By the end of 1914, movement along World War I’s Western Front had ceased, and a great series of trenches stretched from the Channel Coast to the Swiss border. In less than six months, after more than 2 million men had become casualties, the Allies were left with no possibility for strategic maneuver. For the British, it was necessary to use their control of the seas to outflank the Central Powers.
It was believed by many, including First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, that a demonstration by the fleet against the supposedly weak Ottoman Empire could achieve strategic victory. An attack to force the Dardanelles Strait, using expendable pre-dreadnought battleships, could place a fleet off the capital of Turkey, Constantinople. The attack could open a desperately needed supply route to the Black Sea, allowing munitions to flow into Russia and grain to flow out. It was thought that the psychological effect of seeing the mighty warships might compel the Turkish government to surrender, or at least inspire the neutral Balkan and Eastern European nations to join the Allied forces against the Central Powers.
On 19 February 1915, the fleet launched the campaign to silence the coastal batteries defending the strait, with little success.1 Vice Admiral Sir Sackville Carden’s attack was described by Winston Churchill as “utterly without vigour.”2 Between the 19 February operation and the next major attack of 18 March, Carden’s fleet fought several duels with the Turks defending the entrance to the narrows. Civilian-manned minesweepers were taking heavy fire and failing to clear the minefields. Carden resorted to landing several companies of Royal Marine Light Infantry to silence the batteries of the forts at Kum Kale and Sedd el Bahr.3 On 18 March, a powerful force sailed into the narrows with horrendous results. The Allies lost three battleships to mines, and many more suffered severe damage.4
The failure to force the Dardanelles with a naval force compelled the landing of an army on the Gallipoli Peninsula to clear the coastal artillery positions and fortifications. On 25 April 1915, the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force under General Sir Ian Hamilton landed at Gaba Tebe, Cape Helles, and Kum Kale.5 Lacking substantial organic artillery support, many units relied heavily on naval gunfire. Any disruption in this fire support would be devastating to the troops defending their beachheads from enemy counterattacks attempting to push them back into the Aegean. The introduction of German submarines to the Dardanelles would help illustrate the important role they play in repelling an amphibious assault—in 1915, and in the western Pacific today.
Operations: Allied Powers
Early in the campaign, though, it was the Allies who benefited from the submarine factor. British submarines wreaked havoc against Turkish littoral shipping within the strait and the adjacent Sea of Marmara. On 13 December 1914, Lieutenant Commander Norman Holbrook won the first naval Victoria Cross (VC), and the first ever to be awarded to a submariner. Holbrook captained his E11 through minefields and destroyers to find, fix, and finish the Ottoman pre-dreadnought battleship Messudieh.6
Another VC was given to the skipper of the E14, Lieutenant Commander Edward Boyle, for his three-week patrol into the strait and Sea of Marmara. By the end of April, the E14 had sunk two gunboats and two transports, including a liner carrying an artillery battery and 6,000 Ottoman troops.7 On 25 May, the E11 penetrated the harbor of Constantinople, sinking the transport Stamboul. Turkish crowds rioted in the streets of the capital city, and troops intended for Gallipoli were routed to quell civil unrest instead. Lieutenant Commander Martin Nasmith was awarded a VC for the action off the coast of the Ottoman capital.8
By the end of the campaign, eight of the 13 Allied submarines used in the Dardanelles were lost, but the effect they had on the Turkish Navy and the sea supply route to the peninsula was immense. The Turks lost two battleships, a destroyer, five gunboats, 11 transports, 44 steamers, and 148 sailing ships to submarines. Because of the lurking subs, Turkish supply lines were isolated to an inadequate road network and a long rail line that stretched 600 miles, resulting in a logistical nightmare for the peninsula’s defenders.9 The presence of the submarine within the Turkish littoral environment forced Ottoman logistics to bend to the submarine.
