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Chapter 14: Naval Matters and the Matters of the State
Chapter 14: Naval Matters and the Matters of the State

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“The Ottoman Navy had once been the pride of the Ottoman Empire, once the largest and most ferocious fleet on the entire planet, and in the early 1900s, it was a mere shadow and relic of its former glorious past. However the 1910 Naval Plan seemed to envision a slow but sure naval buildup for the Ottoman Navy, which was envisioned to create a more naval secure environment for the empire, both in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and to some extents in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea as well.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire and the German Empires had managed to deliver the destroyers that the Ottomans had ordered and the 16 destroyers which were built over a span of three years were all put into service in the Ottoman Navy. Out of the 16 destroyers, six were put into service in the Mediterranean Fleet based in Izmir, whilst four were put into service in the Black Sea fleet, based at Sinope. Three destroyers were put in place at the Adriatic fleet based out of Durres, and the remaining three were put in the Red Sea fleet based out of Jeddah.


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Naval standard of the Ottoman Empire.

However the Ottomans were more wanting of the four light cruisers that it had ordered from the British and two dreadnoughts as well. Both of them would go a long way in increasing the naval projection power of the Ottoman Navy. The Ottomans had spent a great deal of money for the ships, and they didn’t wish to see it wasted for nothing. At least the submarines and the destroyers had been built in time.

The British admiralty contacted the Ottoman Naval Ministry on March 12th, 1914 and told them that the light cruisers were ready and would arrive at Ottoman Harbor within a week at most, whilst the dreadnoughts would still take a few months to be completed and finished. The Ottomans were ecstatic. The warship program of the Ottoman Navy seemed to be coming towards a close, and the Ottoman Naval Ministry turned its eyes on naval logistics.

The Ottomans were already upgrading their dockyards and slip-yards, however some in the empire called out that the maintenance companies of the shipyards were not up to the task of maintaining such a large amount of ships. In order to get around this problem, the Naval Ministry bought a good amount of maintenance kits from private companies in Greece, Italy and the UK and instead started to reverse engineer them, making suitable maintenance pads for the warships, and these were slowly being dispatched throughout the major ports of the empire.


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One of the Town Class Light Cruisers built for the Ottoman Navy at Izmir Harbor.

Two weeks later the four light cruisers built by the British arrived in harbor in Izmir much to great celebration by the populace, who were having fun in the small fair thrown by the government in celebration of the naval ships. The four light cruisers were made based on the Town Class Cruisers, and all of the light cruisers were put into service in the Mediterranean Fleet. The Ottoman Navy alongside the Royal Australian Navy and the Royal Navy would be the three navies which would operate the Town Class Cruisers. The basic characteristics of the Town class cruisers were:-
Displacement: 4,800 to 5,440 long tons
Length: 453-462 feet.
Beam: 48-50 feet
Draught: 14-16 feet
Installed power: 22,000 – 25,000 horsepower or 16,000 – 19,000 kW, alongside 12 Yarrow boilers.
Propulsion: 4 shafts, 2 steam turbine sets
Speed: 25 knots (46 kilometers per hour)
Range: 4,140 to 5,830 nautical miles
Complement: 310 – 480
Armament: Two BL 6-inch (152 mm) Mk XI guns (50 caliber), Ten BL 4-inch (101.6 mm) Mk VII guns, Four QF 3 pounder (47 mm) guns, Two 18-inch (450 mm) torpedo tubes.
Armor: Deck: 19 to 51 mm
Conning Tower: 102 mm
Gun Shields: 102 mm

These light cruisers were fast, and more importantly for the ottomans, modern. For if the Ottomans truly wished to have a large navy on numbers only, then the Ottomans could easily bring out older patrol ships and torpedo boats to fill the navy numbers (the stored older torpedo boats were kept in reserve for times of war). This would be the beginning of a new era for the Ottoman Navy, for both the naval ministry and the government was finally starting to take the navy as an important facet of the state once again after five decades.” The Ottoman Navy: An Illustrious and Bumpy History, 2001.

