To understand the importance of these two vessels one has to cast one’s mind back to the conditions of 1914, where air-power was virtually non-existent and road and rail transport in the Balkans was limited to a few main routes. Overnight the arrival of one battleship could dominate an enemy fleet and upset the whole balance of power among minor states. With the Russian Black Sea fleet to the north of them, and Greece in the south negotiating with the United States for the possession of two dreadnoughts, it had become urgently necessary for Turkey to acquire warships of her own, and of at least equal strength to those of her neighbours. The order for the two vessels was placed in England, the keels were laid down, and something of a patriotic demonstration was made out of the whole affair.
In every Turkish town people were asked to contribute to the cost of this new venture. Collection boxes were put up on the bridges across the Golden Horn, special drives were made among the village communities, and no doubt in the end there was a warm feeling among the public that this was its own spontaneous contribution to the revival of the Turkish Navy. By August 1914 one of the ships was completed at Armstrong’s on the Tyne, and the other was ready for delivery within a few weeks.
At this point — to be precise on August 3, the eve of the outbreak of war — Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, announced to the Turks that he could not make delivery; in the interests of national security the two ships had been requisitioned by the British Navy.
One does not need much imagination to understand the indignation and disappointment with which this news was received in Turkey: the money had been paid, the two ships had been given Turkish names, and Turkish crews were actually in England waiting to man them and bring them home. And now suddenly nothing. Rarely before had von Wangenheim been allowed such an opportunity. He lost no time in repeating to Enver and Talaat the warning he had been giving them all along — the British were not to be trusted — and he came out with a dramatic offer: Germany would make good Turkey’s loss. Two German warships would be dispatched to Constantinople at once.
The ensuing adventures of the Goeben can be told very briefly. Possibly by accident but much more probably by design she was in the Western Mediterranean with her attendant light cruiser, the Breslau, on this vital day. She was a battle-cruiser recently built in Germany with a displacement of 22,640 tons, ten 11-inch guns and a speed of 26 knots. As such she could dominate the Russian Black Sea fleet and, what was more important at the moment, she could outdistance (though not out-gun) any British vessel in the Mediterranean.
The British knew all about the Goeben. They had been watching her for some time, for they feared that on the outbreak of war she would attack the French army transports coming across from North Africa to the continent. On August 4 the British commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean signalled the Admiralty in London: ‘Indomitable, Indefatigable, shadowing Goeben and Breslau 37º 44’ North 7º 56’ East’, and the Admiralty replied, ‘Very good. Hold her. War is imminent.’ Throughout that afternoon the two British battleships continued closely in the Goeben’s wake. At any moment they could have knocked her out with their 12-inch guns, but the British ultimatum to Germany did not expire until midnight, and the cabinet in London had expressly forbidden any act of war until that time. It was an unbearably tantalizing situation. Churchill has related that at five o’clock in the evening Prince Louis of Battenburg, the First Sea Lord, observed to him at the Admiralty that there was still time to sink the Goeben before dark. But there was nothing to be done but to wait.
As night fell the Goeben increased speed above 24 knots and vanished. It was not until two days later, when the war had already begun, that the British discovered that she was coaling with the Breslau at Messina, in Italy, and they still did not know that Admiral Souchon, who was in command of the vessel, had there received a message instructing him to proceed directly to Constantinople. At 5 p.m. on August 6 the Goeben and the Breslau emerged from Messina with their bands playing and their decks cleared for action. Still under the impression that they would either turn west to attack the French transports or north to the friendly port of Pola, the British fleet had disposed itself to the west of Sicily and at the mouth of the Adriatic. The Goeben and the Breslau turned south-east, and when the British light cruisers of the Adriatic squadron failed to engage they got clean away. Two days later, still undetected, they were hanging about the Greek islands waiting for permission from the Turks to enter the Dardanelles.
The excitement in Constantinople was now intense. To allow the German vessels to pass through the straits was virtually an act of war. But Wangenheim was ready with a solution: once the ships arrived in Turkish waters they would cease to be German and instead become part of the neutral Turkish Navy. But would they arrive? That was the point. On August 8 there was still no news of the two vessels in Constantinople, and it seemed possible that they had been sunk by the British Fleet.
Curiously it was Enver who lost his nerve, and he attempted to restore the situation by performing a simple double-cross. He sent for the Russian Military Attaché and proposed to him the terms of a Russian-Turkish alliance which would have cancelled out the agreement with Wangenheim which had been signed only a week before. Indeed, under one clause, Liman von Sanders and all German officers were to be dismissed from the Turkish service.
The Germans were quite unaware of this duplicity when on the following day one of the officers on Liman’s staff arrived at the Ministry of War with the news that the Goeben and the Breslau were outside the Dardanelles and waiting to enter. Enver said he must consult his colleagues. The German officer, however, insisted that an answer must be given at once. There was a slight pause. Then Enver said, ‘Let them come in.’ The following evening the Goeben and the Breslau steamed through the Dardanelles and the proposed alliance with Russia was forgotten.
But it was not the end. Germany still had no wish to bring Turkey actively into the war, since, as a friendly neutral, she was performing a very useful purpose in tying up a British squadron at the mouth of the Dardanelles, and in threatening the British lines in Egypt. Moreover, if, as everyone expected, the war was going to be over in a few months there was no point in contracting additional obligations to Turkey.
For the Russians, the British and the French, on the other hand, the situation was becoming intolerable. Here was the Goeben anchored in the Bosphorus, here was Admiral Souchon and his crew going through the farce of dressing-up in fezzes and pretending that they were sailors in the Turkish Navy, and here was Liman von Sanders with his Military Mission re-organizing the Turkish Army. At night the cafés in Pera and Stamboul were filled with roistering Germans; staff cars embellished with the Kaiser’s eagles drove ostentatiously through the streets, and Enver’s Ministry of War became every day more like a German military headquarters. A rueful pun went round the foreign colony: ‘Deutschland über Allah’.