The Day Britain's Fleet Turned Back at the Dardanelles

[00:00:00]The boiler room of HMS Irresistible was a furnace of noise, coal dust in his throat, the deck shuttering with every salvo above. Stoker first class Tom had never been under fire. Now he could only feed the fires and wait. It was the 18th of March, 1915. A combined British and French fleet of 18 battleships had been ordered to force the dinels, the narrow straight guarding the sear to Constantinople.

[00:00:28]force it and the Royal Navy could knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war and open a supply line to Russia. The plan was Winston Churchill's. The Narrows were barely a mile wide, ringed with forts, mobile howitzers, and minefields.

[00:00:43]By midafternoon, the fleet pushed deep into the straight. Tom felt the hull ring as shells from the heights struck home. Then, at 11 minutes 4, a deeper blow, a mine. The blast hurled him against the bulkhead and cold seaater came surging across the plates. The starboard engine room was flooding. What he could not know, 10 days earlier, the Ottoman mine layer Nusret had slipped out by night and laid 26 fresh mines in Aaron Koi Bay, exactly where the great ships turned to maneuver. The French battleship Bouvet had already struck one, capsized, and gone down in under two minutes, taking more than 600 men with her. Tom climbed hand over hand up slick ladders, smoke searing his eyes, the deck tilting harder beneath his boots. Above, men crowded the rail as the destroyer wear ran alongside the dying ship. He jumped, was hauled aboard by strangers hands, soaked and shaking and alive.

[00:01:48]irresistible drifted helpless under the guns. The battleship ocean sent to tow her clear struck a mine herself and was abandoned too. By dawn both lay on the seabed. Six capital ships sunk or crippled in a single day. Rear Admiral Drobeck called off the attack. The Navy could not force the straight alone, so the army would be sent in. 5 weeks later, the landings at Gallipoli opened a campaign that would cost close to half a million casualties on both sides. Tom lived through the day the fleet turned back. Many who followed him would never leave that peninsula at all. Hit subscribe if you want more stories like