SMS Lützow

The Derfflinger class was authorised for the 1911 fiscal year under the 1906 naval law, with design work begun in early 1910. Once the British started putting 34.3 cm guns into their battlecruisers, the German naval command concluded it had to raise its own main battery from 28 cm to 30.5 cm; to hold the cost, the number of guns was cut from the ten carried by Seydlitz to eight, arranged more efficiently in superfiring pairs. Lützow, the second of the class, was allocated to the 1912 programme and ordered as Ersatz Kaiserin Augusta, replacing a protected cruiser twenty years old.

She was built by Schichau-Werke at Danzig, her keel laid in May 1912 and her hull launched on 29 November 1913, and named for the Prussian general Ludwig Adolf Wilhelm von Lützow of the Napoleonic Wars. She measured 210.4 metres overall and displaced 26,600 tonnes as designed. Four Parsons turbines drew steam from eighteen boilers — fourteen coal-fired, four oil — for 63,000 metric horsepower and 26.4 knots. She differed from her sister Derfflinger in two small ways that mattered: an extra pair of 15 cm secondary guns, and one more watertight compartment in the hull.

Eight 30.5 cm SK L/50 guns sat in four turrets fore and aft of the superstructure, with fourteen 15 cm in main-deck casemates, eight 8.8 cm quick-firers on anti-aircraft mounts and four submerged 60 cm torpedo tubes. Her armour belt was 300 mm through the citadel that covered magazines and machinery, her turret faces 270 mm, her forward conning tower 300 mm. Commissioned on 8 August 1915, she was badly delayed when her port low-pressure turbine was wrecked on trials that October, and she did not join I Scouting Group until 20 March 1916 — after most of the German battlecruiser force's major actions had already been fought.

Her first and only commander was Kapitän zur See Victor Harder. Her first major operation was the bombardment of Yarmouth and Lowestoft on 24–25 April 1916. Konteradmiral Franz von Hipper was away on sick leave, so Konteradmiral Friedrich Boedicker led the sortie, with Seydlitz as flagship followed by Derfflinger, Lützow, Moltke and Von der Tann out of the Jade at 10:55. British interception of German wireless signals had already given the Admiralty warning, and the Grand Fleet sailed at 15:50.

At 15:38 Seydlitz struck a mine that opened a 15-metre hole in her hull and let in 1,400 short tons of water. She turned back at 15 knots, and once clear of danger she stopped so that Boedicker could transfer — the torpedo boat V28 carried him across to Lützow, which put the admiral aboard the ship for the rest of the raid. The four remaining battlecruisers turned south to keep out of the minefield.

Off Lowestoft at 04:50 the light cruisers Rostock and Elbing sighted Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt's Harwich Force to the south, but Boedicker refused to be drawn and turned his guns on the town, destroying two 6-inch shore batteries. One battery put a shell into Moltke without serious effect. The ships reached Yarmouth at 05:42 in visibility so poor that each fired a single salvo, Derfflinger excepted. Turning back, they met the Harwich Force again at 05:47 and opened at 12,000 metres, badly damaging the cruiser Conquest before submarine reports ended the chase. Lützow became Hipper's flagship afterwards.

I Scouting Group left the Jade at 02:00 on 31 May 1916 with Lützow, Hipper's flagship, in the lead. Shortly before 16:00 they met Vice Admiral David Beatty's 1st Battlecruiser Squadron. Hipper hoisted "Distribution of fire from left" on Lützow and the German ships fired first, at around 15,000 yards. Lion and Princess Royal both concentrated on Lützow; Lützow answered Lion alone, and struck with her fifth salvo at 16:51. One of her 30.5 cm shells then punched through the roof of Lion's centre "Q" turret and set off the charges inside — the ship was saved only because Major Francis Harvey ordered the magazine flooded before the fire reached it.

She had loaded semi-armour-piercing shells while the other German battlecruisers carried armour-piercing, and her gunnery officer Günther Paschen later regretted it, believing AP rounds would have destroyed Lion outright. In the first nineteen minutes she fired thirty-one salvos at Lion for six hits, forcing her out of line. Two British destroyers, Nestor and Nicator, put four torpedoes at her and missed; her own torpedo at Tiger at 17:34 missed too. Around 18:13 a 15-inch shell from one of the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships found her, and more followed at 18:25, 18:30 and 18:45. Both her wireless transmitters were knocked out, leaving signal lamps as her only link to the fleet.

Shortly after 19:00 the German battlecruisers turned north-east at speed to reach the crippled cruiser Wiesbaden. At 19:15 they sighted the British armoured cruiser Defence; Hipper hesitated, thinking her the German Rostock, and it was Harder who ordered fire at 19:16. Lützow put five broadsides into her in rapid succession, and within five minutes a salvo reached Defence's magazines and blew her apart. Then the 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron came up ahead of the German line. Invincible scored eight hits on Lützow in eight minutes, mostly forward, and those hits caused the flooding that would eventually kill her. At 19:33 Lützow's third salvo penetrated Invincible's centre turret and ignited the magazine, and the British ship vanished in a series of explosions.

She had lost speed and could not follow Scheer's 16-point turn, so she hauled off to the south-west. At 19:50 torpedo boats came up to help; G39 took Hipper and his staff off to shift them to another battlecruiser, and V45 and G37 began laying smoke. Before the screen was complete, at 20:15, four heavy shells struck her in quick succession, one through the forward superfiring turret that detonated a charge and destroyed the right gun, another disabling the training gear of the after turret. She fired her last shot at 20:45, hidden at last by the smoke, with KzS Johannes Hartog temporarily commanding the group.

What followed was a nine-hour fight with the sea. Steaming at 15 knots she tried to slip behind the German line; by 22:13 the last ship in that line had lost sight of her. She settled deeper, water washing over the forecastle and in through shell holes above the armoured deck. She was down to 7 knots by 00:45 and at times to 3, easing the pressure on the rear bulkhead of the torpedo flat, and her forward main pumps were useless with their control rods jammed. Her crew patched the shell holes three times and three times the rising draft undid the work.

An attempt to steam astern was abandoned when her bow went so deep that the propellers came half out of the water and her forward draft passed 17 metres. By 02:20, with an estimated 8,000 tonnes of water aboard and the ship in danger of capsizing, Harder ordered her abandoned. The torpedo boats G37, G38, G40 and V45 came alongside; six men trapped in the bow could not be freed. At 02:45 she was submerged to her bridge, G38 put two torpedoes into her, and two minutes later she was gone, some 60 km north-west of Horns Reef. She had fired an estimated 380 main-battery shells and 400 secondary rounds, and had been hit 24 times by British heavy-calibre shells.

Her crew lost 115 men killed and 50 wounded, a toll second only to her sister Derfflinger's 157 dead. The wreck's position was long only estimated, at 56°15′N 5°53′E. In 2015 the survey ship HMS Echo, laying a tide gauge in the area, ran a search and found her on the sea floor with sonar, some eight miles from her last recorded position. Echo took sonar images of the wreck, which her commander said would "ensure the ship's final resting place is properly recognised as a war grave".