HMS Bol HMS E11 Paperback

In May 1915, a British submarine entered the Sea of Marmara through thirty-eight miles of minefields, anti-submarine nets, shore batteries, and searchlights that had already killed two boats that tried before her. She was HMS E11. Her commander was Lieutenant Commander Martin Nasmith. Her orders were to disrupt Ottoman supply lines to the Gallipoli front. What followed across three patrols and seven months was the most sustained submarine campaign in a confined enemy sea that the First World War produced - and one of the most remarkable feats of independent command in the history of naval warfare.Nasmith took E11 into Constantinople harbor and torpedoed a transport alongside the imperial arsenal. He survived a malfunctioning torpedo that circled back and nearly destroyed the boat that fired it. He sent a single officer ashore alone in the dark to demolish a railway viaduct with demolition charges and waited offshore while the man swam back. He conducted gun actions, demolition raids, and torpedo attacks across a sea whose defenders spent seven months improving their capacity to destroy him without achieving it. He brought his boat and his crew back through the Dardanelles three times - each passage harder than the one before, each return more improbable than the last.HMS E11 - The Submarine That Hunted an Empire is the complete operational history of the three patrols - a narrative built from the patrol reports, the admiralty records, the Ottoman archives, and the human evidence of what thirty men sustained across months in a steel hull in an enemy sea. It is the story of a professional formation tested at the outer limit of what a submarine and a commander and a crew can be asked to do, and found sufficient. It is the story of what the Marmara cost the Ottoman Empire's logistical system, what it cost the men who imposed that cost, and what it ultimately could and could not change about the campaign it was ordered to support.The legend says Nasmith was a hero. The record says something more durable: he was a professional who knew exactly what he was doing, in water where not knowing was fatal, for seven months without a single day of certainty that the boat would come back. It came back. This is the full account of how.