Dominic Sandbrook

And the Ottomans will see what's going on, and they will reinforce accordingly.

And that is, of course, exactly what the Ottomans have done.

They've made more mines, they've brought up more artillery.

And some of Churchill's own, you know, subordinates are now becoming extremely anxious about this.

So Admiral Carden, who was already ill two days before the operation, has a complete nervous breakdown and has to be sort of taken away.

And he is replaced by his vice admiral, John de Robeck, who has always thought the whole scheme was mad.

However, the whole thing goes ahead anyway.

The big day is Thursday, the 18th of March.

It's a lovely day, beautiful, sunny sort of spectacle.

16 British and French ships steam towards the entrance to the Narrows, the Straits, and immediately things go wrong.

So one of the French ships, the Bouvet, hits a mine and explodes, and it sinks so quickly that of more than 700 men aboard this ship, all but 75 of them are drowned.

And then two more ships, British ships, HMS Irresistible and HMS Inflexible, they hit Turkish mines too.

Inflexible manages to get away, but Irresistible is totally crippled.

And then they send another ship to try to rescue them, HMS Ocean, and that is hit first by a Turkish shell, then by a Turkish mine, and that sinks too.

So by nightfall, when Robeck says, okay, we're calling this off, this has been an absolute shambles, they have cleared one line of mines out of nine.

Of 176 Turkish shorguns, they have knocked out precisely four.

And of their 16 ships, three of them have been sunk and three of them have been badly damaged.

So this has been a terrible day.

I mean, it's gone really badly.

The next day, Churchill goes to the War Council.