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The Ottoman Empire was once a great naval power. The empire's glory days were in the 1400s and 1500s, when its military prowess made western Europeans shudder. The Ottomans were pioneers in the use of gunpowder artillery, with imperial foundries that poured immense bronze cannon for siege work. In 1451, Sultan Mehmet II conquered Constantinople after a prolonged siege, making it his capital and renaming it Istanbul. In the following 150 years, a succession of warrior sultans expanded Ottoman territory on three continents, laying siege to Nice, Beirut, Damascus, and Vienna, among other places. One memorable triumph was the capture of Rhodes on his second attempt by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. This one battle cost the Magnificent One some 103,000 casualties.
During this time, the vigorous Ottomans fielded a formidable galley fleet on the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Its admirals provided an almost unbroken series of victories over the Italians. In 1571 their navy was soundly thrashed at the Battle of Lepanto but through the time of the French Revolution, the Ottomans maintained a fleet competitive with those of Britain and France in size. During the 19th century, the decline and decadence of the society was reflected in the imperial navy. Ottoman sultans enjoyed the prestige of smartly painted formations of ships-of-the-line adorned with fluttering banners, anchored and booming salutes, proferring glittering ceremonials for visiting VIPs; below left, a gilded caique bears Sultan Abd-i Medjit on an inspection of his fleet, around 1848. Directly behind the sultan's caique is the battleship Mahmudiye, built at Istanbul in 1843, long the world's biggest battleship. Carrying 128 guns, she fought at Sevastopol in 1854-55; was fitted with steam engines at Glasgow after the Crimean War. Her hull rotted from prolonged neglect, she went to the breakers in 1875.
Increasingly the navy suffered from a tendency to regard new ships as mere baubles for the sultan -- reflections of imperial prestige and dazzling power, expected perhaps to appear offshore to intimidate a foe, but hardly ever to fight. This tendency reached its apex under Sultan Abdülhamid II (ruled 1877-1909), who feared a possible coup by his admirals and so in 1878 forbad the fleet from leaving its base at Istanbul -- a ban that was to last 19 years. During the period of advancing decadence under study in this site, corruption was rife in all institutions of the Ottoman Empire. It was the rare Osmanli (Ottoman court) official who was willing to make the continual investment of funds and administrative diligence required to develop a truly first-class oceangoing fleet. Decade after decade the funds were appropriated and then grafted away, with the tacit blessing of the sultan.
Disaster stalked the sultan's fleet when it engaged battle-ready European navies. A case in point was the Anglo-French-Russian (hereafter "Allied") intervention in the Greek War of Independence. This conflict engendered the first of many European interventions against the Ottoman Turks. At Navarino on the west coast of the Peloponnese, the entire Ottoman battle fleet lay anchored, ringing the bay in a great crescent, when on October 20, 1827 the combined Allied fleets sailed in and engulfed them in a devastating cannonade. The wooden Turkish ships proved shockingly vulnerable to shellfire from the new Paixhans shell guns in the Allied fleets. This defeat was not only a loss of face, but a loss of naval capability from which the Turks never fully recovered. It is perhaps misleading to say "the Turks" because the majority of their crews were Greeks, who also made up the preponderance of the 4,109 Ottoman casualties (Allied casualties were 181 killed and 480 wounded). It was a fierce battle, but the coalition forces' superior training, together with a measure of luck, saw them through to a sweeping victory. All the Ottoman battleships and frigates were despatched. Although severe damage was sustained on the Allied side, not a single one of their ships was sunk.
This one hard-fought battle did not win the war, which lasted another two years, but ended in an independent Greek state. It was not the last of the many wars of independence fought by outlying domains of the sultan, frequently with Greek support and incitement. The entire period under study in this site was pockmarked with such conflicts, which marked the drawn-out demise of an empire: Greece, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Moldavia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Crete. Navarino did have one consequence of interest to battleship buffs, however. It resulted in the purchase of the first Turkish steam warship; Ottoman observers had been impressed by British steamers' ability to maneuver regardless of the wind, although this was primarily a sailing-ship battle.
Ridiculed as "the Sick Man of Europe", the once-fearsome Ottoman Empire seemed to be tottering on the brink of collapse through the latter part of the 19th century. Yet that collapse was prolonged -- more like a gradual erosion than a sudden implosion. After five centuries, the antiquated, termite-eaten structure of the Ottomans showed surprising staying power. It became British policy to prop up the ailing giant as a hedge against Russia. This resulted in Britain and France both siding with Turkey ("the Allies") during the Crimean War, when Russian invaded Ottoman-held territory on the Black Sea. By this time the Turks had rebuilt their fleet -- three wooden battleships and a host of frigates and corvettes. This renewal was accomplished under the direction of American experts who operated the Imperial Naval Arsenal on the Haliç, the main navy base of the Ottomans. In the early phase of the war before western forces arrived, the Russians under Vice Adm. Pavel Nakhimov destroyed the Ottoman fleet anchored at at Sinop, Nov. 30, 1853. Absent for guard duty at the capital, the three Ottoman line-of-battle ships were untouched by Nakhimov's raid. Later they joined the Allied fleet in bombardments of Sevastopol and other objectives.
Map showing the Ottoman Empire in 1850. European and northern Asian territories were whittled away before 1914; empire collapsed in 1918-20. Route shown explains the wanderings of Persian-born mystic Baha'u'ullah (1817-1892), founder of the Baha'i faith (no relation to naval affairs).
