Alfonso XIII was the second of three España-class dreadnought battleships built in the 1910s for the Spanish Navy. Named after King Alfonso XIII of Spain, the ship was not completed until 1915 owing to a shortage of materials that resulted from the start of World War I. She was armed with a main battery of eight 305 mm guns and was intended to support the French Navy in the event of a major European war. In the 1920s, she took part in the Rif War in the Spanish protectorate in Morocco. During the Spanish Civil War, she was fatally damaged when she accidentally struck a mine that had been laid by a Nationalist minelayer.
About Spanish battleship Alfonso XIII in brief
Alfonso XIII was the second of three España-class dreadnought battleships built in the 1910s for the Spanish Navy. Named after King Alfonso XIII of Spain, the ship was not completed until 1915 owing to a shortage of materials that resulted from the start of World War I the previous year. She was armed with a main battery of eight 305 mm guns and was intended to support the French Navy in the event of a major European war. In the 1920s, she took part in the Rif War in the Spanish protectorate in Morocco. During the Spanish Civil War, she was fatally damaged when she accidentally struck a mine that had been laid by a Nationalist minelayer. Most of her crew was evacuated by the destroyer Velasco before EspAña capsized and sank; only four were killed in the sinking. The wreck was discovered and examined in 1984 and produced 19,000 nautical miles (30,000 km) of nautical miles (19,000 km) at 10 knots. Her crew consisted of 54 officers and enlisted men. For defense against 50-caliber guns, she carried a secondary battery of 102 torpedo boats that were mounted in casemates along the hull. They were too large to save weight and cost to save, so they were fitted with individually-mounted turrets, which were placed en echelon amidships, and the fourth was aft of the superstructure.
The ships were built as part of a naval construction program to rebuild the fleet after the losses of the Spanish–American War; the program began in the context of closer Spanish relations with Britain and France. Despite the reason for the ships’ construction, Spain remained neutral during World War II. The vessels were authorized some six months after the British had completed the \”all-big-gun\” HMS Dreadnought, and after discarding plans to build pre-dreadnoughts, the naval command quickly decided to build their own dreadnoughting. The ship displaced 15,700 t as designed and up to 16,450 t at full load. She had a beam of 24 m and a draft of 7. 8 m ; her freeboard was 15 ft amidship, and she had a cruising radius of 5,000 miles (8,000 km) at 8,000 knots. Her crew consist of 54 men and enlisted officers and enlisted men, and her crew consisted of 5,54officers and enlisted men. In 1931, the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed; the new republic sought to erase remnants of the royal order, and so Alf Alonso XIII was renamed Españas. As part of cost-cutting measures, the vessel was then reduced to reserve. Plans to modernize Españo and her sister Jaime I in the mid-1930s came to nothing when the Spanish coup of July 1936 initiated the Spanish civil War.
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