Hearing the announcement, Sabri Celebioglu, Dumlupinar’s commander, climbs onto the deck from his cabin to personally oversee the situation. The submarine was caught between a rock and a hard place, Ozmen explains. “If Dumlupinar stayed steady, it would have hit Naboland head-to-head."Īmidst the nerve wracking ordeal, Ozmen added, Dumlupinar’s leading officers made an announcement that the submarine will move to the right near the eastern shores of the Canakkale Strait.īut if Dumlupinar had steered too far to the right, it would have hit the shore. Ozmen served as a radar operator at TCG Murat Reis, a Turkish submarine, for nearly two decades. “As Naboland was turning around Nara Burnu at a speed unusual for a waterway passage, the ship slid inward of the strait and went into Dumlupinar’s lane, leaving little space for the Turkish submarine to safely surpass the Swedish vessel,” says Ercument Ozmen, a retired senior chief petty officer at the Turkish navy and an expert on the Dumlupinar disaster. The two vessels were heading to the Golcuk port in the Marmara Sea, where the headquarters of the Turkish Navy were located.īut heavy misty weather covering the strait, the scene of countless battles and voyages, would fatefully hamper Dumlupinar’s voyage on the dark night of April 4.Īt around 2 am, as the submarine approached Nara Burnu or Nagara Point, one of the deepest and narrowest points of the Canakkale Strait known for strong currents, a Swedish cargo ship, MV Naboland, suddenly emerged from a blind turn and was on the same track as the Turkish vessel. Seventy years ago, TCG Dumlupinar was on the return journey from the Mediterranean Sea, where it had taken part in a NATO training exercise alongside TCG Birinci Inonu (S330), another Turkish submarine. This month marks the Turkish military’s deadly marine accident in the Canakkale Strait, a historically strategic location where the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor state to Türkiye, landed a surprising defeat to the Allied armies during WWI.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |