Tag Archives: Феоктист Андреевич Шпакович

Warship Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2019: That time the Japanese (briefly) won a condemned (but free) secondhand battleship

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Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2019: That time the Japanese (briefly) won a condemned but free battleship

Farenholt Collection. Catalog #: NH 65755

Here we see the Brandenburg-class linienschiff /panzerschiff SMS Weißenburg of the Kaiserliche Marine with a bone in her mouth, likely while on trials in 1893. She would go on to live an interesting life that would leave her one of the last 19th Century battleships still afloat more than a half-century later.

These early German barbette battleships were the Imperial Navy’s first blue water capital ships when they were envisioned in the late 1880s. Stumpy by design, the quartet of Brandenburgers were 379-feet long and weighed 10,000-tons, roughly the same size as a smallish cruiser by the time WWI came around.

The class had an unusual layout for the main armament, mounting two twin 11″/40 cal gun turrets fore and aft with a third twin 11.1″/35 cal turret amidships, which is kinda funky.

The 11-inch guns were good enough to fire a 529-pound shell to 15,000-yards, but the small magazine only carried 60 rounds per gun and the nature of the turret design meant that shells could only be loaded when the gunhouse was trained to 0 degrees. The rate of fire was about 1 shell every 2 minutes. Photo via Navweaps.

However, they could make 17 knots and carried as much as 16-inches of armor, which was decent for their day.

Class leader SMS Brandenburg and our subject Weissenburg were laid down simultaneously at AG Vulcan Stettin in May 1890, followed by SMS Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm at Kaiserliche Werft Wilhelmshaven, and SMS Wörth at Germaniawerft, Kiel, which left them all to commission in 1893/94, staggered just months apart.

Differing from their sisters, Weissenburg and Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm carried lighter nickel (Harvey) steel plate rather than tougher Krupp-made plate, as the latter was in short supply (this will be important later).

Imperial German Brandenburg class battleships gunnery practice at sea 1900

The German battleship SMS Weißenburg in 1894. Note her peculiar three turret arrangement

WEISSENBURG (German Battleship, 1891-1938) Photographed in British waters, probably during the late 1890s. NH 88653

WEISSENBURG German Battleship, 1891 note her big Reichskriegsflagge on the stern NH 48568

When they joined the fleet, Kaiser Willy II and company loved the new toys, although they were outclassed by the comparable British and French designs of the day– e.g. the Royal Navy’s nine Majestic-class pre-dreadnoughts went over 17,000-tons and carried 12-inch guns, although they had thinner armor than the Brandenburgers while the French Charlemagne-class was marginally faster and also mounted 12-inch guns.

Still, until the Germans ordered their Nassau-class dreadnoughts in 1906, the Brandenburgers carried the largest guns in the fleet, as subsequent linienschiff only toted 9.4-inch or the same 11-inch guns as they did, and in smaller quantities. This left them popular for a decade. During that time, the class of sisters waved the flag as a quartet, forming the 1st Division under Konteradmiral Richard von Geißler, and sailed as a group for China in 1900 to exercise gunboat diplomacy using the Boxer Rebellion as a pretext.

Think of them as Kaiser Willy’s low-budget version of the Great White Fleet.

“Das Linienschiff Weißenburg” passing through the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Kanal in Hochbrücke Levensau, 1900

German battleships SMS Brandenburg (foreground) and SMS Weißenburg (right) in Port Said on the way to China, 1900

The Germans published and widely circulated many very nice period postcards and lithographs on the class which serve as classic maritime art today.

S.M. Linienschiff Weissenburg postcard. Isn’t that beautiful?

The whole class

Although they were substantially modernized after their return from China (a second conning tower added, some torpedo tubes removed, boilers replaced, fire control upgraded etc.) the writing was on the wall for these dated bruisers, especially after the epic slaughter of pre-dreadnoughts observed during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-05. Shifted to the II Squadron and then the III Squadron, by 1910 they were listed as part of the Reserve Division.

