SMS Gneisenau

Gneisenau was ordered on 8 June 1904 under the Second Naval Law of 1900, which called for fourteen armoured cruisers, and laid down at the AG Weser yard in Bremen that December as hull 144. A long shipyard strike delayed her, letting Scharnhorst take the water first and the class name with it. She was launched on 14 June 1906 and christened by General Alfred von Schlieffen, Chief of the General Staff, for the screw corvette that had borne the name before her. Commissioned on 6 March 1908, she had Kapitän zur See Franz von Hipper as her first commanding officer.

The Scharnhorst class was a marked advance on the preceding Roon class, better armed and armoured so that they could, if needed, stand in the line of battle. Gneisenau carried eight 21 cm SK L/40 guns — four in twin centreline turrets fore and aft, four in single hull casemates abreast the funnels — with six 15 cm guns a deck below, eighteen 8.8 cm guns against torpedo boats, and four submerged 45 cm torpedo tubes. Her Krupp belt was 15 cm at the citadel, her armoured deck 3.5 to 6 cm, her turret sides 17 cm.

Three triple-expansion engines and eighteen coal-fired water-tube boilers, ducted into four funnels, gave 26,000 metric horsepower and 22.5 knots, with 4,800 nautical miles of range at 14 knots. It was a good ship rendered obsolete almost at once: by 1909 the Royal Navy was commissioning battlecruisers that outclassed any armoured cruiser afloat, which is why Gneisenau's time with I Scouting Group was short. She was a fine gunnery ship regardless, taking the Kaiser's Schießpreis for armoured cruisers in 1908–09, 1910–11 and 1912–13.

Reassigned on 8 September 1910, Gneisenau left Wilhelmshaven on 10 November for Germany's Jiaozhou Bay leased territory in China. She stopped at Málaga for a ceremony over the men lost when her namesake corvette was wrecked there in 1900, transited Suez, took Crown Prince Wilhelm aboard at Colombo and carried him to Bombay, and reached Qingdao on 14 March 1911 to join her sister Scharnhorst, the squadron flagship.

For four years she patrolled Germany's Asian and Pacific possessions and showed the flag. She carried the new ambassador Arthur Graf Rex to Yokohama in April 1911, where the squadron's officers met the Emperor Meiji; she was hurried back to Qingdao during the Agadir Crisis; and she flew Rear Admiral Günther von Krosigk's flag through the outbreak of the Xinhai Revolution in October 1911, when Europeans in China feared a repeat of the Boxer attacks that never came. In August 1912 she pulled the HAPAG steamer Silesia off a Korean shoal and escorted her to Nagasaki.

Maximilian von Spee replaced Krosigk in December 1912 and took the two cruisers through the southwest Pacific, then to Japan to meet the new Emperor Taishō, then through the German colonies of the central Pacific. Kapitän zur See Julius Maerker took command in June 1914. Coaling at Nagasaki and Truk that summer, the squadron learned of the assassination at Sarajevo; at Ponape on 17 July Spee's access to the German radio net brought news of the declaration on Serbia and Russian mobilisation, and on 31 July he ordered his ships stripped for war.

Spee gathered his scattered cruisers at Pagan Island, detached Karl von Müller's Emden to raid commerce on 13 August, and sailed for Chile on the 15th with Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Nürnberg, the auxiliary cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich and colliers. Word of the Allied capture of German Samoa brought the two armoured cruisers to Apia on 14 September, hoping to catch a warship at anchor; the harbour was empty. On 22 September the squadron attacked the French colony of Papeete, sinking the gunboat Zélée and taking fire from shore batteries without damage, though fear of mines kept Spee out of the harbour and the French burned the coal he had come for.

By 12 October the squadron was at Easter Island, joined there by Dresden and Leipzig. On 1 November, told that the British light cruiser Glasgow had been at Coronel, Spee turned in to catch her alone — and found Rear Admiral Christopher Cradock's whole 4th Cruiser Squadron: the armoured cruisers Good Hope and Monmouth, Glasgow and the armed merchant cruiser Otranto, with the old battleship Canopus 300 nautical miles astern.

Spee held his fire until the sun was low, so that the British were silhouetted against it while his own ships lay dark against the coast. He opened at 18:37 with the range down to 10,400 metres, each German ship engaging its opposite number; Gneisenau's was Monmouth. Her third salvo blew the roof off Monmouth's forward turret and started a fire, and her armour-piercing shells knocked out gun after gun until Monmouth fell out of line by 18:50. Gneisenau then joined Scharnhorst against Good Hope, whose guns fell silent at 19:23 after two large explosions.

A single hit on Gneisenau's rear turret failed to penetrate, exploding outside and setting fire to stowed life jackets, which the crew put out. Monmouth capsized at 20:18 under the guns of Nürnberg. More than 1,600 British sailors died in the two armoured cruisers, Cradock among them. Gneisenau was hit four times and had two men lightly hurt. But the squadron had burned over 40 per cent of its ammunition on the far side of the world, with no port and no magazine to replace it — a victory that cost Spee the means to fight the next one.

London's answer was immediate: the battlecruisers Invincible and Inflexible were detached from the Grand Fleet under Vice Admiral Doveton Sturdee, left Devonport on 10 November, gathered Carnarvon, Kent, Cornwall, Bristol, Glasgow and Otranto on the way, and were coaling at the Falklands by 7 December. Spee rounded Cape Horn on 2 December and held a conference aboard Scharnhorst on the 6th; Maerker was among the three captains who argued for bypassing the islands to raid shipping off Argentina. Spee's view carried, and the squadron sailed for Port Stanley.

Gneisenau and Nürnberg went in first to destroy the wireless station. The smoke they saw rising from the harbour they took for burning coal stocks; then 30.5 cm shells from the beached Canopus began to fall, and lookouts made out the tripod masts of battlecruisers. Spee broke off, formed line and ran southeast at 22 knots. Knowing his armoured cruisers could not outrun what was chasing them, he sent the light cruisers away and turned to fight. Inflexible engaged Gneisenau, and Gneisenau scored two quick hits.

Spee held the lee position, where the wind kept his ships clear of their own smoke, and twice manoeuvred so effectively — once bringing his 15 cm secondaries to bear — that the British were forced to haul off. But at long range the British shells came down as plunging fire, through thin deck armour rather than the belt. Gneisenau took underwater hits that flooded boiler rooms 1 and 3; at 15:30 a hit reached her starboard engine room and left her on two screws; at 15:45 her forward funnel came down; at 16:00 number 4 boiler room went. A shell into the main dressing station killed most of the wounded gathered there.

Scharnhorst capsized at 16:17, and the British turned everything on Gneisenau. Out of ammunition, she fired inert training rounds, one of which struck Invincible. By 17:30 she was a burning wreck, stopped and listing hard to starboard. Maerker ordered scuttling charges set at 17:35; a final shell from the forward turret drew a reply from Inflexible into the forward dressing station. The charges went off at 17:42 and she rolled over, 270 to 300 men getting clear, many of whom died quickly in four-degree water. Of her crew 598 were killed and 187 saved, among them Korvettenkapitän Hans Pochhammer, the senior German survivor. Some 2,200 men died with the squadron, Spee and two of his sons among them.