Painting by Louis McCubbin entitled, RAN tribute to Anzac dead, Dardanelles, 12th November 1918. [AWM ART09451]
On 30 October 1918 the Ottoman Empire requested an armistice. For Turkey the war was over. On 10 November British troops landed unopposed on the Gallipoli peninsula. Henry Collinson Owen, A British journalist, recorded what he saw in the Dardanelles which had been the scene of so much naval action in 1914 and 1915:
Later in the day, up toward the Narrows, we saw the remains of submarine E-15, which ran ashore when trying to ascend the strait and was torpedoed from a launch by our own men under heavy fire, and a little further up, the rusty bottom of the Turkish battleship Messudiyeh, looking like an immense turtle, marked one of our submarine successes.
We passed over deep waters that concealed the remains of sunken British and French battleships, the Ocean, Irresistible, Majestic, Goliath, Triumph, and Bouvet. We anchored just off V beach, where the River Clyde was run ashore.
[Collinson Owen, quoted on First World War.com]
On 12 November 1918 a British fleet did something it was unable to do in 1915 and sailed through the Dardanelles bound for Istanbul. With the fleet were warships of Royal Australian Navy serving with the British 5th Destroyer Flotilla - HMA Ships Yarra, Torrens, Warregoand Parramatta. It is this moment of triumphal passage which Louis McCubbin has caught in his painting ‘RAN tribute to Anzac dead, Dardanelles, 12th November 1918’. The Parramatta is shown in the painting flying an Australian blue ensign to the left of the main mast to honour Australians killed at Gallipoli in 1915.