WWI IMPERIAL GERMAN NAVY SAILOR’S CAP FROM SMS GOEBEN, WITH THREE PERIOD POSTCARDS – “THE SHIP THAT CHANGED THE WORLD”

WWI IMPERIAL GERMAN NAVY SAILOR’S CAP FROM SMS GOEBEN, WITH THREE PERIOD POSTCARDS – “THE SHIP THAT CHANGED THE WORLD”

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$3,250.00

Quantity Available: 1

Item Code: 1202-2668

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To Order:
Call 717-334-0347,
Fax 717-334-5016, or E-mail

This is an Imperial German Navy enlisted sailor’s cap with its original “S.M.S. GOEBEN” tally, offered with three period postcards of the ship and her crew.

The cap is dark blue wool with the black-white-red Imperial cockade on the front. The black silk tally ribbon is woven in gold with “S.M.S. GOEBEN” (Seiner Majestät Schiff, “His Majesty’s Ship”) and has its long ribbon tails at the back. The lining is pink twill, printed in silver with plumes and the trademark “Beste Deutsche Marke” (“Best German Brand”). The sweatband is light tan leather and remains soft and flexible.

Three postcards are included:

  • A printed view card of “S. M. S. Goeben” at anchor, published by Hermann Ch. Büsing of Oldenburg. It was posted with a 5-pfennig Germania stamp. The message is dated Varel, 8 August 1913, and it’s addressed to the schoolboy Hermann Schandert in Darmstadt.
  • A real-photo studio portrait of a mustached Goeben sailor wearing the Iron Cross 2nd Class, which dates it to 1914 or later. The back carries a signed message in purple ink in old German script.
  • A real-photo studio portrait of a young Goeben sailor in his blue jumper and named cap.

Both Goeben tallies on the photo postcards match the one adorning this cap.

The cap is in excellent condition, with no moth damage present at all. The wool is clean, and the cockade and tally are intact, with light age wear to the tally. The lining has light soiling, and the sweatband shows slight wear. The postcards show some corner and edge wear on par with age and storage. The mustached sailor’s portrait has surface losses along the top edge but the image remains clear and detailed.

SMS Goeben was a Moltke-class battlecruiser, commissioned in July 1911 and armed with ten 11-inch (28 cm) guns. When war began in August 1914, she was in the Mediterranean under Rear Admiral Wilhelm Souchon. After shelling French ports in North Africa, she escaped British pursuit and reached Constantinople. There she was transferred to the Ottoman Navy as Yavuz Sultan Selim, with her German crew still aboard. In October 1914, Souchon led her in a raid on Russia’s Black Sea ports, and Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire days later. The Dardanelles were closed to Allied shipping, cutting Russia off from her allies, and the Gallipoli campaign followed. Winston Churchill wrote that she brought “more slaughter, more misery and more ruin than has ever before been borne within the compass of a ship.” In The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman traced the war in the Middle East and the fall of the Ottoman Empire to her, ending, “followed from the voyage of the Goeben”;  she aptly described the significance of Goeben’s operations during World War 1:

“Thereafter the red edges of war spread over another half of the world.  Turkey’s neighbors, Bulgaria, Rumania, Italy and Greece were eventually drawn in.  Thereafter, with her exit to the Mediterranean closed, Russia was left dependent on Archangel, icebound half the year, and on Vladivostok, 8,000 miles from the battlefront.  With the Black Sea closed, her exports dropped ninety-eight percent and her imports by ninety-five percent.  The cutting-off of Russia with all its consequences, the vain and sanguinary tragedy of Gallipoli, the diversion of Allied strength in the campaigns of Mesopotamia, Suez and Palestine, the ultimate break-up of the Ottoman Empire, the subsequent history of the Middle East, followed from the voyage of the Goeben.”

The ship served the Turkish Navy until 1950 and was scrapped in the 1970s, the last surviving dreadnought-era warship of the Imperial German Navy.  [gh] [ph:L]

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