SMS Pommern

The Second Naval Law of 1900, driven through by Vizeadmiral Alfred von Tirpitz, funded twenty new battleships over seventeen years. The Deutschland class followed the five Braunschweigs, broadly similar but with incremental improvements in armour and with the secondary battery moved back from turrets into traditional casemates to save weight. Pommern, named for the Prussian province of Pomerania, was laid down at the AG Vulcan yard in Stettin on 22 March 1904. She was to have been launched on 19 November 1905, but the harbour water level was too low and she went in on 2 December, the Oberpräsident of Pommern, Helmuth von Maltzahn, giving the speech.

She was 127.6 m long overall with a 22.2 m beam, displacing 14,218 metric tons at full load. Triple expansion engines rated at 17,453 indicated horsepower drew steam from twelve Schulz-Thornycroft boilers vented through three funnels, for a designed 18 knots. Her main battery was four 28 cm SK L/40 guns in two twin turrets, with fourteen 17 cm guns in casemates and twenty 8.8 cm guns against torpedo boats, and six submerged 45 cm torpedo tubes. Her belt was 240 mm of Krupp cemented armour through the citadel, her turrets 280 mm.

Her main guns were fitted at Kiel in July 1907, and she commissioned for trials on 6 August. On her speed run she made 19.26 knots, the fastest pre-dreadnought battleship in the German fleet, and she was the most fuel-efficient of her class as well, good for 5,830 nautical miles at 10 knots. It made little difference. HMS Dreadnought, with ten 12-inch guns, commissioned in December 1906 and rendered every capital ship in the German navy obsolete, the Deutschlands among them — outclassed in size, armour, firepower and speed before they were fairly worked up.

Assigned to II Battle Squadron of the High Seas Fleet in place of the battleship Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm, she was not fully ready for duty until 11 November 1907. Prince Heinrich had pressed for major Atlantic training cruises, arguing they would prepare the fleet for overseas operations and break the monotony of home waters, and the fleet sailed for the Atlantic in July 1908 and again in July 1909, being received by the Royal Navy at Spithead on the way home from the second.

Under VAdm Henning von Holtzendorff the fleet moved from Kiel to Wilhelmshaven on 1 April 1910 — the new Nassaus were too wide for the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal — and exercised in the Kattegat, in line with a strategy of drawing the Royal Navy into narrow waters. In 1911 Pommern and the fleet received British and American squadrons at Kiel, and a fleet review was held for an Austro-Hungarian delegation including Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In 1912 the Agadir Crisis kept the summer cruise inside the Baltic.

In 1914 she took part in the fiftieth-anniversary commemorations of the Second Schleswig War — at Swinemünde on 17 March for the Battle of Jasmund, and at Sonderburg on 2 May for Dybbøl. That July, about two weeks after the assassination at Sarajevo, she was with the fleet on its annual summer cruise to Norway when rising tension cut the cruise short and brought the ships back to Wilhelmshaven by the 29th. At midnight on 4 August the United Kingdom declared war.

The German command expected an immediate British attack and deployed II Squadron into the German Bight to defend the coast, stationing Pommern and her squadron mates at the mouth of the Elbe to support the vessels on patrol. When it became clear no such attack was coming, the Germans turned to operations designed to draw out and destroy a portion of the numerically superior Grand Fleet and force a decisive battle in the southern North Sea on something like equal terms.

Pommern and II Battle Squadron rejoined the fleet as battleship support for Hipper's battlecruisers during the raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby on 15–16 December 1914. On the evening of the 15th the German fleet came within 10 nautical miles of an isolated squadron of six British battleships, but skirmishing between the destroyer screens in the darkness convinced VAdm Friedrich von Ingenohl that the whole Grand Fleet lay ahead of him. Under the Kaiser's orders to avoid battle unless victory was certain, he broke off and turned for home.

Four more fruitless fleet advances followed, on 17–18 and 21–23 April 1915, on 17–18 May, and on 23–24 October. Each was an attempt to catch a detached British squadron, and each found nothing. On 24–25 April 1916 she joined the dreadnoughts supporting another raid on the English coast; a mine damaged the battlecruiser Seydlitz on the way out and she was detached home, while poor visibility reduced the operation to a brief bombardment of Yarmouth and Lowestoft before it was called off quickly enough to prevent the British fleet intervening.

Pommern sailed on 31 May 1916 with II Battle Squadron at the rear of the German line under KAdm Franz Mauve. During the Run to the North, Scheer ordered a pursuit of the British V Battle Squadron at top speed and the slower Deutschlands quickly fell behind. When the Grand Fleet arrived in strength and Scheer executed the Gefechtskehrtwendung, the battle about turn, the squadron could not conform, and the six old battleships ended up on the disengaged side of the line.

Later that evening, with I Scouting Group's battlecruisers hard pressed, Pommern and the other so-called "five-minute ships" came to their aid by steaming between the opposing battlecruiser squadrons. She could make out no target in the darkness. The British could: a 12-inch shell from Indomitable hit her and forced her to haul out of line, and Mauve ordered an eight-point turn away to disengage, which the British did not follow.

At 03:10 on the morning of 1 June the destroyer Onslaught put at least one torpedo, and possibly two, into her. One detonated a 17 cm ammunition magazine and the explosion broke the ship in half. The stern capsized and stayed afloat for at least twenty minutes with her propellers jutting into the air, and Hannover, next astern, had to haul out of line to avoid the wreck. Her entire crew of 839 officers and enlisted men died with her.

She was the only battleship of either fleet, pre-dreadnought or dreadnought, sunk at Jutland. Her loss, together with the evident vulnerability of the surviving pre-dreadnoughts, persuaded Scheer to leave them behind on the sortie of 18–19 August 1916. Her bow ornament, removed at the outbreak of war in July 1914 and so not aboard, is preserved at the Laboe Naval Memorial.