Brandenburg and Worth were then relegated to training duties, passing in and out of ordinary, and later would form part of V Battle Squadron for coastal defense during WWI.

Meanwhile, with Berlin courting the Ottoman Empire, Germany made a deal to sell the two sisters with Harvey armor– Weissenburg and Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm— to the Turks in September-October 1910. Payment for the two battleships and four companion German-built destroyers amounted to 25 million marks. As the Germans paid about 10 million marks for each of the Brandenburgers‘ construction when new, they got the better end of the deal.

Fez-equipped crew members of the Ottoman battleship Barbaros Hayreddin or Turgut Reis, sometime between 1910-1914

When compared to the rest of the Sultan’s fleet, whose most impressive vessel was the old (c.1874) 9,000-ton coastal defense battleship Messudiyeh and two Anglo-American protected cruisers– Medjidie (Mecidiye) and Hamidie (Hamidiye) — picked up around the turn of the century, the gently-used German battleships were the best things in the Turkish fleet until German Admiral Wilhelm Souchon showed up in 1914 (more on him later).

Weissenburg /Torgud Reis and Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm/Barbaros Hayreddin in the 1914 version of Janes, listed right after the planned British-built modern dreadnoughts which would be seized by Churchill that year and pressed into the Royal Navy, and right before the ancient Messudiyeh, built in 1874.

As the two German battleships required more than 1,800 sailors to crew them– a figure the Turks simply did not have– they were undermanned and filled with often raw recruits from the Empire’s maritime provinces. Within just a few years the lack of trained NCOs and officers meant the two ships had boilers and pipes that were broken, phones that no longer worked, and rangefinders and ammo hoists that could not be operated effectively.

Renamed Torgud Reis and Barbaros Hayreddin, respectively, after famous Ottoman admirals, they sailed for Constantinople just in time to see service against the Italians (then nominal German allies) and against the combined Greek-Bulgarian-Rumanian-Serbo-Montenegrin forces in the series of Balkan Wars, providing artillery support to Ottoman ground forces in Thrace and throwing shells at Greek ships during the ineffective naval skirmishes at Battle of Elli and Lemnos.

Ottoman battleships Barbaros Hayreddin and Turgut Reis, in Thessaloniki, 1911, just after delivery

Unfortunately for the Turks, both of their new-to-them German battleships got the short end of the stick against the Greek’s Italian-built armored cruiser Georgios Averof and her companions and were peppered with shells in each of their meetings with the Hellenic Navy, leaving them in poor shape just two years after delivery. Due to a low number of 280mm shells available, most of the rounds fired by the ships in their career were from 150mm and 120mm secondary guns. At the Battle of Elli on 16 December 1912, Torgut Rus suffered 8 killed and 20 wounded. At the Battle of Lemnos on 18 January 1913, the Greeks inflicted another 9 killed and 49 wounded on our subject’s crew.

Comparison between the Ottoman (left) and Greek (right) fleets during the First Balkan War, 1912-13 L’Illustration, No. 3652, 22 Février 1913 via Wiki. Torgut Ruis is the second from the bottom left.

With little time to lick their wounds, the Ottomans were sucked into World War I on the German side, largely due to the machinations of the aforementioned Adm. Souchon, who showed up with the SMS Goeben and SMS Breslau at Constantinople just after the balloon went up with the British hot on his heels. Donning fez and raising an Ottoman crescent banner, Souchon on his own went on to raid the Russian coast in the Black Sea under the pretext of being in the Sultan’s navy, an act that brought the “Sick Man of Europe” into the hospice care of a conflict it could never hope to survive.

The Ottoman battleship Torgud Reis (ex-SMS Weißenburg) in 1915 during the Gallipoli Campaign. Note her stubby 11″/35s amidships compared to her 11″/40s in the front and rear.

