Current Information:

Gallipoli 1915

On 25 April, 1915,  British, Australian and New Zealand forces landed on the Gallipoli peninsular . The plan was that these forces would soon defeat a demoralised Turkish army, knock Turkey out of the war, open up the Mediterranean to the Russian navy and threaten Austo-Hungary from the south. None of these things were achieved despite nine months of hard fighting in terrible conditions. The fighting soon degenerated into trench warfare with the Allies unable to break out of their toe holds on the tip of the Helles peninsular and at ANZAC Cove. The Turkish soldiers were much tougher fighters than they had been given credit for and they were of course fighting an invasion of their homeland. The terrain, a series of steep rocky ridges and deep gullies made the fighting much more difficult and during the hot summer of 1915, the flies arrived in biblical proportions. By January 1916, all British, Australian and New Zealand forces had left Gallipoli, leaving only behind the dead, over 56,000 of them.

HMS Goliath was a pre-dreadnought battleship built in the late 19th Century. Put into mothballs before 1914, she was quickly brought back into service when war broke out and in March, 1915, she became part of the Eastern Mediterranean fleet that supported the Gallipoli landings. The large calibre guns of the Royal Navy ships acted as the artillery for the troops ashore and the Turks had little means to strike back at them. This changed in the early hours of 13th May when she was anchored in Morto Bay close to Cape Helles. A Turkish torpedo boat, the Muavenet-I Milliye, sailed into the Bay, managed to elude the destroyers and fired three torpedoes into HMS Goliath. Within minutes she had sunk taking 570 of her crew with her, including Frederick Folkes.