SMS Scharnhorst was an armored cruiser of the Imperial German Navy. She was the lead ship of her class, which included SMS Gneisenau. The ship was named after the Prussian military reformer General Gerhard von ScharnHorst. She served with the German East Asia Squadron in China from 1909 to 1914. After the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, she sailed across the Pacific Ocean to the southern coast of South America.
About SMS Scharnhorst in brief
SMS Scharnhorst was an armored cruiser of the Imperial German Navy. She was the lead ship of her class, which included SMS Gneisenau. The ship was named after the Prussian military reformer General Gerhard von ScharnHorst. She served with the German East Asia Squadron in China from 1909 to 1914. After the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, she sailed across the Pacific Ocean to the southern coast of South America. The British Admiralty dispatched two battlecruisers to hunt down and destroy the German squadron, which they accomplished at the Battle of the Falkland Islands on 8 December 1914. The discovery of the wreck was announced in December 2019 by Mensun Bound. Ship was laid down at the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg, Germany on 22 March 1905, and launched on 23 March 1906. Scharn Horst and her sister were enlarged versions of the preceding Roon class; they were equipped with a greater number of main guns and were capable of a higher top speed. The ships were ordered as part of the naval construction program laid out in the Second Naval Law of 1900, which called for a force of fourteen armored cruisers. She had a cruising radius of 4,800 nautical miles at a speed of 14 knots. She was powered by three triple-expansion steam engines with steam provided by eighteen coal-fired water-tube boilers. Her primary armament consisted of eight 21 cm SK L40 guns, four in twin gun turrets, one fore and one aft of the main superstructure on the centerline, and the remaining four mounted in single casemates.
Secondary armament included six 15 cm SK L 40 guns, also in individual casemate, and four 45 cm submerged torpedo tubes. She also had an armored deck that was 3. 5 to 6 cm thick, with 18 cm of armor protecting the ship’s engine and boiler rooms and ammunition magazines. The secondary battery was protected by a strake of 13 cm armor that was 13 cm thick. She went on several tours of various Asian ports to show the flag for Germany. She frequently carried the squadron commanders to meet Asian heads of state and was present in Japan for the coronation of the Taishō Emperor in 1912. Her crew consisted of 52 officers and 788 enlisted men; of these, 14 officer and 62 enlisted men were assigned to the squadron commander’s staff and were additional to the standard complement. The number of crew members on board was 175, with the number of officers and enlisted men at a total of 788. The warship was commissioned into service on 24 October 1907 and was the first of the German Navy to be named after a Prussian military reformer during the Napoleonic Wars, General Gerhard Von Scharn Harder. It was also the first German cruiser to bear the name “SMS Scharn horst”
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This page is based on the article SMS Scharnhorst published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
