SMS König
König was the first of four König-class dreadnought battleships of the Imperial German Navy during World War I. Laid down in October 1911, the ship was launched on 1 March 1913. She was commissioned into the High Seas Fleet on 9 August 1914. Along with her three sister ships, Grosser Kurfürst, Markgraf, and Kronprinz, she took part in most of the fleet actions during the war. On 21 June 1919, Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter gave the order to scuttle the fleet, including Königs, while the British guard ships were out of the harbor on exercises.
About SMS König in brief
König was the first of four König-class dreadnought battleships of the Imperial German Navy during World War I. Laid down in October 1911, the ship was launched on 1 March 1913. She was commissioned into the High Seas Fleet on 9 August 1914. Along with her three sister ships, Grosser Kurfürst, Markgraf, and Kronprinz, she took part in most of the fleet actions during the war. On 21 June 1919, Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter gave the order to scuttle the fleet, including Königs, while the British guard ships were out of the harbor on exercises. The ship was never raised for scrapping; the wreck is still on the bottom of the bay. The four ships were ordered as part of the Anglo-German naval arms race, and they were built in response to the British Orion class that had been ordered in 1909. The ships had also been intended to use a diesel engine on the center propeller shaft to increase their cruising range, but development of the diesels proved to be more complicated than expected, so an all-steam turbine powerplant was retained. The main battery was armed with ten 30. 5 cm SK L50 guns arranged in five twin gun turrets: two superfiring turrets each fore and aft and one turret amidships between the two funnels. She had a range of 8,000 nautical miles at a cruising speed of 12 knots. Her crew numbered 41 officers and 1,095 enlisted men.
She also had five 50-cm underwater torpedo tubes, one in the bow and two on each beam. The sides of the ship had 30 cm of armor on the sides and 11 cm on the roofs, while casemate guns had 15 cm on the forward tower of the conning tower. Her hull was made of Krupp cemented steel that was 35 cm thick in the central portion that protected the propulsion machinery spaces and the ammunition magazines, and was reduced to 18 cm forward and 12 cm aft. Her keel was laid down on 1 October 1911 and she was launched in October 1913. Direct-out work was completed under the provisional name \”S\” and built at the Kaiserliche Werhelft Werft Wilhelmshaven, under construction number 33, on 1 August 1914, she was commissioned the day after the outbreak of the War. KönIG was interned, along with the majority of the High seas Fleet, at Scapa Flow in November 1918 following the Armistice. She suffered ten large-caliber shell hits in the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916. In October 1917, she forced the Russian pre-dreadnought Battleship Slava to scutttle herself in theBattle of Moon Sound, which followed Germany’s successful Operation Albion. As the first German battleship to mount all of her main battery artillery on thecenterline, Kön Gig could bring all of its main guns to bear on either side, but the newer vessel enjoyed a wider arc of fire.
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This page is based on the article SMS König published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
