Duty Padre's Piece, The Royal Naval Association, Cyprus, remembering others

Rev. Eric Freeman

As I considered what to write about for this month, I received a reminder about a major Royal Navy action during February 1915. Strangely though, this came in news about an army affair – with no reference to the navy at all.

It was of course a news report of the first re-burial service for one of the men found nearly two years ago in mass graves in Northern France and dating back to the Battle of Fromelles in July 1916. The connection lies in the fact that many of the 250 men in those graves were actually Australians who had taken part in the Gallipoli campaign, where of course the Royal Navy and Royal Marines played major parts and suffered substantial losses.

Incidentally, there was another connection in that, also in February 1915, naval forces were involved in an action to prevent the Turks from invading Egypt from the Sinai Peninsula by crossing the Suez Canal. After their exertions at Gallipoli, the Australian troops took over responsibility for the Canal for a while until they were transferred to Flanders.

As we all know, with the benefit of hindsight, the whole Dardanelles campaign was badly conceived and disastrously planned. However, the naval element carried out their part well – despite being asked to perform in less than ideal conditions. With a combination of gunnery bombardment and landings by the Royal Marines, all the outer defences of the Turkish positions were destroyed.

Unfortunately though, the planners had not reckoned on the Turkish ability to lay extensive minefields in the Straits and this caused some heavy losses, including capital ships. This then meant that the naval bombardment capacity, which had been planned to support the troops, could not be deployed.

In the subsequent attempt to penetrate the Straits a total fleet of eighteen battleships, including three from France were involved. But the French ship Bouvet struck a mine and was sunk. Soon after the British ships HMS Irresistible and HMS Ocean also struck mines and sank. Most of the crews were saved, but that was the end of the naval campaign and by the time the fleet was withdrawn over 700 shipmates had lost their lives.