The centerpiece of the Crimean War was the siege of Sevastopol, Russia's great fortress and naval base built on a rugged peninsula of the Crimea, commanding the Black Sea. Ottoman battleships joined in the mighty bombardment of the Russian citadel, earning disparaging reviews for their seamanship and marksmanship from their western comrades. Adm. Nakhimov was killed manning the batteries to the last shell, earning immortality in Russian naval circles: a long series of warships has borne his name, indomitable as the city he defended, which held out for several years. At the last, Sevastopol was pounded into dust. Fort Constantine's magazines exploded and showered flaming wreckage over the ruinous battlefield; afterwards Allied troops marched in and took prisoner the wretched remnants of the once-proud garrison, which capitulated on Sept. 8, 1858. Even the destruction of Sevastopol and loss of the territory they had siezed did not discourage the Russians. But when Britain's Adm. Napier mounted an overwhelming demonstration of naval might in the Baltic, sailing up the Gulf of Finland to threaten Kronstadt and Petersburg, the Tsar came to the table in a hurry. In the peace settlement Russia was forced back to her 1852 borders with Turkey. She was also prohibited from maintaining a war fleet on the Black Sea. Though not gained by Ottoman arms in any significant degree, the peace treaty greatly benefited the Osmanli Government's interests. After the Crimean War, there followed a final half-century-plus before the roof caved in -- an Indian summer of Ottoman rule. In this interval great things were dreamed of and even, fleetingly, attempted. But the endemic habits of corruption and petty gangsterism arose to sabotage every effort.
Top of PageIt is said that Sultan Mahmüd II thought steamships mere novelties until two of them saved his bacon. Returning to the capital aboard a sailing frigate after the launch of a new warship, the royal party ran into a howling gale that threatened to drive them onto a lee shore. Then two foreign steamships appeared, passed cables, and towed them to safety. After this 1836 deliverance, the grateful sultan became an enthusiastic convert to steam propulsion and dropped his opposition to steam warships in the imperial fleet. The first Ottoman navy steamer Eser-i Hayir was launched the following year. The sultan's naval advisors -- the aforementioned Americans, Charles Ross and Forster Rhodes -- sent the navy's capital ships one by one to Britain to be engined. By 1859 all were converted. The Ottomans continued to build wooden warships for another 20 years, but in the late 1860s the ironclad bug bit them hard, and an ambitious fleet of the new type ships was built.
So it was that Ottoman orders flooded mostly British yards; many French and a few Italian and native-built ships augmented the efforts of eminent British builders: Armstrong's, Napier's and the Thames Iron Works. Small- to medium-sized frigates and central battery types of 2,000 - 9,000 tons, the late-1860s/early-1870s warships formed the core of the Ottoman fleet through 1900. Corvettes and gunboats were ordered as part of the sultan's modernization spree, as were three ironclad monitors to patrol the Danube (and in so doing, keep up with the Austrians). With rebuilding, some ships of this generation stayed in service until the First World War. Many moldered away for decades as floating barracks; the iron battleship Mesudiye was reconstructed in 1903-4, only to be sunk by a British submarine in 1914.
Though on paper this constituted a formidable fleet, in practice it was less so. The old practice of maintaining a fleet for show continued, with the novel steam technology to make it sexier to the sultan. In 1876, Abdülhamid II assumed the throne, initiating a prolonged period of imactivity. A wily intriguer, the new sultan harbored such innate suspicion of his admirals that, from the close of the Russo-Turkish War onwards, he kept all the ironclads permanently anchored at the Imperial Naval Arsenal in Istanbul, where the sultan and his agents could keep them under close scrutiny. During his long reign (1876-1909), the fleet was considered less a source of national protection than a source of personal enrichment for all concerned. The ministers of the Osmanli Government all had a hand in the cookie jar, even those whose portfolios had nothing to do with naval matters. Many of the ships were grossly overstaffed in order to supply income for absentee officers, many of whom had no interest in the sea. Too often, their knowledge of navigation was limited to making coins travel directly into their own pockets. Year after year the Vizier allocated funds for a first-class defense force, and year after year -- at the sultan's order -- the ships remained at their moorings on the Haliç, the main naval base in the capital.
Mechanical problems bedeviled the Ottoman fleet. After their first years, many of the fine new warships were crippled by boiler and condenser trouble, capable of only a fraction of their design speed. The reason was easy to find: the finer points of steam navigation were rather beyond the Osmanli admiralty administrators, who viewed it not as an operational necessity, but as yet another lucrative source of income, and deftly evaporated the funds earmarked for maintenance and replacement parts. By 1897 this resulted in the disgraceful spectacle of ironclads being towed into action by tugs, just like their wooden predecessors in 1855. As part of the modernization program, iron shipbuilding was added to the capabilities of the Imperial Naval Arsenal at Istanbul. This allowed ministers to extoll their native-built craft, even though the plates, propulsion machinery, and yes, even the guns had to be imported, usually from Britain. Yard management was firmly in the hands of foreign-born exports, following a centuries-old tradition. For an empire whose shipyards and gun foundries had once been world-class, this was a troubling dependency, but one met with complacency by Osmanli bureaucrats. More irritating to Turkish pride, virtually all empire's coal deposits were owned by British interests. British investors in times past had obtained a perpetual lease on the mines by richly bribing insiders at court. As the extent of the deposits became evident and the market for the fuel exploded, the benefit accrued to the leaseholders, not to the country -- other than the continual bribes, sweeteners, carrying charges, administrative overheads, etc., demanded by certain government officials.
