SMS Hindenburg

The Derfflinger class answered British battlecruisers carrying 34.3 cm guns: German designers raised the main battery from 28 cm to 30.5 cm and, to hold down cost, cut the number of guns from ten to eight while adopting a more efficient superfiring layout. Hindenburg was the third and last of the class, allocated to the 1913 programme and built slightly longer to hold the same speed at greater displacement. She was named for the field marshal who won at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes and who took supreme command of the German armies in 1916.

Her real advantage over her sisters lay in her turrets. The Drh LC/1913 mountings allowed 16 degrees of elevation against 13.5 in the earlier type, worth some 2,000 metres of extra range for the same eight 30.5 cm guns. Like Lutzow she carried fourteen 15 cm secondaries and four 60 cm torpedo tubes. Her belt was 300 mm through the citadel, her turret faces 270 mm, her conning tower 300 mm. Fourteen coal-fired and eight oil-fired boilers fed four sets of turbines rated at 72,000 metric horsepower; on trials she made 26.67 knots in shallow water, equivalent to about 27.5 in deep.

Her keel was laid at the Kaiserliche Werft in Wilhelmshaven on 30 June 1913 as Ersatz Hertha, replacement for an elderly protected cruiser. War stopped the work almost at once so that reserve ships could be mobilised, and she was launched on 1 August 1915 into a yard short of material and men, with repairs after Jutland and then U-boat construction taking priority. Only the loss of Lutzow at Jutland kept her going at all. She was commissioned on 10 May 1917, the last capital ship the imperial navy ever commissioned, under Kapitan zur See Johannes von Karpf.

She was declared fully operational on 26 October 1917, by which time the chance of a fleet action had largely gone. Early in November she patrolled the German Bight in support of the light forces watching the defensive minefields. On 17 November she and Moltke were distant support for minesweepers when British warships attacked them, the raiders including the new battlecruisers Repulse, Courageous and Glorious; by the time the German ships arrived the British had withdrawn. The next day she went out again with torpedo boats to clear the buoys marking the minefield entrances.

On 23 November 1917 she replaced Seydlitz as flagship of I Scouting Group under Franz von Hipper, though Hipper spent little time aboard: he was also responsible for the defence of the German Bight and worked from the light cruiser Niobe, coming to his flagship only when the whole group went to sea. The pattern of her service was patrol duty in the bight punctuated by dry-docking, and by covering operations for minesweepers, including a major effort at the end of July 1918 to clear a path for U-boats through British minefields.

On 11 August 1918 Hipper was promoted to Admiral and given the whole High Seas Fleet, and Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter took over I Scouting Group, raising his flag aboard Hindenburg the following day. Through August and September she worked up off Helgoland with day and night shooting practice between patrols. On 22 October the battlecruiser group went out to cover minesweepers with reconnaissance aircraft flown from the seaplane tender Santa Elena, and came home the next day.

German light forces had begun cutting into the British convoys to Norway. On 17 October 1917 the light cruisers Brummer and Bremse destroyed nine of twelve cargo ships and both escorting destroyers, Mary Rose and Strongbow; on 12 December four destroyers sank all five transports of a second convoy and one of its escorts. Admiral Beatty responded by detaching battleships from the Grand Fleet to cover the route, which handed the German navy the opportunity it had waited the whole war for: a detached portion of a stronger fleet that might be isolated and destroyed.

Hipper planned it. The battlecruisers of I Scouting Group with light cruisers and destroyers would fall on a convoy while the High Seas Fleet stood ready to take the covering British battleship squadron. At 05:00 on 23 April 1918 the fleet left the Schillig roadstead with Hindenburg leading, wireless kept to a minimum against British interception. At 06:10, about sixty kilometres south-west of Bergen, Moltke lost an inner starboard propeller; the unloaded shaft raced until an engine gear flew apart, wrecking boilers and holing the hull, and she had to be towed by the battleship Oldenburg.

Hipper pressed north regardless. By 14:00 his force had crossed the convoy route several times and found nothing, and at 14:10 he turned south. The fleet was back inside its defensive minefields by 18:37. It emerged afterwards that the convoy had sailed a day later than the German staff had assumed. Hindenburg was back on patrol duty in the bight by 27 April, covered the laying of a defensive minefield on 10 May, and went out again at the end of the month as distant support for minesweepers. It was the closest the German battlecruisers came to a fleet action in 1918.

The last plan of the war would have sent the fleet out to meet the Grand Fleet off the Dutch coast, Hindenburg and the other battlecruisers supporting an attack on shipping in the Thames estuary, so that Scheer could inflict what damage he could and improve Germany's bargaining position. As the fleet gathered at Wilhelmshaven, sailors deserted in numbers: some 300 men went over the side from Von der Tann and Derfflinger as they passed through the locks. From the night of 29 October battleships mutinied, three refusing to weigh anchor and acts of sabotage occurring aboard Thuringen and Helgoland. The order to sail was rescinded.

Under the Armistice, fourteen capital ships, seven light cruisers and fifty torpedo boats left German waters on 21 November 1918 for internment, met by the light cruiser Cardiff and an escort of some 370 British, American and French warships. Hindenburg and the other battlecruisers reached Scapa Flow on 25 November. Crews were repatriated through December until fewer than 5,000 men remained. Before sailing, Admiral Adolf von Trotha had made clear to Reuter that the Allies could not be allowed to seize the ships under any conditions.

A copy of The Times told Reuter that the Armistice would expire at noon on 21 June 1919. Concluding that the British meant to take the ships, he waited until the British fleet left the Flow for exercises on the morning of the 21st and transmitted the order at 11:20. Hindenburg was the last to go down, at 17:00; her captain had deliberately arranged for her to sink on an even keel so that her crew could get off. Cox & Danks bought the salvage rights in January 1924, raised her on 23 July 1930 after several failed attempts, and she was towed to Rosyth and broken up between 1930 and 1932.