20 January in military history: Battle of Imbros, 1918

20 January 1918 · 108 years ago

Two German ships under the Ottoman flag

The two ships began the war as the German battlecruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau. In August 1914 they escaped into the Dardanelles, and the Ottoman government told the British that it had bought them. They were renamed Yavuz Sultan Selim and Midilli and hoisted the Ottoman flag, but kept their German admiral, Wilhelm Souchon, and German crews. At the end of October 1914 they led an attack on Russia's Black Sea ports, including Sevastopol, and the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of the Central Powers.¹

In January 1918 the German admiral then commanding the fleet decided to strike at the British ships guarding the mouth of the Dardanelles and then to bombard the British base at Mudros on Lemnos. It was the straits where the Allies had fought the failed campaign described in our article on Gallipoli. Just before the ships sailed, Liman von Sanders, the German general commanding the Ottoman troops at the straits, sent the admiral a British chart of the minefields captured from a stranded vessel. The chart was far from complete.²

The raid on Kusu Bay

The ships came out of the straits early on 20 January. Off Mavro Island Yavuz struck a mine, but the damage was light and she went on. In the misty morning the two ships reached Kusu Bay on Imbros, where the monitors Raglan and M28, slow ships built to bombard the shore, lay at anchor, and opened fire. The British were taken by surprise. Within a few minutes both monitors were wrecked and sunk.³

The minefield

The two ships then turned toward Mudros, with British aircraft from Imbros now attacking them, and steamed into a British minefield. Midilli struck a mine, Yavuz was mined again while trying to take her in tow, and Midilli, hitting several more mines, sank. Yavuz gave up the attack on Mudros and turned back, struck a third mine on her way into the straits, and then ran aground near Nagara Point.⁴

She lay there for days while British aircraft bombed her. The bombs were too light to do real damage. On 26 January she was got off the sandbank and returned to Constantinople.⁵

Losses and aftermath

The British lost both monitors. The submarine E14, sent into the straits to finish off Yavuz, found that she had already gone, and on the way back she was sunk by Turkish gunfire on 28 January. Her commander, Lieutenant-Commander Geoffrey Saxton White, was killed.⁶

With Midilli sunk and Yavuz badly damaged, the raid was the last sortie of the two ships: Yavuz never came out of the straits again for the rest of the war. For the wider war, see our guide to the greatest battles of World War I.⁷