Operations: Central Powers
As the situation ashore developed into trench warfare, the Allied battleships were used to provide fire support for the infantry and counterbattery fire against new heavy batteries brought up by the Turks. The situation offshore would take a turn for the worse as German U-boats arrived in the Aegean Sea. British intelligence predicted their presence as inevitable—but the precautions taken to mitigate the risk of their arrival would prove to fail.10
On 18 May, a large U-boat was spotted by British agents in the port of Smyrna, as information came of two new Ottoman divisions deploying to the Gallipoli front.11 Otto Liman von Sanders, the German commanding general of the Turkish 5th Army, wished to combine submarine attacks on the supporting fleet with a renewed counteroffensive on 19 May against the Australian New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC). The Ottoman assault was turned back by the Allies, and no submarines struck home on any battleships . . . yet. But the effectiveness of the submarine soon would prove decisive in cutting off the Allies from much-needed fire support that had assisted them so well in repulsing the 19 May assault.
The German U-boat U-21, under the command of Kapitänleutnant Otto Hersing, sank the British pre-dreadnought battleships HMS Triumph and Majestic on 25 May and 27 May, respectively. Although the Triumph spotted and opened fire on a periscope at 500 yards, she was struck by a torpedo. British naval historian and strategist Julian Corbett described the ineffectiveness of the Triumph’s torpedo nets: “The torpedo had got fairly home as though her nets had been a spider’s web.”12 As the ship began to list, retreat was sounded, and soon she slipped beneath the waves.
Although she lost 70 men and three officers, a greater loss was felt by the ANZACs ashore. Corbett describes the mood at ANZAC Cove after the loss of the Triumph:
It was like an old friend gone, so ready and skillful had she been to help at every turn of good or evil fortune . . . not only did it mean a serious new complication in the problems of supplying the various beaches, but the fact had to be faced that continuous battleship support for the army was no longer possible.13
On 27 May at 0645, a periscope broke the surface of the water some 400 yards from the port beam of HMS Majestic.14 The Majestic opened fire—but she was too late, with a torpedo running in between a gap in the screen of several surrounding transports. The torpedo broke through the anti-torpedo netting around the ship’s hull, as with the Triumph, striking amidships. This first torpedo was rapidly joined by a second that struck home.
With the loss of both battleships, Corbett observed, “Never before, perhaps, had a military operation been so deeply affected by means so small.”15 A single U-boat and a few well-placed torpedoes had affected the morale of all within sight of the naval disaster on both sides of the trenches. The large floating forts that had terrorized the Turks in their trenches had been forced to retreat, giving the Turks a welcome dose of confidence, while taking much of it away from the Allies on shore.
The death of these leviathans caused the withdrawal of all major Allied warships off Cape Helles and ANZAC Cove. Not only had troop morale in the trenches been impacted; even worse, naval gunfire support available to those troops fighting on the peninsula had been reduced. In his account of the campaign, Joseph Murray, a member of the Royal Naval Division, wrote about the Majestic being struck by the torpedoes from U-21, describing the shock that her sinking had on the troops:
She served us well. We shall miss her protection. She was an inspiration to us all. How we cheered when her shells landed on Achi Baba. She had been our guardian. A quarter of an hour ago she was defiant and even now her keel had a look of defiance about it. We now know why the warships and transports have gone. A German submarine is lurking about . . . we feel as though the Navy has deserted us.”16
Fearing more attacks against their primary fire support platforms, Rear Admiral John de Robeck, commanding the Allied naval force in the Dardanelles, retired the main body of the fleet to the Greek island of Lemnos, where the ships could be sufficiently guarded by torpedo nets.17 Only smaller ships remained offshore to support the beachheads.
A disenchanted British soldier observed, “I saw them in full flight, transports, and battleships . . . which gave the effect of a number of dogs running away with their tails between their legs. The sense of abandonment was acute.”18 The Army woke up one morning from their trenches to see the absence of the once-mighty fleet that had previously given many a stout heart.
