“The Navy Called It Impossible” — How One Aussie Sub Ran Amok Where The British Fleet Failed

In the spring of 1915, the most powerful fleet on Earth tried to force its way through a narrow strip of water in Turkey called the Dardinels, and the Strait beat it. On the 18th of March, a long line of British and French battleships steamed up toward the Narrows to blast their way through to Constantinople.

 Instead, they steamed onto a hidden field of mines. The French battleship Bouvet rolled over and went under in about 2 minutes, taking most of her crew down with her. The British battleships irresistible and ocean followed her to the bottom. And the battle cruiser, inflexible, limped away, torn open and burning.

 The largest navy in the world turned around and pulled back out to sea, beaten by a few miles of water it could not cross. The Dardinels was a fortress made of water. It ran fast  and cold through a bend the sailors called the Narrows in places barely a couple of kilometers wide, and the Turks had spent months  turning it into a trap.

 Lines of mines sat waiting under the surface, and heavy steel nets hung across the deep water to snag anything trying to creep beneath them. Gun batteries and search lights on the cliffs above  covered every meter of the channel. Anything that came through had to run the whole gauntlet in the open, watched from both  banks with nowhere to hide and nowhere to turn.

 With the surface fleet stopped cold, the Allied command turned to the submarines. The idea was close to madness. A boat would have to creep under the minefields and thread the steel nets while the current shoved it sideways, running half blind the whole way, then surface on the far side inside a Turkish sea with no easy way home. if anything went wrong.

 The straight had already wrecked one submarine on the shore and turned another one back at the mouth. The next boat ordered to try the passage was  an Australian one, AE2, and almost nobody who knew the water rated her chances of ever coming back. AE2 belonged to the young Royal Australian Navy,  and she carried a mixed crew, Australian and British sailors, packed together into one narrow steel tube, under an Irish captain named Henry Stoker. His orders were blunt.

 Get through the narrows into the Sea of Marura beyond, and once there, run a muck among the Turkish shipping that was carrying men and guns down to the Gallipoli front. No submarine had ever been taken the whole way through. Stoker was told to go and try it on the very morning the ANZACs were due to storm the beaches.

 Before dawn on the 25th of April 1915, while the first ANZAC boats were already pulling for the beaches to the south, AE2 slipped into the mouth of the dinels and pointed her bow up the straight. Stoker took her down into the black water. Above the  submarine lay the minefields that had gutted the battle fleet and the steel nets strung  below them with the guns and the search lights waiting on the cliffs.

 the current alone  could pin a boat against a mine and hold it there until it went off. He ran her in blind  to find out whether steel and nerve could do the one thing the greatest navy in the world could not. The war had come to this straight because of a map. The dinels was the doorway between the Mediterranean and the Turkish capital at Constantinople and whoever held it controlled the seaw road to Russia and the back door of the whole Ottoman Empire.

 In 1915, the Allies set out to force it open, first with the battleships in March. Then, when the ships failed by landing an army at Gallipoli in April to take the shore forts from behind and underneath both the fleet and the soldiers, the submarines were sent to do a third job, to break into the sea behind the strait and cut the Turkish supply line at  its throat.

 The thing that had wrecked the battle fleet was almost embarrassingly small. A little Turkish steamer called the Nusrret had crept out one dark night and laid a fresh line of 26 mines in a quiet bay in the exact stretch of water where the Allied ships like to swing round and reload. The great battleships hunting for forts and gun positions never once suspected the water itself.

 They turned into the bay to maneuver and sailed  straight across the hidden line, and it cost them three ships in a single afternoon. The strongest navy on earth had been  stopped by a handful of mines that nobody had spotted. Behind the narrows lay the sea of Marmura, and that inland sea was the key to the whole campaign.

It sat ringed by Constantinople and the  railheads that fed the Ottoman war, and every Turkish soldier and every shell bound for Gallipoli crossed it or ran along its shore. A submarine loose in the Marmura could throttle the enemy army from behind while the ANZACs held it by the throat from the front.

