SMS Gneisenau

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''This article is about the WWI armoured cruiser 'Gneisenau'; for other ships of this name, see Gneisenau.

Career

Ordered:
Laid down:	December 1904 at Weserwerft, Bremen.
Launched:	14 June 1906
Commissioned:	6 March 1908
Fate:	sunk 8 December 1914, First Battle of the Falkland Islands
General characteristics
Displacement:	12, 781 tons
Length:	144.6 meters (474.75 ft) overall 143.8 meters (472 ft) waterline
Beam:	21.6 metres (71 ft)
Draft:	8.4 metres (27.5 ft)
Propulsion:	3 shaft Triple expansion engines, 26,000 ihp
Speed:	22.5 knots
Range:	6500 nautical miles at 12 knots 4800 nm at 14 knots
Fuel capacity:	2000 tons of coal, 800 tons of oil
Complement:	764 men
Armament:	8-21 cm (8.2in) (2x2, 4x1) 6-150 mm (5.9in) (6x1) 18 x 88 mm/35 cal (3.45in) (18 x 1) 4 x 450 mm (17.7in) Torpedo Tubes
Armour:	Belt: 80-150 mm Deck:41-61 mm Conning Tower: 150 mm

SMS Gneisenau was an armoured cruiser of the German navy. She was named after August von Gneisenau, a Prussian general of the Napoleonic Wars. Launched on 14 June 1906, together with her sister ship SMS Scharnhorst, they were improvements on the previous Yorck class armoured cruiser. After commissioning, these 2 ships formed the core of the German East Asia cruiser squadron based at Qingdao (then Romanised as Tsingtao) in China under Vice-Admiral Graf Maximilian von Spee. On the outbreak of the First World War, the squadron left Qingdao after Japan entered the war on the Allied side, and engaged in a period of commerce raiding before encountering and defeating a weaker British force and sinking the British armoured cruisers HMS Good Hope and HMS Monmouth under Admiral Sir Christopher Craddock at the Battle of Coronel off the coast of Chile on 1 November 1914.

On 8 December 1914, after passing into the South Atlantic through the Straits of Magellan, the squadron launched an attack on the Falkland Islands in an attempt to get coal for the ship's bunkers. However, they encountered a much more powerful British force, which included the battlecruisers HMS Invincible and HMS Inflexible, which proceeded to destroy the German ships in the first Battle of the Falkland Islands. Gneisenau was lost with most of its crew, although some survivors were picked up by the British.

References

Jane's Fighting Ships of World War I (Jane's Publishing, London, 1919)
Robert Gardiner, ed., Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships 1860-1905 (Conway Maritime Press, London, 1979)
Hanson W. Baldwin, World War I: An Outline History (Harper and Row, New York, 1962)

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