Poor management begat poor performance in battle. In 1870, benefiting from the uproar over France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Russia unilaterally renounced the terms of the Peace of Paris that had ended the Crimean War. She began to build a war fleet once again on the Black Sea and in 1877 she invaded Ottoman territory west of the Black Sea and in the Balkan Danube region. Under the influence of Pan-Slavism, the Tsar was coming in to support brother Slavs seeking liberation from Turkish rule, especially the Bulgars. In the two-year Russo-Turkish War which ensued, a squadron of anchored Ottoman warships and transports was destroyed at Batumi. The Ottoman fleet's bombardments were not dependably destructive: some were of laughable accuracy, while others were more effective. Ironically, the ironclads were found to be most useful as troop transports. On the Danube, Ottoman gunboats and monitors were blockaded in port most of the time, having no effect on the campaign that birthed Bulgarian independence. In the war two Turkish warships were captured, beside one sunk by mining, one by torpedo, and two damaged by shellfire. Undoubtedly the most spectacular development of the war was the successful use of Whitehead torpedoes by the Russians under the inspired leadership of Stepan O. Makaroff. After several unsuccessful tries, a night attack on Jan. 26, 1878 succeeded in sinking the Intibah (right), a 163-ton gunboat (plan). Russia claimed to have eliminated "several Turkish battleships." This was the first recorded kill for the new weapon, although the first use of Whiteheads in combat had come over a year earlier. In a separate incident, the 5,000-ton French-built casemate corvette Asar-i Tevfik was holed below the waterline by torpedo. However, the ship survived and was later repaired. In these cases, the Whiteheads were launched from steam-powered picket boats adapted for the purpose. The Russians also used spar torpedoes during the war, without success.
After their stinging introduction to the perils of the locomotive torpedo, the Osmanli Government contracted for modern torpedo boats to be built in France, Britain, and Germany beginning in 1883. Some 40 such vessels were commissioned over the next two decades, about one-quarter of them built in Turkish yards to European designs. These vessels had rather more importance in the Ottoman fleet than in the first-class navies because of the weakness of the core battle fleet, and because torpedo vessels were exempted from the royal ban on sorties beyond the Golden Horn. Indeed the Ottoman navy appeared to be in its dotage. It was not surprising that the classic underdog weapon, the TB, should become a crutch when little else was done to allay the institutional rot. In any case, the torpedo service became one of the most effective branches of the Ottoman navy. Improved between 1909-14 by quartets of Normand Durandal-type destroyers from France and Schichau boats from Germany, the Ottoman torpedomen contributed to the spirited defense of the Turkish heartland in World War I. An effective mining service, developed under German tutelage in the last years before the Great War, also made a signal contribution.
In 1886, two submarines were ordered from Nordenfelt to counter the Russian Nordenfelts then entering service and the one ordered by Greece. But once the advanced craft were delivered, they were treated strictly as toys for the sultan. Turkey's first sub, the steam-powered Abdülhamid, made one majestic circuit of the Bosporus upon arrival, but with apparent stability problems and a tendency to swamp when on the surface, could not muster a willing crew. Named for the sitting sultan, Abdülhamid II, the vessel had a sister, Abdülmecid, which was the first submarine to fire a Whitehead torpedo while underway. After this exploit and a few trial trips, she occupied a place along the Kasim Pasha Dockyard wall with her sister until they both fell to pieces, rather like the empire under the sultan's régime.
The sultan was a clever man who juggled many conflicting interests and factions in a long reign during which his empire gradually approached the brink. One of Abdülhamid's pet paranoias was a mutiny by naval officers. Accordingly, in 1878 he had ordered the fleet immobilized at the Haliç. For 19 years, all the fine ironclads of the Ottoman battle fleet rusted away, virtually under the sultan's nose. A time would come when he would need a ready fleet and find only corroded junk in the dockyard, and officers with rusty skills to command it.
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Imperial Naval Dockyard, Istanbul: Wooden corvette Sinop at the Haliç, the main navy base on the Golden Horn. At left some of the yard buildings; at right, the stately offices of the Ottoman Navy Ministry.
The Ottoman navy's principal base was situated right in the capital, along the waterway known as the Golden Horn (Haliç in Turkish), across from the old, conservative neighborhoods of Balat and Fener and the ancient lighthouse in the latter. Chart The Golden Horn, separating sections of present-day Istanbul and providing a natural deepwater harbor, is a flooded prehistoric estuary 7.5 km long and 750 m across at its widest point (4.7 mi long by 2,461 feet wide). The Ottoman navy base began on the site of existing Byzantine navy shops, and in our period included a large drydock (below) and two small ones, anchor and gun foundries (the latter disused since most artillery was purchased abroad), cordage works, machine and boiler shops, and a number of covered and open marine railways, including the Hasköy Dockyard.
The offices of the Naval Ministry were housed in a campus of monumental buildings in the Italianate style next to the navy base. Incompetence housed in grandeur bequeathed by the past -- it reflected the nature of government all over the empire in its final years. Some of the buildings still exist today, chiefly housing the Rahmi Koç Museum -- a terrific collection related to transportation and, secondarily, to scientific and technological matters. The Museum's headquarters is housed in the 17th-century Ottoman anchor foundry. Visitors can take in antique autos, steam locomotives and ornate rolling stock, or classic boats and beautiful ship models, all in the very buildings where gunboats, frigates, and caiques were built for the sultans in centuries past. Outdoors in the still-active Hasköy Dockyard, a number of classic boats afloat and in cradles are open to visitors.
Torpedo boats and destroyers were based at Izmir and Istinye, the latter of which had a smallish floating dock.
