Naval Battle of Lemnos
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The Naval Battle of Lemnos (January 5-18, 1913) First Balkan War.
Following the loss of a number of Aegean Islands to Greece during the first phase of the war in 1912, the Ottoman navy sought to check Greek progress by destroying the Greek fleet docked at the port of Moudros, Lemnos. The plan of action was to bait the Greek fleet into leaving the safety of the port and to ambush it just off the southern coast of the Island where the Ottoman navy lay in wait. Despite the sinking of a Greek transport ship off the island of Syros on January 1st 1913, the Greek navy, having realised the Turkish trap, was not enticed into sailing out of its port.
Having unsettled the Turks with its apparent inactivity, the Greek fleet slipped out of Moudros on January 5th and engaged the Ottoman fleet 12 miles south east of Lemnos where an running sea battle which culminated on the January 18th took place.
The Greek fleet was composed of its 9,960 ton armored cruiser flagship Averof, three coast defence battleships and eight destroyers. While the Ottoman flotilla included the pre-dreadnought battleships Hayreddin Barbarossa and Turgut Reis, the battleships Mesudiye and Assari Tevfik, thirteen destroyers and torpedo ships. Following a three-hour gunnery exchange on the morning of the January 18th the Turkish fleet, having sustained heavy damage, fled and was subsequently pursued and harried by the Greek ships all the way back to straits of the Dardanelles.
This, the final naval battle of the First Balkan War, forced the Ottoman navy to retreat to its base within the Dardanelles, where it did not venture from for the rest of the war.
- The withdrawal of the Turkish fleet to within the Dardanelles was confirmed by 1st Lieutenat Michael Moutoussis and Ensign Aristedes Moraitines on January 24, 1913 who took part in the first ever wartime naval aviation mission while flying their Maurice Farman hydroplane over the Nagara point where they spotted the enemy fleet. During their sortie, they accurately drew a diagram of the positions of the retreating fleet, against which they successfully managed to drop four bombs. Moutoussis and Moraitines travelled over 180KM and took 2 hours 20 minutes to complete their mission, which was extensively reported in both the Greek and International Press.