VISIT TO THE GOBEN.

Taranaki Daily News, 9 January 1919, Page 8

VISIT TO THE GOBEN.

BATTLE-SCARRED WARSHIP,

DAMAGE DONE BY JUNES. In a little wooded bay ox the Bosphorus lies a great blue-grey warship, the Goebcn, of notorious history, the ship that thrust through the Dardanelles at the very beginning of the war to be for the Turk a pledge .and proof of Germany's power, and one that has since been the cause" of more surmises and preparation on the part of all the Allies than any othc-r ship in all the enemy fleets, wrote Mi- Ward Price from Constantinople on November 15.

The Goebcn is now called t!:e Yoa3 by the Turku, a name given in history to Sultan Salim the Grim. She has a Turkish admiral, Arir Pasha, on board, and a Turkish crew This morning, with a British naval captain and a majorgeneral, I went to visit her. Tlioro have been so many accounts of the fighting condition of the Goefocn that it was extremely interesting to see it for oneself- What has chiefly damaged the ship is mines, of which she hit five, two in the Black Sea early in the war, and three during her sortie and attack on British monitors outside the Dardanelles last spring. jfn each case the outer hull of the ship was b!ow;i in, but the inner ■bulkhcada held, awl thanks to the excellent construction of the Goebon and the multitude of her watertight compartments, the damage was localised to gaps in her outer hull and the Hooding of the compartments around them.

DAMAGED BULKHEADS. We went down into, the stokeholds to see the bent inner bulkheads. The Germans had great confidence in the resistance o.f their materials. The curving pl:ite3 of steel are not even supported by timfoor baulks against the pressure of water beyond them. The effcei of t'aoso punctures of her outer hull in, however, to reduce the speed of the Goebcn probably to 15 knot.?, so that ai a fightiiig unit she ha.3 loot a great deal of her quality. When the Gorrains left her on November 3 they took away all the plans of the ship and ol her engines, so thai the Turkish craw on board can only find out. the details of her mechanism by actual inspection. The German? carried off, too, all the fire-control and other scientific instruments, so aa 1 to make the ship useless for as lon;j as possible.

From the Turlnsh officers' on board I heard the story of the Goebcn's famous sortie from the Dardanelles when she sink the Eaglan and another monitor. The Germans alone know the aim of the raid, but the Turks think it wa-3 a sortie without an objective. The Goebon hit three of our minej outside, but still remained manageable. Sho i;vnf. 2,'V.0r0, they say, in the lCarrov.'s only 'because the Gorm,-n navigating officer neglected the advice of tie Turkish pilot, who hid slewed him out of Ihs Straite.

DOJ'BED BY BRITISH AIRME2T.

Tito German mistook tits position of some baoya and st:-a:ided his ship. lOurir>.™ ths sis day 3 sho was wound the Goebei? was raided day and night by British aircraft. Her own guns were her best dot'eaco. Two British bombs struck the ship, one at the baso of the after funnel, which it holed. Neither did material damage. The only bombs we had available at that time v/ore too small,-in fact. .

When the Goe'oen was got off-die had hundreds -oJ tons-of. water inside her, but she made Constantinople under her own power at 18 knots. Even Wo thin damage was done her thc-GoSifc

has been several times to Sebastopol and back.

Practically the who'e of what is left of the Turkish fleet lies ia Stenia Bay. They lost three big ships during the war, ono mined near Odessa and two