On 8th August 1915, Lieutenant Commander Martin Nasmith, in command of the submarine E11, torpedoed and sank the Turkish battleship Barbarousse Hairedene off Nagara Point in the Dardanelle Straits. It might not sound a remarkable feat, until one considers the geography of the Dardanelles.
The strait is a maximum of four miles wide and near Nagara Point it narrows to just one mile across. The water is too shallow in several parts to allow a submarine to pass through fully submerged and the Turks had searchlights and artillery forts either side of the channel. When it was possible for a submarine to dive, the crew had to navigate blind, despite the presence of treacherous shoals around. The alternative was to navigate at periscope depth, but that didn’t help much. The surface current was up to five knots against the submarine and on battery power its maximum speed was only three to four knots. Even at this speed, its periscope produced a tell-tale ‘V’ in the water and, whether it be daylight or at night, the Turkish searchlights and gunners were on a sharp lookout.
Just to make the passage more challenging, the Turks laid at least ten barriers of anti-submarine nets and mines. The submarine crew had to dive beneath each net to avoid entanglement and hope they didn’t hit a submerged mine. The nets were heavily patrolled and marked with floats, so if hit, the Turks would see the floats wobble and drop mines onto the submarine below. Finally, just to make life more interesting for the crew, the strait is 40 miles long and a submarine’s battery of the day couldn’t last that long. The Commanding Officer had to surface to recharge the battery somewhere along the way and, of course, the submarine had to get back, too, with the Turks expecting it this time. No wonder the Turks thought it impossible to penetrate the Dardanelle Straits… and yet time after time several Royal Navy submarines and one Australian did it.
Nasmith went on to sink 120 other vessels by gunfire, burning and torpedo over the next eight months and was awarded the Victoria Cross for his success on his first patrol. In my first novel on early submarines operations, The Custom of the Trade, I based my protagonist on Nasmith. With almost 700 four and five star reviews it was once Amazon.com’s #1 best-selling novel and #2 in the UK. I can recommend it as a good read.
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