SMS Westfalen was one of the four Nassau-class dreadnoughts built for the German Imperial Navy. She served with her sister ships for the majority of World War I, seeing extensive service in the North Sea. In 1919, following the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow, the ship was ceded to the Allies as a replacement for the ships that had been sunk. She is the only ship of the Nassau class to have been sunk by a British submarine during the Second World War.
About SMS Westfalen in brief
SMS Westfalen was one of the four Nassau-class dreadnoughts built for the German Imperial Navy. She was armed with a main battery of twelve 28 cm guns in six twin turrets in an unusual hexagonal arrangement. The ship served with her sister ships for the majority of World War I, seeing extensive service in the North Sea. In 1919, following the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow, the ship was ceded to the Allies as a replacement for the ships that had been sunk. She then was sent to ship-breakers in England, who broke the ship up for scrap by 1924. She is the only ship of the Nassau class to have been sunk by a British submarine during the Second World War. She has been named after the town of Westfalia, Germany, where she was based during the First World War, and after the Battle of Jutland, where the ship fought against British light forces. The Westfalian name means “Westfalen” in German, which means “west” or “westward” in English. The name was taken from the Westfarian town of Würzburg, where it was built in the early 20th century. It was also known as “Sachsen” because it was the name of one of its owners, Ersatz Sachsen, who was a member of the SS Sachsen-Geschwanden-Bremen (SSG) family. It is one of only a handful of German battleships to bear the name “Nassau” in honor of the first dreadnought, which was built by the German Navy in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
The design was developed in the context of the Anglo-German naval arms race, with the aim of outclassing foreign navies with increasingly heavy secondary guns. The Nassauclass was the first German battleship to be armed with an all-big-gun armament consisting of eight 28-cm guns. Her secondary armament consisted of twelve 15 cm SK L45 guns and sixteen 8.8 cm SK L 45 guns, all of which were mounted in casemates. She also had six 45 cm submerged torpedo tubes on either end of the torpedo bulkhead. The hull’s belt armor was 300mm thick in the central portion of the hull, and the deck was 80mm thick on the sides and the conning tower was 400mm of armor plating with 400 mm of plating. The Reich approved the design and provided funds for the ship at the end of March 1906, but construction was delayed while the lead-class ironclads were secretly approved and provided by the Reichstag. The first ship to be completed was SMS Sachsen on 1 July 1908, and she was commissioned into the High Seas Fleet on 16 November 1909. She displaced 18,873 t with a standard load, and 20,535 t fully laden, and had a draft of 8.9m.
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This page is based on the article SMS Westfalen published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