With the coming of the Germans in 1914, the navy began taking a far more aggresive rôle. Adm. Souchon favored the nearby base of Gölçük for operations -- it was out of the city and not limited by the large volume of water traffic on the Bosporus. After the War, Gölçük became the main navy base for the resurgent navy of the new Turkish Republic. A large floating drydock was purchased for the Yavuz and her war damage was repaired beginning in 1927, just as the Turks found their wounds healing after a long, rough patch.
Some of the units of the Turkish fleet that could sortie anchored in the Dardanelles in 1897 during the brief Greco-Turkish War. Ships shown include (l-r, front row:) TBs Burhaneddin and Gilyum; (further row:) Aziziye, Orhaniye, and Osmaniye. This is the profile of a circa 1880 naval fleet, unsurprising since Abdülhamid II took power in 1876.
In 1897 Greek agitators fomented a revolt against Ottoman rule on Crete, determined to annex the island. The response of the Ottoman ruler was characteristically harsh and a brief but ugly war erupted, lasting from January to May of that year. This was another case where the western powers intervened, blockading Crete to prevent Ottoman troops and munitions coming in to suppress the rebellion, while they allowed Greek soldiers to land. In this war, the Ottoman fleet proved to be of negligible value. After nearly 20 years at anchor in the Haliç, most of the warships were in poor repair and could not leave base; the three ironclads that could move had chronic engine troubles; the big gun mounts jammed under the stress of continued firing. The German naval attaché observed one of the two sorties by the Ottoman battle fleet. He recorded that crews were so slow in working their weapons that the fleet would have been vulnerable to approach by any well-trained enemy. He further wrote that many ships were unable to train their guns at all.
The navy's inability to convoy troops to Crete and its pathetic performance in the Marmara sorties underlined the need for reform and renewal of the service. Abdülhamid II, the long-reigning sultan whose fear of naval treachery was largely responsible for the decrepitude of the fleet, reluctantly agreed to an overhaul. The Navy Minister was tasked with setting up a blue-ribbon commission to make recommendations for the modernization of the service. The commission issued its report in May, recommending modernization of the best surviving warships and a large buy of new warships abroad. The recommended purchase included two 10,000-ton battleships and four armored cruisers. This was a pipe dream: the Osmanli treasury was empty; it already owed vast sums to British and German shipyards and to foreign banks.
Eventually the sultan's men settled for the possible. Most of the old ironclads were so badly deteriorated that no shipyard would touch them. Other uses were found for them. Cleverly pitting one builder against another, the sultan was able to shave enough off the price to purchase a trio of modern protected cruisers, eight destroyers, and an assortment of gunboats, tugs, and auxiliaries. The Osmanli government's fiscal habits caught up to him when the third cruiser Drama, on the stocks at Ansaldo, Genoa, was siezed by the Italian government in lieu of payment on long overdue armaments bills. A British naval mission was established in 1907 to assist with equipment and training. The new purchases proved to be good warships, their virtues soon proven in combat. The 1860s relics were mostly relegated to service as hulks: tenders, floating barracks and warehouses.
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Taking note of the creaky state of the Ottoman Empire, hostile powers nibbled away at its remaining territory in Europe in a series of small wars from 1911-13: the Italo-Turkish War and the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. In the former, ultra-nationalists in Rome sent their armies to sieze and occupy large parts of Libya, then an Ottoman protectorate. In this war, Avnillah was sunk at Beirut, and a number of other Ottoman gunboats were destroyed by Italian cruisers.
Worse was yet to come, when the First Balkan War brought two humiliating naval defeats, triggering an even more disastrous thumping on land. In this conflict, the Balkan League chewed off nearly all the Ottoman-held lands remaining in Europe, making Albania independent and dividing the rest of the territories. Then in the Second Balkan War, Bulgaria quarreled with her allies over her share of the spoils while the Turks sat on the sidelines, licking their wounds; in the Bucharest settlement Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria all enlarged their share at Bulgaria's expense.
Turkey's enemies had chosen an opportune time to strike, for an internal power struggle was convulsing the Ottomans. By 1908, instability had accelerated, soon to attain a dizzy momentum. A movement more than 20 years old, the ultra-nationalist Young Turks had become a revolutionary force with the organization of the Committee of Union and Progress political party (CUP). One manifestly talented army officer was eager to join the CUP: a Selanik native named Mustafa Kemal. In 1908 the army revolted in Kemal's home province of Macedonia, demanding a return to constitutional rule and the suspension of Sharia law. Under army pressure the 1876 Constitution was reinstated and parliament convened for the first time in nearly 30 years -- a parliament dominated by the CUP. This turn of events amounted to a coup d'êtat.
Months later in the capital, on April 13, 1909, the First Army Corps mutinied in a counter-coup instigated by the sultan. The First demanded reinstatement of Sharia law and dissolution of parliament. With characteristic savagery, they began executing CUP sympathizers in the army and government. Five days later after a forced march from Selanik, 30,000 Balkan troops, dubbed "the Army of Action," paraded into the capital, ostensibly to protest the mass executions. Loyal to the Young Turk faction, the Army of Action (above right) occupied Istanbul and restored CUP rule. Weeks later, the long-time Islamist Sultan Abdülhamid II was deposed much as shown in the cartoon below, and a puppet installed on the throne.
A Young Turk (left, behind seat) reaches around to tip the sultan off the throne in a contemporary cartoon from Punch. Enlarge This drawing is no exaggeration but an accurate lampoon of the CUP coup (or counter-counter-coup, to be precise) and the forced abdication of Abdülhamid.
