The Windfall Battleships: Agincourt, Canada, Erin, Eagle and the Balkan and Latin-American Arms Races by Aidan Dodson

Author:Aidan Dodson [Aidan Dodson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781399063227
Google: FhO4zwEACAAJ
Publisher: Seafort Publishing
Published: 2023-09-20T21:00:00+00:00

The monitor HMS Abercrombie, armed with a 14in turret intended for Salamis; she is shown at Imbros in 1915. (NHHC NH 63153)

As no spare guns had been ordered by Greece, the British acquired four similar guns from the US Navy (US Mk I Mod 4, which became the UK Mk IV and V), and had two more made in the UK at the Royal Gun Factory at Woolwich (Mk II), using British constructional principles (wire-wound, as against the American all-steel). Of the twelve 6in guns (designated 6in QF Mk IV), eight were used in coast-defence batteries at Scapa Flow, and the rest in defensively-armed merchant ships.

Salamis/Vasilèfs Giorgios was still at Hamburg at the end of the First World War. Regardless of her actual naming on launch, she was still, and would continue to be, generally referred to by her original name. This may have been in part owing to the travails of the Greek monarchy during and following the war, culminating in its decade-long abolition in 1924 with the overthrow of King Giorgios II.

That the Greek authorities had early thoughts of getting the ship completed is suggested by a 1919 Armstrong proposal to Greece to supply three single 15in/45 and twelve 4in/50 weapons, with Salamis the only obvious recipient.³¹ However, it was only in 1920 that formal action regarding the unfinished battleship began.³² In October 1920, the Allied Conference of Ambassadors determined that, since the ship was being built to a foreign order, she did not fall under the provisions of Article 186 of the Treaty of Versailles, which required that all warships under construction in Germany be destroyed.³³ There were thus no Treaty-based objections to her being completed (albeit without guns and armour), and that a decision on the future of the ship was wholly a matter between the Greek government and AG Vulcan.

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