Braunschweig-class battleship
The Braunschweig-class battleships were a group of five pre-dreadnought battleships of the German Kaiserliche Marine built in the early 1900s. They were the first class of battleships authorized under the Second Naval Law, a major naval expansion program. Less than two years after the first members of the class entered service, the ships were rendered obsolescent by the British all-big-gun battleship Dreadnought. All five were withdrawn from service starting in 1916, thereafter being used in subsidiary roles, including as barracks and training ships.
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The Braunschweig-class battleships were a group of five pre-dreadnought battleships of the German Kaiserliche Marine built in the early 1900s. They were the first class of battleships authorized under the Second Naval Law, a major naval expansion program. Less than two years after the first members of the class entered service, the ships were rendered obsolescent by the British all-big-gun battleship Dreadnought. All five were withdrawn from service starting in 1916, thereafter being used in subsidiary roles, including as barracks and training ships. After the war, the vessels were among the vessels that the new Reichsmarine was permitted to retain by the Treaty of Versailles. Hessen remained in service until late 1934, when she was decommissioned and converted into a radio-controlled target ship, a role she filled through World War II. Ceded as a war prize to the Soviet Union, she was commissioned as Tsel and used as a target until 1960 whenshe was scrapped. The other three were modernized in the late 1920s and served with the fleet into the 1930s. The ships were eventually stricken from the register in 1931, and along with Lothringen and Elsass were thereafter broken up. The last of the five ships to be scrapped was the German battleship Tsel, which was scrapped in 1960 after serving as a Soviet war prize until the end of the Second World War. She was scrapped after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1945, but was used as an anti-aircraft missile carrier until the 1970s and then again in the 1980s as a training ship for the German navy’s anti-submarine fleet.
The first of the new battleships to be built under the new law was the Wittelsbach-class, which had been authorized in 1898. The Wittelsachs were armed with 24 cm guns, far smaller than the standard in most other navies. The new class had a more powerful 28 cm gun, and mounted it in the superstructure directly above the secondary guns in the casemates. Previous designs had carried the 24-cm guns in casemate, but the next issue was the muzzle blast effects from the 28cm guns. The German naval command typically favored high rates of fire rather than heavy shells, on the principal that a flurry of shells would wreck the enemy battleships faster than powerful but slow-firing guns and superstructure. The next issue to be settled was the caliber of the main battery, and the decision was made to adopt the 28 cm gun, so the naval command decided to adopt it for the new ships. The class was the first to be authorized under this new plan, and they marked a significant advance in combat power over earlier German battleships. They saw combat with the Russian battleship Slava during the Battle of the Gulf of Riga in August 1915. The previous law had called for a total strength of nineteen battleships by 1 April 1904.
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