Admiral Sir Archibald Berkeley Milne, 2nd Baronet, GCVO, KCB (2 June 1855 – 4 July 1938) was a senior Royal Navy officer who commanded the Mediterranean Fleet at the outbreak of the First World War.

[1] In 1879 he became aide-de-camp to Lord Chelmsford during the Zulu Wars,[1] being fortunate enough to have been separated from the main army at the time of the massacre of British forces at the Battle of Isandlwana on 22 January 1879.

The ships met as the Germans were steaming back to Messina, Italy, to refuel after bombarding the French colonial ports of Philippeville and Bône, Algeria.

Near the western coast of Greece, the pursuit of Goeben and Breslau was taken up by four more British ships, led by Milne's second-in-command, Rear-Admiral Sir Ernest Charles Thomas Troubridge.

Troubridge's ships (the cruisers HMS Defence, Black Prince, Warrior and Duke of Edinburgh) were smaller and slower than Goeben; they were also substantially outgunned, and much less well-armoured.

They concluded that the enemy battlecruiser's superior speed and range would allow it to maintain enough distance to pick off Troubridge's ships at leisure before they could ever get close enough to engage effectively.

[6] The German diplomats reminded the Turks that Great Britain had recently broken a contract to supply two new battleships to the Turkish government (which the British Admiralty had decided to keep for its own use as war loomed), and offered to sell them Goeben and Breslau.