ABSTRACT
The eastern Mediterranean and Aegean had, from a strictly naval point of view, enjoyed what might be termed benign neglect for much of the last half of 1917. The real action in the Mediterranean, especially as far as the submarine war was concerned, was elsewhere, notably in the central and western portions. The Allied naval forces off the Dardanelles, particularly the British Aegean Squadron, were steadily run down and consisted essentially of the semi-dreadnoughts Lord Nelson and Agamemnon, the Patrie-class French battleship République, the light cruiser Lowestoft, a few scouts and eight destroyers, as well as the usual flotilla of miscellaneous light craft. It was a shadow of the imposing force it had been under de Robeck at the time of the Dardanelles campaign. The French battleship was, in theory, to replace one of the British battleships at Mudros whenever it went off for refit, with the objective of always keeping two battleships off the Dardanelles. How any of them would have been able to catch the much-faster Goeben was a question no one could answer. The British commanders, Cecil Thursby until the end of August 1917 and then Sydney Fremantle, were also hard put to maintain the minimum number of destroyers on patrol. Calthorpe considered eight destroyers to be the minimum necessary to maintain the Dardanelles patrol. There were only four available in September 1917 and there had been no real improvement by December, with six available at the beginning of the month but only four around Christmas. 1 This was truly a backwater of the war, or so it seemed.
