KMS Gneisenau class battleship
After the construction of three German warships Germany, Admiral Scheer and Admiral Graf Spee, the planning began on the battleships D and E. With the construction of the French Dunkerque and Strasbourg (26500 tons, 31 knots, 8-33cm in two front turrets), Germany reacted, with leading military and politicians calling for an increase in displacement to approximately 18,000 tons to reach a higher speed and better on equal footing. In the spring of 1934, their keel was laid. After Hitler approved on June 27, 1934 an increase the number of guns from six to nine, and thus the installation of a third turret, the work was set on both ships and started with the redesign.
The armament was a major weak point, both ships carrying 9 11" guns, left over from cancelled pocket battleships. If a later proposal to upgrade the main armament to six 15-inch (380 mm) guns in three twin turrets had been implemented, it would make a very formidable opponent, faster than any British capital ship and nearly as well armored. But due to constraints of German pre-war economy and those imposed later by World War II, this modification was never carried out, until it was too late for it to make any difference.
Prussia was among the states which were able to adjust to the challenge of Napoleon. After years of isolation, Prussia had taken on Napoleon single-handed in 1806 and suffered defeats more spectacular and a collapse of morale such as theapparently decadent Austrian Empire never experienced. With French garrisons in Berlin and all the principle fortresses, the nation of Frederick the Great all but disintegrated. Prussia responded to the defeats at Jena and Auerstadt with a determination to re-establish her military reputation. Equally spectacular was the recovery during the following six years, staged on the civilian side by Stein, and on the military by Gerhard von Scharnhorst and Augustus Wilhelm von Gneisenau. The key element was the development of a General Staff system, consisting of professional officers who would assist and advise the king, yet have specific responsibilities and duties of their own. The reforms which Scharnhorst and Gneisenau initiated recognized that the King would act as the Commander in Chief of the army, but the system they created was designed to be effective regardless of the King's military competence. Scharnhorst was the leader and most important member of the team. As a result of Scharnhorst's efforts, Prussian field units took guidance from the new general staff for the first time. After Scharnhorst suffered an early death in 1813, Gneisenau became the most important leader of the movement.
SMS Scharnhorst, a 11,616-ton armored cruiser built at Hamburg, Germany, was commissioned in October 1907. When the Great War broke out in August 1914, Scharnhorst was the German flagship in the Far East. For nearly five months, she and her consorts in the squadron led by Vice Admiral von Spee conducted a campaign in the Pacific ocean against Germany's enemies. This included a lopsided victory over a British cruiser force in the Battle of Coronel, off the west coast of South America on 1 November 1914. Five weeks later, on 8 December 1914, von Spee's squadron encountered a greatly superior British force, including the battlecruisers HMS Invincible and HMS Inflexible, when it attempted to attack Port Stanley, in the Falkland Islands. The British battle cruisers mounted eight 12-inch (305 mm) guns apiece, whereas Spee's SMS Scharnhorst and SMS Gneisenau each had eight 8.2-inch (208 mm) guns. Additionally, the battle cruisers could make 25½ knots against Spee's 22½ knots. In the running gunfire action that followed, SMS Scharnhorst was sunk with the admiral and her entire crew. None of the 765 officers and men from the Scharnhorst survived. Gneisenau continued to fire and evade until 17:15 by which time her ammunition had gone and her crew allowed her to sink. Of the Gneisenau's crew, 190 were rescued from the water. The battlecruisers had received about 40 hits and lost one man, with four more injured.
Both ships of the Scharnhorst Class were laid down at two different shipyards in Germany on February 14, 1934. On May 06, 1934 the keel of the battleship E was laid down at the Deutsche Werke in Kiel. Three days before the conclusion of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, with which these ships were legalized, work began on June 15, 1935 at the Naval Shipyard in Wilhelmshaven port on battleship D, the second ship of this class. From then on, these vessels were known as battleships.
On Oct 03, 1936, the battleship D was launched, and was named Scharnhorst. The battleship E was lanched on Dec 08, 1936 by Stack and received the name Gneisenau. On May 21, 1938 came the formal commissioning of the first battleship of the navy, the Gneisenau. This date was chosen under the constraints of the Sudeten crisis, even though the ship was far from finished. The Scharnhorst was put into service on 07 January 1939. They were poor sea boats, and had to be rebuilt with new "Atlantic bows" almost immediately. Having encountered problems in the first trial runs of the Gneisenau, both ships were equipped before the war broke out with the new bow shape.
In June 1940 both battleships participated in "Operation Juno" and helped sink the Royal Navy aircraft carrier Glorious and two destroyers, but Scharnhorst was torpedoed by the destroyer HMS Acasta and withdrew to Trondheim for emergency repairs, and then Kiel. In conjunction with direct bombing and torpedo attacks, RAF mining operations seriously constrained the movement of German capital ships, minimizing their value to the Reich. As a result, Germany's surface naval forces were effectively held in check throughout the war by air action. In one notable case, the threat posed by the RAF to the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, then bottled up by air attack in Brest, France, forced the Nazi naval leadership to order the three ships on a risky dash through the English Channel to safety in German ports.