Naval Gunfire Support Neutralized
The impact on Turkish morale was significant as the powerful guns of the fleet that had hit them hard in their trenches and assisted the Allied lines during Ottoman attacks were gone. Only in special circumstances could the big guns of the fleet sail within range of the beaches to provide much-needed fire support, but even this would provide the enemy with a potential tip as to General Hamilton’s intentions once the battleships arrived offshore to brave the possibilities of prowling U-boats.19
For Kapitänleutnant Hersing’s actions in the Dardanelles, he received the Pour le Mérite, Imperial Germany’s highest military honor. Hersing earned the nickname Zerstörer von Schlachtschiffen—“destroyer of battleships.” The Royal Navy placed a 100,000-pound bounty on his capture or death.
The Ottoman surface forces also struck an unlikely blow in the littoral domain, complementing their total defense of the straits. Twelve days before Hersing sank HMS Triumph, an Ottoman torpedo boat destroyer (TBD), the Muâvenet-i Millîye, passed by the picketing destroyers and cruisers guarding the entrance to the narrows. As the TBD approached the pre-dreadnought HMS Goliath, a password was flashed to confirm identification. The Muâvenet-i Millîye answered the Goliath’s call in the dark with two torpedoes that struck home and quickly sank the battlewagon. The TBD had used the cover of darkness and a fog bank to mask her approach.20 Five hundred seventy of the Goliath’s 700-man crew, including Captain Thomas Shelford, perished.21
The loss of the Goliath and the losses of both the Majestic and Triumph days later, added to the total loss of several battleships in the initial pushes against the straits, reduced the daily on-call naval gunfire support for the troops to cruisers and destroyers.22 The battleships were dropping like flies without any equal trade or strategic gain as originally conceived.
U-boats sank no fewer than 18 transports along the routes between Egypt and the Dardanelles; however, these successes had little impact the beachheads at Gallipoli once the force had been firmly established ashore.23 If the transports carrying the original Allied assault force had faced off against submarines in the initial landing phase, the consequences would have been catastrophic.
Warnings from a Lieutenant Named Nimitz
In December 1912, a young U.S. Navy lieutenant, Chester Nimitz, had an article published in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings titled “Military Value and Tactics of Modern Submarines.” In it, Nimitz argues for an increased emphasis on the use of the submarine in three key areas: harbor defense, coastal defense, and longer-range “sea-keeping” operations. The first two domains detail the tactical use of submarines to defend the North American coast, the U.S. Commonwealth of the Philippines, and the Panama Canal Zone from an enemy fleet.
Nimitz prophesied the risks of keeping a power-projecting fleet anchored offshore without sufficient attention to antisubmarine warfare when he wrote:
The steady development of the torpedo together with the gradual improvement in the size, motive power, and speed of submarine craft of the near future will result in a most dangerous offensive weapon, and one which will have a large part in deciding fleet actions. Even at this present day it is impossible for an enemy to blockade a port protected by submarines, and decidedly dangerous to even attempt operations anywhere along the coast where it is known that submarines are employed in the coast defense.24
Nimitz understood, from a defender’s point of view, the value of using submarines in the littoral environment, and his principles from 1912 can be translated into the counter-amphibious defense employed by General Otto Liman Von Sanders in 1915.
Sanders expressed dissatisfaction with the German and Ottoman navies during the campaign precisely because the principles argued by Nimitz in his Proceedings article two and a half years earlier were not used to full effect from the beginning. The Allied forces were not thrown into the sea by the Ottomans directly. The Central Powers failed to adequately incorporate littoral defenses with their beach fortifications in the nearly five weeks of preparation provided by the Allies while Hamilton’s forces gathered the ad hoc Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. This long period of time to prepare cannot be expected by a U.S.-led alliance in a modern Pacific scenario.
Echoes from 1915 Resonating in 2025 . . .
Just as U-21 had heavily influenced Allied naval operations off Cape Helles and ANZAC Cove, submarine operations in the western Pacific in a counter–Taiwan invasion role will be substantial in determining the outcome. The importance that People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) escorts will have in a contemporary operational scenario is not unlike that of the pre-dreadnought battleships providing naval gunfire support for troops on the peninsula in 1915. The sinking of battleships took away the already limited artillery available for the Allied troops on the peninsula.
