Gneisenau (ship, 1936)
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The Gneisenau was a battleship of the Kriegsmarine of the German Reich . The second and last unit of the Scharnhorst class was named after the Prussian Field Marshal August Neidhardt von Gneisenau (1760–1831).
After construction was delayed, she was put into service in 1938 before the sister ship Scharnhorst and took part in some naval operations during the Second World War, where she was damaged several times. The Gneisenau was badly damaged in the night of February 26th to 27th 1942 in the floating dock of the Deutsche Werke Kiel by a bomb and then decommissioned. The armament was expanded and used as coastal artillery. (Tower "Bruno" came to Fjell Fortress as a marine coastal battery 11/504 .) In March 1945 it was self- sunk as a block ship in the port entrance of Gotenhafen .
The most striking feature of the two ships of this class was the weak main armament for battleships with a caliber of only 28 cm. The originally planned upgrade with 38 cm guns , which were also the main armament of the Bismarck class , was not carried out.
Before that, the Imperial Navy had already had a cadet training ship SMS Gneisenau from 1879 and a large cruiser SMS Gneisenau from 1906. The latter belonged to the East Asian squadron commanded by Vice Admiral Count Maximilian von Spee and was sunk on December 8, 1914 in the Battle of the Falkland Islands .
history
The Gneisenau , designated under budget law as the ironclad "E", was originally planned in the naval armament plans of the Reichsmarine with a displacement of around 18,000 t. In response to the construction of the French battleships of the Dunkerque class , the design was changed before construction began and it was rebuilt with an official tonnage of 26,000 t; this was actually exceeded by a good 5,000 tons. The new plan provided the Gneisenau with good armor protection, and its high-pressure superheated steam turbine system gave it a superior maximum speed.
In order not to provoke conflicts with Great Britain, the 28.0 cm caliber guns, which were undersized for battleships of that time, were provided in triplet turrets like those of the Deutschland class . A later upgrade to twin towers with 38 cm cannons would have been possible due to the same barbed diameter of the towers - but this was not yet seriously considered during the planning. The nine guns were placed in a turret aft and two overfire turrets on the forecastle.
Technical specifications
The Gneisenau had twelve oil-fired high-pressure superheated steam water-tube boilers of Deschimag in Bremen . The operating temperature was 450 ° C and the operating pressure was 58 atmospheres (this corresponds to 56.89 bar). One cauldron was 6,685 m high. The amount of steam generated was a maximum of 54.5 tons per hour. The boilers were housed in three boiler rooms one behind the other. The Gneisenau had three screws and thus three shafts; they were each driven by a turbine set. There was a turbine room for each shaft. The spaces for the outer waves were next to each other and the space for the middle wave was centered behind them. The three turbine sets each consisted of a high, medium and low pressure stage for forward travel and a high and low pressure stage for reverse travel. When driving forward, a turbine developed up to 53,350 hp. All the turbines together came to a calculated 160,050 hp. When reversing, a turbine set made up to 13,000 HP and all turbines together 39,000 HP. At full load, the speed was 6,700 rpm. The power was transmitted via gears to a three-bladed propeller with a diameter of 4.45 m. The turbines weighed 970 tons, the boilers 1,100 tons, the shafts 366 tons and the auxiliary machines 80 tons. The total weight of the drive system was 2,516 tons. At full speed, the Gneisenau reached a speed of 31.3 knots.
History of the Gneisenau
The keel laying of the ships "D" and "E" was on February 14, 1934. Subsequently, completely new plans were made, which provided that the ships "D" and "E" should have a third turret. A construction freeze followed. The new keel laying of the ship "E" ( Gneisenau ) was on May 6, 1935; the German-British naval agreement , which legalized these ships, was not signed until a month later. The Gneisenau was launched on December 8, 1936 . Werner von Fritsch gave the baptismal address ; the widow of the sea captain Maerker, the last in command of the sunk armored cruiser Gneisenau , christened the ship . When the ship was launched it was not possible to brake the hull; the Gneisenau rammed the opposite quay wall . The ship was not significantly damaged, but the quay wall was dented by 4 m.
