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The Dardanelles”, map reproduced from “The Naval memoirs of admiral of the fleet, Sir Roger Keyes”, (London 1934), Roger Keyes.

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last updated : 20/01/08

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The entrance to the straits was guarded by four forts, two on each shore, with massive stone walls built up to 250 years earlier by Ottoman sultans anxious to keep out unwanted ships.  Seventeen kilometres up the straits was another series of forts and a single line of sea mines shore to shore.  Then, at the Narrows, was the third and most formidable line of defence.  No less than eleven forts (five on the European shore, six in Asia) guarded the sea lane.

The shorelines were dominated by two huge, white stone fortresses built by the Ottomans in the fifteenth century.  In all, there were over 100 heavy –and medium-calibre guns positioned along the straits, but only fourteen of these were modern long-range weapons.

"Gallipoli, the Turkish story", (Crows Nest 2003), Kevin Fewster, Vecihi Başarın, Hatice Hürmüz Başarın, p. 50-51

Between the November 1914 and the February of 1915, therefore, a major change had taken place in the defensive system of the Dardanelles. The guns, either in the conspicuous fortresses and batteries or in the hidden mobile howitzer formations, were protecting the minefields, which were skilfully situated. The battleships could not pass through the Dardanelles, nor even close with the Narrows forts, until the mines were swept; until the guns were silenced the sweepers could not clear the minefields. This was the problem confronting any purely naval attempt to force the Dardanelles. It was a situation which was never fully grasped by the British, and which has not been understood by some historians of the campaign. The British, both in London and at the Dardanelles, persisted in treating the forcing of the Dardanelles in terms of knocking out the main established batteries at the Narrows.

“Gallipoli”, Robert Rhodes James, p. 15-16

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