The first of the Turkish vessels, the 23,000-ton dreadnought Reshadieh, was similar to King George V, carrying ten 13.5-inch guns. The second, larger, battleship eventually would earn a unique place in the history of naval construction for, within a single year, it was owned by three different governments. For a decade, the three principal South American powers, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, had been conducting their own dreadnought-building race, draining each country of a quarter of its annual national income. Brazil began by ordering from British yards a pair of 21,000-ton dreadnoughts each carrying twelve 12-inch guns. Argentina responded by ordering two 28,000-ton battleships with twelve 12-inch guns—one ship from the New York Ship Building Company, the other from the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. Brazil, alarmed by the larger size of the new Argentine vessels, returned to Britain in 1911 to order a third new battleship. This vessel was to be a phenomenon: the longest dreadnought in the world, with the unequaled armament of fourteen 12-inch guns set in seven turrets. Laid down in September 1911 at Armstrong’s Elswick yard in Newcastle upon Tyne, she was launched in January 1913 as Rio de Janeiro. By October, however, cheap rubber from Malaya had undermined the market value of Brazil’s rubber exports; the Brazilian government, unable to pay for the new ship, put the unfinished dreadnought up for sale. Turkey stepped forward, and on December 28, 1913, Rio de Janeiro became Sultan Osman I. Meanwhile, Chile had ordered two new 28,000-ton British-built dreadnoughts, each designed to carry ten 14-inch guns, but in July 1914 both were a year from completion.
It was on the two Turkish battleships, therefore, that the Admiralty focused its attention. Although a clause in the building contracts permitted the British government to buy back the ships in a national emergency, the Turks were unlikely to sell them willingly. The two vessels had cost the impoverished nation almost £6 million. Some of the money had been borrowed from bankers in Paris and some came from taxes—on sheep and wool, on tobacco, and on bread. In January 1914, all December salaries of civil servants, none yet paid, were diverted to pay for the ships. But still more money was needed. Every Turkish town and village contributed; women sold their hair to raise money; collection boxes were placed on the bridges across the Golden Horn and on ferryboats plying the Bosporus. Purchase of the two dreadnoughts became a unifying national cause.
Meanwhile, at the Elswick yard, British workers were altering the ship to meet the needs of her new owners. Nameplates in Portuguese carrying instructions and locations were unscrewed and replaced. The admiral’s stateroom and dining room were fitted with seasoned mahogany paneling, Otto-man carpets, silk lampshades, and a pink-tiled bath. Belowdecks, the crew was given more space by eliminating numerous watertight bulkheads. Lavatory arrangements appropriate to European or Brazilian usage were altered as toilet bowls were ripped out and replaced by rows of conical holes in the deck, suitable for the Turkish practice of squatting.
The Ottoman navy waited anxiously. With Russia constructing a new fleet on the Black Sea and Greece building a dreadnought in Germany and negotiating to buy two predreadnoughts from the United States, Turkey urgently needed a modern navy. Her ships were hopelessly out-of-date; one old battleship mounted wooden guns, which her officers hoped would seem real to a viewer on shore. By July 1914, the Turks were impatient to bring the new ships home and parade them to the nation off the Golden Horn. Rashadieh was ready in early July, but the British Admiralty advised that she remain in England until the two ships could sail for Turkey together. Meanwhile, hints from Whitehall to Armstrong and Vickers suggested that there was no need to hurry delivery of the two vessels. Pressure on the Admiralty increased when, on July 27, a shabby Turkish passenger ship, carrying 500 Turkish sailors to man the Sultan Osman I, arrived in the Tyne and berthed across the narrow river from the new battleship. The official delivery date was set for August 2. On the morning of August 1, the thirteenth 12-inch gun was hoisted on board and placed in its turret. The final and fourteenth gun was expected later that day. But still no ammunition had been delivered.
On Friday, July 31, with European war impending, Churchill made his decision. “In view of present circumstances,” the First Lord informed the builders, “the Government cannot permit the ship to be handed over to a Foreign Power.” The following morning, Armstrong, fearing that the Turkish captain and his sailors waiting across the river might try to board the new battleship and hoist the Turkish flag, placed armed guards at the dockyard gates. On August 2, a company of British army Sherwood Foresters with fixed bayonets marched on board. Stunned, the Turks could do nothing.
