Admiral Hipper

The Admiral Hipper class was ordered as Germany rearmed after 1933. The 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement allowed five 10,000-long-ton "treaty cruisers", and the class sat nominally within that limit while in fact displacing over 16,000 tons. Blohm & Voss laid the lead ship's keel in Hamburg on 6 July 1935 as construction number 501. She was launched on 6 February 1937 and commissioned on 29 April 1939, named for Franz von Hipper, who had commanded the German battlecruisers at Jutland.

Erich Raeder, Hipper's chief of staff in the First World War, gave the christening speech and his wife Erika performed the ceremony. Three sets of geared steam turbines on twelve ultra-high-pressure oil-fired boilers gave 132,000 shaft horsepower and 32 knots. The main battery was eight 20.3 cm SK L/60 guns in four twin turrets in superfiring pairs, with twelve 10.5 cm anti-aircraft guns and four triple torpedo launchers. The belt was only 70 to 80 mm; the conning tower's 150 mm faces carried the heaviest armour.

As built she had a straight stem, replaced after launch with a clipper bow that took her overall length to 205.9 metres, and a raked funnel cap was added. A hangar planned for one aircraft was widened during construction to take two floatplanes side by side, which forced the middle pair of 10.5 cm guns down to the upper deck and restricted their arc astern. In 1941 the hangar was cut back again to one machine, the space going to refuelling gear and food storage.

For Operation Weserübung she was flagship of Group 2, carrying mountain troops for Trondheim with four destroyers. On the morning of 8 April 1940 Lütjens sent her to investigate a destroyer contact, and she found HMS Glowworm, which at first mistook her for a friendly ship and so let the German cruiser fire first. Glowworm took several hits, tried to flee, then turned in, fired a spread of torpedoes that all missed, scored one hit — and, her rudder jammed, rammed.

The collision tore away a 40-metre section of the cruiser's starboard armour belt and her starboard torpedo launcher, and flooding gave a four-degree list. Glowworm's boilers exploded and she sank quickly; the Germans picked up forty survivors. Her wireless report gave the Admiralty enough warning for the battlecruiser Renown to move against Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Admiral Hipper then passed herself off as a British warship long enough to run the Norwegian batteries in the Trondheim fjord, anchoring to disembark her troops at 05:25.

She reached Wilhelmshaven on 12 April with 125 of 3,005 cubic metres of fuel left, and dry-docking showed the ramming damage was worse than first thought, though repairs took only a fortnight. In June, during Operation Juno, she sank the trawler HMT Juniper with gunfire and then the empty troopship Orama, while Scharnhorst and Gneisenau destroyed the carrier Glorious and her escorts Ardent and Acasta. Her anti-aircraft gunners brought down one of the Skuas that struck at the ships in Trondheim on 13 June.

Operation Nordseetour took her through the Denmark Strait undetected in a gale on the night of 6 December 1940, refuelling repeatedly from tankers while B-Dienst intelligence pointed her at convoys the weather kept hiding. At dusk on Christmas Eve her DeTe radar found convoy WS 5A some 700 nautical miles west of Cape Finisterre — not a merchant convoy at all but twenty ships under heavy escort, with the heavy cruiser Berwick and the light cruisers Bonaventure and Dunedin.

Attacking in the morning, she badly damaged the 13,994-GRT transport Empire Trooper and lightly damaged the freighter Arabistan, then hit Berwick's rear turrets, waterline and forward superstructure with salvos from her after turrets before disengaging. She sank the passenger ship Jumna on 25 December and put into Brest on the 27th, low on fuel. RAF raids on the port followed — 53 bombers on 4 January, twelve Whitleys on the 10th, 26 more aircraft two nights later — without serious damage.

Her second Atlantic sortie began on 1 February 1941 with orders to work the lanes between Britain and West Africa. She sank the straggler Iceland on the 11th, and around midnight her radar picked up the unescorted convoy SLS 64, nineteen merchant ships. Posing as a British cruiser, she opened fire at 06:19, closed the range as ammunition ran low, and finished stopped ships with all twelve of her torpedoes. The British reported seven ships lost totalling 32,806 GRT; German claims ran to thirteen.

From March 1942 she operated out of Norway against the Arctic convoys, joining the aborted operations against PQ 17 and PQ 18, laying a minefield off Novaya Zemlya in Operation Zarin to push merchant traffic further south, and flying off the Arado that found the Soviet tanker Donbass in November. On 30 December she left Altafjord as Vizeadmiral Oskar Kummetz's flagship for Operation Regenbogen against convoy JW 51B, with Lützow and six destroyers, under orders to avoid action even with an equal opponent.

Kummetz split his force to draw off the escort. At 09:15 on 31 December the destroyer Obdurate sighted his screen; Admiral Hipper's salvos rained splinters on Achates, severing steam lines and cutting her to 15 knots, while Captain Robert Sherbrooke took four destroyers after the cruiser. Force R — Rear Admiral Robert Burnett with Sheffield and Jamaica — came up unseen on her starboard side and hit her three times, filling No. 3 boiler with oil and water, shutting down the starboard turbine and dropping her to 23 knots.

Kummetz broke off at 10:37 and turned west. Achates sank from her damage and the minesweeper Bramble was sunk, but the destroyer Friedrich Eckoldt, mistaking Sheffield for the flagship, closed too near and was destroyed. Hitler, furious that the convoy had survived, ordered the surface fleet paid off and its guns sent to the Atlantic Wall; Karl Dönitz talked him out of it. Admiral Hipper reached Kiel on 8 February 1943 and was decommissioned on the 28th.

Recommissioned in her damaged state on 1 March 1944 as a cadet training ship at Gotenhafen, she never came back to full service; RAF minelaying around the port and the drafting of her crew into the city's defences saw to that. On 29 January 1945 she left with 1,377 refugees aboard, escorted by the torpedo boat T36, and the following evening passed the distress call from the sinking Wilhelm Gustloff without stopping, for fear of the submarine that had sunk her.

At Kiel she entered the Germaniawerft. A bomb on 3 April killed six of her crew without penetrating the armour deck; in the raid of 9 April, 591 RAF heavy bombers hit her three times, capsized Admiral Scheer and struck the light cruiser Emden. Ammunition was brought aboard with a view to using her as a floating battery, but her crew scuttled her at her moorings at 04:25 on 3 May. Raised that July, she was broken up between 1948 and 1952; her bell is at the Laboe Naval Memorial near Kiel.