Meanwhile, Adm. Sir Douglas Gamble had taken over as attaché at the British naval mission on Sept. 18, 1908, expecting to administer the sensible program of modernization and new construction approved after the 1897 debacle. His duties included supervising training of personnel and soliciting construction and munitions contracts for British firms. From the first Sir Douglas had a hard time with the relaxed local standards of integrity. For example, it seemed every minister in the government demanded a piece of every naval contract, whether or not his duties had anything to do with the navy. By relentless jawboning, Sir Douglas succeeded in changing the procedures so contracts would be negotiated between the Naval Minister and Gamble. Predictably, the aggrieved officials whose income had been cut off ganged up on the Naval Minister and had him sacked. Although Gamble's competence and devotion to duty were widely admired among their naval officers, Osmanli Government officials took a narrow view of his influence in the service. That the traits of competence and honesty were considered suspect by the court reveals much about the state of the Ottoman Empire.
Despite the unrest, the imperturbable Gamble and officers he had trained conducted fleet maneuvers in the Sea of Marmara during May 1909. This marked the first at-sea exercises by the Ottoman navy since the 1880s. The practice was considered a success. If it lacked the realism found in one of the first-rate navies, still it was a step forward. These operations cemented personal loyalty between the British naval mission and the Ottoman participants. Training program grads would remain anglophile through WWI, proving a persistent thorn in the side for the Germans commanding the Ottoman fleet. The Germans' star was in the ascendant in 1910, and the new government, following in the footsteps of the abdicated Abdülhamid, nimbly played the British and Germans off against each other.
On April 27, 1909 the sultan was deposed in favor of his brother Reshad, a man with limited mental powers who served as a puppet for the CUP. While Abdülhamid lived under house arrest in Selanik (present-day Thessaloniki, Greece), Reshad was himself toppled early in 1910. The entire Ottoman fleet anchored off the sultan's palace at Selanik to demonstrate its allegiance to the new order. This incident, May 25 through June 12, 1911, was dubbed the Fleet Demonstration and placed the navy firmly on the side of the Young Turks. For the British attaché, all this instability was bad for business. In a country where business was pre-eminently a matter of personal relations, Sir Douglas had invested much time in cultivating oficials who were now swept away. Nor could he readily befriend the new men: In 1909-11 alone, there were three different sultans -- all powerless -- and no less than nine different navy ministers. It was worse than an Italian government reeling through a cascading bribery scandal.
The Osmanli government felt it must have dreadnoughts to counter the Russian ships building at Nikolaiev -- the Imperatritsa Mariya class. Unable to afford the new dreadnoughts they lusted after, the Ottoman bureaucrats accepted a very fair deal on some old but recently modernized German battleships. On offer were all four Brandenburg class ships, completed in 1893. Istanbul accepted the two which had Krupp nickel-steel armor (the others were made with compound armor). The new acquisitions mustered into the Ottoman fleet Aug. 31, 1910.
Meanwhile, Sir Douglas Gamble had managed a small but important reform. One of the persistent drains on the navy's finances was the large number of officers who collected their pay but never set foot on deck or did anything of value to the navy. In March 1909, the Osmanli Government issued a decree reducing the size of the officer corps. This immediately made a host of enemies for Gamble, who was seen as holding too much power for a foreigner, and having insufficient respect for local customs. The British attaché found the situation increasingly uncomfortable -- nay, untenable.
It was plain to all observers that the Ottoman Empire was enfeebled and embroiled in internal upheavals. In 1912 the Balkan League judged the time ripe to strike. During the First Balkan War the cruiser Hamidiye made an eight-month raiding voyage against Greek commerce and fortifications, with marked success. This operation was skillfully commanded by Capt. Yüzbashi Hüseyin Rauf (right).
Otherwise, the navy's performance in these small wars was deplorable and contributed to the Ottoman defeats. Troop landings were botched; bombardments devastated civilian quarters and left Bulgarian troops unscathed; Ottoman units proved unequal to the fast armored cruiser Giorgios Averof acquired by Greece in 1910. Matters climaxed on Dec. 16, 1912 at the Battle of Elli, when the Greek flagship Averof and three destroyers lunged aggressively at the antiquated Ottoman battleships as they emerged from the Dardanelles. Crossing the Turks' T, Greek Adm. Paulos Kountouriotis blasted the Ottoman flagship Hayreddin Barbarossa with six well-placed salvos, then turned to her sister-ship Torgud Reis. Nursing 56 casualties (15 killed), the two ex-German battleships retreated in disorder from the single armored cruiser and its cruelly precise gunnery, as the three old Greek battleships churned into range. The Turks withdrew to their forward base at Nagara and pondered their next move.
This took the form of a diversion and a raid on the Greek fleet base at Mudros. The Hamidiye's sortie was intended as bait, hopefully to draw off the Averof while the Ottoman van wreaked havoc on the Greek base. But Kountouriotis refused to be drawn. His suspicions were confirmed when the Ottoman fleet was sighted at 0830 on the morning of Jan. 18, 1913. In the ensuing Battle of Lemnos, he repeated his performance at Elli with the added firepower of his old Hydra class battleships. The Turks got a good thrashing and retreated to the Dardanelles after only 30 minutes in action, pursued by a vengeful and undamaged Averof every league of that five-hour journey. Withdrawing into the Straits, the Ottoman fleet did not emerge again for the duration. Thus, the Ottoman generals were unable to send troopships or supplies safely to the theatre of war; this inability guaranteed their defeat because their extensive fortifications throughout the theatre of war could not be resupplied and furnished with replacements. Further, abandoning the Aegean left important Turkish-held islands there open to Greek attack. All these key positions fell in 1912-13, and Greek they remain to this day.
