The Ships of Brawling Battleships Steel: Russia Battleship Imperator Aleksandr III

Laid down on November 11, 1911, launched on April 15, 1914 and commissioned in June 1917, Imperator Aleksandr III carried a main armament of twelve 12 inch main guns mounted three per turret; one centerline forward, one centerline aft and two centerline amidships that could fire to both sides. Imperator Aleksandr III was one of the three-ship Imperatrica Marija battleship class for the Black Sea. This class had its armor more intelligently placed that in the earlier Gangut class, improving the ships’ staying power. Imperator Aleksandr III was powered by turbines with coal-fired boilers and supplementary oil burners. The name honored a former Czar (1845–1894, ruler from 1881) who, despite numerous assassination attempts managed, in the end, to die of natural causes. The Russian Navy’s strategic problem was that it was largely eliminated during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 (except for the Black Sea Fleet, bottled up there by Turkey) and the empire had to rebuild the navy to maintain three separate fleets, one in the Black Sea, one in the Baltic Sea and one in the Pacific Ocean. These fleets each faced different opponents and different operating conditions and they could not readily combine with each other in wartime. The Imperatrica Marija class was designed for operations against Turkey in the Black Sea. During World War One. None of her sorties resulted in any real action and she was taken over by the Germans on October 1, 1918 and renamed Wolga. Returned to the Russians after the German surrender the following month, she was temporarily under the British white ensign during 1919. During the Russian Civil War, she was on the "White" side under yet another new name, General Alekseev . After the evacuation of the Crimea, the ship escaped from the Black Sea and was interned in Bizerta in North Africa starting in December 1920. In 1924, the French offered to return the ship to the Soviet Union but her condition was so poor that it remained in Bizerta until scrapped in 1936.

See ther battleships: Imperatriza Ekaterina, Gangut, Queen Elizabeth