The Escape of the Goeben and Breslau, August 1914
The presence of these two ships in the Mediterranean at the opening of the First World War gave the Germans a dangerous advantage. Their escape to the Dardanelles, writes David Woodward, had a manifold influence on Allied strategy.
More than forty-five years after the outbreak of the First World War, there still exists under the Turkish flag, the battle cruiser Yavuz, once known as Goeben.
This ship is the last survivor of the great rival dreadnought fleets, British and German, that confronted each other in 1914. She is also the last surviving warship to have taken part in the Dardanelles campaign; indeed, her escape to Turkish waters in the early days of August 1914, almost certainly caused that campaign to be fought when and as it was.
In view of the effect of the Dardanelles campaign upon the rest of the war—and notably upon the fighting on the Western Front and upon the affairs of Russia—it is not surprising that Sir Julian Corbett, British official naval historian of the First World War and author of standard works on the campaigns of Nelson and of Drake, described the despatch of the Goeben to Constantinople in the following terms:
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