The targets that represent essential centers of gravity for a PLA beachhead on Taiwan will be the amphibious assault and supply ships. The Allied attack submarines that can respond to a cross-channel operation will need to exercise extremely deliberate targeting to impact the amphibious lift capability for echelon follow-on forces that will be reinforcing the Communist beachheads throughout the campaign. The story of U-21’s outsized impact courtesy of a few torpedoes is an example of what a number of well-placed submarine-launched cruise missiles or modern torpedoes can do during a battle.
A 2023 Center for Strategic and International Studies report titled “The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan” details the importance of a continued focus on U.S. attack submarine modernization and production to effectively assist in countering a potential PLA cross-channel invasion of Taiwan. According to the report,
U.S. submarines wreaked havoc on Chinese shipping. Based on the agent-based modeling found in RAND’s U.S.-China Military Scorecard and historical evidence from World War II, each submarine would sink two large amphibious vessels (and an equal number of decoys and escorts) over the course of a 3.5-day period turn. Every submarine squadron (four submarines) in the strait sank eight Chinese amphibious ships and eight escorts or decoys, but at a price of roughly 20 percent attrition per 3.5 days. . . . Given the value of submarines, acquiring more is an obvious recommendation.25
The report also speaks of the need for coverage of PLAN submarines by U.S. submarines throughout the campaign, which decreases the number of attack boats allies could send against the amphibious force.26 Relieving allied attack boats from the burden of shadowing PLAN boats (not including the necessary shadowing of ballistic-missile submarines) to concentrate on the amphibious forces should be another priority for long-range naval aviation and Air Force assets. These can integrate outside the immediate weapon engagement zones to protect key supply centers and bases from subsurface cruise missile attack.27
The effective use of submarines both by the allies and the PLAN will be an essential factor in any future conflict. For the allies, a performance like U-21’s will be required. Attack submarines will need to deploy forward and survive long enough to exercise proper target selection on the amphibious ships that maintain the center of gravity for success or failure of any assault.
As for the PLAN, its submarine force likewise will need to retain survivability—but also exercise deep penetration into the Second and Third Island Chains. By so doing, the PLAN’s submarines will be able to interdict key nodes of allied supply and communication centers—and thus pose a major threat to any counterattack against a Communist crossing of the Taiwan Strait.
1. John D. Burtt, “Gallipoli Campaign: A Strategic and Operational Analysis,” Strategy and Tactics no. 336 (September–October 2022): 23.
2. Edward J. Erickson, Gallipoli & the Middle East 1914–1918: From the Dardanelles to Mesopotamia (London: Amber, 2012).
3. Erickson, Gallipoli & the Middle East, 57.
4. Burtt, “Gallipoli Campaign,” 23–24.
5. Burtt, 27–29.
6. Stephen Chambers, Krithia: Gallipoli (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Military, 2021), 63.
7. Chambers, Krithia, 63.
8. Chambers, 63.
9. Chambers, 63–64.
10. Julian S. Corbett and Henry John Newbolt, History of the Great War, Based on Official Documents: Naval Operations (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1920), vol. 3, ch. 2.
11. Corbett and Newbolt, History of the Great War.
12. Corbett and Newbolt.
13. Corbett and Newbolt.
14. Corbett and Newbolt.
15. Corbett and Newbolt.
16. Joseph Murray, Gallipoli 1915 (London: Silvertail Books, 2015).
17. Theodore L. Gatchel, At the Water’s Edge: Defending Against the Modern Amphibious Assault (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996), 20.
18. Gatchel, At the Water’s Edge, 20.
19. Chambers, Krithia, 65.
20. Robin Prior, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 146.
21. Prior, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth, 146.
22. Prior, 146–47.
23. Gatchel, At the Water’s Edge, 20.
24. LT C. W. Nimitz, USN, “Military Value and Tactics of Modern Submarines,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 38, no. 4 (December 2012).
25. Mark F. Cancian, Matthew Cancian, and Eric Heginbotham, “The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, 9 January 2023.
26. Cancian et al., “The First Battle of the Next War.”
27. LT Grant T. Willis, USAF, “Subsurface Threats to Future Allied Conflict,” Consortium of Indo-Pacific Researchers.org, 28 May 2023.
