German battleship Gneisenau

Gneisenau was ordered as Ersatz Hessen, a replacement for the old pre-dreadnought Hessen, and built at the Deutsche Werke dockyard in Kiel: keel laid 6 May 1935, launched 8 December 1936, completed May 1938. Second ship of the Scharnhorst class, she displaced 32,100 long tons standard and made 31.3 knots on trials from geared turbines developing 165,930 metric horsepower. Her belt was 320 mm thick over magazines and machinery, her turret faces 360 mm.

She carried nine 28 cm guns in three triple turrets — Anton and Bruno forward, Caesar aft. A plan to rearm her with six 38 cm guns in twin turrets was approved after construction began, then shelved when the redesign proved too extensive; the upgrade pencilled in for the winter of 1940–41 was stopped by the war itself. Sea trials exposed a dangerous tendency to ship water forward, flooding the bow and damaging electrical systems, so the straight stem was replaced with a raised "Atlantic bow", completed by September 1939.

On 23 November 1939, sortying with Scharnhorst against the Northern Patrol between Iceland and the Faroes, the sisters intercepted the auxiliary cruiser Rawalpindi. Scharnhorst fired first, Gneisenau eight minutes later, and the ship was quickly reduced to a burning wreck; the arrival of the cruiser Newcastle forced Admiral Marschall to abandon rescue work and run for Wilhelmshaven through heavy weather.

Covering the Narvik and Trondheim landings in April 1940, Gneisenau found HMS Renown with her Seetakt radar at 04:30 on 9 April. Renown fired first. Gneisenau hit her twice — one shell failing to explode, the other bursting on the upper deck — but took two 15-inch hits in return: one passed through the director tower, cutting cables and killing an officer and five men, the other disabled her rear turret. The German ships used their speed to break away.

During Operation Juno on 8 June 1940 the sisters caught the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and her destroyers Ardent and Acasta. Gneisenau opened fire on Ardent at 18:28 and on Glorious at 18:46; the Germans found the smoke-laying British destroyers skilfully handled and hard to hit, but all three ships were sunk, Acasta putting a torpedo into Scharnhorst before she went down. On 20 June the submarine HMS Clyde torpedoed Gneisenau in the bow off Halten, forcing her back to Trondheim and then to five months of repairs in Kiel.

In Operation Berlin, from 22 January 1941, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst broke into the open Atlantic under Admiral Lütjens to savage the convoy lanes. Forbidden to engage capital ships, Lütjens twice declined battle with convoy escorts Ramillies and Malaya, but the raid told: Gneisenau sank three ships from a dispersed convoy in February, captured three tankers and sank a fourth on 15 March, and destroyed seven more ships the following day. The pair reached Brest on 22 March.

In Brest the ship became a bomber's mark. On 6 April 1941 a Bristol Beaufort flown by Flying Officer Kenneth Campbell — killed in the attack and awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross — torpedoed her by the rear turret, letting in some 3,050 tonnes of water. Three nights later four armour-piercing bombs struck her forward superstructure, killing 72 outright, with 16 more dying of wounds. The damage kept her out of the Bismarck sortie of May 1941.

In the Channel Dash of 11–13 February 1942 — Operation Cerberus — Gneisenau, Scharnhorst and Prinz Eugen ran the English Channel in daylight from Brest to Germany under Vice Admiral Ciliax, screened by Adolf Galland's fighters flying at masthead height. All six attacking Swordfish were destroyed, and five British destroyers were beaten off, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen seriously damaging the destroyer Worcester. A magnetic mine off Terschelling cost her less than thirty minutes' stop, and she reached Kiel via Helgoland.

On the night of 26–27 February 1942, with repairs just finished and her ammunition restocked in dry dock at Kiel, a British bomb penetrated Gneisenau's armoured deck in the forecastle. Red-hot fragments ignited propellant charges in the forward turret; the explosion threw the turret off its mount, burned out the entire bow section, and killed 112 men, wounding 21. Only partial flooding of the magazine prevented worse.

The Naval Staff chose to rebuild her with the six 38 cm guns originally planned rather than simply repair her, and a lengthened bow was prepared. But in 1943 Hitler, angered by the failure of the surface fleet at the Battle of the Barents Sea, ordered all work stopped. Gneisenau was disarmed; her turrets went to shore batteries, turret Caesar to Austrått Fort near Trondheim as the coastal battery Orlandet.

As the Red Army closed on Gotenhafen (Gdynia), her remaining crew sank her as a blockship in the harbour entrance on 27 March 1945. Poland ordered the wreck removed in 1947; refloated on 12 September 1951 — the largest ship raised to that time — she was completely scrapped, some of her steel believed to have gone into Polish merchant vessels. Norway offered to return the Trondheim turret in 1979; declined, it was preserved as a museum instead.