Deutschland was the first of five Deutschland-class pre-dreadnought battleships built for the German Kaiserliche Marine. The ship was armed with a main battery of four 28 cm guns in two twin turrets. She served as the flagship of the High Seas Fleet until 1913, when she was transferred to II Battle Squadron. With the outbreak of World War I in July 1914, she and her sister ships were tasked with defending the mouth of the Elbe and the German Bight from possible British incursions. By 1917, they had been withdrawn from combat service completely, disarmed, and tasked with auxiliary roles. She was struck from the naval register on 25 January 1920, sold to ship breakers that year
About SMS Deutschland (1904) in brief
Deutschland was the first of five Deutschland-class pre-dreadnought battleships built for the German Kaiserliche Marine. The ship was armed with a main battery of four 28 cm guns in two twin turrets. She served as the flagship of the High Seas Fleet until 1913, when she was transferred to II Battle Squadron. With the outbreak of World War I in July 1914, she and her sister ships were tasked with defending the mouth of the Elbe and the German Bight from possible British incursions. She and her three surviving sisters were assigned to coastal defense duties. By 1917, they had been withdrawn from combat service completely, disarmed, and tasked with auxiliary roles. She was struck from the naval register on 25 January 1920, sold to ship breakers that year, and broken up for scrap by 1922. She is the second German naval vessel to bear that name, after the 1874 frigate 1874 Deutschlands. The modern German battle line with other battleships of the Imperial German Navy was the Deutschlander-class frigate Deutsch lander, which was laid down in July 1903 and commissioned on 3 August 1906. The British battleship HMS Dreadnought, armed with ten 12-inch guns, was commissioned in December 1906. Dreadnoughts’ revolutionary design rendered every capital ship of the German navy obsolete, including DeutschLand. Deutsch Land was the second vessel to be named after a German ship, after 1874 Frigate Deutschlands, which had been built in 1874 and was named after the German city of Deutschlanders.
The name was later adopted for a German battleship of the same name, built in the 1930s and 1940s, which also served as a barracks ship in Wilhelmshaven until the end of the World War II era. She has been preserved in a museum at the University of Würzburg, along with three of her sisters, and is now owned by the German Maritime Museum, which is based in Wurzburg. The ships were built at the Germaniawerft shipyard in Kiel, where she was built in June 1903 and launched in November 1904. The first group, the five Braunschweig-class battleships, were laid down in the early 1900s, and shortly thereafter design work began on a follow-on design, which became the deutschland class. They also abandoned the gun turrets for the secondary battery guns, moving them back to traditional casemates to save weight. They were broadly similar to the Braunschtweigs, featuring incremental improvements in armor protection, including thinner plating on the hull and thinner machinery spaces. At a cruising speed of 10 knots, she could steam for 4,850 nautical miles. She displaced 13,191 metric tons at normal loading, and up to 14,218 metric tons at full loading. Her main-deck armor was 40mm thick, while her main battery turrets had 280mm of plating.
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