SMS Zähringen was the third Wittelsbach-class pre-dreadnought battleship of the German Imperial Navy. She is the only ship of the class to be named after a German royal family member, the House of ZäHringen. The ship was decommissioned in September 1910, but returned to service briefly for training in 1912, where she accidentally rammed and sank a torpedo boat. She saw limited duty in the Baltic Sea, including during the Battle of the Gulf of Riga in August 1915, but saw no combat with Russian forces. In the mid-1920s, she was heavily reconstructed and equipped for use as a radio-controlled target ship. She served in this capacity until 1944,
About SMS Zähringen in brief
SMS Zähringen was the third Wittelsbach-class pre-dreadnought battleship of the German Imperial Navy. She was built in 1899 and commissioned on 25 October 1902. The ship was decommissioned in September 1910, but returned to service briefly for training in 1912, where she accidentally rammed and sank a torpedo boat. She saw limited duty in the Baltic Sea, including during the Battle of the Gulf of Riga in August 1915, but saw no combat with Russian forces. In the mid-1920s, she was heavily reconstructed and equipped for use as a radio-controlled target ship. She served in this capacity until 1944, when she was sunk in Gotenhafen by British bombers during World War II. The retreating Germans raised the ship and moved her to the harbor mouth, where they scuttled her to block the port. The battleship was broken up in situ in 1949–50. Her name was later used as a unit for a new fleet unit for the new fleet, the E-boats. She is the only ship of the class to be named after a German royal family member, the House of ZäHringen. She has been named for the former royal House ofZähringsen, which was a member of the Kaiserliche Marine until the end of the First World War. She had a top speed of 18 knots and was armed with a main battery of four 24 cm guns and a secondary armament of eighteen 15 cm SK L40 quick-firing guns.
Her armor was 225 millimeters thick in the central portion that protected her magazines and the magazines and machinery spaces, and the deck was 50mm thick on the deck. She also had six 45cm torpedo tubes, all submerged; one was in the bow, one in the broadside and the other four were in the stern. She was ordered under the contract for the fleet unit as a new unit. Her keel was signed on 12 June 1901. She and her sisters were the first capital ships built under the Navy Law of 1898, brought about by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. The Wittels Bachs were broadly similar to the Kaiser Friedrichs, carrying the same armament but with a more comprehensive armor layout. She displaced 11,774 t as designed and up to 12,798 t at full load. The powerplant was rated at 14,000 metric horsepower, which generated aTop speed of18 knots. The ship had a cruising radius of 5,000 nautical miles at a speed of 10 knots. It had a crew of 30 officers and 650 enlisted men. It was built at the Germaniawerft shipyard in Kiel, and she was launched in June 1901 and commissioned in October 1902; she was the first of the Wittelsach-class battleships built under Tirpitzer’s tenure. The last two ships of theclass, as well as the five ships of Tirpitz’s tenure, were built in 1903.
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This page is based on the article SMS Zähringen published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