 The surface fleet had no way past the Narrows to get in and do it. That job fell instead to a few small boats, and AE2 was the one ordered to go first and open the way. Submarines had already probed the mouth of the Dardinels, and the strait had punished them for it. Months earlier, a British boat B11 had dived under the outer minefields and torpedoed an old Turkish warship, then turned straight back because nobody yet believed a boat could push any further.

Another E15 had tried for the Narrows themselves and run hard ground beneath the Turkish guns where she was shelled to a wreck and her captain lost. That was the whole record when Stoker was ordered up the straight. He had to get past the point where one boat had turned back and another had been destroyed and then keep going into water no submarine had ever crossed.

 Henry Stoker was a Royal Navy officer, an Irishman from Dublin, handed command of AE2 before the war when Australia bought its first two submarines and needed men who could run them. His boat was an E-class, a little over 50 m of thin steel, slow and cramped, built for patrol work in the cold North Sea rather than a fortified straight full of mines.

 Her crew of around 35 men lived shoulderto-shoulder among the machinery and the torpedoes, breathing each other’s air. Half of them were Australian and  half were British, and not one of them had ever done anything remotely like the thing they were about to try. The timing  was no accident. On that same dawn, the 25th of April, thousands of Australian  and New Zealand soldiers were climbing down into rowing boats off the Gallipoli beaches, about to land under fire on the far side of the peninsula.  While the ANZACs

waited ashore into the machine guns and began to claw their way up the cliffs, a few dozen Australian and British sailors were taking a submarine down into a minefield only a few miles away across the water. Two Australian fights were beginning at the very same hour that morning, one up on the ridges and one under the sea.

 And for years, hardly anyone at home would hear a word about the second. Going in, everything that could go wrong did. In the dark before the landing, AE2 crossed the first minefield, and Stoker heard the mooring wires of the mines scraping down the length of the hull. A sound like fingernails dragging along the boat from bow  to stern.

 Any one of those wires could drag a mine down onto the casing and end it all in a single flash of water and  steel. The current took hold of her and swung her off her course, and twice she scraped hard along the bottom of the channel. When Stoker lifted the periscope for a quick look, the Turkish gunners caught the feather of it, and the water around the thin tube began to boil with shellfire.

 For close to an hour, AE2 crawled up the narrows in the dark and the racing current, feeling her way blind between the lines of mines. Stoker could only guess his position from the compass and  the clock, holding a course he had no way of seeing, down a channel that had been built to end him. Now and then the hull rang again as another mooring wire slid along it, and every man aboard held his breath and waited to learn whether that one was the one.

 He kept her climbing up  the straight deeper into the fortress that had thrown a whole fleet of battleships back only weeks  before, and he did not turn her around. Partway up through the periscope,  Stoker picked out the shape of a warship and fired a torpedo at it. He believed at the time that he had hit a cruiser.

What he had actually struck was a smaller Turkish gunboat near the fort at Chennok, and she was left badly damaged rather than sunk outright. It made little difference to the men inside the submarine. The thing that mattered to them was that AE2 was still moving, still climbing the throat of the straight that had turned the whole battle fleet around, and that nothing waiting on the surface had yet managed to stop her.

 By the middle of that morning, AE2 had done the thing everyone said could not be done. She came up in open water at the top of the Narrows and found the Sea of Marura spread out ahead of her, wide and gray and empty. No Allied submarine had ever reached that  water. The battleships had been wrecked trying to force the same passage on the surface, and one small Australian boat had crawled underneath it and come out the other side alive.

Stoker turned her north into the empty sea and sent a wireless signal back down the straight to say against all the odds that he was through. Getting through was only half the danger. Once AE2 was inside the Marmura, the same wall of mines and nets  and guns lay behind her, and going home again would mean running the whole gauntlet a second time in a boat that was already failing.

