but managed to fire just a few shells. The German ships arrived in Turkish waters on August 10 and waited for Ottoman authorities to decide what to do.
And then the Germans scored a diplomatic coup. In order to avoid legal problems associated with transiting ships through the straits, the Turks formally transferred Goeben and Breslau to the Ottoman navy. This had the added advantage of humiliating Britain, which had seized a pair of battleships under construction for the Ottoman Empire in British yards. In late October, still under the command of Souchon, Yavuz Sultan Selim and Midilli—the former Goeben and Breslau, respectively—attacked a Russian naval installation on the Black Sea.
Their raid was Turkey’s first military action of World War I. Some historians have overstated the diplomatic impact of the transfer. The Ottoman government under Enver Pasha would likely have joined the Central Powers in any case. But the dramatic German offer undoubtedly had a popular impact, making it easier for Pasha to push his government into war.
Yavuz Sultan Selim had an active war career. The Russian Navy has historically been crippled by exceptionally bad geography, and Turkish entry into the war exacerbated the problem. The Black Sea fleet could not move through the Dardanelles and play any larger role in the war while the Ottoman Empire continued to fight, nor could the other members of the Entente supply Russia with war material. In essence, the Black Sea became a large lake which the Turks and Russians fought over for four years. For the first year, Yavuz was the big fish in the small pond. The Black Sea Fleet included five pre-dreadnoughts, none of which could equal Yavuz but which were, in numbers, capable of hurting her. One of the Russian battleships was named Panteleimon; its name, before 1905, had been Potemkin. Yavuz’s political importance made her service particularly delicate, as it was thought that her loss might demoralize the Turkish people. Thus, the Germans and Turks were careful. When Yavuz hit a mine in late 1914, shipyard workers elaborately concealed the damage.
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Yavuz Sultan Selim, Midilli and other ships from the German airship SL 10, June 15, 1916.
In the long term the Russians had the upper hand, as they had three dreadnoughts under construction in Black Sea yards. The Ottoman Empire also faced a threat from the Mediterranean. Winston Churchill got it into his head that Royal Navy battleships, if able to penetrate the Dardanelles, could force Turkey from the war. If Constantinople could be bombarded, he reasoned, the Ottoman government would collapse. To this purpose he launched a series of attacks on the Dardanelles. The most spectacular naval attack, on March 18, 1915, was led by the new British super-dreadnought Queen Elizabeth and included the battlecruiser Inflexible and fourteen French and British pre-dreadnoughts. In case the Allied fleet broke through, Admiral Souchon was instructed to fight to the death in defense of Constantinople. But the Allied operation was not a success: Six of the battleships hit mines and three sank.
Churchill was not the sort of man to be dissuaded by failure. He reasoned that ground troops might seize critical points along the passage and allow for the movement of the battleships down the strait. British, French, Australian, and New Zealander troops invaded in April of 1915. The scattered Turkish defenders were commanded by a thirty-four-year-old colonel named Mustafa Kemal. The land battle for the Dardanelles was brutal on both sides, and eventually cost the Allies 45,000 dead and the Ottomans 88,000 dead. The Allied troops, unable to make progress, withdrew in January of 1916.
Yavuz tangled with the Russian battle squadron three times in the first year of the war, but was never able to corner and destroy it piecemeal. The five Russian ships, conversely, lacked the speed to force an engagement with Yavuz. The balance of power in the Black Sea tipped decisively towards the Russians in the latter part of 1915, however, with the commissioning of Imperatritsa Maria and Imperatritsa Ekaterina Velikaya, two new dreadnoughts. Each was more powerful than Yavuz, and gave the Russian fleet the capability of employing three different squadrons capable of killing the annoying Turkish/German battlecruiser. Yavuz exchanged fire with Imperatritsa Maria to little effect in early 1916. Fortunately for the Germans and Turks, the Russian fleet was none too careful with its gunpowder: Imperatritsa Maria exploded and sank at anchor in late 1916.
Then, in March 1917, Russia went and had a revolution. Imperatritsa Ekaterina Velikaya became Svobodnaya Rossiya, and a third new dreadnought, Imperator Alexander II, became Volya. Panteleimon became Potemkinagain, briefly, then Boretz Za Svobuda. Russian operations steadily grew more sporadic as the revolution took its toll, and Yavuz resumed its predominance in the Black Sea. The Bolshevik Revolution of late 1917 completely shut the Russian fleet down. Admiral Souchon departed in September 1917 to claim the command of a squadron in the High Seas Fleet.
In January 1918 the prospects of the Turkish/German navy looked bright. The Germans were on the verge of seizing the Russian dreadnoughts (they eventually captured and pressed into service Volya). However, things were going poorly for the Turks on the ground. The new German admiral hoped that a foray by Yavuz and Midilli (formerly Breslau) into the Mediterranean would draw the Royal Navy from the supporting positions it had taken around Palestine. The Dardanelles were defended by several old British and French ships, including the advanced pre-dreadnoughts Agamemnon and Lord Nelson. The British admiral, however, had divided his fleet and was left with only Lord Nelson to engage Yavuz. Fortunately for the Royal Navy, Yavuz and Midilli ran into a minefield. Midilli struck a mine first, and Yavuz hit a mine while attempting to tow Midilli to safety. Yavuz broke off the operation, allowing Midilli, her partner in operation after operation since 1913, to sink. Yavuz then hit another mine, but managed to make it back to the strait before running aground because of a navigational error.
Badly damaged by mines, Yavuz Sultan Selim required four months of repair work at Constantinople. Given Allied domination of the North Sea and the Mediterranean, Yavuz could serve no more meaningful purpose in the war. Transferred to German-controlled Sevastopol, Yavuz was again placed in drydock for permanent repairs. In June, only partially repaired, Yavuz oversaw the surrender of the last remnant of the Russian fleet at Novorosiisky, although most of the ships were scuttled by the time of Yavuz’s arrival. Yavuz returned to Istanbul for further repairs, but peace interfered. Knowing that the war was coming to an end, the German crew of Yavuz transferred the ship to a Turkish crew on November 2, 1918.
At the end of the war, Turkey was required by treaty to turn over Yavuz Sultan Selim. However, a nasty little war had begun for control of Asia Minor. The ship was not scuttled or turned over, but instead left in an inactive state. The Allied desire to carve up the Ottoman Empire did not end with the Empire’s Arab possessions. Greece, France, Italy, Bolshevik Russia, and the United Kingdom all sought territorial concessions within Anatolia itself. The Allies had substantial control over the rump Ottoman state, but elements within the Army, led by Mustafa Kemal, resisted the allied incursions. Through a long series of extraordinarily adroit political and military maneuvers, Kemal managed to force all the Allies out of Anatolia, although the Turks sold out Armenia to the Bolsheviks in return for arms and leverage. The Treaty of Lausanne ensured the independence of the new Republic of Turkey (under the rule of Kemal, now known as Ataturk), and provided for the return of Yavuz to the Turkish Navy In 1923, Great Britain turned formal possession of Yavuz Sultan Selim over to the new Turkish government.
TCG Yavuz and USS Missouri, Istanbul, April 1946. USN photo.
Battleship technology had developed considerably since 1910. Yavuz Sultan Selim was no longer a state-of-the-art ship, even as the naval treaties froze battleship development. Yavuz sat in reserve for several years as the Turkish government struggled to gather funds for a major refit. The Turks could not pay for a radical reconstruction of the sort that many other navies were carrying out, but they did intend a modest modernization, rendering Yavuz capable of defeating anything that the Soviet Union or Greece, Turkey’s most likely two enemies, could put to sea.
