E14 had weighed anchor at 1.40 in the morning. There was no escort for their lonely voyage. The goodbyes had been said. They had written their farewell letters and given them into safekeeping, knowing that the chances were now against their survival.
The submarine’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Courtney Boyle, had written three – to his wife, his parents and his solicitor – in the three hours warning he had been given at Mudros harbour the day before. Now he stood in his navy greatcoat, holding onto the rail, his binoculars around his neck, staring ahead in the blackness at the navigation lights of the allied warships, the greens and reds slipping away behind him. Next to him was his navigating officer, Lieutenant Reginald Lawrence, only 22 years old, a reserve officer from the merchant navy, who had been there just a year before in peacetime. Below, the executive officer, Edward Stanley, was supervising the control room, listening to the rhythmic pulse of the engines.
It was a flat calm and there was no moon. From the northern shore in the distance ahead of them came the boom of guns and the flash of high explosive, a reminder that British, Australian, New Zealand and Indian troops were now dug in on the beaches, after their dramatic and perilous landings 48 hours before. Closer to the invasion beaches, they could see the shimmer of tiny glows from the trenches, the cigarette ends and makeshift fires of the soldiers dug into the dunes.
On their left hand side, there was a huge searchlight by the Suan Dere river; Boyle’s first objective was to get as close as possible to the estuary there before diving. Beyond that, he could see searchlights on both shores, sweeping the sea ahead of them. He and Lawrence reckoned the one past the white cliffs on the southern shore must be Kephez Point, where E15 had come to grief and, further ahead, a more powerful yellow light, was the great fort at Chanak.
One diesel engine drove them ahead, and the noise and the fumes were horribly apparent to anyone on the conning tower, where the exhaust pipe was. Boyle was as experienced a submarine commander as any other afloat, but he was aware that he had not quite earned his commander’s confidence. The calculations about speed, battery endurance, current and all the rest had been going through his head constantly since the dramatic meeting in the fleet flagship just two weeks before when – like all but one in the room – he had judged the venture impossible. That single dissenting voice was now dead.
He was aware also that, if the commander of E15 had not declared the passage of the Dardanelles possible by submarine, then almost certainly – as the most senior commander present – he would have been asked to try anyway. The one ray of hope was that the Australian submarine AE2, under the command of Henry Stoker, had now signalled that they had got through. This news had reached the E14 immediately before their departure and had changed the mood of the crew from resigned acceptance to hopeful elation. The passage of the Dardanelles must be possible after all, even if it remained extraordinarily hazardous.
But Boyle did have a plan. It was to get as far as possible to conserve their battery before diving, to dive as deep as possible under the obstructions, but to rise to periscope depth as often as possible in the most difficult sections of the journey, where the current was most unpredictable, to make sure the submarine did not drift He was acutely aware that his own skill and experience was now the determining factor, above all others, in his survival, the survival of the other 29 men on board, and of course of the success or otherwise of the mission.
They passed a brightly lit hospital ship, with its red crosses illuminated under spotlights, and then they were alone at the mouth of the Dardanelles. The crew were sent below and the engine room hatch was closed as a precaution. The Suan Dere searchlight loomed ahead, swept over them and then came back. Had they been seen? It flashed away again. It was clear from the experience of the ancient trawlers the British were using as minesweepers that the batteries ignored small ships on the way up the Dardanelles, waiting for them to drift closer to the shore as they turned back before firing. It was not clear, however, how much the stripped down conning tower was visible.
Then the searchlight was back and this time it stayed on them for 30 seconds. Lawrence gave a strained laugh. They had been seen. Boyle sent Lawrence below and ordered diving stations. By the time the hatch had been shut behind them, and they had swept down the iron ladder into the control room, two shots been fired. Lawrence settled down with his notebook in the control room. “Now we had really started on our long dive,” he wrote later.
Everything now depended on the captain’s skill and the resources of their electric batteries to drive them underwater.
I
“Underhand, unfair and damned un-English.”
The definition of submarines articulated by Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson in 1901.
We forget these days, when technology moves so slowly – I have been travelling on jumbo jets now for almost four decades – just how fast technological change was racing ahead a century ago. So fast, in fact, that the pioneers of motor transport, aviation and cinematography in the 1890s and 1900s often lived to see their full fruition in the 1960s. It was the same with submarines.
When the French navy ordered their first submarines at the turn of the twentieth century, it was almost inevitable that their sceptical British opposite numbers would do so too – even though official naval policy was to shun submarines. The First Sea Lord joked that they would hang submariners as pirates if they were captured. In April 1901, the House of Commons was told that the Royal Navy was ordering five submarines, designed by the Irish American submarine pioneer John Philip Holland, in order to “assess them”.
So it was that the first five submarines, the Holland class, joined the Royal Navy. There was the usual confusion with new technology about what kind of skills would be needed to make it work. It occurred to Reginald Bacon, described once as “the cleverest man in the navy”, that what they really needed was a series of enthusiastic torpedo experts from the so-called electrical branch. He therefore applied for the position of Inspecting Captain of Submarines, and got the job:
“I knew nothing about submarines; nor did anyone else, so the first thing to do was to sit down and think out where the difficulties were that we were likely to come across and arrived at methods by which they might be forestalled. The result was rather peculiar; for all the problems that I originally considered to be likely to be difficult turned out to be simple, and several of those that appeared to be simple gave, in the end, an infinity of trouble.”
The new submarines were 63 foot long, as long as a cricket pitch, and full of levers. There were complex experiments about crews breathing the same air for long periods of time. In case of poisonous fumes, which remained a serious danger from the accidental combination of batteries and seawater, a small cage of white mice was provided and the crew of eight kept a close eye on their behaviour whenever they dived.
The new submarine service attracted officers and ratings who had just got married, or planned to be, and needed the extra pay – submarine pay was almost twice that of those in the conventional navy – and because there was less discipline. The service was always more idiosyncratic than the regular naval life, and attracted those who were most thrilled by technology: many of the first submarine commanders – Courtney Boyle included – owned motorcycles and enjoyed riding them fast. Submarine officers dressed in a bizarre mixture of wing collars, monkey jackets and sea boots (one submarine captain greeted a visiting admiral in carpet slippers in 1914). They attracted the mavericks who enjoyed the disapproval of the naval old guard, led by the abrasive Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, known to the ranks as Old ‘ard ‘eart. The very classlessness of the submarines, with only maybe a curtain between the officers and other ranks, made the old salts nervous.