You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [65]
The Straits of Messina are narrow enough that the British ships could not follow him in and blockade the port without violating Italian neutrality. Milne sat at the north end of the mousehole with two battle cruisers and assorted support craft. Milne asked the British diplomatic service to ask the Italians for permission to pass through if Souchon exited to the south, but these questions and nonanswers took longer than the twenty-four hours the Goeben was in port.
Watching the south end of the strait was a small British ship, the Gloucester. Lurking in the distance was Admiral Troubridge, with the Adriatic Squadron of aging armored cruisers and destroyers — ships clearly inferior to the Goeben in a fight on open water. Troubridge had the job of keeping the Goeben out of the Adriatic — but Souchon was not headed for the Adriatic.
Despite all the telegraphic bellowing that Churchill could put forth, nothing moved Milne to take active, useful steps to hold and sink the Goeben. He did not detach one of his fast battle-cruisers to go back around Sicily and be positioned in the central Mediterranean. He did not ask Troubridge to move westward and be in position to shadow or attack. He did not suggest to Troubridge — or turn Troubridge loose to think of it himself — an attack using the complicated naval topography of southern Greece, where the Goeben might be constrained by narrow waters into an encounter where her longer-ranged guns would be of less use.
Even when the shadowing Gloucester reported that the Goeben was moving rapidly to the east, Milne pursued in a lackadaisical manner, proving that he simply could not imagine his enemy doing anything so insane as causing real trouble in the east.
But Souchon could. And despite Turkish neutrality, he was allowed to sail the Goeben up the Dardanelles, and into the harbor at Constantinople, where the Goeben’s great guns added weight to German persuasive arguments encouraging the Turks to come into the war on the side of Austria and Germany. Some historians are sure that Turkey would have done so anyway, and that the Goeben’s presence made no difference. Maybe, though it’s also possible that the sultan would have been glad to continue a policy of milking the various sides in turn for his lack of cooperation with the others. What is more certain is that the Goeben’s presence there and harrying the southern Black Sea, provided a potent barb to the bottle stopper: Russian ships could not effectively attack Constantinople.
As a result of that action, the flow of necessary supplies into Russia through Black Sea ports ceased — no guns, no butter. As a result of that action, the Germans had an inside supply line to Middle Eastern oilfields, and could also menace the Suez Canal, Britain’s necessary route for transporting the armies of empire to the battlefields of Europe. As a result of Turkey’s alliance with Austria and Germany, the Western Front stiffened and became one long bloodbath; Churchill’s attempt to open a new front with the attack on the Dardanelles failed (partly because the traditionalists in the navy were passive-aggressively determined that it should), and with that failure, his political career went into a long eclipse. Each of these three main consequences deserves a book.
Russia’s economy was perilous even before World War I started; this huge nation was more backward than any other nominally European country (most of it was in Asia, after all) and split, then as now, into many cultures, factions, religions, as well as geographic regions. It lacked the transport capacity to move large quantities of supplies by road or rail, and still depended heavily on water transport — which ran north and south along its rivers. It lacked the industrial capacity to make its own war matériel. With Austria and Germany allied against it, no shipments from the