In this time of widespread incompetence, Capt. Rauf proved one of the brightest lights in the Turkish service. He was given command of the battle fleet four days after the fiasco at Elli, but was unable to break the Greek blockade. Despite a few jabs at the Greeks, his forces invariably turned away from combat and, in effect, passively accepted the blockade of the Dardanelles, the Gulf of Izmir, and Mediterranean ports. On Jan. 23, 1913, the CUP took over the empire and installed a three-man rule at Istanbul: Mehmed Talaat Pasha, Minister of the Interior; Ismail Enver Pasha, Minister of War; and Ahmed Djemal Pasha, Naval Minister. The centralization of power in their hands effectively ended democracy and reinstated the same sort of authoritarian rule that the Young Turk Revolution originally had pledged to abolish. Rauf Bey proved one of their most adept officers; indeed, he became an important politician and statesman during the Great War and the early years of the Turkish Republic -- a cause he served assiduously through his death in 1964. But back in 1913, the coup marked the ascendancy of German influence in Istanbul. Gen. Otto Liman von Sanders was engaged to reorganize the Ottoman army, and the pro-German leanings of Enver Pasha became open. A treaty of military cooperation was signed in August 1914, even before the Ottomans formally entered the War. Through the final defeat of Ottoman arms in 1918, von Sanders and Enver remained at the helm, and Rauf Bey their loyal servant until casting his lot in with Atatürk's revolt.
As German power waxed, British influence waned; but there was still a pesence. Adm. Gamble had departed in July 1910, to be replaced at the British militay mission by Adm. Trevor Williams, who had even less success than his predecessor; the British mission did remain at Istanbul until Turkey formally threw in its lot with the Central Powers in October 1914. As European tensions heightened and the prewar arms race picked up speed, the Turks proved adept at playing a weak hand. Giving up as little as possible, they managed to get a number of smaller ships laid down essentially without paying for them. The German naval attaché, Major von Stremple, played upon the ruinous Ottoman finances to further ingratiate himself to the Young Turk triumvirate. Did the effendi desire dreadnoughts, but find himself held back by mere lack of money? Why not raise the funds through public subscription, using a nationwide Navy League organization? The German Flottenverein was a fine example, Stremple argued. The Young Turks jumped at his suggestion and pursued grass-roots fundraising with marked success. Nearly every peasant in every province contributed a coin or two, in a remarkable show of patriotism. When all the lira were counted, there was enough to pay for two new dreadnoughts.
The order was placed with Vickers Ltd. for two dreadnoughts similar to the latest British type, the Iron Duke class with five twin turrets mounting 13.5" guns (340 mm/45). The first ship, to be called Sultan Mehmet Reshad (schematic) or Reshadiye for short, was completing at Vickers' fitting-out basin in Barrow-in-Furness when another nearly complete dreadnought became available at Armstrong Whitworth's gigantic facility in Newcastle-on-Tyne. This vessel was a superdreadnought, ordered by Brazil in a fit of megalomania. Her purpose was to trump the competition in a South American naval arms race, and she was designed by Armstrongs' pre-eminent architect/salesman, Tennyson d'Eyncourt.
Three years and a worldwide economic slump later, the Latin arms race was winding down, and the Brazilians wanted out of their contract. Their ship, completing at Elswick, was the vessel known to history as HMS Agincourt. This huge oddity, the longest battleship to fight in WWI, was less strongly constructed than comparable Royal Navy ships; had thinner armor (9" belt versus 12") and less effective watertight subdivision. But she had more guns (14) and more main turrets (7) than any other battleship afloat -- a record she still holds. She appealed to Osmanli officialdom's love of show, of holding records -- their megalomania. They had to have her.
Rechristened Sultan Osman-i Evvel, the great ship was completed with sumptuous interiors at the Turks' direction. In summer 1914 the two battleships' crews embarked for England to receive training, read the ships into their navy, and sail them back to Istanbul to an anticipated thunderous welcome. But it was not to be. As the delivery date approached, the European crisis deepened. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill put a freeze on the handover, delaying the ceremony again and again. The Turkish crews were held virtual prisoners on their rusty transport, fretting within sight of their huge floating homes-to-be. Armed guards would not permit them onto the pier. Then on Aug. 2, a company of British regulars confiscated the two warships in the name of the King, renaming them HMS Erin and Agincourt. The latter was nicknamed "The Gin Palace" in the Grand Fleet; her crew reveled in the unprecedented spaciousness and luxury of their accommodations. She turned out to be a perfectly practical warship, too, fighting at the Battle of Jutland without sustaining damage, as did the more conventional Erin.
Although the British offered the Turks a £1,000-a-day fee for the use of each ship plus the return of the ships when the war was over, payment was contingent on Turkey's remaining neutral. The sense of betrayal and violation was overwhelming from one end of the Ottoman Empire to the other. Gone was the magic bullet, the wonder weapon -- the weapon paid for by every clerk, blacksmith, dressmaker, and goatherd in that vast empire. After this affront, every panjandrum and peasant would rather spit in John Bull's eye than accept his condescending offer.
The British made the mistake of not taking the Osmanli leadership or the Ottoman Empire's peoples seriously. It somehow was never considered that they might flip their loyalty. The British commandeered two fine new ships without which they probably could have won the war anyway. But in the wake of the battleship seizures, Turkish wrath burned white-hot against Britain. That very year the Allies lost a valuable neutral and invited a longer, costlier, more heartbreakingly difficult war, losing her least difficult supply route to Russia and ceding valuable naval bases to the Germans.