“The Zia government was supported in Persia by the elite Persian Cossack Brigades, all of whom were veterans of tribal wars in Persia, and since they had sworn personal loyalty to Prince Abdul-Hussein Farman Farma Qajar, who had been proclaimed Shah by Zia, they supported the Zia government as well. This led to a massive gaping hole in the Qajar loyalist military, and the government was forced to plug this gap with conscription service in the Persian population, which did not exactly endear the loyalist government to the population.


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The Persian Cossack Brigade at attention in 1912.

A few revolutionary uprisings in Qoms and Isfahan had been put down by the loyalist gendarmerie already and the situation was turning pretty bad for the loyalists. Shah Ahmad did not make things any better. He was a child, a teenager and like many teenagers, knew nothing of the conduct of war in the modern era, yet he tried to interdict in the decision making process, and tried to give war time orders, which the regent was forced to annul time and again. However the regent could not be present everywhere, and could not hear of the Shah’s antics every time. And such a time came at a most un-opportune moment. On March 17th, 1914 Shah Ahmad, noticing the absence of his uncle, the regent, who had gone to Mazaradan to gather supporters there, ordered the military to encircle the pockets of Zia’s supporters in the Persian north and to eradicate them. The military who swore allegiance to Shah Ahmad protested however Shah Ahmad insisted on the move much to their dismay and to conduct the northern offensive, the Qajar military had to strip the southern front, where the Zia’s forces were most strong and send them north.

The Zia government immediately felt the absence of the enemy troops at the front, and ordered Reza Pahlavi, the overall commander of the Persian Cossack Brigades of the region to probe north and move as far north as possible without meeting serious resistance. Reza Pahlavi acquiesced and moved north, slowly but surely. He defeated isolated garrisons, and was only drawn into major combat in the Battle of Sirjan. The 8,000 Persian Cossacks stood their ground against the loyalist militias and tribal bands as they attacked headlong into Reza Pahlavi’s small army.


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Reza Pahlavi, one of Qajar Persia's most successful Prime Ministers in the future.

Pahlavi defeated the attack and moved north and managed to group up with one of the many pockets of Zia’s supporters in the north, based in and around of Bam and Kerman, dealing a hefty blow to the loyalist regime. The loyalist regime did have successes however. In the north, in Iranian Azerbaijan, the small pocket of Zia’s supporters based in Ardabil were surrounded by loyalist military and were crushed at the Battle of Davil. After the Battle of Davil, the Qajar loyalists entered Ardabil and took the city without a real fight, even though some Zia militias did wreak the place a bit in their small bid for resistance.

This action in the north was hampered and dampened by the effects of what was going on in the south unfortunately. The Zia government had given command to General Ahmad Nakhjavan to invade and capture Qajar Balochistan which was under the firm control of the Loyalists. Nakhjkavan invaded Balochistan with some 6000 troops and managed to defeat the tribal guerillas sent at him by the loyalists and eventually reached the port city of Chabahar in early April, defeating the loyalists in open battle, forcing the loyalists to take up arms in a guerilla war against the Zia government in the tribal regions of Balochistan.

This, however was a fool’s approach. The British government was secretly supporting the Zia government and the Persian Baloch region was right next to British Balochistan, then a part of the British Raj. Weapons flowed from the British Raj into the Zia government’s hands now, and a few Baloch tribes were allowed by the British government to cross the border from British Balochistan into Persian Balochistan to deal with the Balochi tribes who were allied with the Qajar loyalists. [1]

The Zia government then turned to securing a broad amount of support in the country. Under the loyalist regime, minorities of the Sunni Muslim community, the minority Arabic community in Khuzestan, as well as the Armenian, Assyrian and Zoroastrian communities had been oppressed and suppressed. The Zia government let out a declaration from Bandar Abbas declaring the government of the Persian Dissidents led by Zia to be free for all Iranians, regardless of their ethnicity and religion, adopting semi-secularism as one of their ideologies. This immediately had a ripple effect on the Persian nation. Armenian, Assyrian and Zoroastrian guerilla groups and militia groups which were active in Iran defected over to the Zia government (most of them anyway), and the Sheikh of Arabistan, Sheikh Jabir declared his support for the Zia government.


