Churchill's bold plan to knock Turkey out of WWI with warships ended in one catastrophic day — three battleships sunk by a minefield no one knew existed, nearly ending his career.
In early 1915, Winston Churchill — then First Lord of the Admiralty — championed a daring plan to force a naval passage through the Dardanelles Strait, knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war, open a supply route to Russia, and potentially end the stalemate on the Western Front. It seemed like strategic genius on paper.
The Ottomans had secretly laid a new minefield in Eren Köy Bay — twenty mines positioned parallel to shore, detected by no Allied reconnaissance. On March 18, 1915, the largest Allied naval assault of the campaign struck this invisible obstacle. Within hours, the French battleship Bouvet struck a mine and capsized in under three minutes, killing 639 of 718 crew.
The disaster of March 18 did not end there. HMS Inflexible struck another mine, flooding 1,600 tons of seawater into her hull. HMS Irresistible and HMS Ocean both struck mines in quick succession and had to be abandoned. By day's end, three Allied battleships were sunk and three more badly damaged — all for 118 Ottoman casualties.
What the Allies did not know was how close they were to victory. The U.S. Ambassador to Turkey reported that Constantinople was in panic, expecting the fleet to resume its attack the next morning. The Ottomans had nearly exhausted their ammunition. The decision not to press on may have been one of the most costly hesitations in military history.
The naval failure forced a pivot to a land campaign at Gallipoli — which proved even bloodier. The army spent eight months fighting for the peninsula, suffering over 250,000 casualties before evacuating in January 1916. Churchill was forced to resign from the Admiralty in disgrace.
The submarine operations were the campaign's only clear Allied success. British, French, and Australian submarines slipped through the heavily mined straits and wreaked havoc in the Sea of Marmara — sinking one battleship, five gunboats, eleven troop transports, and dozens of supply ships. Three submarine commanders were awarded the Victoria Cross.
The first Victoria Cross of the Royal Navy in WWI was awarded for the Dardanelles campaign. Lieutenant-Commander Norman Holbrook of HMS B11 dove his submarine under five rows of mines to torpedo the Ottoman battleship Mesûdiye, an antique ironclad serving as a floating fort — and then navigated back out to safety.