Nonetheless, both Torgud Reis and Barbaros Hayreddin managed to give a good account of themselves in the Dardanelles Campaign, shelling ANZAC troops along Gallipoli and dodging Allied submarines and battleships. Speaking of which, Barbaros Hayreddin was dispatched by a single torpedo from Royal Navy HMS E11, which had penetrated the Sea of Marmara, in August 1915, taking half her crew with her.

Her biggest contribution to the war would seem to come when she tied to Goeben/Yavuz on a rough day for the Turks in January 1918 during the Battle of Imbros and pull the stranded battlecruiser off Nagara Point before the Allies could kill her, as such preserving a fleet in being for the rest of the conflict.

For more on the Ottoman Navy of that period, click here for an excellent essay.

When the war ended, Torgud Reis was in exceptionally poor condition, lacking parts and shells, still suffering from damages inflicted in her wars with the Balkan states as well as a turret explosion in 1915. Following the Armistice of Mudros in October 1918 and the resulting Allied occupation of Constantinople– the first time the city had changed hands since 1453– the Ottoman fleet was disarmed and interned under British guns.

In the controversial Treaty of Sevres, signed on 10 August 1920, the victorious Allies divided the Ottoman fleet among the victors, with Britain to receive the ripest fruit including Yavuz Sultân Selîm (ex-Goeben), Hamidiye, Mecidiye, Muavenet-i, Millet, Numene, Tasoz, Basra, and Samsun. The French, Greeks and others were to split the destroyers Berk-i Efsan, Pelagni Deria, Zuhaf Peyk-i Sevket, and Nusret.

The Japanese, who never fired a shot at the Turks in anger as far as I can tell, was to get Torgud Reis. In fairness to the Emperor, it should be noted that the Japanese sent two squadrons of cruisers and destroyers to the Med in 1917-18 for escort duties for troop transports and anti-submarine operations, which included the destroyer Sakaki getting damaged by a torpedo from the Austro-Hungarian submarine U 27 off Crete.

Needless to say, the Japanese, who picked up the much nicer Jutland-veteran dreadnoughts SMS Nassau and SMS Oldenburg as well as the cruiser Augsburg and five destroyers from the Germans as reparations in the Treaty of Versailles– only to sell them for scrap– never took over the leaky and busted Torgud Reis.

Regardless, the Sevres pact never took effect, as the Greeks and Turks both balked at it although for different reasons, which in turn led to the milder Treaty of Lausanne, signed on 24 July 1923, that allowed the Turks to keep their ancient fleet. The treaty came into force on 6 August 1924 and soon after, Torguid Reis was refitted at the Gölcük Naval Shipyard through 1925 then returned to service as an armed training ship, still with at least two of her 11.1-inch guns working while two of her other turrets were removed and mounted ashore in concrete on the Asian coast of the Dardanelles as a coastal artillery battery.

Meanwhile, her two sisters still in Germany, Brandenburg, and Worth, were scrapped in Danzig just after the war.

The 40-year old battleship Torgud Reis in 1930 in poor shape with only her forward turret remaining. Note the destroyer to the left

Torgud Reis remained on active duty until at least 1933 and endured as an accommodations hulk for another two decades past that date, only being broken in the late 1950s. With that, I believe she was one of the final 19th Century pre-dreadnoughts left, as the USS Kearsarge (BB-5) which was converted to a heavy-crane ship in 1920, had been scrapped in 1955; and the hulk of the ex-USS Oregon (BB-3), which had been used as an ammunition barge at Guam until 1948, was scrapped in 1956. An honorable mention goes to the USS Illinois (BB-7), who was commissioned in 1901, disarmed in 1923, and ultimately sold for scrap in 1956. Only Togo’s Mikasa, which has been preserved as a museum ship at Yokosuka since 1923, remains of the era. Dewey’s 1898-era protected cruiser Olympia, remains as an honorable mention.

Nonetheless, the two turrets removed from Torgud Reis in 1925 and repurposed into coastal artillery, still endure, which counts for something.

