Vice-Admiral Hubert von Rebeur-Paschwitz had taken over the Black Sea command in late 1917 and arrived to a theatre running out of options. Allied troops under Allenby were advancing through Palestine; British monitors were lobbing shells onto Ottoman positions from the Aegean coast; the Ottoman fleet had not made a serious foray in years. Rebeur-Paschwitz wanted to draw Allied attention away from Palestine by hitting the British base at Mudros, on Lemnos. To get there, he would first attack the British anchorage at Kusu Bay on the island of Imbros, where the monitors HMS Raglan and M28 lay. The British pre-dreadnought Lord Nelson, normally on guard, was away ferrying the squadron's admiral to a conference at Salonika. Agamemnon, the other heavy ship, was at Mudros and too slow to catch anything. The window was open.

The Yavûz Sultân Selîm and her smaller consort, the light cruiser Midilli — formerly the German Breslau — slipped out of the Dardanelles before dawn. Yavûz struck a mine on the way out. The damage was minor. They pressed on. At first light Yavûz opened fire on the British signal station at Kephalo Point on Imbros while Midilli pushed ahead toward Kusu Bay. At 5:30 a.m. the destroyer HMS Lizard sighted them and turned to attack, but couldn't close to torpedo range through the heavy fire from the larger ships. Yavûz spotted the two monitors at anchor and broke off to deal with them. Raglan's 14-inch turret was knocked out almost immediately; both monitors sank. M28 went down with most of her crew; Raglan lost 127 men. Lizard, joined by HMS Tigress, continued to duel with Midilli but could do little more than mark her path.

The Ottoman ships turned for home with their morning's work done. The British had spent three years laying mines across the approaches to the Dardanelles, and on the way back Midilli ran into them. She struck five in succession. The light cruiser broke up and sank with most of her crew; about 162 men went down with her. Yavûz, behind her, hit two more mines. She was holed badly enough that her captain pushed her hard for the Dardanelles and ran her aground on a sandbar off Nagara Point inside the strait. She lay there for six days. Allied seaplanes attacked with sixty-five-pound bombs that proved too small to do real damage. Ottoman seaplanes and shore batteries kept the British away. The British submarine E14, sent in to finish her off, was driven back by shore fire and beached. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Geoffrey Saxton White, was killed on the conning tower while keeping his boat moving long enough for some of his crew to be picked up. He was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously.

Yavûz was eventually towed to safety in the Sea of Marmara and patched together for harbour duty, but she would not fight again before the armistice. With Midilli on the seabed and her own battlecruiser out of action, the Ottoman Navy had effectively no offensive arm left. The British Aegean Squadron, meanwhile, took the loss of the two monitors hard. Both Lord Nelson and Agamemnon were criticised for being out of position; the squadron's commander was relieved. Imbros itself, then a Greek-populated Ottoman island, would be ceded to Greece after the war and then handed back to Turkey under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. It is now called Gökçeada. The bay where Raglan and M28 went down is still named Kuzu Limanı, still small, still quiet. The wrecks lie on its floor.

The Yavûz had a longer life than most of the men who fought her. She was repaired in the 1930s in the new Turkish Republic, kept in commission as the flagship Yavuz, escorted Atatürk's body to Istanbul in 1938, and was not finally retired until 1950 and broken up in 1973. She was the last of the German dreadnought-era capital ships to remain in service anywhere in the world. The men of Raglan and M28 are remembered on the Mudros and Chatham memorials. The men of Midilli and Lizard's submariners are remembered on stones that bear their names but rarely see visitors. Imbros, now Gökçeada, sits at the mouth of the Dardanelles like it always has — a place ships pass on the way to somewhere more important.