SMS Hessen was the third of five pre-dreadnought battleships of the Braunschweig class. Named after the state of Hesse, the ship was armed with a battery of four 28 cm guns and had a top speed of 18 knots. Hessen’s peacetime career centered on squadron and fleet exercises and training cruises. She was decommissioned in December 1916, disarmed and used as a depot ship for the rest of the war. The ship was ceded to the Soviet Union in 1946 after the war, renamed Tsel, and served until she was scrapped in 1960.
About SMS Hessen in brief
SMS Hessen was the third of five pre-dreadnought battleships of the Braunschweig class. Named after the state of Hesse, the ship was armed with a battery of four 28 cm guns and had a top speed of 18 knots. Hessen’s peacetime career centered on squadron and fleet exercises and training cruises. She was decommissioned in December 1916, disarmed and used as a depot ship for the rest of the war. The ship was ceded to the Soviet Union in 1946 after the war, renamed Tsel, and served until she was scrapped in 1960. She served as a radio-controlled target ship through World War II, also working as an icebreaker in the Baltic and North Seas. Her crew consisted of 35 officers and 708 enlisted men. She could steam 4,530 nautical miles at a cruising speed of 10 knots. Her armament consisted of a main battery of 28 cm L40 guns in twin-gun turrets, one fore and one aft, and one central armament of one 28 cm SK L40 gun in the superstructure. She had a powerplant at 16,000 metric metric horsepower, which generated a topspeed of 18 knots. She was built in 1902 and was launched in September 1903, and was commissioned in September 1905. Her design fell victim to the rapid pace of technological development in the early 1900s. The British battleship HMS Dreadnoughts—armed with ten 30. 5 cm guns—was commissioned in December 1906, just over a year after Hessen entered service.
The Dreadnought’s revolutionary design rendered every capital ship of the German navy obsolete, including Hessen and her sister ships. In the 1920s and early 1930s, she served with the fleet in the1920s, though she was withdrawn from front-line service in 1934. The following year, she was converted into aRadio- controlled target ship and served in this capacity through World war II. She displaced 13,208t as designed and 14,394t as full load. The vessel was scrapped after the end of the Second World War in 1968, and her name was changed to Tsel. She is now a museum ship in the German port city of Leipzig, where she is on display as part of a collection of historical photographs of the Kaiserliche Marine. She also serves as a training ship and a training vessel for the German Navy. She has been named after the German state of Hesse, which was once ruled by Joachim von Rundstedt, the first German state to become a member of the Kaiserliche Marine Department of the Reichsmarineamt in 1894. She suffered two accidental collisions, with a Danish steamship in 1911 and a German torpedo boat in 1913. In August 1914, the start of World War I in July interrupted that plan and she remained in service with the High Seas Fleet.
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This page is based on the article SMS Hessen published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
