AE 2 Prisoners of the Turks.

It was about 2.30 am on 25 April 1915, while Australian and New Zealand troops were being assembled to land at Anzac Cove, that Australia's submarine, AE2, entered the Dardanelles with orders to "run amok". For several days it roamed around the Sea of Marmora looking for ships large enough to torpedo. It was successful in severely damaging, but not sinking, the Turkish gunboat Peykisevket.

Then on 30 April 1915 disaster; endangered by an unaccountable loss of diving trim and under gunfire from the Turkish gunboat Sultan Hissar the AE2 was scuttled, the crew of 32 being rescued by the Turks.

From the Sultan Hissar the crew was transported to Constantinople where they were supplied with second-hand Turkish uniforms, slippers and fezes and marched through the streets to prison. The "welcoming" words of its Commandant you are not to consider yourselves as prisoners but the honoured guests of the Turkish Government were little comfort to the crew who would be prisoners for the next 3 1/2 years.

Malnutrition, disease and arduous work, more often in inhospitable conditions, accompanied their captivity. Four of AE2's crew died in camps in Turkey at Belemedik and Bozanti in the Taurus Mountains where they were forced to work building a rail line to link Berlin to Baghdad via Constantinople. The overcrowded camp at Belemedik was riddled with meningitis and malaria; Petty Officer S Gilbert and Able Seaman A Knaggs died from typhus, Chief Stoker C Varcoe from meningitis and Stoker M Williams from malaria.

Stoker C Suckling, who died in 1983, aged 92, was the last of the AE2 to die; his latter years were blind caused by the beatings to his head as a prisoner of the Turks. He recalled the crew's capture then began a life for us which was nothing but a sorry existence, and I don't think, if we had known what was ahead of us, that one of us would have left the boat.