Churchill never apologized. “The Turkish battleships were vital to us,” he said later. “With a margin of only seven dreadnoughts we could not afford to do without these two fine ships.” He attempted to patch up the damage by offering that at the end of the war Turkey should receive either the two “requisitioned” dreadnoughts, fully repaired, or else their full value; he added that, in any case, Britain would pay Turkey a thousand pounds a day for every day she kept them. The offer would stand so long as Turkey remained neutral.
Sultan Osman I, renamed Agincourt, steamed into Scapa Flow on Au-gust 26. Some British officers feared that the firing of her first full broadside would break her back, but when it happened the simultaneous blast of fourteen 12-inch guns broke only her crockery. Reshadieh, renamed Erin, reached the British fleet soon after. The North Sea dreadnought ratio now rose to twenty-six British against seventeen German. This still did not sufficiently calm the First Lord; in September 1914, Almirante Latorre, the first of the unfinished 28,000-ton Chilean dreadnoughts, was “requisitioned” by the Admiralty. A year later, she joined the Grand Fleet as HMS Canada. The other Chilean battleship was also “requisitioned,” and was completed in 1918 as the aircraft carrier Eagle.
On Wednesday, July 29, even as the British fleet was steaming toward Scapa Flow, the Austrian bombardment of Belgrade began. Russia immediately began mobilizing her southern forces. Germany announced that unless Russia ended her mobilization against Austria, Germany would mobilize and declare war. The Russians continued. On Friday, July 31, Germany sent an ultimatum to St. Petersburg demanding Russian demobilization within twelve hours. At noon the next day, Saturday, August 1, the ultimatum expired and Germany declared war on Russia.
For the next three days, Great Britain remained neutral. The factor that ultimately unified British thinking was Belgium, across whose territory the German General Staff meant to send 700,000 men to strike the French army on its weak left wing. A British treaty with Belgium guaranteed that country’s neutrality. On Saturday, August 1, Britain asked both France and Germany for assurances that, in the event of war, Belgian territory would not be violated. France immediately gave full assurances; Germany refused to reply. Thereupon the German ambassador in London was given formal notice that if Belgium was invaded, Britain might take action. Early that afternoon, the British ambassador in Berlin reported that British ships were being detained in German ports. Learning this, the Admiralty decided to mobilize the Royal Navy. All patrol and local defense flotillas were ordered to remain out at night, and the same naval reserves who had been discharged after the test mobilization were ordered back to their ships. On Sunday, August 2, Germany delivered an ultimatum to Belgium demanding that the German army be allowed uncontested passage across Belgian territory. On Monday, August 3, Germany declared war on France. The Royal Navy commissioned nine ocean liners as armed merchant cruisers, including Lusitania, Aquitania, Caronia, and Mauretania. Soon, Lusitania, Aquitania, and Mauretania were released, the cost of their fuel being judged out of proportion to their usefulness. At 6:00 a.m. on Tuesday, August 4, news came that the German army intended to cross the Belgian frontier at four o’clock that afternoon. At 9:30 a.m., the Foreign Office protested to Berlin. At noon came a German reply which assured that no Belgian territory would be annexed, but also stated that Germany could not leave Belgian territory unoccupied to be used by the French as an avenue for attacking Germany. No doubt
s remained; at 5:50 p.m., the Admiralty informed the navy that Berlin had been sent a formal British ultimatum, which would expire at midnight Berlin time. Unless an acceptable reply was received by then, war would begin. “In view of our ultimatum,” the message said, “they may decide to open fire at any moment. You must be ready for this,”
At eleven o’clock in London—midnight, Berlin time—on Tuesday, August 4, the British ultimatum expired, unanswered. From the Admiralty, the war telegram flashed to all ships and stations under the White Ensign around the world. “Commence hostilities against Germany.” The old battleship Prince of Wales was coaling in Portland harbor when a bugle sounded. “The collier’s winches suddenly stopped,” recalled one of the ship’s officers, “and the bosun’s mate passed the word: ‘Hostilities will commence against Germany at midnight.’ The loud cheers which followed were soon silenced by the renewed clatter of the winches and the thud of the coal bags as they came in with increased speed.”
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 to Goeben. 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.