The Gneisenau was put into service on May 21, 1938. This date was chosen because of the Sudeten crisis ; the Gneisenau was not finished at that time. After the maiden trip from June 30 to July 8, 1938 in the North-East Atlantic, she went again because of residual and reconstruction work in the shipyard, where chimney pot and the topmast at the foretop -Drehhaube were modified on the tower mast. The most obvious change was the bow : the ship was given the so-called Atlantic stem . Too much water came over at high speeds and penetrated into the front turret A ("Anton") and caused malfunctions in the electrical turret controls. Despite these modifications, the Gneisenau was repeatedly hindered in its operational readiness without having had contact with the enemy.
Another résumé of Gneisenau
- August 22, 1938 - Participation in the fleet parade in the Bay of Kiel
- January 1939 - Remaining and renovation work
- June 12 to July 26, 1939 - Six-week training voyage in the Central Atlantic, supported by the supply ship Westerwald
- September 3, 1939 - Sea captain Erich Förste announces the start of hostilities with England and France to the assembled crew.
- November 21-27, 1939 - Advance with sister ship Scharnhorst into the waters south of Iceland. (23 November: sinking of the British auxiliary cruiser HMS Rawalpindi 145 nautical miles northwest of the Faroe Islands )
- 7th to 12th April 1940 - "Weser Exercise" company . (Support of the land units in the occupation of Norway and Denmark) Received heavy hits from the battle cruiser Renown in the foremars.
- June 4 to July 26, 1940 - Operation "Juno" . (Advance to relieve the troops oppressed in Norway. Together with Scharnhorst , cruiser Admiral Hipper and four destroyers) Sinking of the British aircraft carrier Glorious and the two destroyers Ardent and Acasta . On June 20, Gneisenau received a heavy torpedo hit by the British submarine Clyde . The torpedo hit tore a huge hole in the forecastle; one of the dinghies could pass through without any problems. There were no dead or wounded. The ship returned to Trondheim, where it was temporarily repaired by the workshop ship Huascaran . On July 25th the transfer to Kiel took place, whereby a torpedo of the British submarine Thames aimed at the battleship sank the torpedo boat Luchs, which was in the line of fire .
- July 26 to November 14, 1940 - Repairs in the German works in Kiel.
- December 28, 1940 - Attempt to break through the Atlantic together with Scharnhorst . The operation had to be canceled due to severe damage to the sea on the Gneisenau .
- January 2, 1941 - Repair of the sea damage in Gotenhafen.
- January 22, 1941 - Operation “Berlin”: With Scharnhorst, another, this time successful, breakthrough into the Atlantic to fight convoys.
- March 22, 1941 - Arrival in Brest. Gneisenau alone sank 66,500 GRT merchant ships. The plan was to return to the Atlantic after a general overhaul of the two ships. However, due to the presence of the ships, air strikes immediately increased.
- April 6, 1941 - A single flying Bristol Beaufort of the RAF Squadron 22 was hit by an air torpedo in the stern. The combat load of the torpedo of the type Mk XII used here only weighed 176 kg. As a result of the hit, the outer skin was torn open, but the longitudinal torpedo bulkhead located about 4.5 meters further inside the ship was not even deformed.
- April 10, 1941 - Lying in the dry dock, the Gneisenau received four more bomb hits, repairs until January 1942.
- February 11-13, 1942 - Operation "Cerberus" . (Return of the warships Gneisenau , Scharnhorst and Prinz Eugen lying in Brest to Germany) Received light mine hit.
- February 13, 1942 - Docking in the floating dock of the Deutsche Werke.
The end of the Gneisenau
During the "Cerberus" operation, the repatriation of three large warships from Brest to Germany, a ground mine caused damage to the ship that was to be repaired in the floating dock of the Deutsche Werke in Kiel. The mine hit was declared minor and it was planned that the Gneisenau should leave Kiel after two weeks. Normally, all ammunition had to be removed from the ship during a dock stay. However, since the Gneisenau was only supposed to be berthed for two weeks, this measure was waived and only the detonators of the grenades were removed.
During one of the air raids on Kiel , the ship suffered a devastating hit on the night of February 26th to 27th, 1942. A bomb penetrated the upper deck and battery deck and detonated on the armored deck , near the vent of the powder chamber below. Glowing metal fragments from the bomb and the ship deck hit cartridges and ignited their propellant charges . The entire powder supply of tower A (Anton) burned up in one fell swoop. The pressure spread and lifted the tower from its barbette . It fell back into its bedding at an angle, which destroyed the slewing mechanism of the tower. Some of the pressure escaped upwards and destroyed large parts of the upper deck. 112 men died that night. The next morning you saw that the entire forecastle had burned out and could no longer be repaired. Because the plan was to send the Gneisenau to Gotenhafen for rearmament in a few weeks anyway , they were made ready for transfer.
