Deutschland class cruiser
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 Admiral Scheer in Gibraltar |
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| Class overview | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Deutschland |
| Succeeded by: | Admiral Hipper class cruiser |
| Completed: | Three ordered and commissioned |
| General characteristics | |
| Type: | Heavy cruiser |
| Displacement: | 12,100 t standard; 16,200 t full load |
| Length: | 610 ft (190 m) |
| Beam: | 71 ft (22 m) |
| Draught: | 24 ft (7.3 m) |
| Propulsion: | Eight MAN diesels driving two screws, 52,050 hp (40 MW) |
| Speed: | 28.5 knots (52.8 km/h) |
| Range: | 8,900 nautical miles at 20 knots (16,500 km at 37 km/h) |
| Electronic warfare and decoys: |
From 1937, 60 cm Seetakt FuMO |
| Armament: | 6 × 280 mm (11 inch) 8 × 150 mm (5.9 inch) 6 × 105 mm (4.1 inch) 8 × 37 mm 10 × 20 mm 8 × 533 mm (21 inch) Torpedo Tubes |
| Armour: | turret face: (160 mm) belt: (80 mm) deck: 40 mm) |
| Aircraft carried: | one catapult with Arado 196 seaplane(s) |
The Deutschland class was a series of three Panzerschiffe ("armoured ships"), a form of heavily armed cruiser, built by the German Reichsmarine more or less in accordance with restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. The class is named after the first ship of this class to be completed (the Deutschland). She and her sister ships, the Admiral Scheer and the Admiral Graf Spee, were all launched between 1931 and 1934 and served in Germany's Kriegsmarine during World War II.
The British began referring to the vessels as pocket battleships ("a battleship that fits into a pocket"), in reference to the heavy firepower of the relatively small vessels; they were considerably smaller than battleships and battlecruisers, and although their displacement was that of a heavy cruiser, they were armed with guns larger than the heavy cruisers of other nations. Deutschland class ships continue to be called pocket battleships in some circles. The ships were actually two feet longer than the American Pennsylvania-class battleships, though considerably narrower and much less heavily armored.
Deutschland class ships were initially classified as panzerschiffe, but the Kriegsmarine reclassified them as heavy cruisers in February 1940.
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[edit] Description
German capital ships were restricted by the Treaty of Versailles to a displacement of 10,000 tons for "armoured ships". The idea was to limit Germany to nothing more than coastal defence ships—effectively pre-dreadnought types—which could not challenge the major naval powers of Britain, France and the United States. A number of technical innovations were used by Germany to build a formidable warship within this restricted weight; among them were the large-scale use of welding to join hull components together (as opposed to the then-standard rivets), triple-gun main armament turrets (which had first been used by the Austro-Hungarian Navy in battleships in the Tegetthoff class of 1912), and the use of diesel engines for propulsion. Even so, all members of the class were well over that weight limit (first constructed as 10,600 tons, later enlarged to 12,100 tons), although for political reasons their announced displacement was always misrepresented as the 10,000 tons of the Treaty limit.
Though the Deutschlands had much more in common with heavy cruisers than battleships/battlecruisers, they were nonetheless considered capital ships. They also superficially resembled contemporary battleships due to their unusually high conning tower/bridge and the masts of the Admiral Scheer and Admiral Graf Spee.
The principal feature of the Deutschland design was that it had guns of large enough calibre—280 mm (11 inches)—to out-gun almost any enemy cruiser fast enough to catch it, while being fast enough to outrun almost any enemy powerful enough to sink it. The Royal Navy had three modernized battlecruisers that could be effective in pursuing the Deutschlands; the HMS Repulse, HMS Renown, and HMS Hood were equal to the Deutschland ships in speed and were better protected and better armed. Some World War I-era Japanese battlecruisers could do the same. The German naval staff also knew that new ships would be built that were both faster and more powerful than the Deutschland class ships—the announced intention to build six of the Deutschland ships led the French, for example, to draw up their own small "fast battleship" (the Dunkerque class)—but they hoped for a temporary advantage. The advantage did not last long: Deutschland ships had a maximum speed of 28.5 knots, which would already be considered to be too slow at the beginning of the Second World War, only eight years after the first ship was launched. The ships had a range of about 30,000 km (18,650 miles).
The Kriegsmarine, which superseded the Reichsmarine and thus inherited the ships, was much more cognizant of the ships' limitations, and during the war they intended to use the Deutschland ships purely as commerce raiders on the high seas. In the early years of the conflict—before the Allies closed the air gap over the North Atlantic, developed better Huff-Duff (radio triangulation equipment) and airborne centimetric radar, and provided escort carrier protection to the merchant ship convoys—the Deutschland ships' speed and heavy armament made them very difficult to bring to task, as they could generally avoid any fight they did not like; indeed, they were ordered not to fight enemy ships unless they were much stronger than them.
[edit] Ships in class
Though all ships were technically of the same class, there were some considerable differences between the members, with the Admiral Graf Spee being the most improved, as well as being the heaviest.
[edit] Deutschland / Lützow
The lead ship of the class, Deutschland was renamed Lützow upon the outbreak of World War II due to fears of the political liability of having a ship named Deutschland (Germany) sunk. She generally remained close to home through the war, doing service in the Baltic in support of German troops. One of the two German heavy ships in the Battle of the Barents Sea, she failed to do any damage to the British ships. Deutschland survived until the last weeks of the war.
[edit] Admiral Scheer
The most successful commerce raider of the class, Admiral Scheer made several raids into the North Atlantic and operated as far as the Indian Ocean during her raiding. On one occasion she sank the armed merchant cruiser HMS Jervis Bay and several cargo ships after catching convoy HX84. In 1945, she was bombed by the Royal Air Force (RAF) while docked in Kiel, causing her to capsize and sink.
[edit] Admiral Graf Spee
Admiral Graf Spee destroyed nine British merchant ships (totalling 50,089 tons) before being cornered by three British cruisers in December 1939. In the ensuing Battle of the River Plate she damaged the heavy cruiser HMS Exeter so severely that it had to break off the action. However, the German ship suffered significant topside damage (though the British 8-inch shells could not penetrate her armour), and after spending several days trapped at Montevideo, she was deliberately scuttled on 17 December 1939, rather than risk a battle with a superior Royal Navy force assumed to be approaching. Her captain, Hans Langsdorff, committed suicide three days later.
[edit] See also
- List of naval ships of Germany
- List of Kriegsmarine ships
- List of World War II ships
- Washington Naval Treaty
- Alaska class cruiser
[edit] Further reading
- Breyer, Siegfried, and Gerhard Koop. Edward Force, trans. The German Navy at War 1939–1945: Volume 1—The Battleships. West Chester, Penn.: Schiffer, 1989. ISBN 0887402208.
- Ireland, Bernard, and Tony Gibbons (illustrator). Jane's Battleships of the 20th Century, pp. 42–43. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. ISBN 0004709977.
- Pope, Dudley. Graf Spee: The Life and Death of a Raider. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1956.
[edit] External links
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