SMS Gneisenau

: "This article is about the WWI armoured cruiser 'Gneisenau'; for other ships of this name, see Gneisenau.SMS "Gneisenau" was an armoured cruiser of the German navy. She was named after August von Gneisenau, a Prussian general of the Napoleonic Wars.

ervice history

Launched on 14 June 1906, together with her sister ship SMS "Scharnhorst", they were improvements on the previous "Roon" class. 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. The ships successfully traversed the Pacific before having encountered and defeated a weaker British force. The British armoured cruisers HMS "Good Hope" and HMS "Monmouth", under Admiral Sir Christopher Craddock, were sunk at the Battle of Coronel off the coast of Chile on 1 November 1914.

Battle of the Falkland Islands

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 176 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)
*Robert K. Massie, "Castles Of Steel" (Ballantine Books, 2003)