Germany’s pocket battleships

by Jim Stebinger

After Germany’s defeat in World War I, the winning powers sought to cripple any future German navy. Treaties severely limited the country’s ability to build major warships and left it with eight obsolete predreadnought ships, each of which could be replaced no sooner than 20 years after launch. Replacements could have guns of any size and number, but could weigh no more than 10,000 tons—one-third the weight of post-WWI battleships.

Germany’s Weimar Republic was monitored carefully and had to find cunning and ingenious ways to skirt the international rule book until Adolf Hitler tore it up altogether.  Weimar initiated plans for three small, speedy, power-packed, in-between capital ships that could run from a battleship and punish a cruiser.  The results were Deutschland, Admiral Scheer, and Admiral Graf Spee.  About the size of contemporary cruisers, they were called pocket battleships by the British and given a designation all their own (later they were officially reclassified as cruisers).  Designers cheated on the weight restrictions and used technology to try and overcome the size and power of their opponents.  Weighing in at around 12,000 tons (15,000 fully equipped), they used diesel engines and welding to save weight and increase speed.  They packed six 11-inch guns in two turrets fore and aft and eight torpedo tubes.  The class could get about 26 knots and had an 18,000-mile range at 15 knots.

The three were never considered battleships, and their compromise design was outpaced by Allied ship design. Contemporary battleships weighed more than 30,000 tons and many carried nine 16-inch guns. Even American heavy cruisers, which slightly outweighed the pocket battleships, carried nine guns and could speed at 33 knots.

Commissioned between 1933 and 1936, the pocket battleships went to war immediately but were largely unsuccessful.  Deutschland, renamed Lutzow, was especially unlucky.  She was heavily damaged by the RAF several times and spent much of the war in port.  In April 1945, the RAF caught her in the shallows off the coast of Pomerania.  She settled and was used as a static battery until destroyed by her crew in May. 

Admiral Scheer began the war with success in Norway, followed by devastating commerce raids in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, sinking 17 ships weighing more than 100,000 tons.  For most of the rest of the war she was confined to northern waters, dodging Allied aircraft.  She was finished by bombing at the German port of Kiel late in the war. 

Admiral Graf Spee had the shortest war career, under 120 days, but was spectacular.  As a commerce raider she sank nine ships collectively weighing more than 50,000 tons.  To catch her Britain dispatched eight naval teams, consisting of three battleships, two battle cruisers, four aircraft carriers and 16 cruisers.  She tangled with three of the cruisers—Exeter, Achilles, and Ajax—off the coast of Uruguay, where she mauled two before taking serious damage that forced a retreat to that country’s neutral port of Montevideo.  The British appear to have fooled Captain Hans Langsdorff into believing that heavy reinforcements were on the way.  Langsdorff, who was not sympathetic to the Nazi regime, ordered the ship scuttled and committed suicide a few days later.