On April 4, 1953, the Turkish submarine Dumlupinar sank in the Canakkale Strait and the navy called off the rescue mission on April 7. Here's a detailed account of how the tragedy unfolded
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.
“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. Ozmen served as a radar operator at TGC Murat Reis, a Turkish submarine, for nearly two decades.
Many military experts believe that at this moment, it would have been a better choice to turn the ship completely to the right even though it could possibly be stranded on land, instead of turning the ship to the left, says Ozmen. Only 22 sailors were able to reach and lock themselves in the stern torpedo section as Dumlupinar completely sank on the Canakkale Strait’s deepest and darkest bed after an explosion in the ship’s central compartment.
When the sun rose, the Turkish customs ship, which had rescued five sailors the night before, was the first to spot the communications buoy. Selim Yoluduz, the customs ship’s second engineer, had looked for a telephone inside the floating buoy and saw the inscription on the telephone, which connects the buoy with the submarine through a cable.
Yoluduz had then passed the telephone to Zeki Adar, the top navy officer of Canakkale at the time. “My son, we will rescue you. Don’t worry!” Adar said. “Thank you! Long live my country!” replied Ozben. After this conversation, several contact attempts were reportedly made with the sunken submarine survivors.
The biggest challenge during the attempted rescue mission was getting the wires of the diving bell, a chamber used to transport divers from sea surface to depth and back up, to the escape hatch of the older-fashioned submarine, which was a former American ship transferred by the US to Türkiye in 1950 to hasten Ankara’s entry to the Western alliance in 1953.
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