Reşadiye-class battleship
Reşadiye after entering Royal Navy service as HMS Erin
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| Class overview | |
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| Builders: | Vickers, Armstrong Whitworth (planned) |
| Operators: |
 Royal Navy
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| Built: | 1911–1914 |
| Planned: | 2 |
| Completed: | 1 |
| Cancelled: | 1 |
| Scrapped: | 2 |
| General characteristics | |
| Type: | Battleship |
| Displacement: | 23,000 t (22,640 long tons) |
| Length: | 559 ft 6 in (170.54 m) |
| Beam: | 91 ft 7 in (27.91 m) |
| Draft: | 28 ft 5 in (8.66 m) |
| Installed power: |
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| Propulsion: |
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| Speed: | 21 kn (39 km/h; 24 mph) |
| Complement: | 1,070 |
| Armament: |
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| Armor: |
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The Reşadiye class was a group of two dreadnought battleships ordered by the Ottoman Empire from Britain in the 1910s. The design for the ships was based on the British King George V-class battleships, although it incorporated several significant improvements. They carried the same 13.5-inch (340 mm) main battery guns as the British ships, but their secondary battery consisted of 6-inch (150 mm) guns, compared to the British vessels' 4-inch (100 mm) pieces. The first ship, Reşadiye, was laid down in 1911 and completed in August 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I; she was seized by the British Royal Navy and commissioned as HMS Erin. The second ship, Fatih Sultan Mehmed, had only been ordered in April 1914 and little work had been done by the start of the war, so she was quickly broken up for scrap.
Erin served with the Grand Fleet for the duration of the war, and saw action at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May – 1 June 1916. She holds the dubious distinction of being the only British capital ship engaged in the battle to not fire its main battery. The vessel served briefly as the flagship of The Nore in 1919, but her career was cut short by the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. She was scrapped under the terms of the treaty in 1922–23.
The Ottoman Navy had languished since the 1870s, the result of decades of little funding for new ships, poor maintenance of existing vessels, and no serious training regimen. Efforts to modernize the fleet had occurred in fits and starts during the period, including the failed attempt to build the pre-dreadnought Abdül Kadir in the 1890s, and a major reconstruction program launched in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, which had highlighted the poor condition of the fleet. Starting in 1909, the Ottoman government began to seriously look for warships to purchase from foreign shipbuilders to counter the growing strength of the Greek Navy, particularly the armored cruiser Georgios Averof. As a stopgap measure, two German Brandenburg-class battleships, Barbaros Hayreddin and Turgut Reis, were purchased in 1910.
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Wikipedia