Ottoman battleship Barbaros Hayreddin

Type

Battleship

Period

20th Century

Nation

Ottoman Empire

Overview: Barbaros Hayreddin was a Brandenburg-class pre-dreadnought battleship, originally built for the German Imperial Navy as SMS Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm and sold to the Ottoman Empire in 1910. Renamed after the famed 16th-century Ottoman admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa, she became one of the Ottoman Navy's two capital ships alongside her sister Turgut Reis (ex-Weissenburg) in the years leading up to and during the First World War. Specifications: As built she displaced roughly 10,013 tonnes normal (10,670 tonnes full load), measured about 115.7 m (379 ft) in length with a beam of 19.5 m (64 ft) and draft of 7.9 m (26 ft). She was powered by two triple-expansion steam engines driving twin screws for about 10,000 ihp, giving a top speed near 16.5 knots, and carried a complement of roughly 38 officers and 530 enlisted men. Service History: In the Balkan Wars she served as the Ottoman fleet's flagship division and fought at the Battles of Elli and Lemnos against the Greek Navy, taking damage in both engagements without decisive results. During the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 she bombarded Allied landings and served partly disarmed as a floating battery before being sent to resupply the Ottoman Fifth Army; on 8 August 1915 she was intercepted and sunk off Bolayır in the Sea of Marmara by a single torpedo from the British submarine HMS E11, with roughly 253 men lost. Notable Facts: The ship and her sister were essentially obsolete by WWI, having been built in the early 1890s in Germany, and were noted to be in a state of severe disrepair by the time war broke out, with some guns even removed for shore-based coastal defense batteries. Her sinking by HMS E11 was one of many successes for that submarine, which sank over 80 vessels during the Dardanelles campaign, making the loss of Barbaros Hayreddin a notable single-torpedo kill of a capital ship.