Sword of the Sea:
The Ottoman Turkish Navy, Part Two
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
May 2023

In the world of the Second Great War, Ottoman Turkey faces the most challenging naval situation of any of the Central Powers allies. During the First World War, Turkey abandoned its Red Sea and Persian Gulf sea frontiers in the face of overwhelming Allied naval superiority. In our alternative-history Second Great War at Sea story arc, the Turks have chosen to defend these waters.

Second Great War at Sea: Sword of the Sea is our expansion for Second World War at Sea: Horn of Africa, bringing this conflict to the waters of the Middle East. In the narrative of the Second Great War, Turkey belongs to the Central Powers military and economic alliance, facing initially Italian and Persian enemies, later joined by the British.

A backwater in the actual Second World War, the theater gains added importance in our alternative history when the Turks seize the Suez Canal intact, theoretically allowing sea communications to German colonies in East Africa and German/Dutch possessions in South-East Asia.

That puts added importance on the Turkish Red Sea Fleet, and its attached Arabian Gulf Squadron. It’s mostly a collection of re-built ex-German veterans of the First Great War, and (relatively) inexpensive coast-defense ships. Let’s have a look at some more of them.

Coast Defense Ships

The German High Seas Fleet scrapped its oldest dreadnoughts in the years after the first Great War. The turrets and armored barbettes that underpinned them were retained in storage for use in a new series of coast-defense ships.

The High Seas Fleet used the 305mm (12-inch) turrets from the scrapped Oldenburg class dreadnoughts for its own Cherusker class of coast defense ships, but released the two dozen 280mm mounts from the Nassau class for use in twelve similar but smaller ships built for Central Powers export customers.

Note: The Cherusker-class ships, and the Estonian ship, appear in Second Great War at Sea: Tre Kronor. Their design is based on actual 1920’s proposals for German coast defense ships (ultimately rejected in favor of the Deutschland-class commerce-raiding armored cruiser).

One such ship went to Estonia, and another to Bulgaria. The Ottoman Navy took the remaining ten, five of them built in German shipyards and the other five at the newly-expanded shipyard complex at Gölcük near the main naval base of Izmit. The Sinop class displaces 10,000 tons, and is built around a pair of re-furbished turrets from scrapped Nassau-class dreadnoughts.

The 280mm gun mounts have been given new weapons, the same 52-caliber model fitted to the rebuilt Vildiz-class battle cruisers. The turrets themselves have been modified to accommodate the newer weapon, and given additional armor to the turret roof. In addition to her main armament, she has a pair of 150mm (5.9-inch) guns in a turret mounted amidships and six torpedo tubes in two triple banks, one on either side of the ship. Finally, she carries eight 105mm (4.1-inch) heavy anti-aircraft guns and an array of lighter weapons.

Sinop’s armor is more than adequate to resist the fire of enemy cruisers, and she has a very good underwater protection scheme. None of that makes the design a match for enemy battleships, but in the narrow confines of the Red Sea she’s more likely to run into Italian coast-defense ships – which are larger and more heavily-armed, but are still not true battleships.

The Turks liked their coast-defense ships; their shallow draft made them very suitable for both the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf, they were inexpensive to build and to operate, and could fulfill many missions including gunnery training in peacetime and minelaying and escort in wartime.

Once the supply of 280mm turrets ran out, the Turks wished to order more ships to the same design, but balked at the increased cost of a ship fitted with newly-manufactured turrets and barbettes. The Dogan-class design replaced the 280mm and 150mm turrets with three twin turrets for the excellent 210mm (8.2-inch) rifles that equipped German and Turkish heavy cruisers. With their long range and high rate of fire, they make the new ship at least as effective in most of her missions; even with the heavier guns, she would never be able to fight enemy battleships. With more guns, she can do a better job against the enemy cruisers and coast-defense ships she’s designed to fight.

Other than the main and secondary armament, the Dogan class is identical to the Sinop class. The Ottoman Navy built a dozen of them, all ordered from Gölcük and the Taskizak Naval Shipyard just outside Constantinople.

Armored Cruisers

The Ottoman Navy’s first order for new warships following the Great War came in 1920, even as unrest grew in the Arabian Peninsula that would soon lead to a bloody, dirty war. The Turks ordered four fast armored cruisers of the Gefion class, the so-called “Iron Pups” – 15,500 tons’ displacement, with their designed based on the German battle cruiser Derfflinger.

They carry ten 210mm guns in five twin turrets, all along the centerline, and are both fast and well-protected. The Turkish ships underwent modernization in the mid-1930’s along with their eight German sisters, their coal-burning boilers replaced by new oil-fired machinery with the weight savings going to thicker deck and belt armor.

Displacement rose to 18,500 tons, considerably more than any heavy cruiser, while their speed dropped to about 31 knots. The ships retained all ten of their heavy guns, but lost their secondary battery of a dozen 120mm guns mounted in armored casemates. In their place they received eight 105mm heavy anti-aircraft guns in dual high-angle mounts, the standard tertiary weapon of German capital ships. A new, 60-caliber model with a range of 32,000 yards, better than many battleships’ main batteries, replaced their 45-caliber 210mm guns.

Note: While all of the Central Powers cheat on this reality’s naval treaty limits, these particular ships would not have been in violation, as they were laid down before the talks began.

The two big cruisers assigned to the Red Sea Fleet are almost as large as the two re-constructed battle cruisers, and usually operate together with them in a four-ship division. They have the range to project Turkish power into the Arabian Sea, if they can get through the narrow bottleneck of the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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