Further, the Internationales Maritimes Museum in Hamburg has a set of very well done 1:100/1:250 scale models of the Brandenburgers by master model maker Thomas Klünemann on public display, keeping the memory of the class alive in their former homeland.

Specs:
Displacement:10,670 t (10,500 long tons)
Length: 379 ft 7 in
Beam: 64 ft 0 in
Draft: 24 ft 11 in
Installed power: 10,000 ihp (7,500 kW)
Propulsion: 2-shaft triple expansion engines
Speed: 16.9 knots
Range: 4,300 nautical miles at 10 knots on 1050 tons coal
Complement:
38 officers
530 enlisted men
Armament:
4 × 28 cm (11 in) MRK L/40 caliber guns (two removed 1925)
2 × 28 cm (11 in) MRK L/35 caliber guns (removed 1925)
8 × 10.5 cm (4.1 in) SK L/35 guns
8 × 8.8 cm (3.5 in) SK L/30 guns
5 × 45 cm (18 in) torpedo tubes (1 bow, 4 beam) (removed 1910)
Armor:
Belt: 400 mm (15.7 in)
Barbettes: 300 millimeters (11.8 in)
Deck: 60 millimeters (2.4 in)

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

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Warship Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2017: You just can’t keep those Cramp cruisers down

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Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2017: You just can’t keep those Cramp cruisers down

NH 48569

Here we see, in her gleaming white-and-buff scheme with ornate bow scrolls, the one-of-a-kind protected cruiser TCG Mecidiye (also seen as Mecidiye or Medjidieh in the West and Medzhidiye in the East) of the Ottoman Navy in the yard of her builder, William Cramp & Sons, at Philadelphia in 1903. On the far left is a US armored cruiser of the California class.

Cramp, perhaps the biggest name in iron shipbuilding on the East Coast for years was big in the biz of constructing cruisers both domestically and for overseas customers. Their first overseas customer for a warship, Russia, bought Yard#200, 203, 204 and 205, the “cruisers” (really just fast commercial liners converted with a few 4- and 6-inch guns) Asia, Africa, Evropa, and Zabiyaka in 1877 for use in that country’s war against the Ottoman Empire. They proved so good that the Russians kept them around for decades.

Imperial Russian cruiser Zabiyaka in Port Arthur, 1900. She was a Cramp cruiser with fine lines.

Just a few years later Cramp produced the first U.S. cruisers– USS Newark (C-1), Baltimore (C-3), and Philadelphia (C-4) — as well as the armored cruiser USS New York (ACR-2), followed by the protected cruisers Columbia (C-12) and Minneapolis (C-13). Japan in 1898 bought the 4,900-ton cruiser Kasagi from the Philadelphia ship maker while Russia purchased the 6,500-ton Varyag in 1900. The business was a boomin!

Then, in a fit of attempting to replace worn-out 19th-century vessels, the Ottoman Navy in 1900 went looking for a pair of modern protected cruisers. From Armstrong in Newcastle, they ordered a 22-knot 3,900-ton British-designed cruiser to be named Abdül Hamid (later changed to Hamidiye) equipped with a pair of 150mm and 8x120mm guns. Then, (you have been waiting for this moment), from Cramp they ordered our vessel, the 3,900-ton Abdül Mecid (later changed to Mecidiye, which means “glory”– By note, the Order of Mecidiye, an Ottoman military decoration for honor and bravery instituted in 1851 by Sultan Abdulmejid and disestablished in 1922, is not related to the ship’s name–) in 1901.

While you would think since both ships are the same size and type and ordered while they were the same design– and you are absolutely wrong.

