SMS Schwaben was the fourth ship of the Wittelsbach class of pre-dreadnought battleships of the German Imperial Navy. She was armed with a main battery of four 24-centimeter guns and had a top speed of 18 knots. She spent most of her career as a gunnery training ship from 1904 to 1914. She saw limited duty in the North Sea as a guard ship and in the Baltic Sea against Russian forces. The ship was stricken from the navy list in March 1921 and sold for scrapping in that year.
About SMS Schwaben in brief
SMS Schwaben was the fourth ship of the Wittelsbach class of pre-dreadnought battleships of the German Imperial Navy. She was armed with a main battery of four 24-centimeter guns and had a top speed of 18 knots. She spent most of her career as a gunnery training ship from 1904 to 1914. After the start of World War I in August 1914, the ship was mobilized with her sisters as IV Battle Squadron. She saw limited duty in the North Sea as a guard ship and in the Baltic Sea against Russian forces. The ship was stricken from the navy list in March 1921 and sold for scrapping in that year. The last ship of her class to enter active service was the battleship Wettin, which was commissioned in April 1904, the last of the class to serve in active service. She is now a museum ship at the Bremen Navy Museum in Germany. The name of the ship is taken from the German word “Schwaben” which means “swallow” or “swallower” in German. The word “Wittelsbach” is also used to refer to one of the first capital ships built under the Navy Law of 1898, championed by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the first battleship of the Kaiser Friedrich III-class. The first battleships built under this law were the four Brandenburg-class battleships, which were commissioned in 1894.
The Wittels Bachs were broadly similar to the Brandenburgs, carrying the same armament but with a more comprehensive armor layout. They were ordered by the Kaiserliche Marine in 1889, but were delayed by budgetary constraints, opposition in the Reichstag, and a lack of a coherent fleet plan. The ships were commissioned on 19 August 1901; King Wilhelm II of Württemberg christened the ship during a speech by his wife, Queen Charlotte Würgemberg. Schwaban was ordered under contract under the new unit name “Gastarbeit” and was completed on 19 April 1904. She had a cruising radius of 5,000 nautical miles at a speed of 10 knots and displaced 11,774 t as designed and up to 12,798 t at full load. Her main battery turrets had 250 mm of armor plating, and the deck was 50 mm thick. The armament system was rounded out with six 45 cm torpedo tubes, all submerged in the hull; one was in the bow, one in the stern and the other four were on the broadside. After her commissioning in 1904, she was assigned to use as a training ship.
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This page is based on the article SMS Schwaben published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