The Channel Dash, dubbed 'Operation Cerberus', was a complex and dangerous operation to move the German warships Prinz Eugen, Gneisenau, and Scharnhorst from France to Norway through the English Channel. On Feb. 11, 1942, Prinz Eugen left Brest with the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. They were escorted by six destroyers for a dash through the English Channel. Even then, both the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau struck magnetic mines dropped previously by Bomber Command that forced repairs, fatally in the case of Gneisenau. After expending over 5,000 rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition and some heavy shells, Prinz Eugen reached Brunsbüttel undamaged on the morning of the 13th. Though this escape constituted a public relations coup for the Nazis, all three ships subsequently had little influence on the war.
Schlachtschiffe E Gneisenau
Gneisenau was torpedoed on the way home, by SS Clyde, and went to Trondheim in Norway for emergency repairs before returning to Kiel for refit in July 1940. In April 1941 she was torpedoed again and then bombed at Brest, which necessitated repairs until January 1942. The next month - during "Operation Cerberus" - she hit a mine and returned to Kiel for more repairs, but was bombed in the dock by the RAF resulting in her forecastle being burnt out. Three subsequent British air raids broke her back and destroyed her upperworks. A major reconstruction was planned but never completed and she was decommissioned July 1942, and scuttled as a block ship at Gotenhafen in March 1945. A shattered hulk, Gneisenau ignominiously ended her days as a blockship after being towed to Gdynia.
Schlachtschiffe D Scharnhorst
Scharnhorst, a 31,100-ton Gneisenau class battleship, was built at Wilhelmshaven, Germany. Launched in October 1936 under the Hitler regime's massive rearmament program, she was commissioned in January 1939. After initial service, in mid-1939 she was modified, with a new mainmast located further aft and a "clipper bow" to improve her seakeeping. However, her relatively low freeboard ensured that she was always very "wet" when at sea.
War began before Scharnhorst's modification work was completed. Her first wartime operation was a sweep into the Iceland-Faroes passage in late November 1939, in which the British armed merchant cruiser Rawalpindi was sunk. In the spring of 1940 the battleship and her sister, Gneisenau, covered the conquest of Norway. They engaged the British battlecruiser Renown on 9 April 1940 and sank the carrier HMS Glorious and two destroyers on 8 June. In the latter action, Scharnhorst was torpedoed. She was further damaged by a bomb a few days later and was under repair for most of the rest of 1940.
From 22 January until 22 March 1941 Scharnhorst and Gneisenau operated in the Atlantic, sinking several ships and severely threating British seaborne supply lines. While at Brest, France, following this operation, the German ships were the targets of repeated air attacks. The resulting damage kept them non-operational into late 1941, when it was decided to concentrate German surface naval power in the Norwegian theater. Since it was too risky to attempt the redeployment via the North Atlantic, on 11-13 February 1942 the two battleships and heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen made a daring "dash" through the English Channel to reach Germany. Caught off guard, the British were unable to stop the ships with air and surface attacks, though both Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were damaged by mines during the latter part of the voyage.
Scharnhorst's career was short, being damaged by two mines during "Operation Cerberus" in February 1942 - which required return to Kiel for repairs. Scharnhorst lay in port for a year before returning to Norway in 1943. Repair work, a grounding and her always troublesome steam powerplant kept Scharnhorst out of action until March 1943, when she went to northern Norway to join the battleship Tirpitz and other German ships threatening the convoy route to the USSR. Training exercises over the next several months climaxed a brief sortie with Tirpitz to bombard Spitzbergen on 8 September 1943.
On the following operation "Ostfront" in the North Atlantic during late December 1943, Scharnhorst was sunk off the North Cape by gunfire and torpedo hits from a Royal Navy task force. At the end of the year, the German naval command ordered Scharnhorst to attack a Russian convoy. On Christmas day 1943, Scharnhorst and several destroyers put to sea to attack a convoy northwest of Norway. Unfortunately for the Germans, their orders were decoded by the British, who sent a superior force to intercept. The Royal Navy cruisers Belfast, Norfolk and Sheffield effectively kept Scharnhorst away from the convoy until the reinforcements arrived. Realizing the futility of their mission, the Germans attempted to return to their base, but Scharnhorst was cut off by the British battleship Duke of York and her escorting cruisers and destroyers. In a three-hour battle in the frigid Arctic seas, the German battleship was battered by gunfire and sunk by torpedoes. There were 36 survivors of her crew of some 1968 men.
Scharnhorst's wreck was located and photographed by a Norwegian Navy underwater exploration group in the year 2000.
Scharnhorst and Gneisenau specifications Length As built 753' 9"; refitted 770' 7" Beam 98 ft 6 in Displacement 31,552 tons; 38,900 tons fully loaded Power Plant Krupps steam turbines Screws / SHP 3 screws; 160,000 SHP Speed 31.5 knots Range 7,100 nm at 19 kts Armament 3 triple 11", 4 twin 5.9", 7 twin 4.1", 8 twin 37mm, 2 single 20mm, 2 triple torpedo tubes Aircraft 3 Arado Ar-196A-3 float planes Crew 1,968
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