Mecidiye was its own ship altogether different from her step-sister Hamidiye. Whereas the British ship had two Hawthorn Leslie and Co VTE engines and 6 boilers on three shafts with an Armstrong-made main battery, the American ship had two VQE engines on 16 French-designed Niclausse boilers on two shafts with a Bethlehem main battery and Armstrong secondaries. Further, they had a slightly different topside appearance and endurance with Hamidiye having longer legs and a more reliable engineering plant. In the end, while the two shared the same broad design, Mecidiye was visibly shorter in profile and her trio of stacks was more robust, making it easy to tell the pair apart.

Ottoman cruisers Medjidie (Mecidiye, right) and Hamidie (Hamidiye, left) at Golden Horn in 1905. Note the difference in profiles, esp in Mecidiye’s thicker, stubbier stacks. Photo via Turkish Navy

The Ottoman fleet itself, according to the 1897 Naval Plan, would modernize several older armored warships, buy two new battleships, two new armored cruisers, two new light cruisers, and two new protected cruisers. However, only the two lowly protected cruisers managed to be funded.

Completed 19 December 1903, Mecidiye sailed off to join the Ottoman fleet as one of her proudest new vessels, literally making up half of the protected cruisers in service.

U.S. built Ottoman cruiser Mecidiye with both U.S. and Ottoman flags. Via Istanbul University http://katalog.istanbul.edu.tr/client/tr_TR/default_tr/search/results?qu=Mecidiye+Kruvaz%C3%B6r%C3%BC

Behind the old (c.1876) 9,000-ton coastal defense battleship Mesudiye and the two 10,000-ton former German pre-dreadnoughts Hayreddin Barbarossa (ex-Kurfurst Friedrich Wilhelm) and Turgut Reis (ex-Weissenburg), the two new Anglo-American cruisers were the best things in the Turkish fleet until German Admiral Wilhelm Souchon showed up in 1914.

Mecidiye and her step-sister were something of showboats before the Great War.

French postcard showing off the Ottoman fleet with the old German battleships center and the U.S. and British made protected cruisers to the far left and right respectively. Even in the postcard, you can see that Hamidie’s funnels are taller

French colored postcard The Cruiser Medjidie, c.1905 (Mecidiye Kruvazörü)

Medjidie French postcard

Ottoman Cruiser, Medjidie, Istanbul, 1903. Note her bow scrolls

During the First Balkan War in 1912, when the Greek Navy decided to try and muscle up against the Turks, Mecidiye had the distinction of being the first modern warship attacked by a locomotive torpedo while at sea when the primitive French-built Greek submarine Delfin (460-tons) fired a 450mm torpedo at the Turk’s Cramp cruiser just off the Dardanelles from a range of 800 meters on the morning of 9 December 1912. The torpedo reportedly broached and sailed past the cruiser without doing any damage.

She also took part in the naval skirmish at Elli the next week in the Aegean Sea and in the attempt to break the Greek blockade at Lemnos in 1913. In both instances, when pitted against the Hellenic fleet which included the bruising 10,000-ton Italian-made Pisa-class armored cruiser Georgios Averof, Mecidiye managed to come away unscathed. Hamidiye was not so lucky in the campaign and was damaged by a surface torpedo from Bulgarian torpedo boat Druzki off Varna.

Then came the Great War.

Although the Turks were forced into the war after Churchill seized their brand-new battleships fitting out in the UK and Souchon showed up to sleepwalk them into attacking the Russians in October 1914, the Ottomans rose to the fight with the old foe, and both Hamidiye and Mecidiye, in conjunction with Souchon, sortied out that year and plastered the Russian ports of Feodosia, Yalta, Tuapse, and Batumi, only narrowly dodging the Tsar’s Black Sea Fleet on several occasions.

Then, in April 1915, Hamidiye and Mecidiye set out with orders to conduct a pre-dawn Saturday morning raid on the well-protected Russian naval hub at Odessa. The port proved so well protected that Mecidiye hit an M08 mine and immediately sank in 35 feet of water. Hamidiye grabbed the survivors, left 30 dead behind for the Russians to bury ashore and beat feet after sending a torpedo into the cruiser’s hull to make sure she remained the property of Davy Jones.

