Читать книгу The Battleship Book - Robert M. Farley - Страница 17

Laid Down: 1909

Launched: 1911

Completed: June, 1912

Displacement: 23,000 tons

Main Armament: ten 11” guns (five twin turrets)

Secondary Armament: twelve 5.9” guns (casemates)

Speed: 27 knots

Treaty: Pre-Washington Naval Treaty

Major Engagements: Mediterranean Pursuit, Bombardment of Sevastopol, Dardanelles, Battle of Imbros,

Fate: Scrapped, 1973

After the abortive hybrid armored cruiser Blücher, Germany responded to the British Invincible class battlecruisers with Von der Tann, a 20,000 ton warship carrying eight 11” guns, capable of 27 knots. As the Royal Navy continued to build battlecruisers, the Kaiserliche Marine determined to keep pace with its own battlecruiser squadron, alongside the larger dreadnought battlefleet.

Germany followed up Von der Tann with two ships of the Moltke class, Moltke and Goeben. Because Germany lacked a long naval tradition, the ships of Kaiserliche Marine took their names from famous German generals. Goeben was named after August Karl von Goeben, a Prussian infantry commander from the Franco-Prussian War. The Moltkes represented an incremental improvement over Von der Tann, but all of the German battlecruisers of the First World War demonstrated stability, longevity, and the ability to absorb damage.

The battlecruisers (along with their armored cruiser predecessors) were, by virtue of their speed, more flexible than the dreadnoughts, and capable of deployment on stations distant from the North Sea. In the years prior to the war, Germany deployed naval squadrons around the world to protect its burgeoning colonial empire. War came so quickly that some of these squadrons were trapped in unfriendly waters, chased by superior British forces.

Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau amounted to a respectable, if not formidable, German presence in the Mediterranean. Germany had two allies in the Med—Italy and Austria—but Berlin worried the two traditional enemies might fight each other in preference of France. After twenty-two months on station, Goeben badly needed a refit, not to mention the more immediate desire for coal, and Mediterranean allies weren’t eager to accommodate.

The German squadron began the war at the Austro-Hungarian port Pola, but even though the war began on Austria-Hungary’s terms, Vienna still hoped it could avoid war with Britain. Goeben headed for Brindisi, arriving on August 1, but the Italians were indifferent-to-hostile. In desperate need of fuel, Goeben (then joined by Breslau) traveled the next day to Messina, where Italian authorities again denied them fuel. The German crews literally tore apart several German merchant ships in search of coal, eventually finding sufficient stores to move on.

Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, who would later command a squadron in the High Seas Fleet, led the German detachment. He had few choices, none of them good. He could attack French convoys, head back to Austrian safe havens, or make a run for Turkey. His official orders involved interference with convoys of French troops coming from North Africa, but French and British naval superiority in the Med made any concerted offensive action nearly suicidal. Sitting out the war with the Kaiserliche und Königliche Kriegsmarine (Austria-Hungary’s navy) held little strategic appeal, as Souchon understood that adding two German ships would not tilt the military balance in the Med.

And so Souchon set off for Turkey, a choice that—surprisingly—would add nearly fifty years to his flagship’s lifespan. Thus began an epic pursuit across the Mediterranean, with effects that reverberated across World War I.

The Admiralty appreciated the threat posed by Goeben and Breslau, and had made preparations. Souchon’s squadron faced a trio of Royal Navy battlecruisers, as well as a squadron of armored cruisers. The Royal Navy expected Souchon to break west, in search of the convoys and in hope of making his way into the Atlantic. The battlecruisers Indomitable and Indefatigable guarded the western exit of Messina, Inflexible patrolled off Tunisia, and the squadron of armored cruisers patrolled the eastern approaches.

Yavuz Sultan Selim in the Bosphorus

The first and best chance to stop Goeben came when this squadron, consisting of four British armored cruisers and eight destroyers under Admiral Ernest Troubridge, sighted the ship and considered closing for combat. Goeben, a battlecruiser, could both outrun and outgun any individual Royal Navy cruiser. However, she could not beat an entire squadron.

In 1914, there was still little distinction between an armored cruiser and a capital warship. Each of Troubridge’s cruisers displaced nearly 13,000 tons, with a heavy armament of 9.2-inch guns. However, the cruisers lacked Goeben’s speed, as well as the armor to protect them from the German’s 11-inch shells. At the very least, Troubridge might have forced the Germans to expend more fuel and ammunition than they could afford. But Troubridge, concerned that Goeben might just pound the British ships from long range, avoided contact and planned to launch a torpedo attack after nightfall.

Against all expectations, Souchon continued toward the Dardanelles. The Royal Navy cruisers and battlecruisers pursued, 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.

[no image in epub file]

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.

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.