Stoker knew it, and so did every man aboard. They had crossed into a sea with the enemy on every shore, and the only way out sealed by the defenses that had already beaten a fleet. Whatever they were going to do up here, they  would do it as a boat with no line of retreat, deep behind the enemy and entirely on their own.

 A month earlier, the combined might of two navies, the greatest sea power on Earth, and the French fleet alongside it had thrown themselves at this straight and been beaten and bloodied and turned away. Now a single obsolete submarine crewed by a few dozen men who mostly were not career sailors had gone quietly under the same defenses and come out breathing on the far side.

 The thing the admirals had written off as impossible had just been done by one tired old boat that nobody back home had even heard of. A E2 had turned a month of failure on its head in a single morning’s work. That signal reached the Allied commanders at a black moment. Ashore at Gallipoli, the landing had already turned to chaos.

 The ANZACs were pinned in shallow scrapes under the cliffs, and through that first night, the generals were arguing about whether to give it all up and pull the whole force back off the beaches. Word that AE2 had broken through was one of the very few scraps of good news in a grim and bloody day.

 Stoker himself always believed it helped tip the argument toward staying. Whether it truly changed the decision, no one can say for certain, but the news landed at the moment it was needed most. Beyond the Narrows, AE2 was let loose in the enemy’s own  backyard. For the first time in the war, the Sea of Marura, the sheltered highway that fed the whole Gallipoli front, had an Allied submarine prowling in the middle of it.

Stoker’s orders had been to run a muck, and he said about it with what little he had. He chased down transports, forced loaded steamers to turn back  to port, and threw the careful Turkish shipping schedule into confusion simply by being somewhere out there under the surface.

 One submarine could never sink an army’s supplies on her own, but she could make every captain  on that sea afraid to leave harbor. The effect was out of all proportion to one small boat. Word ran through the Turkish ports that an enemy submarine was loose in the Marmura, and the traffic that had always run freely down to Gallipoli suddenly began to hesitate.

 Steamers stayed tied up at the warves, waiting for word that it was safe to sail. Captains held out for escorts that the  Navy simply could not spare. Every extra day that AE2 stayed at large, the sea the Turks had always treated as safe home water felt a little more like a hunting ground with their own ships as the quarry.

 The shock reached all the way to the capital. For months, the Turks had treated the Marmara and the sea approaches to Constantinople as safe water far behind the fighting, beyond the reach of any enemy. Now a hostile submarine  had come up out of the narrows into the heart of it, and no one in the city could say how many more might be following  her through.

Fairies and steamers near the capital were held back in port. Nervous lookouts began watching the flat water for the telltale feather of a periscope,  and one small boat had put a jolt of real fear into a whole city’s sealanes. The hardest enemy in the end was the boat herself. A E2 was worn and temperamental, and she would not hold her depth.

 Time and again she porposed without warning,  her bow pitching up until she broke surface in full view of the shore, or dropping away until she plunged toward the depth that would crush the hull. Every time she showed herself, Turkish ships and shore guns opened up, and she had to claw her way back under  the water.

 Stoker and his men spent 5 days in the Marmara, fighting the enemy above them and their own failing  submarine below them. There were moments in that week when it very nearly ended  early. Once the failing boat threw her bow up and broke surface right in the middle of a  knot of Turkish ships in broad daylight, close enough for the crew to see men running to their guns across the water.

 Shells came down around the hull while Stoker fought her back down under. Time after time, AE2 showed herself when she should have stayed hidden. And time after time, the crew wrestled her down again and slid away into the deep before the enemy gunners could find the range. Life inside the submarine in those days was an ordeal all its own.

 The air went thick and stale whenever she stayed down for  long, so foul that the men learned to move slowly to save their breath. There was no room to stand up straight, no dry corner to rest in, and never more than a few minutes of quiet before the next alarm. When trouble came, every man did his job in a cramped steel darkness, and trusted the man beside him to do exactly the same, because a single mistake at the wrong moment would take the lot of them to the bottom together.