The German Mediterranean Squadron consisted of two new ships: the battlecruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau, under the command of R. Adm. Wilhelm Souchon. Unlike the sycophants and staff officers at Wilhelmshaven, Souchon was accustomed to taking the initiative. While at the Austrian Adriatic base at Pola in the last days before war exploded, he heard of the battleship seizures in Britain and put to sea, first shelling troop embarkation ports in French Algeria. In the two days after London declared war, the two Germans managed to fuel at Messina and shake off British pursuit. Coaling surreptitiously in hidden nooks of the Aegean, making emergency repairs to the boilers at every stop, they made their way eastward while the superior British forces searched to the west, toward Gibraltar. At 2100 on Aug. 10 the German ships arrived at the Dardanelles and signaled for a pilot. Having transited the Straits and Bosporus, they arrived at Istanbul the 16th, the Goeben carrying, in the words of Winston Churchill, "more slaughter, more misery and more ruin than [had] ever before been borne within the compass of a ship." Once arrived, Souchon offered both ships for Ottoman service if only the Turks would join the War on Germany's side. In effect this was "an offer they couldn't refuse," since Goeben's 11-in guns could easily train on the Sublime Porte or any other site in Istanbul. A mutual defensive alliance with Germany was hastily signed. But the Ottoman Empire was unprepared for war. The Young Turks' counsel was divided, with War Minister Enver Pasha a strongly pro-German voice. The Osmanli inner clique prevaricated for nearly three months over the question of war or peace.
Meanwhile, the two German warships were accepted into the Osmanli navy. There they changed history in a way few other ships could or did. In Turkish service, Breslau was known as Midilli, the Turkish name for the isle of Lesbos, while Goeben was renamed Yavuz Sultan Selim after a 15th-century Ottoman ruler, Selim the Strict. The ex-Germans found themselves virtually the only modern units in the Turkish fleet. Adm. Souchon was appinted C-in-C of the Turkish navy by imperial firman, and both ex-German ships were operated by their original German crews wearing fezzes; the shipboard day of worship was changed to Friday, but the Lutheran and Catholic liturgy remained unchanged.
Weary of Oriental delaying tactics, Souchon determined to give events a forceful nudge. On October 29, 1914 the two ex-Germans, together with units of the Turkish navy under Souchon's command, bombarded Russian cities on the Black Sea to embroil Turkey in the War: the admiral wrote his wife, "I have thrown the Turks into the powder keg and kindled war betwen Russia and Turkey." Later that year, the two ex-German ships encountered stiff resistance from five Russian pre-dreadnoughts at once and had to run from their deadly fire; they engaged in 2 long-range artillery duels with the Russian dreadnought Imperatritsa Yekaterina in 1917 -- the Goeben's only bouts with another dreadnought in a long career. Breslau was nicknamed Plaemyannik (the nephew) by the Russian gunners. Bombardments, escort duties, intercepting troop convoys -- the work of warships in wartime was their lot until Yavuz ran into a mine and had to take several months under repair. During 1916 the fleet operated on the Black Sea in support of the hard-pressed troops on the Caucasus front, where the Russians were winning. The ships were laid up by a coal shortage for most of 1917.
Late in January 1918, the two vessels stood down the Straits to attack the British base on the island of Imbros, just off Gallipoli. They did not find the Lord Nelson class battleships at Imbros, but they did find and sink two monitors used for offshore bombardment. Allied destroyers and aircraft launched a blistering counterattack, and in retreat the Germans stumbled into a minefield. Breslau eventually sank on Jan. 20, 1918 after hitting no fewer than five mines and losing 93% of her crew. Also damaged by three mines while assisting her consort, Yavuz beached herself inside the Dardanelles. Despite repeated bombing runs by Imbros-based aircraft, the British failed to damage the ship seriously as she lay bows-up on a sandbar, undergoing emergency repairs. After a several days' ordeal, Yavuz limped back to Istanbul towed by two salvage tugs and escorted by the battleship Torgud Reis. Yavuz was docked in May 1918 at German-held Sevastopol, her first actual dockyard visit in four years. She had her hull cleaned and received emergency repairs; permanent restoration would wait until 1927. The new Turkish Republic made a commitment to its single dreadnought by purchasing a 29,000-ton floating dock to keep her in repair, and a thorough rebuild was done betwen 1927 and 1930. The ship commissioned as the Turkish Republic's flagship in that year, and continued as such for 21 years, based at Izmir. One signal honor she performed was to bear the body of Atatürk to his state funeral in 1938. At the end of her long career, Yavuz was offered to Germany as a naval museum in 1963; but tragically, the offer was rejected. The old warship was finally cut up between 1973 and 1976 -- one of the longest-lived of all WWI dreadnoughts, second only to the USS Texas, preserved today as a war memorial near Houston. One of Yavuz' giant screws stands as a memorial in Gölçük today -- the only relic of a ship that mightily influenced history.
During the War, submarine activity also took its toll. British submarines infiltrated the Bosporus and wreaked havoc in the Black Sea and the approaches to Istanbul. One British sub, the E15, ran aground in the Sea of Marmara and was captured. One French sub, the Turquoise, ran aground while under attack and was captured and read into he Ottoman navy with much publicity; however the craft had been damaged in capture and served merely as a battery-charging station for German U-boats. Several German U-boats homeported or replenished in the Bosporus and emerged to harry Allied shipping. At the Turkish Naval Museum at Beshiktash today, the visitor may walk around the remains of a German type UB U-boat sunk by depth charges in the Marmara. Meantime in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), Turkish forces waged a fierce campaign against a British invasion force. Ottoman side-wheel and prop-powered river steamers saw duty as gunboats and transports on the Tigris during this bloody and protracted fight, 1915-17.
