards; their best speed in company was 17 knots. These factors left him—as the man on the spot—in no doubt thatGoeben constituted a superior force, which he was forbidden to engage. “All I could gain [by engaging],” he said, “would be the reputation of having attempted something which, though predestined to be ineffective, would be indicative of the boldness of our spirit. I felt that more than that was expected of an admiral entrusted by Their Lordships with great responsibilities.”

Milne, who was present throughout the Troubridge proceedings, was consistently hostile to his former subordinate. Addressing the Court of Inquiry, Milne had declared that he had expected Troubridge to fight Goeben and that in such an action it would have been difficult for Goeben to engage four ships at once; in practice, most single ships had all they could do to aim and fire at two enemy ships. For this reason, Milne said, he did not approve of Admiral Troubridge’s abandonment of the chase. Troubridge, regarding Milne, limited himself to expressing his “deep conviction . . . that Goeben had no right to be escaping at all and that if she had been sealed up in the Strait of Messina by the battle cruisers, as I thought she ought to have been, she would never have escaped.”

Ultimately, the judgment of the court-martial, like Troubridge’s decision in the early hours of August 7, came down to a calculation of the relative strength of four armored cruisers as against one battle cruiser. Troubridge claimed that his first decision to attack was “a desperate one” made in the face of clear orders by his immediate superior not to engage “a superior force.” “But I made it and for a time I stuck with it,” he said. “Gradually, however, it forced itself more and more upon my mind that though my decision might be natural, might be heroic, it was certainly wrong and certainly in the teeth of my orders. . . . It was at this psychological moment . . . that my Flag Captain came back to me. . . . It was his duty . . . and, as a matter of fact, I did in reality completely agree with [him]. After he left me I thought it over a little further and then I made my decision.”

Many British naval officers simply did not agree with Troubridge that in daylight Goeben constituted a force superior to his four armored cruisers. Battenberg emphatically declared that the twenty-two British 9.2-inch guns and fourteen 7.5-inch guns would have nullified and overpowered Goeben’s ten 11-inch guns. The Admiralty prosecutor argued that Troubridge had “assumed too readily” that all was well with Goeben; that she could steam at full speed and had plenty of coal and no worry about using up her ammunition. Churchill declared after the war that “the limited ammunition of Goeben would have had to have been wonderfully employed to have sunk all four British armored cruisers one after another at this long range.” Churchill also pointed out that at the Battle of the Falkland Islands a few months later, two British battle cruisers were to use up nearly three-quarters of their ammunition sinking only two German armored cruisers.

Captain Fawcett Wray of Defence supported Troubridge, restating the opinion he had expressed to the admiral in his ship’s chart room: “Up to the range of sixteen thousand yards, Goeben must be a superior force to one Defence or four Defences. . . . For four ships to try to attack her is . . . impossible because you could not get . . . [within] sixteen thousand yards unless she wanted you to, but if you did get within sixteen thousand or twenty thousand yards . . . it . . . [would be] suicidal.”

Oddly, the court-martial devoted no time to a consideration of comparative armor. Nor had Troubridge apparently ever asked himself whether his cruisers’ 9.2-inch or 7.5-inch shells would penetrate Goeben’s heavy 11-inch armor. An answer was provided at Jutland, when the German battle cruiser Seydlitz, similar in construction to Goeben, survived twenty-two hits from 12-inch, 13.5-inch, and 15-inch British shells, each with many times the penetrating and destructive power of Troubridge’s 9.2-inch shells. Nor did Troubridge’s defenders mention the vulnerability of his own thinly armored ships to 11-inch shellfire. Jutland made it painfully clear that armored cruisers were spectacularly vulnerable to heavy shells fired by battleships or battle cruisers; that day, four of the ships that had pursued the Goeben—the battle cruiser Indefatigable and the armored cruisers Defence, Black Prince, and Warrior—blew up and sank because heavy German shells penetrated their inadequate armor.

The verdict of the court-martial was handed down on November 9. The court accepted Troubridge’s judgment that, under the circumstances of weather, time, and position at the time the two sides would have met—6:00 a.m. in full daylight on the open sea—Goebenconstituted a “superior force.” The court acknowledged that Troubridge’s instructions, passed to him from the Admiralty by Milne and repeated to him again by Milne, ordered him not to engage a “superior force.” Admiral Troubridge, therefore, was “fully and honourably” acquitted.

In the larger sense, however, neither Milne nor Troubridge ever received full acquittal. Troubridge afterward was given various commands on shore, but he never again served at sea. Milne remained on half pay for the rest of the war. Fisher continued to blame the “serpent” Milne for Goeben’s escape. “Personally, I should have shot Sir Berkeley Milne,” Fisher wrote to a friend. He changed the prewar “Sir Berkeley Mean” to “Sir Berkeley Goeben,” adding that “this most disastrous event . . . [a] lamentable blow to British naval prestige, would never have occurred had Sir B. Milne had been off Messina with the three battle cruisers . . . as if international law mattered a damn.” Many historians agreed that Milne’s failure to blockade Messina was the key. When Sir Julian Corbett, the official navy historian, criticized Milne for not guarding both entrances to the Straits of Messina with his battle cruisers, Milne raged at the presumption of “an amateur on shore” daring to criticize a senior naval officer. Arthur Marder, the American naval historian, closed his account of the episode by citing Milne’s remark “They pay me to be an admiral. They don’t pay me to think.”

Within the navy, the court-martial left a basic issue unresolved: when an officer finds himself confronting a possibly superior force, should he ignore the odds, summon raw courage, and attack, or should he retreat and await a better day? Nelson’s dictum “No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy” had become holy writ in the Royal Navy, but Nelson had said it at Trafalgar, when his fleet of sailing ships had physical parity and psychological superiority over the enemy. In the modern era, no British destroyer captain was expected to invoke Nelson and lay his ship alongside—or even singlehandedly attack—a German dreadnought. The navy expected the exercise of judgment along with a display of courage; this was the verdict and lesson of the Troubridge court-martial. And, in fact, the subsequent battles of Coronel, the Falkland Islands, and Jutland strongly supported Troubridge’s belief that bigger ships firing heavier guns could destroy smaller, weaker ships with relative ease, especially when the smaller ships could not—or did not choose to—run away.

Nevertheless, the Troubridge court-martial left a bad taste in the mouths of British sailors for many years. Twenty-five years later in the South Atlantic, a situation arose somewhat similar to the one faced by Troubridge. In December 1939, early in World War II, the German pocket battleship Graf Spee, a formidable ship armed with six 11-inch and eight 5.9-inch guns, encountered three smaller British cruisers, which among them carried six 8-inch and sixteen 6-inch guns. The British commodore Henry Harwood did not hesitate to engage. Graf Spee, concentrating her heavy gunfire on the largest British ship, the heavy cruiser Exeter, put this enemy out of action, but she did not seriously harm or shake off the two light cruisers, Ajax and Achilles, which continued to pepper her with gunfire and threaten her with torpedoes. After an all-day battle, the damaged Graf Spee retreated into the neutral harbor of Montevideo, Uruguay, claiming the legal seventy-two-hour respite to make repairs. During this span, the two small British cruisers waited outside territorial waters while British reinforcements, including a battle cruiser and an aircraft carrier, hurried toward the scene. In the end, Graf Spee emerged, steamed into shallow offshore water, and scuttled herself. Then her captain, Hans Langsdorff, went to a hotel room and shot himself. In the aftermath, Britain’s First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, wrote to Harwood, “Even if all our ships had been sunk you would have done the right thing. . . . Your action has reversed the finding of the Troubridge court martial and shows how wrong it was.”