back         British and Australian Submarines in the Dardanelles, 1915

               The Australian Submarine AE2 Got up through the Narrows.......(Gallipoli)....

Click and watch this animation  APRIL 1915 - THE STORY OF THE AE2

View an animation of the AE2's passage of the Dardanelles on 24-29 April 1915. The presentation is based on Lieutenant-Commander Henry Stoker's report of the voyage submitted after the end of the war and published in Arthur Jose, The Royal Australian Navy 1914-1918, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, Sydney, 1941, pp.242-248.    On the night of 25 April 1915, Britain’s greatest dreadnought battleship, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, cruised up the western coast of the Gallipoli peninsula near where the landings of the Anzac Corps had taken place that morning. On board was General Sir Ian Hamilton, thecommander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF), who had retired to bed. At midnight he was shaken awake by his Chief-of-Staff, Major-General Walter Braithwaite, who told

  him that an important message had arrived from the force ashore at Anzac. Hamilton followed Braithwaite to the battleship’s dining saloon where he found a group of Royal Navy officers and others. He recalled that ‘a cold hand clutched my heart as I scanned their faces’. He was handed a note from Lieutenant-General Sir William Birdwood, the Anzac Corps commander. Birdwood wrote that his generals, after the setbacks and chaos of the first day’s fighting, during which they had failed to take their objectives, recommended evacuation. Birdwood himself was not convinced they should leave but he had passed on the opinions of the commanders on the spot for Hamilton to decide. A ‘yes’ from Hamilton, and the ‘Anzac Legend’ would have been stillborn.