SMS Goeben

Goeben was the second Moltke-class battlecruiser, ordered on 8 April 1909 from the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg as Germany's arms race with the Royal Navy accelerated. A budget increase had raised the possibility of stepping up from 28 cm to 30.5 cm guns, but Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz opposed it, preferring to add a pair of 28 cm guns instead — so Goeben carried ten 28 cm guns in five twin turrets, two of them en echelon amidships. She and her sister Moltke were significantly larger and better armoured than the comparable British Indefatigable class.

Her hull was laid down on 12 August 1909 and launched on 28 March 1911, christened for August Karl von Goeben, the Franco-Prussian War general. Four Parsons steam turbines, fed by twenty-four coal-fired Schulz-Thornycroft boilers, drove four screws at a rated 25.5 knots — a speed she comfortably exceeded on trials. Her protection was Krupp cemented steel: a belt 280 mm thick over the magazines and machinery, turret faces of 230 mm. Twelve 15 cm casemate guns and twelve 8.8 cm guns rounded out the armament, with four submerged 50 cm torpedo tubes. She commissioned on 2 July 1912 and within months was sent south, flagship of the new German Mediterranean Division during the Balkan Wars.

When the First World War broke out, Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau were the Kaiser's force in the Mediterranean under Rear Admiral Wilhelm Souchon. On 4 August 1914 Goeben bombarded the port of Philippeville in French Algeria while Breslau shelled Bône, spooking the French into convoying their troopships. Ordered to Constantinople by Tirpitz and Pohl — in direct contravention of the Kaiser's instructions — Souchon coaled at Messina, where sympathetic Italian authorities stretched the neutral 24-hour limit to around 36. The British battlecruisers Indefatigable and Indomitable shadowed him, but with no declaration of war yet between Britain and Germany, no one fired, and Goeben outran them.

The last force in Souchon's path was Rear Admiral Ernest Troubridge's four armoured cruisers. A German feint towards the Adriatic drew Troubridge out of position, and when he realised his mistake he judged that attacking Goeben's 28 cm guns with his older ships would be suicidal, and broke off. On 10 August the Germans entered the Dardanelles. To sidestep neutrality law the Ottomans announced they had purchased the two ships for 80 million marks, and on 16 August Goeben was commissioned into the Ottoman Navy as Yavuz Sultan Selim, her German crew donning fezzes.

The transfer had consequences far beyond one hull. On 29 October 1914, under Enver Pasha's direction, Yavuz bombarded Sevastopol while the Ottoman Empire was still formally at peace. Russia declared war on 1 November, forcing the Ottomans into the world war on Germany's side. The Russians drew their own lesson from the raid: the Black Sea Fleet would have to stay concentrated, so that Yavuz could not defeat it ship by ship.

On 18 November 1914, returning from Trebizond, the Russian fleet met Yavuz in fog off the Crimea at the Battle of Cape Sarych. The pre-dreadnought Evstafi, unable to see the master ship's faulty ranging data applied, fired on her own estimate and hit with her first salvo, penetrating a casemate and detonating ready ammunition — the entire gun crew died, thirteen men in all. Yavuz's reply hit Evstafi four times out of nineteen 28 cm shells in fourteen minutes of combat, killing 34. On 26 December she struck two Russian mines outside the Bosphorus, tearing holes of 50 and 64 square metres. No Ottoman dock could take her; repairs were made inside steel cofferdams, the holes patched with concrete.

For the next three years she was the pivot of the Black Sea war: covering troop convoys, escorting colliers from Zonguldak when mines disabled Breslau's successor Midilli, dodging torpedoes from the submarines Tyulen and Morzh, and rushing troops and munitions to Trebizond during the Caucasus Campaign. Off Zonguldak on 8 January 1916 she duelled the new Russian dreadnought Imperatritsa Ekaterina — the only battle between dreadnoughts ever fought on the Black Sea. Neither ship landed a hit, and Yavuz, her bottom fouled and shafts worn, struggled to escape a battleship reported making 23.5 knots.

Her hardest day came in the Aegean. On 20 January 1918, under Vice Admiral Hubert von Rebeur-Paschwitz, Yavuz sortied from the Dardanelles to draw Allied forces away from Palestine. At the Battle of Imbros she surprised and sank the British monitors Raglan and M28 at anchor. But Midilli struck several mines and sank, and Yavuz herself hit three mines retreating; pursued by the destroyers Lizard and Tigress, she was intentionally beached at Nagara Point. British bombers hit her twice to little effect, and before the submarine E14 could reach her, the old battleship Turgut Reis towed her back to Constantinople. Cofferdam repairs took until October — weeks before the Armistice of Mudros ended the Ottoman war.

The Treaty of Sèvres would have handed Yavuz to the Royal Navy as reparations, but the Turkish War of Independence intervened, and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne let the new republic keep her. She lay neglected at İzmit until 1926 — two working boilers, unable to steam or steer, mine scars unrepaired. Refurbishing her as the centrepiece of the fleet was the one constant in Turkish naval policy of the 1920s: a 26,000-ton floating dock was bought from Germany, and the refit of 1927–30 survived a collapsed dock, an embezzlement conviction of the Minister of Marine, and a Greek proposal for a ten-year naval building holiday made in alarm at her return.

Recommissioned in 1930, she made 27.1 knots on trials — better than expected — and resumed her place as flagship. The Soviets moved the battleship Parizhskaya Kommuna from the Baltic to keep parity in the Black Sea. In November 1938 she performed her most solemn duty, carrying the remains of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk from Istanbul to İzmit. Turkey stayed neutral through the Second World War, Yavuz kept at Gölcük behind torpedo nets with a steadily thickening anti-aircraft battery. In April 1946, when USS Missouri brought home the remains of the Turkish ambassador, Yavuz greeted her in the Bosphorus and the two ships exchanged 19-gun salutes. She was decommissioned on 20 December 1950.

Yavuz was stricken from the register in 1954 yet served on as a stationary headquarters until 1960. Turkey offered her to West Germany as a museum ship in 1963; Bonn declined on cost grounds. With no buyer and preservation unaffordable, she was sold for scrap in 1971 and towed to the breakers on 7 June 1973, the work finished in February 1976. She was by then the last dreadnought in existence outside the United States, the last surviving ship built by the Imperial German Navy, and the longest-serving dreadnought-type ship in any navy.

Her end was documented by the Turkish photographer Ara Güler, whose film Hero's End — a cinematic collage of historical drawings, photographs and his own footage, with music by the folk musician Ruhi Su — was built around a fictional account of her dismantling. Pieces of the ship survive: three screws at the Naval Command and the Istanbul Naval Museum, her foremast at the naval academy, artefacts at the Mürwik Naval School in Flensburg and the Deutsches Museum in Munich, and a 6 cm landing-party field gun, landed at Messina in August 1914, on display at La Spezia.