 They held on for 5 days on almost no sleep, and they did not crack. Up on the peninsula, the soldiers in the ANZAC trenches never knew the submarine was down there under the sea, but they felt the good of what she did. Every shell fired at them, every sack of flour and box of cartridges the Turks hauled up to the firing line had to come down across the Sea of Marura or along its shore road.

 A handful of Allied boats loose in that water meant the enemy could no longer move his supplies in daylight without the fear of a torpedo coming out of nowhere. AE2 had been the first to break in and prove that the sea could  be taken and held. On the 30th of April, 5 days into the patrol, it finally caught up with them.

 AE2 was trying to meet up with a British submarine that had followed her through the straight when she lost her depth once too often and broke surface near a small Turkish torpedo boat called the Sultan Heisar. The little warship swung around toward her and opened fire at once. Stoker fought to take her back down, but the submarine would not answer him, rising and falling out of his hands, and one of the Sultan Heisar’s shells punched clean through the pressure hull below the water line.

Water came pouring in through the hole, and there was no saving her now. Stoker did the one thing left to a submarine captain who could neither fight nor run. He brought AE2 up to the surface one last time, got every one of his men out onto the casing in the open air, and then opened her vents to send her down.

The boat that had beaten the Narrows slid backwards under the Sea of Marura, scuttled by her own captain, so that the Turks could never raise her and turn her against her own side. Every man got clear of her. Not a single member of the crew was lost when she finally went under.

 It was a strange lopsided sort of end. The submarine that had beaten the whole Dinell’s defenses, the  minefields, and the steel nets, and the great forts that had thrown back a fleet of battleships was brought down in the end by one small elderly gunboat and her own worn out machinery. She had done the very thing the admirals had sworn could not be done.

 And then it was plain bad luck and a tired engine that caught up with her. on the far side of the wall she had already broken clean through, alone  and a long way from any help. For Stoker and his men, the war was over, and a long, hard captivity had begun.  The Turks took them prisoner and marched them off into nearly four years behind wire in the  camps of the interior.

 Most of them came home when the war finally ended in 1918. Four of them did  not, lost to sickness and hardship in the camps before the peace came. Between them they had spent one  submarine and their own freedom to prove a single stubborn point that the straight the whole battle fleet could not force could in the end be beaten by men willing to go under it.

What AE2 started did not end with her. The British submarine that had come through the straight behind her E14 stayed on in the Marmura and carried on the work and boat after boat followed the two of them into the Turkish Sea over the months that came.  Allied submarines squeezed the shipping in the Marmmora so hard that the Turks  were driven in the end to move their supplies by road and by night.

 A great deal of that was done by British crews, and they earned every bit of the credit, but the door they all poured through had been forced open  first by an Australian boat and a mixed Australian and British crew. By the end of the Gallipoli campaign, the Sea of Marura had become a graveyard for Turkish shipping.

 The transports and steamers that fed the front were hunted through that water until moving anything by sea was a gamble no captain wanted to take. It never quite starved  the Turkish army off the peninsula. But it bled the enemy supply line steadily month after month from behind his own lines where he had always felt  safe.

 And all of it had grown out of one crossing on the morning of the landing made by a boat that most  people had written off before she even started. Henry Stoker came home from the prison camps, went back to the Navy for a time, and then, of all things, made a whole second life on the London  stage as an actor and a playwright.

 He never made much noise about the Dinells  in the years that followed. When he did write about it at all, he handed the credit to his crew and to a tired little submarine that kept surfacing at the worst possible moments, and somehow kept dragging them all out of it. He had taken a boat through a straight that had beaten an empire’s battle fleet, and he talked about it like a job that had simply needed doing.

 AE2 is still down there. Divers found her many years later on the floor of the Sea of Mara, sitting upright and largely whole, resting where her captain had sent her, rather than let her fall into enemy hands. On one gray morning in 1915, a slow and halfbroken Australian submarine and a mixed crew of Australians and Britains went down into the strip of water that had beaten the greatest navy on Earth.

And they came out the other side. That was the part the admirals had called impossible.