alt="TCG Yavuz, Istanbul, 1947. USN photo."/>
TCG Yavuz, Istanbul, 1947. USN photo.
The project was a financial disaster, and brought down Turkey’s naval ministry. Turkey was on the verge of giving up on Yavuz when, in September 1928, Greece gave the Turkish Navy a wonderful gift. In an effort to intimidate Turkey, the Greeks undertook a massive naval exercise near Turkish waters. The maneuvers included Kilkis and Lemnos, a pair of pre-dreadnought battleships that the Greeks had acquired from the United States in 1914. Ataturk was enraged, and ordered the immediate refit of Yavuz, as well as the acquisition of modern destroyers and patrol ships. In 1930 she returned to service, flagship of the Turkish Navy.
Much had changed since Yavuz last served, however. As the rest of the High Seas Fleet lay at the bottom in the British naval base of Scapa Flow, Yavuz was the last remaining German-built battleship. Technology had moved forward, as the newest battleships operated by Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom displaced nearly twice the tonnage of Yavuz and carried 16” guns. The battlecruiser concept itself had come into question, after the Royal Navy’s disaster at Jutland. Advances in propulsion and hull technology had allowed naval architects to largely solve the speed vs. armor dilemma. The modern battlecruisers of the Royal Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy outclassed Yavuz on every metric, as did the new generation of fast battleships that the great powers would lay down in the 1930s.
Obsolete does not mean useless, however. The Greek Kilkis and Lemnos were no match for the Turkish battlecruiser either alone or in tandem. Yavuz could not claim similar superiority over the Russian Navy in the Black Sea, as the battleship Parizhya Kommuna had arrived in early 1930. Nevertheless, Yavuz gave the Turks rough equality with the Russians. In 1936 Yavuz led a Turkish naval squadron to Malta, an event that helped re-inagurate Anglo-Turkish friendship. This meant that the Turks had little to fear from the far larger Italian Navy.
At 9:05 am on November 10, 1938, Ataturk died of cirrhosis of the liver. General stress and a lifetime of heavy drinking had taken their toll. TCG Yavuz bore Ataturk’s body to its final resting place. One of Ataturk’s legacies was a preference for a modest foreign policy, and suspicion of the fascist movements in Italy and Germany. Consequently, Turkey remained neutral during World War II, at least until February 1945. Even then, the declaration of war against Germany and Japan had no effect other than to secure Turkey’s position in the United Nations. Bulgaria and Rumania had already left the war, securing the Black Sea, and the rump fascist Italian state no longer possessed a navy in the Mediterranean. TCG Yavuz thus engaged in no combat missions during World War II.
With the war over, most of the navies of the world decommissioned their old battleships. The oldest Royal Navy ships were sent to the scrapyard by 1949. The United States either sank or scrapped its most elderly ships. Yavuz became part of an odd sorority of ancient battleships possessed by second rate navies. Yavuz’s new “sisters” included the Soviet Novorossiysk, the Argentine Rivadavia, the Brazilian São Paulo, and the Chilean Almirante Latorre. Even among these Yavuz was an anachronism, as she was the only one to have coal propulsion rather than oil. Nevertheless, Yavuz would remain the flagship of the Turkish Navy until 1954, two years after Turkey joined the NATO alliance.
There was little compelling military logic for keeping Yavuz in service. Turkey’s admission into the NATO alliance essentially gave it naval superiority against any opponent other than Greece. The Soviet Union had recently acquired the Italian Giulio Cesare, but she was used mostly for training purposes, and it’s unlikely that a Turko-Soviet dispute in the Black Sea would have been decided by battleship combat in any case.
Yavuz lay in reserve for eight years before, in 1962, the Federal Republic of Germany offered to purchase her and turn the ship into a museum. Unfortunately, the Turkish government declined to sell Yavuz back to the Germans. By 1966 the Turks had changed their minds, but German politics had moved a bit to the left, and Imperial nostalgia had waned. Goeben was not tainted by association with Nazism, but she remained a symbol of German militarism in the twentieth century. As no other buyer willing to preserve Yavuz could be found she was sold in 1971, and scrapped between 1973 and 1976.
Author’s Note
Goeben earns the longest entry in this book because of her longevity, because of how compelling her story is, and because of her importance to two different navies. Of all the ships that should have been preserved, and could have been preserved, Goeben stands out. It’s unclear where Goeben would have been berthed, but I suspect either in Hamburg or near the Laboe Naval Memorial. It was a tragedy for naval history. One commentator argued that scrapping Goeben was roughly akin to finding, then eating, a complete, intact mastodon corpse.
Related Entries:
Inspired by…HMS Invincible
Contemporary of… HMS Lion
Replaced… HMS Agincourt
Dante Alighieri
Laid Down: 1909
Launched: 1910
Completed: January, 1913
Displacement: 19,500 tons
Main Armament: twelve 12” guns (four triple turrets)
Secondary Armament: sixteen 4.7” guns (twelve individual mounts, two twin turrets)
Speed: 22 knots
Major Actions: None
Treaty: Pre-Washington Naval Treaty
Fate: Scrapped, 1928
Naming a battleship is fraught with complication. A capital ship is more than just a weapon; it represents national power in its purest and most visible form. Names, therefore, carry with them deep political and symbolic implications. Warship names sometimes send a message to foes, but they just as often speak to domestic audiences.
The various navies of the world used different protocols to name their battleships. The United States Navy was probably the most programmatic; battleships were to be named after states, cruisers after cities, destroyers after people, submarines after fish, and aircraft carriers after famous battles. (This has changed in recent years.) The Kriegsmarine named its battleships after former monarchs, great admirals, and German states. The Royal Navy took names from all manner of different sources, including great battles (Agincourt), military commanders (Nelson, Marlborough, Iron Duke), monarchs (Queen Elizabeth), and famous old ships (Dreadnought). The Soviets changed the names of all of Russian battleships to suitably revolutionary terms after 1920, then changed them back during World War II. Only the Italians seem to have named a battleship after a poet.
[no image in epub file]
RN Dante Alighieri. Dr. Dan Sangera
Dante Alighieri was the first Italian dreadnought, and one of the first battleships anywhere to carry its main armament in triple turrets. The disposition of the turrets (four down the centerline, but not superfiring) gave Dante Alighieri a particularly heavy broadside for her 19,500 ton displacement. However, her end-on fire amounted to only three guns on either side. Only the Americans trusted the idea of superfiring turrets enough to attempt it on their first dreadnoughts. Like many Italian warships, Dante could make a good speed (23 knots) but sacrificed protection.