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Sheikh Jabir of Arabistan

The Emirate of Arabistan, which was a semi-independent polity within the framework of the Persian Empires ever since the Safavid Empire, was a strong subsidiary kingdom, and with the defection of Sheikh Jabir, the Qajar loyalists lost all connection to the Persian Gulf. The British troops in Khuzestan watched impassively as the Zia government raised the new reformist Qajar flag in the province, remaining true to their armed neutrality in the conflict.” The Qajar Civil War: How the Modern Middle East Was Shaped. University of Qoms, 1998.

“The completion of the Hejaz railway on April 7th, 1914 was a good omen for the Ottoman Empire, as many believed that it heralded a new era of infrastructural development in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were all the more happy to see their country being brought up to par with the rest of the world.

The Hejaz railway was opened by Sultan Mehmed V the next day personally in a royal ceremony in which he invited Hajj visitors to go to Hejaz using the railway service to the region to make their journey more comfortable and easier. The railway would become one of the most used railways in the Ottoman Empire, and still remains as such till this day as well.

The completion of one project that the Ottomans had been gunning for years opened the platform for the government to look into other matters of the state regarding infrastructure as well. The Libyan railway construction was going on perfectly, however the Ottoman government was more concerned with the rural Anatolian inlands, which were very sparsely populated, and very rural and backwards in comparison to the coastal lands of Anatolia, which were developed. The only real city that stood out in development in the Anatolian interior was Angora, and sometimes Van. Angora and Van already had railways connecting each other, and to the main Ottoman rail service, however a proper railway system had not been designed for the other isolated places in the interior, and as transportation and connectivity had been one of the major topics on which Ali Kemal and the Liberal Union had run their entire platform on during the elections, the government turned their attention to the transportation sector of the interior as well.


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The Hejaz Railway

It was decided that a new railway line would be opened through Sivas to Angora, which would then be connected all the way to Erzincan and finally towards Erzurum. Then the railroad from Erzurum would be connected to Trabzon as well, creating a ring of railroads in the interior of Anatolia, so to speak. The bill presenting this was passed in the Chamber of Deputies, and soon ratified in the Senate and construction began in the empire soon enough.” A History of the Ottoman Railway System, University of Angora, 2008.

“Lake Bardawil in the Sinai Peninsula is a very large saline lagoon nearby the forested area of Zaranik. The lake is about 30 kilometers long and around 14 kilometers wide. It is considered to be one of the three great lakes of the Sinai alongside the Great Bitter Lake and the Little Bitter Lake. It is shallow, reaching a depth of around three meters at most, and is separated from the Mediterranean Sea by a narrow sandbar. Its fertile coasts and calm temperate made it the best place for the Zionists to settle down according to the Egyptian government and the Zionist Congress.


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modern day New Tiberias.

Khedive Abbas II gave his permission to start the construction of a city in the region near Zaranik, and the town was to be named New Tiberias by the Zionist Congress. As the small town expanded, the newly constructed port of New Tiberias received around 50 new Jewish families, mainly from Britain and France to live in their new home. New Tiberias would grow on to become the capital of Zionist Sinai, and would become a sprawling metropolitan area in the future.” A History of Jewish Sinai

“The tensions between the Ottoman Empire and the Serbian Kingdom over the Black Hand and the attempted assassination of Sultan Mehmed V had started to reach boiling point with one another. The Ottomans were becoming increasingly angry that they were finding more and more Black Hand members in Ottoman Serbia and Ottoman Macedonia, and were lambasting the Serbs to actually work on their promise of suppressing the Black Hand society.

The Black Hands were not taking the situation sitting down either. The execution of Ljuba Cupa, who was a hero and martyr in the eyes of the Black Hand, had galvanized and radicalized them even further, and several terrorist attacks had taken place in Ottoman Serbia against Ottoman rule. The Ottomans responded by using anti-terrorist civilian measures. They had learned their lesson from the 1903 IMRO uprising in Macedonia and instead of using the army, used the civilian gendarmerie to take care of the terrorists and civilian anti-terrorist measures were successful on many lengths to calm the Ottoman population down and to eradicate Black Hand influence in the Ottoman Balkans.

