SMS Elsass was the second of five pre-dreadnought battleships of the Braunschweig class in the German Imperial Navy. She is the only German battleship to have been sunk by a British warship, HMS Dreadnoughts, in the First World War. She has been named for the German province of ElsAss, now the French region of Alsace, and her sister ships were Braunscweig, Hessen, Preussen and Lothringen.
About SMS Elsass in brief
SMS Elsass was the second of five pre-dreadnought battleships of the Braunschweig class in the German Imperial Navy. The ship was armed with a battery of four 28 cm guns and had a top speed of 18 knots. She was decommissioned in 1913, though she was reactivated a year later following the outbreak of World War I and assigned to VI Battle Squadron. In 1916, she was placed in reserve because of crew shortages and the threat of British submarines operating in the Baltic, and she spent the remainder of the war as a training ship. After the war, she served in the Reichsmarine with the surface fleet until 1930, conducting training operations and visits to foreign ports. The outdated battleship was sold to Norddeutscher Lloyd in late 1935 and was broken up for scrap the following year. She is the only German battleship to have been sunk by a British warship, HMS Dreadnoughts, in the First World War. She has been named for the German province of ElsAss, now the French region of Alsace, and her sister ships were Braunscweig, Hessen, Preussen and Lothringen. Her name is also used for a ship of the same name, which was also built in the early 1900s, but was scrapped in the 1970s and 1980s. The German Navy has no plans to name a new battleship after her, as the name has been used for several other ships of this type in the past, including the German battleships Kriegsmarine and Württemberg, as well as the British battleship HMS Brisbane and the French battleship HMS Albion.
The last ship of this class to be named after a German province was the battleship Einsiedel, which served in World War II. The name “Elsass” is now used for the ship that was built in May 1901, though it was not completed until May 1905. The first ship of her type to be commissioned was the German ship of that name, SMS Ersass, built in 1903 and commissioned in November 1904. She served in II Squadron of the German fleet after commissioning, and was occupied with extensive annual training, and making good-will trips to foreign countries. She saw action against the Russian Navy in the Battle of the Gulf of Riga, during which she engaged the Russian battleship Slava. In 1906, the British battalion of the Royal Navy launched the revolutionary dreadnought, which replaced the Wittelsbach-class battleships as the standard German capital ship. The dreadnought’s revolutionary design rendered every capital ship of the Navy obsolete, including Elsass. The German navy was modernized in 1923–1924, and the ship was used as a hulk in Wilhelmshaven until 1930.
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This page is based on the article SMS Elsass published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