Allied ANZAC troops charge out of their trenches during the bloody Gallipoli campaign, an all-out invasion aimed at the Turkish heartland. Allied forces evacuated in the final days of 1915 after nearly a year of frustration and death. Gallipoli is synonymous with fiasco in the West. In Turkey it birthed the nation's greatest war hero, Müstafa Kemal Pasha (later known as Atatürk) and kindled a burning patriotism that survived the defeats and hardships that followed Gallipoli. Kemal Pasha's forces threw out Allied occupation troops in 1920 and the gifted general went on the found the modern, secular Turkish state in 1923, and to serve as its minister or president almost continuously through 1937.
World War I was a long and fearsome ordeal for all countries involved. The Ottoman army regulars paid the price for Souchon's adventurism (at left -- Ottoman troops guard their trench on Gallipoli. Click to enlarge). Strategically this was one of the brilliant turns of the Central Powers. The Bosporus was closed to their enemies, denying them the easiest means of supplying Russia. The need to make war in the East diluted Britain's manpower on the Western Front. The Turk, dismissed before the War as "the unspeakable Turk" or the "Sick Man of Europe," proved a doughty fighter, however brutal and decrepit his government. 'Johnny Turk' made good use of his geographic advantages and his massive fortifications and well-sited artillery. Those who thought the Ottomans would be a push-over had a rude awakening at Gallipoli, the tragic 1915 invasion that filled so many makeshift hospital wards and hospital ships. Brainchild of Winston Churchill, the doomed campaign may have been conceived in part to get even with the Turks for abandoning the British cause over the commandeered battleships. Beginning as a purely naval attack, the campaign evolved into a full-scale amphibious invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula with the avowed purpose of breaking through and capturing the Ottoman capital, Istanbul -- a goal the Allied troops never came close to achieving. They withdrew finally in the last week of 1915 and the first weeks of 1916. In the Gallipoli campaign, the Ottoman Empire lost over 250,000 men killed and wounded (86,692 killed), while the Allies lost 141,029 altogether (44,000 of them killed). Thus the entire butcher's bill for the hard-fought campaign was 130,784 killed on both sides and just under 392,0000 wounded -- as the well-populated military cemeteries on the peninsula attest. Full statistics
And despite the anglophile inclinations of some of its officers, the Ottoman navy gave a good account of itself in the Great War. In fact, this was a far better showing than any of its 19th century efforts or the disgraceful showing earlier the same decade. Their biggest push during WWI was at Gallipoli, defending against the foreign armada invading their territory and threatening the capital.
Mines and torpedoes sank six Allied pre-dreadnought battleships during the campaign; many more suffered severely from mines and shellfire, particularly at the March 18, 1915 Allied attempt to force the Straits, known in Turkey as the Battle of Çanakkale. Not long after war was declared, British submarines infiltrated the Dardanelles and launched sneak attacks, sinking the old coat-defense battleship Mesudiye, the battleship Hayreddin Barbarossa, the destroyers Yarhisar and Gairet-i Watanije, and many commercial vessels and transports. German U-boats retaliated; some homeported at Istanbul during the War, operating against the Russians on the Black Sea and the Allied shipping in the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean -- there was an Allied land campaign against Bulgaria, based in Thessaloniki, Greece, long after the Gallipoli force had been evacuated. At right, wartime German propaganda postcard shows the Yavuz and Midilli with other Turkish units in a rather obviously composited image. Jammed into an alien background from its native dimension, the battlecruiser floats unconvincingly over the waters of the Golden Horn. An oval portrait of Enver Pasha, the most pro-German of the Young Turks, is inserted. Other propaganda art from German presses featured Sultan Mehmet V with the two kaisers, Wilhelm and Franz Josef, in an even more misleading ensemble: theirs was by no means a partnership of equals, and the sultan was but a figurehead -- though very soon the Kaiser found the real power in Germany went by the name "Hindendorff."
The Ottoman Empire had been threatening to disintegrate for so long that many thought it might contrive against all odds to survive. But the prolonged strain of conducting a modern world war -- of fighting on several fronts simultaneously -- proved the proverbial straw, snapping the backbone of the Ottoman system. The antiquated structure crashed down in 1918 and we are stil living with the consequences.
Some Pertinent Weblinks
- History of the Turkish Navies - from Wikipedia
- Sick Man of Europe - Ottoman Turkish History in Our Period
- The Naval Battle of Elli - Dec. 16, 1912
- The Turkish Naval Museum - at Beshiktash, Near Istanbul
- The Turkish Navy in World War I
- Short Video on the Battlecruiser Yavuz Sultan Selim
- The Nusret Replica Today - at Çanakkale Naval Museum
- Photos of Naval Battle of Gallipoli - Forts, Ships, Maps: Piotr Nykiel's Stunning Collection
- Blog on the Attempt to Force the Straits - Graveyard of Old Battleships
- The Gallipoli Campaign - Overview from Wikipedia
- The U-Boat War in the Eastern Mediterranean - WWI History from Keadive.gr
- The First Balkan War and the Turko-Italian War of 1912 in Brief
- Punch Cartoons About Turkey 1870s to 1914 - Many by Tenniel. Barbed Political Commentary
- Everything About The Battle of Navarino - 1827
- Turkey's Arch-Enemy: The Royal Hellenic Navy - 1832-1920
- Lay In a Course for Global Site Nav
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