Thankfully the Black Hand wasn’t fighting against the Ottomans only, and they soon turned their attention towards the Serbian government, who had started to slowly suppress the secret society in order to stave off war with the Ottomans for which they were not prepared for. The Black Hand believed that the Serbian government led by Nikola Pasic had betrayed the Serbian and Yugoslav cause and blamed Pasic for ‘appeasing’ Constantinople and betraying the Pan-Slavic cause as well.

It certainly didn’t seem to them that the Ottoman Serbian population were becoming more and more pro-Ottoman due to the terror attacks conducted by them, and that the Serbian government did not wish for war. Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary aptly described the Black Hand when he called them ‘raving and spoilt children throwing a tantrum for not getting what they wanted’.


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Nikola Pasic

Nonetheless, this did not mean that the Black Hand were weak and not dangerous. They further solidified their reputation and infamy when they assassinated Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pasic on the 10th of April, 1914 for ‘betraying’ them.

Pasic had a habit of sitting on one of the many parks near the Danube river in Belgrade during calm evenings, and the Black Hand took advantage of this and assassinated the man when he was taking a calm rest near the Danube. The Serbian government themselves, now facing the brunt of the Black Hand attack were horrified by the assassination.


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Aleksa Aca Stanojević

Much to the distaste of the Black Hand and many radical serbs, Aca Stanojevic, a moderate member of the People’s Radical Party succeeded Nikola Pasic as Prime Minister of Serbia. Stanojevic had never liked the Black Hand and their overbearing influence in the government, and whilst he was a supporter of Yugoslav ideals, he didn’t wish it to come through with overbearing force of arms and instead intended to use democratic ideals for it. After receiving royal mandate from King Peter I, he assumed the premiership and started to mend ties with the Ottomans a little bit, to at least come to neutral terms, though he did not break off the alliance with the Bulgarians. And this time, he actively suppressed the Black Hand, fulfilling the promise of the Serbian government. The Black Hand was forced to go further into hiding in the European continent.” The Black Hand: Born in Infamy. Salzburg Publishing, Archduchy of Austria.

“In light of the growing tensions on the continent, and between the Balkan powers as well, the Ottomans knew that their rearmament process would have to be sped up. They increased the funding of the military, and former commanders and reservist officers were recalled back into the military as well. Generals such as Mustafa Kemal Pasha were sent to service in the Balkans, and most famously, Mustafa Kemal Pasha was given command of the forces guarding and garrisoning the Rhodope Mountain defenses, which were only half or partially complete when he took up command in the region.

Such appointments were made all throughout the empire and for great effect. Military exercises under the careful watch of the government took place all throughout the country to better the standards of the army and its quality, and lessons learned from the Italo-Ottoman War were being reviewed once again as well. Defensive tactics to play on the defense in the Balkans until the Asian armies could reinforce the Balkans were being drafted and the Ottoman Military Academies received new academic charters as well.

The Ottoman government was praying to the high heavens that war could be avoided, however they were not fools either. The assassination of Nikola Pasic had inflamed tensions on the continent once again, and ultra-nationalism at its heart was making decision makers in Europe make rash decisions. The Ottomans knew, that as a great power they could only watch from the sidelines for a small amount of time before being dragged in from one side.

When the war did start, their enemies would be caught off guard by the new Ottoman military pointing their guns at them.” A History of Ottoman Rearmament: The Great War.

