HMS Goliath (1898): Sunk in Minutes by a Torpedo Boat a Third Her Size

Built for the China Station

HMS Goliath was laid down on 4 January 1897 and launched on 23 March 1898, a Canopus-class pre-dreadnought battleship measuring 421 feet 6 inches in length, displacing 13,150 long tons normally and up to 14,300 tons fully loaded.

She carried four 12-inch guns in twin turrets and twelve 6-inch secondary guns, driven by triple expansion engines producing 13,500 indicated horsepower for a top speed of 18 knots, with a crew of 682 officers and ratings.

She commissioned on 27 March 1900 under Captain Lewis Edmund Wintz for service on the China Station, part of the Canopus class's deliberate design as a lighter, longer ranged battleship suited to distant imperial deployments rather than home waters.

That phrase, suited to distant imperial deployments, conceals a specific and rather mundane requirement: the whole class was drawn around the dimensions of the Suez Canal, so that a battleship could be sent to Hong Kong by the short route rather than round the Cape. The design story, and what the Admiralty gave up to get it, is told in the article on HMS Glory (1899). Six of them were built, and between them they got through a remarkable amount of the First World War in places nobody had drawn them for: the North Atlantic, the Falklands, East Africa, the Dardanelles and the White Sea.

HMS Goliath underwent a refit at Hong Kong between September 1901 and April 1902 before leaving the China Station in July 1903 and paying off at Chatham that October.

She subsequently served with the Channel Fleet from January 1906, the Home Fleet from March 1907 and the Mediterranean Fleet from February 1908, before being placed in reserve in 1913 as newer dreadnought battleships rendered her increasingly obsolete.

From the Rufiji Delta to the Dardanelles

HMS Goliath was assigned to the 8th Battle Squadron of the Channel Fleet on the outbreak of war in August 1914, escorting troops to Belgium before transferring to the East Indies Station, where she took part in the blockade of the German cruiser SMS Konigsberg in the Rufiji River delta off East Africa, unglamorous but truly important work bottling up a raider that had been causing considerable trouble for Allied shipping. Her own 12-inch guns never actually managed to hit the Konigsberg, the cruiser having tucked herself far enough upriver, and behind water too shallow for a battleship, to stay out of range, but in January 1915 Goliath carried the Boer scout and hunter Piet Pretorius out to the delta, and it was his disguised reconnaissance, at one point passing himself off as an Arab trader, that finally pinned down the cruiser's exact position and cleared the way for the shallow-draught monitors that eventually finished her off that July.

The Konigsberg had a strange afterlife, and it is the reason the blockade mattered as much as it did. When the monitors finally got up the delta and she was scuttled on 11 July 1915, her crew stripped her before they left: all ten of her 10.5cm guns came out of the wreck, along with two smaller pieces, and were handed to Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck ashore. Some were mounted on carriages knocked up in Dar es Salaam, some on proper carriages shipped out from Krupp, and one ended up in a converted lake steamer. For the remaining three years of the war they were the heaviest artillery in East Africa, and they were still being dragged around the bush by von Lettow's force when the armistice was signed. Goliath spent months off a river mouth she could not enter, shooting at a ship she could not reach, and the ship she never hit went on arming a campaign that was still running in November 1918.

HMS Goliath joined the Gallipoli campaign in April 1915, providing gunfire support during the landings at Cape Helles on 25 April and sustaining light damage from Turkish shore batteries in the fighting that followed, one of a squadron of older pre-dreadnought battleships judged expendable enough to risk in the dangerous, mine and shore battery infested waters of the Dardanelles.

A Night in Morto Bay

HMS Goliath anchored in Morto Bay near Cape Helles on the evening of 12 May 1915 alongside HMS Cornwallis, with five destroyers providing escort against submarine and torpedo attack, though thick fog reduced visibility considerably.

In one of the enduring small mysteries of the whole campaign, the ships' searchlights were switched off around 11:30pm that night, removing a layer of protection that might otherwise have given warning of what followed.

