![[April 4, 1970] Twixt Scylla and Charybdis (S&T's <i>The Flight of the Goeben</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/700404goeben-672x243.jpg)
by Gideon Marcus
A little over half a century ago, the actions of two ships changed the entire course of human events.
SMS Goeben and SMS Breslau bombarding Phillipeville on the French-Algerian coast (W. Malchin, 1915)
In 1912, two warships of the German Kriegsmarine were stationed in the Mediterranean. The battlecruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau, in the event of war, were to raid French shipping between Africa and Europa. When war broke out between Austria-Hungary and Serbia on July 28, 1914, the vessels were in the Adriatic port of Pola. Admiral Souchon, commander of the German duo, decided he didn't want to be bottled up, so he took his ships to the central Mediterranean and waited for orders.
They arrived: head east for the Aegean Sea and ultimately the Dardanelles, the strait on which Turkish Istanbul was situated. There, Souchon was to offer the two modern vessels to the aging and inefficient Ottomans. In return, the Sultan would bring Turkey into The Great War on the side of the Central Powers.
Thus ensued a grand chase, which the British lost. The rest is history.
But what if Souchon had been given different orders? What if the British had had different priorities? Such are the What Ifs that compelling parallel universes are made of—and the subject of the newest game to arrive in the magazine Strategy & Tactics.
The Game
Continue reading [April 4, 1970] Twixt Scylla and Charybdis (S&T's The Flight of the Goeben)