War & conflict

The German warship that dragged Turkey into a war it dodged

One ship's escape across the Mediterranean in August 1914 did more to reshape the war than most battles: handed over to the Ottomans, renamed, and sent to shell Russian ports, she pulled an empire into the conflict on Germany's side. Then she kept going — carrying Atatürk's body in 1938, serving as flagship of the Turkish Navy until 1950, and outliving by decades the navy that built her. The strangest part is the ending, when West Germany was offered the chance to buy back the last surviving ship of the Imperial German Navy and said no.

She was the longest-serving dreadnought-type ship in any navy, and was finally scrapped in 1973 after the West German government turned down the offer to buy her back.

Read the whole of SMS Goeben on Wikipedia

The article comes from Wikipedia and is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The introduction above is our own.