The Ottoman torpedo boat Muavenet-i Milliye, meaning National Support, commanded by Senior Lieutenant Ahmet Saffet Ohkay with the German officer Lieutenant Rudolf Firle advising, picked her way through Turkish minefields and crept down along the shore, passing within sight of two of the escorting destroyers, HMS Beagle and HMS Bulldog, without ever being challenged. She was already within torpedo range before Goliath could so much as signal a request for the night's password. At around 1:00am on 13 May, she launched three torpedoes at close range.

The boat that did it deserves naming properly, because the mismatch is even greater than a third her size suggests. Muavenet-i Milliye was built in Germany, at the Schichau yard at Elbing, as the torpedo boat S165; she and three sisters were sold to the Ottoman Navy and commissioned in 1910, and there were still three German officers aboard her that night under Kapitanleutnant Rudolf Firle, who handled the torpedo attack. She displaced something over seven hundred tons against Goliath's thirteen thousand, and she carried no gun that could have scratched the battleship's armour. What she had was three torpedoes, a dark night and a crew willing to run down a defended anchorage in fog to get inside a thousand yards. She survived the war, was discarded in 1924, spent the next thirty years as an accommodation hulk at Taskizak and was broken up in 1953, having outlived her victim by thirty-eight years.

Two struck almost simultaneously, one abreast the fore turret and the other abeam the fore funnel, triggering a huge explosion, and HMS Goliath began to capsize almost immediately, a third torpedo striking as she rolled over.

570 Lost

HMS Goliath sank so quickly, and the surrounding waters were so dark and fast running, that rescue efforts were severely hampered, and the human cost was devastating: 570 of her crew of 750 were killed, including her commanding officer, Captain Thomas Shelford.

It remains one of the heaviest single losses of life suffered by any Royal Navy ship during the entire Gallipoli campaign, a notably shocking demonstration of how vulnerable even a heavily armoured battleship could be to a small, fast torpedo boat operating with courage and a measure of good fortune. Some 73 of her dead came from Ireland alone, and the toll fell with particular cruelty on the tiny village of Coonagh in County Limerick, home to just 48 men of fighting age, eight of whom went down with the ship.

Even the enemy seemed faintly startled by what a torpedo boat a fraction of Goliath's size had managed to pull off. The Muavenet-i Milliye's crew returned to Istanbul to a hero's welcome, with illuminations strung along the Bosporus in their honour, while the British commander at Gallipoli, General Sir Ian Hamilton, is reported to have offered the rather generous verdict that "the Turks deserve a medal."

HMS Goliath's loss carried consequences well beyond the ship herself: the sinking, coming amid a string of setbacks in the Dardanelles campaign, contributed directly to the resignation of First Sea Lord Admiral Fisher and, soon after, of Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty, a political aftershock that reshaped the leadership of the Royal Navy at one of the most difficult moments of the entire war.

The wider sequence is worth setting out, because Goliath was the first of three. She went on 13 May. Fisher resigned on the 15th. On 25 May the German submarine U-21, which had come the whole way from Wilhelmshaven round Scotland and through Gibraltar, torpedoed the battleship Triumph off Anzac in full view of the troops ashore, and two days later she did the same to Majestic off Cape Helles. Her captain, Otto Hersing, went home to be called the destroyer of battleships. Three capital ships in a fortnight was more than the campaign could absorb: the surviving battleships were pulled back to the anchorage at Imbros and thereafter only came forward when they were actually needed to shoot, which meant the army ashore lost the constant naval gunfire that had been holding parts of the line together. The strategic argument for a naval campaign in the Dardanelles did not survive May 1915, and Goliath is where the fortnight starts.

Her wreck today lies upside down at a depth of around 63 metres, largely buried in sediment off the coast where she was lost.

She is a war grave, and an awkward one. The wreck lies in Turkish territorial water at the mouth of the Dardanelles in a strong current, upside down and deep in silt, with something like five hundred and seventy men still in her. She was never salvaged, and her people, having no known grave but the sea, are commemorated instead on the naval memorials at Portsmouth, Plymouth and Chatham. For Coonagh in County Limerick, which lost eight of its forty-eight men of military age in a single hour off a beach two thousand miles away, that is where the story of the village and the battleship still ends.