With the potential for a great trophy, the Russians immediately went to work on a salvage job. After all, it’s not every day that a scratch and dent American-made cruiser gets dropped off in your front yard.

Introduce the divemaster

Lt. Feoktist Andreevich Shpakovich, a noted diver, and rescue specialist in the Black Sea Fleet. Born in 1879, Shpakovich joined the Navy after he was forced to drop out of engineering school due to family issues and by 1906 was a warrant officer in the diving detachment in Sevastopol. Fast forward a few years and he received his commission after completing courses in St. Petersburg and by 1909 was head of the operation to examine the lost Russian submarine Kambala, sunk in collision with the battleship Rostislav.

Just a week after the Mecidiye sank, Shpakovich and his team were assembled and diving on the wreck.

Divers on the Medjidie In the cap – diving officer FA. Shpakovich

Drawing of damages of the cruiser Medzhidiye by diver officer Shpakovitch

They found two 30-foot holes but little other damage and soon went about patching and pumping– a process that took two months before her keel was afloat again (though drawing 25-feet of water) and Russian navy tugs pulled her into the dock on 25 May, to the salutes of shore batteries and ships alike as the full assembled bands of the fleet played. Soon a cofferdam and dry dock were arranged, and she was to be refitted– with the assistance of builder’s plans provided by Cramp, for a fee, of course.

Her mixed American armament was ditched for a set of 10 good Pulitov 130mm L/55 guns, four high-angle 76mm Canets, and a few machine guns, her boilers cobbled back together at the Ropit Yard with spec-made tubes, and she was commissioned in October 1915 as Prut (Прут), named after the C.1878 Russian minelayer scuttled after a surface action to Goeben one year previously.

Prut Medzhidiye in Russian service

Prut Medzhidiye in Russian service

“Turkish Cruiser Mecidiye – sunk in the Black Sea, has been raised by the Russians and refitted.” Via Pathe

Notably, though she did make at least one cruise to Turkish waters to bombard the Anatolian coast, she was in poor condition, only capable of 18-knots and that for brief periods, and the Russians largely left her in the harbor for the rest of the war. The Tsar ordered a set of new boilers from the U.S. for her in 1916 and, according to some sources, they made it as far as Murmansk but were never installed.

Russian War Ships at Batum on The Black Sea in 1916. Caption: Three vessels together from left: –gunboat KUBANEZ (1887-ca. 1930 later KRASMY KUBANEZ); battleship Rostislav (1896-1922); and in right background: –cruiser PRUT (ex-Turkish MEDJIDIEH, 1903, sunk 1915 and salvaged). Courtesy of Mr. Boris V. Drashpil of Margate, Fla., 1893 Catalog #: NH 94411

Russian War Ships at Novorossiysk on The Black Sea in 1916. Caption: Three ships together in 1916, from left: seaplane carrier IMPERATOR NIKOLAI I (1913-1942); Seaplane carrier IMPERATOR ALEKSANDRI (1913-1942); protected cruiser PRUT (1903, ex -TURKISH MEDJIDIEH, salvaged 1915-1916 after mining. Description: Courtesy of Mr. Boris V. Drashpil of Margate, Fla., 1893 Catalog #: NH 94409

Then, with the Bolsheviks knocking the country out of the conflict, the Germans marched into Sevastopol in May 1918 and promptly ordered the Russians to amscray from their trophy ship, which was then towed back across the Black Sea to her original owners.

The war soon ended and the Ottoman fleet’s operations were substantially limited as the Allies kept the few working warships inactive in the Golden Horn under the watchful eyes of occupying forces, though they were later restored to the navy of the new Republic of Turkey.

