Studia Maritima (Jan 2022)
Intruder in the Harem, or Captain Martin Eric Nasmith’s Oriental Adventures
Abstract
The article is devoted to the early phase of the career of Martin Eric Nasmith (1883–1965) and is an attempt to summarise his achievements during three underwater patrols in the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara in 1915. Those missions brought him the appellation of the most effective British submariner of WW1. In Anglophone historiography, all the books and articles related to this subject constitute a one-sided narrative based solely on British sources. Thus, the author has made the first attempt in western historiography to compare the British and Turkish points of view. Although a few such efforts have been made in Tur- key, their results are not widely known to western historians, and in some cases, they raise objections. The decision to take up this challenge came from an awareness that Nasmith’s view of the situation at the moment when he was personally observing the effects of his attacks could not be complete and entirely objective. He could not have known that some of the vessels he had sunk in shallow coastal waters were salvaged by the Turks and restored to service. The article gives detailed coverage of the attacks conducted by Nasmith on Ottoman warships, steam-powered merchant ships and land targets, during all three patrols of the “E11” submarine. As a result of his research, the author was able to draw attention to the fact that the results of “E11”’s second patrol were incomparably more favourable than those of the first one (for which Nasmith was awarded the Victoria Cross), both in terms of losses inflicted on the Ottoman Navy and on the transport fleet. In the case of the latter, the total tonnage of definitively sunken steam-powered vessels was more than 470 percent higher. While Nasmith claimed that he had sunk at least 122 Ottoman vessels during all three patrols, Turkish sources indicate that the total number of warships and steam-powered transport ships definitively destroyed by him did not exceed fifteen.
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