SMS Pommern was one of five Deutschland-class pre-dreadnought battleships built for the Kaiserliche Marine between 1904 and 1906. Named after the Prussian province of Pomerania, she was laid down on 22 March 1904 and launched on 2 December 1905. She was assigned to II Battle Squadron of the High Seas Fleet, where she served throughout her peacetime career and the first two years of World War I. The ship was hit by one, or possibly two, torpedoes from the British destroyer HMS Onslaught, which detonated one of her 17-centimeter gun magazines. The resulting explosion broke the ship in half and killed the entire crew. Pommersn was the only battleship
About SMS Pommern in brief
SMS Pommern was one of five Deutschland-class pre-dreadnought battleships built for the Kaiserliche Marine between 1904 and 1906. Named after the Prussian province of Pomerania, she was laid down on 22 March 1904 and launched on 2 December 1905. The ship was armed with a battery of four 28 cm guns and had a top speed of 18 knots. She was assigned to II Battle Squadron of the High Seas Fleet, where she served throughout her peacetime career and the first two years of World War I. The ships of her class were already outdated by the time they entered the service, being inferior in size, armor, firepower, and speed to the revolutionary new battleship HMS Dreadnought. PommerN and her sisters briefly engaged the British battlecruisers commanded by David Beatty late on the first day of the war, and she was hit once by a 12 in shell from the battlecruiser HMS Indomitable. During the confused night actions in the early hours of 1 June, the ship was hit by one, or possibly two, torpedoes from the British destroyer HMS Onslaught, which detonated one of her 17-centimeter gun magazines. The resulting explosion broke the ship in half and killed the entire crew. Pommersn was the only battleship of either side sunk during the battle, and the only one of the German and British fleets to be destroyed in the conflict. The British battleship HMS Dreadnought was commissioned in December 1906, and was the first capital ship of its kind to be built for a major European navy.
The German navy ordered the construction of twenty new battleships over the next seventeen years. The first group, the five Braunschweig-class battleships, were laid down in early 1900s, and shortly thereafter work began on a follow-on design, which became the deutschland class. The Deutschlands featured incremental improvements in armor protection. They also abandoned the gun turrets for the secondary battery guns, moving them back to traditional casemates to save weight. In addition to being the fastest ship of herclass, Pommerm was the most fuel efficient. At a cruising speed of 10 knots, she could steam for 5,830 nautical miles. Her crew numbered 35 officers and 708 enlisted men. Her main-deck armor was 40mm thick, while thinner plating covered the hull ends of the hull and magazines and machinery, where it protected the central portion of the ship. She had a fuel capacity of up to 1,540 metric tons of coal. Her secondary battery was fourteen 8-cm SK L40 guns mounted in ports and pivot mounts with six 45cm torpedo tubes, all submerged in the bow, one in the stern, and four on the broadside and one on the stern. One of the Krupp cemented cemented plating plating was ordered under the contract as a new addition to the fleet’s fleet.
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This page is based on the article SMS Pommern published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
