Abstract:

The Ottoman Navy played a key role in the Gallipoli Campaign. One of its successes was that a torpedo boat of the Turkish Army named Muâvenet-i Millîye sank the pre-dreadnought battleship Goliath of the British Royal Navy as a result of a successful military operation while the land fightings continued on the Gallipoli peninsula. With the outbreak of the Great War a German admiral was appointed as the commander of the Ottoman Navy and German commanding officers and navy lieutenants were taken into service in the ships of the Ottoman Navy during the war. In this article, the sinking of the Goliath battleship –its background and aftermath- by the Ottoman Navy in the Gallipoli Campaign in the World War I will be analyzed through the documents of German Navy Lieutenant Rudolph Firle in the German Federal Military Archive in Freiburg [Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, BA-MA] and an article written by him after the WWI. After that, the discussions on how this operation has been treated in the historiography will be examined with some examples.