SMS Seydlitz was a battlecruiser of the German Kaiserliche Marine. She was ordered in 1910 and commissioned in May 1913. She participated in many of the large fleet actions during World War I, including the battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland. The ship, along with the rest of the High Seas Fleet, was scuttled in June 1919, to prevent her seizure by the British Royal Navy. It was raised on 2 November 1928 and scrapped by 1930 in Rosyth.
About SMS Seydlitz in brief
SMS Seydlitz was a battlecruiser of the German Kaiserliche Marine. She was ordered in 1910 and commissioned in May 1913. She participated in many of the large fleet actions during World War I, including the battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland. The ship, along with the rest of the High Seas Fleet, was scuttled in June 1919, to prevent her seizure by the British Royal Navy. It was raised on 2 November 1928 and scrapped by 1930 in Rosyth. She is one of the few German battlecruisers to have survived the war, and the only one to have been named after a Prussian general during the reign of King Frederick the Great and the Seven Years’ War. Her name was taken from Friedrich Wilhelm von Seyd litz, a general in the Prussian army during the Seven years’ War and the First Sino-Prussian War. It is the fourth battlecruizer to be built for the German High Seas fleet, after the Von der Tann and the Moltke-class ships of 1907 and 1908. She also served as a training ship for the Battlecruisers of the Second World War, and in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. She served in the North Sea until 1918, when she was interned in Scapa Flow, where she was scrapped in 1930. She has been identified as the first German battleship to be sunk by a direct hit, although this is disputed by the German Navy Department and the German Museum of Naval History and Science. The last ship to be scrapped by the Germans was the battleship Kriegsmarine, which was sunk by the Royal Navy in 1945.
She had been built in 1903 as part of a larger project to build a new fleet of battleships, but was never used for combat. The first ship to bear her name, she was built in Hamburg in 1910. She featured several incremental improvements over the preceding designs, including a redesigned propulsion system and an improved armor layout. At 24,988 metric tons, the ship was approximately 3,000 metric tons heavier than her predecessors. She suffered severe damage during both engagements, and was hit twenty-one times by large-caliber shells, one of which penetrated the working chamber of the aft superfiring turret. In August 1909, the Reichsmarineamt requested Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the State Secretary for the navy, to provide them with the improvements that would be necessary for the next battle Cruiser design. TirPitz continued to push for the use of battlecruists solely as fleet scouts and to destroy enemy cruisers, along the lines of the battlecruizers employed by theBritish Royal Navy, and this meant larger guns, higher speeds, and less armor protection. The initial design specifications mandated that speed was to be at least as high as with the M Boltke class. The design staff considered three-gun turrets, but these were discarded when it was decided that the standard 28cm twin turret was sufficient.
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This page is based on the article SMS Seydlitz published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
