Armored mastodons for the poor
Usually, when they write about third world battleships, they mention Latin America, but this is fundamentally not true. Latin American fleets have a long history, and at least a long combat experience. There were monitors, there were squadron battleships, there were armored cruisers... Of course, the appearance of battleships in those parts is simply inevitable. It is more correct to speak about Eurasia, more precisely, about the attempts of minor countries of this continent to acquire linear fleets, or semi-linear, or at least armored to some extent.
And there were a lot of these attempts, another question - someone fell out of the race at the planning stage, someone at the construction stage, and someone created something that brings to mind the immortal "The queen gave birth in the night." On the other hand, battleships were able to build only eight states, buy five, so the desire of small countries to have something in armor is understandable, this is prestige and belonging to the club, at least somehow.
Turkey
It was easiest for the Turks - even the Ottoman Empire formally acquired a real battlecruiser. Why formal? A ship under the command of a German, fighting in the interests of Germany and with a German crew, it is not entirely Turkish. But after the First World War, despite all the prohibitions, "Yavuz", aka "Goeben" in girlhood, did not go anywhere. On November 1, 1918, the German crew left it, and until 1926 the ship froze at the pier.
The Ottoman Empire crumbled, the Entente allies demanded to give up the ship, Istanbul resisted, as a result, Yavuz Selima still defended. But there was little point in this - in Turkey there was neither a dock nor money for repairs. The battlecruiser was remembered only in 1925, when the government of Mustafa Kemal ordered a floating dock for 25 tons. From 000 to 1926, the ship was overhauled with the help of the French, and again became a full-fledged combat unit.
True, Turkey was of little use for this - the ship successfully devoured money, in 1938 the second overhaul took place, which also cost a pretty penny, but in a military sense ... The USSR easily parried this move by transferring the Paris Commune to the Black Sea Fleet and increasing the number of light and submarine forces, and against others the old man, and even with weak anti-aircraft weapons, was no good.
And since 1950, it was completely put against the wall in Izmit, where it stood for 13 years, until it was decommissioned, when the last fragment of the Hochseeflotte began to be dismantled for metal. From the point of view of prestige for Turkey, the Goeben, of course, became an acquisition, from the point of view of the state, the floating dock and two upgrades cost like several light ships, and its guns on the shore would have looked much more harmonious.
Greece
The descendants of the Hellenes took care of the battleships in 1911, having learned about the plans of the Ottoman Empire. They did not work out with the French, the Insidious Albion built dreadnoughts for the Ottomans, and the Germans came to the aid of the Greeks. In 1913, the battleship Salamis was laid down - the smallest battleship in the world, carrying guns with a caliber of 356 mm. Eight of these guns decided to squeeze into a ship with a total displacement of 21 tons and disperse the resulting result to 500 knots. The armor, however, was not that great, but on paper it turned out pretty. The battleship was launched in Bremen and abandoned completely. The Germans did not intend to complete the ship to the Entente country during the war, but they could not complete it for themselves for two reasons - there were no guns that the Greeks ordered from the USA, and which ended up on British monitors, and the ship itself did not fit into the Hochseeflotte for all parameters.
As a result, the baby superdreadnought quietly rusted, after the war, however, the Greeks demanded their own, but the courts dragged on for ten long years, and by the beginning of the thirties it became pointless to buy a rusty hull. As a result, Salamis was quietly dismantled, along with the hopes of the Greeks to become almost like a sea power. I had to make do with the same ancient armored cruiser as a carrier of relatively large guns.
In this sense, the Greeks were lucky - a lot of money was saved and not superfluous for a small country.
Armored midgets
Three more states acted pragmatically - not compensating for national prestige with large calibers, they built what they had enough money for and what could be useful in possible wars. The Swedes were the first to embark on this path, laying down coastal defense battleships with steam turbine installations. From 1917 to 1921, three units of the Sverige type entered service. At 8000 tons displacement, with 4 23-inch guns and a speed of XNUMX knots, they were either classic BBO or something new thanks to the machines.
In any case, this trinity devoured much less money than dreadnoughts, and there was a benefit from them - heavy guns turned out to be useful to maintain neutrality in the World Wars. And they served for a long time, until the 50s, when the very concept of an artillery ship became outdated. In general, the Swedes showed just rare pragmatism in this sense, trying to build what is needed, and not what is fashionable
Finland chose a similar approach, building two coastal defense battleships with the unpronounceable names Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen. Both babies were built for operations in skerries, and in a displacement of 3900 tons, the Finns managed to place diesel-electric installations that accelerated ships up to 15 knots, four (in two-gun turrets) ten-inch guns, with a range of up to 160 cables, and a modest armor of 55 mm.
True, their fate turned out to be sad, the Ilmarinen hit a mine on September 13, 1941 and sank, and the Väinämöinen survived until the end of the war and turned into the Vyborg, sold by the USSR in 1947. It was repaired in the Soviet Navy and remained in service until 1966. The very idea of a small skerry ship with ice reinforcements and heavy guns turned out to be much more viable than plans to build something huge and useless.
Third in the club of armored babies was the kingdom of Siam, which built its "Sri Ayuti" and "Donburi" in Japan. In the displacement of the leader (2200 tons), the Japanese shoved two diesel engines, four eight-inchers and an armor belt 63 mm thick. The ships entered service in 1938, managed to take part in battles with the French and internal troubles. Thonburi was heavily damaged by the French in 1941, and was never restored, but was used as a non-self-propelled battery, and Sri Ayuti was sunk ... by mortars during the 1951 uprising.
Thus, little is not always good either, and Thai babies have never justified themselves.
Huge plans
“Portugal in 1912 seriously discussed the issue of ordering three 21-ton dreadnoughts of the Brazilian São Paulo type from England. But this seemed not enough. A year later, the Portuguese wanted three more battleships - this time of the Orion type or even the Queen Elizabeth! Of course, all these plans remained on paper, and Portugal had to be content with three destroyers and as many submarines, which in the end resulted in its grandiose shipbuilding program. Holland went even further in their plans. Fearing for the safety of their colonies in Southeast Asia (present-day Indonesia), they decided to build here no less than nine (!) Battleships with a displacement of more than 500 thousand tons each.
And then there was Poland, a descendant of the Commonwealth dreamed of two battleships:
“At the disarmament conference in Geneva, Poland announced its desire to create a fleet with a total displacement of 150 tons. Polish publicist Julian Ginsbert published a draft shipbuilding program, which included two battleships, 000 heavy cruisers, 2 destroyers, 9 destroyers, 9 submarines, 18 minesweeper, 21 patrol boats and many auxiliary ships.
Holland experienced a relapse, planning to copy the German Gneisnau:
“... in 1938 a big plan was adopted to strengthen the Dutch armed forces. The naval part of this plan was called the Battlecruiser Program. The design of the ships that gave the name to the plan was based on the foresight that the war would be a coalition and Holland would have to put up enough forces to, together with the Allies, repulse the aggressor. The basis of the Dutch forces should be battlecruisers.
Others also had dreams, fortunately, completely intangible. And in the end, the path of Sweden and Finland turned out to be correct, which, without foolishness, built what was needed for real tasks, and not symbols of a superpower that does not exist.
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