page_title: Reşadiye-class battleship
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Reşadiye-class battleship / Background
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: SMS Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm English: SMS Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm
context_page_description: 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 main battery guns as the British ships, but their secondary battery consisted of 6-inch guns, compared to the British vessels' 4-inch 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.
context_section_description: 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.
  The Ottoman government then began looking for newer vessels to buy in late 1911, and first contacted Armstrong Whitworth about the possibility of acquiring the dreadnought Rio de Janeiro, then under construction for the Brazilian Navy, along with Minas Geraes, which had been commissioned into the Brazilian fleet in 1910. These deals fell through, so the Ottomans contacted Vickers to order two new battleships. Douglas Gamble, who had previously served as a naval adviser to the Ottoman government, prepared two designs, the first of which was ordered as Mehmed Reşad V; during construction, this ship was renamed Reşadiye. A second ship, to be named Fatih Sultan Mehmed, was ordered in April 1914.
  Ordering the Reşadiye class started a significant naval arms race between the Ottoman Empire and Greece. The Greek Navy ordered the battleship Salamis in 1912 in response, which prompted the Ottomans to resume their bid for Rio de Janeiro. The contract to purchase the ship, to be renamed Sultân Osmân-ı Evvel, was signed in January 1914. This in turn provoked the Greeks to order a second battleship, Vasilefs Konstantinos, which required a third Ottoman battleship to be ordered; this was the second Reşadiye-class ship, Fatih Sultan Mehmed.
caption: The German battleship Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm, purchased in 1910 and renamed Barbaros Hayreddin
exif: {}