But when the military operations were getting under way during May, 1915, the larger ships of the fleets were again used. The Germans realizing that these great ships, moving as they did slowly and deliberately while they fired on the land forts, would be good targets for torpedoes, sent some of their newest submarines from the bases in the North Sea, down along the coasts of France and Spain, through the passage at Gibraltar and to the Dardanelles. Destroyers accompanying the allied fleets kept diligent watch for attacks from them. The _Goeben_, one of the German battle cruisers that had escaped British and French fleets in the Mediterranean during the first weeks of the war, and which was now a part of the Turkish navy, was brought to the scene and aided the Turkish forts in their bombardment of the hostile warships.
On May 12, 1915, the British battleship _Goliath_, of old design and displacing some 12,000 tons, was sunk by a torpedo. This ship had been protecting a part of the French fleet from flank attack inside the straits, and under the cover of darkness had been approached by a Turkish destroyer which fired the fatal torpedo. It sank almost immediately.
The submarines of the German navy which had made the long journey to participate in the action near the Dardanelles got in their first work on May 26, 1915, when a torpedo fired by one of them struck the British battleship _Triumph_ and sent her to the bottom. Of interest to naval authorities all over the world was the fact that this ship at the time she was struck had out torpedo nets which were supposed to be torpedo-proof; but the German missile tore through them and reached the hull. A hunt was made for the hostile submarine by the British destroyers, but she was found by the British battleship _Majestic_; but before the British ship could fire a shot at the German submarine, the latter fired a torpedo that caught the battleship near her stern and sank her immediately. Apprehension was now felt for the more formidable ships such as the _Queen Elizabeth_ and others of her class which were in those waters; inasmuch as the operations at the Dardanelles assumed more and more a military rather than a naval character, the British admiralty thought it wiser to keep the _Queen Elizabeth_ in safer waters; she was consequently called back to England. Only old battleships and cruisers were left to cooperate with the troops operating on the Gallipoli Peninsula.