Sinope, Turkey as seen from cruiser USS OLYMPIA in 1919-1920. A Turkish Cruiser in full dress is on the right, possibly Mecidiye. Description: Catalog #: NH 63466

Too worn out to participate in the conflict with Greece (1919-22), Mecidiye was patched up for use as a training hulk with a diminished armament, though a 1927 refit at Gölcük Naval Shipyard through the use of a new floating drydock and included a new set of American-made Babcock & Wilcox boilers returned her to a modicum of regular use.

Hamidiye (L), Mecidiye (R) at Zonguldak in 1930. Again, note the differences in stacks. Also, note the diminished armament

Turkish cruiser Mecidiye in Istanbul, 1932.

However, by WWII, she was static again and used as a cadet training ship along with Hamidiye, obsolete and totally without any AAA defenses. The modern Turkish Republic avoided picking sides in the latter world war until they jumped on the Allied bandwagon about six weeks before Hitler took his own life. Of the 4,800~ men of the Turkish Navy, none fell in WWII.

The Turkish cruiser Mecidiye as cadet training ship 1940s Note she only has 4 guns fitted U.S. Navy All Hands magazine April 1948,

Both ships were stricken in 1947 as the fleet, now a UN and soon to be a NATO member, received surplus U.S. ships in quantity, with Mecidiye dismantled in 1956 and her half-sister following in 1964. Neither ship’s name is on the current naval list of the Turkish Navy.

The ship in some ways is also very well remembered in Russia and Ukraine.

Shpakovich, the salvor of “Prut” later searched for the lost British storeship HMS Prince off Balaklava, hid most of his unit’s gear underwater when the Germans came into the Crimea in 1918 then used some of it later to establish the Red Navy’s EPRON– Special-Purpose Underwater Rescue Party– a group of underwater submarine rescue and salvage unit while crafting the manuals for the service’s dive training school.

EPRON divers in the Crimea, 1923. Shpakovich is front and center

He went on and raise the scuttled Bars-class submarines Gagara, Ledbed, and Pelikan in 1924 and continued such operations throughout the 1930s, as his team salvaged several of the Russian wrecks in the Baltic and the Black Sea left over from the Great War and Civil War before retiring as a Captain, 1st Rank and wore several Orders of Lenin, Red Banner, and Labor. He survived all the purges–rare for a former Tsarist officer– and died in 1964 at age 85. He is remembered as the founding grandfather of the Russian Navy’s deep-water hardhat divers, with over 10,000 hours in his logbook spent underwater.

The Russian Navy Museum has Mecidiye’s old Ottoman ensign preserved and in their collection.

Combrig, the largest producer of models of Russian warships in the world, has made a model of her as both Mecidiye and Prut.

As for Cramp, they continued making cruisers, as well as other ships of course, with the last one they worked on being Yard#536, the USS Galveston (CL-93/CLG-3), which was the last Cramp ship completed in 1958, long after the yard suspended operations. She remained in service until 1970, one of the last big-gun cruisers in any fleet. The end of an era, indeed.

Specs:

TCG Mecidiye 1903 (Protected Cruiser), Aka Russian cruiser Prut, via Combrig, click to big up

Displacement:
3,485 t (normal draught)
3,967 t (full load)
Length:
336 ft. (LOA)
330 ft.) (LPP)
Beam: 42 ft.
Draught: 16 ft.
Speed:22 knots (full speed in trials)
18 knots Russian service
Complement:
302 (1903)
355 (1915)
268 (1916, Russian)
310 (1936)
Armament (Turkish 1901-1915)
2 × 152 mm Bethlehem QF L/45 guns, singles forward
8 × 120 mm Armstrong QF L/45 guns, singles casemate
6 × 47 mm Vickers QF guns
6 × 37mm Vickers QF guns
2 × 457 mm torpedo tubes
Armament (Russian 1916-18)
10 × 130/55 cal guns (later reduced to 8)
4 × 75/30 Schneider high-angle guns
4x 7.62mm MG
Armament (Turkish, 1927-47)
4 × 130/55 cal guns
4 × 7/30 Schneider high-angle guns

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!