The hull and the propulsion system were undamaged, so that on April 4, 1942, the Gneisenau was able to sail to Gotenhafen on its own with the liner Silesia and an icebreaker. There it was supposed to be repaired, lengthened by about 10 m and re-armed with six 38 cm guns in twin towers. On July 1, 1942, the battleship was decommissioned in order to begin with the conversion can, for which about a year was estimated. After Hitler's decommissioning order for all heavy navy units had been issued, work was stopped in February 1943 and not resumed. The already developed armament was used as coastal artillery in Norway and Denmark (→ Stevnsfort ). Until the spring of 1945 the ship - hidden under camouflage nets - lay still in Gotenhafen. On March 27, 1945, when Gotenhafen was cleared by the Wehrmacht, it was aground in the port entrance as a block ship . It was lifted and scrapped by Polish soldiers from September 1951.
Use of the guns
In January 1943, the ship's armament was dismantled. The towers "B" and "C" served from then on to protect the coast of Norway: Tower "B" was used as the Fjell fortress on the island of Sotra near Bergen and was completed on July 1, 1943. Tower "C" was erected as the Örland battery on the peninsula of the same name at the entrance to the Trondheimfjord and was ready for use in September 1943; later this coastal battery was called Fortress Agdenes . The three guns from tower "A" were used at Hoek van Holland (Netherlands) in weakly armored single turrets as the Rozenburg battery . Two gun turrets of the 15 cm medium artillery came to the Danish island of Fanø . Other guns of the middle artillery reached Wangerooge and were used there in the Jade and Jade-Ost batteries .
With the exception of tower "B", which was scrapped in the mid-1960s, the guns are still in Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark. Tower “C” on Ørland is now open to visitors in the Austrått fort museum . Parts of the guns from tower “A” are exhibited in the Stichting Fort near Hoek van Holland. The middle artillery on Fanø was dismantled in the early 1950s and set up on the southeast coast of Zealand to protect the Øresund . The batteries were only decommissioned in 2000. The guns are now in the Koldkrigsmuseum Stevnsfort .
Two of the 38 cm towers built for the conversion were to be erected in 1944 on the west coast of Denmark near the town of Blåvand under the name Battery Tirpitz , but they could no longer be completed. Today the two bunkers with bedding for the 38 cm towers are still preserved. One of the 38 cm guns is on display in the Hanstholm Museum Center.
memory
A stele in the north cemetery in Kiel commemorates the battleship Gneisenau .
Gneisenau march by Hermann Schäfer.
Commanders
| May 21, 1938 to November 25, 1939 | Sea captain Erich Förste |
| November 26, 1939 to August 1940 | Sea captain Harald Netzbandt |
| August 20, 1940 to April 14, 1942 | Sea captain Otto Fein |
| April 15-17, 1942 | Sea captain Rudolf Peters ( mdWdGb ) |
| May to July 1942 | Frigate Captain Wolfgang Kähler |
literature
- Gröner, Erich / Dieter Jung / Martin Maass: The German warships 1815-1945 . tape 1 : Armored ships, ships of the line, battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, gunboats . Bernard & Graefe, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-7637-4800-8 , p. 55-58 .
- Kähler, Wolfgang: Battleship Gneisenau . Koehler Verlagsgesellschaft, Herford 1979, ISBN 3-453-01364-6 .
- Koop, Gerhard / Klaus-Peter Schmolke: The battleships of the Scharnhorst class . Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Bonn 1991, ISBN 3-7637-5892-5 .
- Armin Kern: Gneisenau . In: Schiff Classic , magazine for shipping and marine history eV of the DGSM , issue: 3/2020, pp. 12–21.
Web links
- www.scharnhorst-class.dk (engl.)
- www.schlachtschiff.com (engl.)
- www.german-navy.de (engl.)
- Picture gallery
- Gneisenau conversions ( Memento from March 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
Footnotes
- ↑ www.denkmalprojekt.org
- ↑ Janes - Warships of the 20th Century , Bechtermünz Verlag, ISBN 3-86047-592-4 , p. 46
- ^ Siegfried Breyer - Battleships and battle cruisers 1921-1997, Bernard & Graefe Verlag, ISBN 3-7637-6225-6 , p. 125