“The Ottoman Public Debt Administration and the countries represented in the OPDA during the early months of 1914 were becoming quickly anxious as they looked over the statistics and numbers all over again, reviewing the statistics once again out of fear and confusion. The Ottomans had never liked the OPDA, and after their economic growth rate had increased from the 1908 revolution, the Ministry of Finance had made it a number one priority to pay their debts off as fast as they could to get rid of the economic capitulations the empire owed to France, Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy and the Netherlands. The amount of debt that the Ottomans owed to Italy had been drastically reduced during the Italo-Ottoman War as the Ottomans had defaulted on their debt partially, and on April 15, to much celebration, the Italian government withdrew their delegation from the OPDA declaring the Ottoman capitulations to Italy over, as the Ottomans finally managed to pay the Italians to their full extent. The Netherlands was quickly becoming worried as they had absolved the Ottoman government of some debt during the Aceh crisis for their aid, and now it looked like the Ottomans were paying the Dutch as fast as they could. By the end of 1914, the Ottomans were well in position to have paid the Dutch off as well.


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The OPDA building in Constantinople.

It was predicted that the Ottomans could pay the Austrians off by mid-1915 to late 1915 and the Germans off by 1917. After that it was predicted that the Ottomans could pay the British by 1918 and finally the French by 1920. A small meeting between the diplomats of these countries took place in Holland and it was agreed that after the payments were fulfilled, the Ottoman Public Debt Administration would be annulled and shut down. The Ottomans would complete their payments by 1921 and the OPDA would be shut down forever after that, much to the respite of the Ottoman Empire.” A History of the OPDA, University of the Hague, Netherlands, 1999.

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[1] - Balochi tribesmen loved killing each other, tribal feuds in a tribal society
 
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the situation in Persia is turning hot, and the Black Hand commits an irrational move, as the Ottoman economic situation stabilizes. Any predictions? Thoughts?
 
How close to the Mediterranean seashore are the railroad tracks the ottoman built in Levant since if they are too near the seashore they can be shelled by warships or captured by a enemy landing cutting off supplies for troops that are depending on railroad
 
Will the Ottoman try to settle some of the bedouin or kurdish tribes? They need to adress this eventually since these tribes often act as bandit (especially if the Ottoman want to really develop the remote interior) or can be bought off by foreign power. I am afraid not all can be peaceful to address these problem though.

I like to see more development progress in this tl. Middle east surely will become known for different reason in this tl. Also I can see in not so far future, the Ottoman will begin to attract some immigrant from South Asian with infrastructure already set up to facilitate it.
 
I.....they really murdered Pasic huh. Now with the Black Hand largely in hiding the development in Balkan is going to get more interesting.

Also umm, is it okay if I ask something? Do you mean Mazandaran, or it is really Mazaradan?
 
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How close to the Mediterranean seashore are the railroad tracks the ottoman built in Levant since if they are too near the seashore they can be shelled by warships or captured by a enemy landing cutting off supplies for troops that are depending on railroad
the map of the railroad is given in the chapter.
 
Will the Ottoman try to settle some of the bedouin or kurdish tribes? They need to adress this eventually since these tribes often act as bandit (especially if the Ottoman want to really develop the remote interior) or can be bought off by foreign power. I am afraid not all can be peaceful to address these problem though.
They will, and it will be kinda ugly.
I like to see more development progress in this tl. Middle east surely will become known for different reason in this tl. Also I can see in not so far future, the Ottoman will begin to attract some immigrant from South Asian with infrastructure already set up to facilitate it.
I think the Basra Vilayet and the Najd Sanjak will get some South eastern immigration, mainly from indonesia and such.
 
So
How close to the Mediterranean seashore are the railroad tracks the ottoman built in Levant since if they are too near the seashore they can be shelled by warships or captured by a enemy landing cutting off supplies for troops that are depending on railroad.
Didn't something of that kind happen in OTL.
 
Yikes. I hope it doesn't get too ugly.
Also, maybe related - will Kurdish nationalism still become a thing in the future, with their region is partitioned between the Ottomans and Persia?
proto-nationalism and tribal pride, yes will develop among the Kurds even in this timeline.
 
Sarthaka,what is the situation of maronites and Assyrians in ottoman Empire ?
they're fine. Relative minorities with small numbers, with some autonomy given to them. They have ethnic minority councils and some representation in parliament.
 
so there are still some conflicts in the muslim world like the armenian tatar war, the indonesian resistance and the african imperialism going on during this time. How do you guys think the Ottomans should get involved? Or should they get involved at all?
 
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