SMS Schlesien

Schlesien was laid down at the Schichau-Werke in Danzig on 19 November 1904, one of the last two Deutschland-class pre-dreadnoughts ordered under Tirpitz's Second Naval Law. Launched on 28 May 1906 and christened for the province of Silesia by Duchess Mathilde of Pless, she was commissioned on 5 May 1908. Her class was an incremental improvement on the Braunschweigs — a little better armoured, the secondary guns moved back from turrets into traditional casemates to save weight. Seven months before her launch, HMS Dreadnought was commissioned with ten 12-inch guns and made every capital ship in the German navy obsolete, hers included.

She was 127.6 metres long and displaced 14,218 metric tons at full load. Three triple-expansion engines and twelve coal-fired water-tube boilers produced 18,664 indicated horsepower for a top speed of 18.5 knots and 4,770 nautical miles at 10 knots. Her main battery was four 28 cm SK L/40 guns in two twin turrets fore and aft, with fourteen 17 cm guns in casemates, twenty 8.8 cm guns against torpedo boats, and six submerged 45 cm torpedo tubes. Her belt was 240 mm at the citadel, her deck 40 mm, her turret sides 280 mm.

Her first years were peacetime routine: I Battle Squadron, an Atlantic cruise received by the Royal Navy at Spithead, Kattegat exercises under Admiral von Holtzendorff, and reviews for visiting British, American and Austro-Hungarian squadrons. She moved to II Battle Squadron on 3 November 1911 and back to Kiel with her sisters. The 1914 summer cruise to Norway began on 14 July and was cut short after two weeks by the July Crisis.

Schlesien guarded the German Bight at the outbreak of war, then supported the battlecruisers that bombarded Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby on 15–16 December 1914 — an operation in which the German fleet came within ten nautical miles of an isolated squadron of six British battleships before Admiral von Ingenohl, reading his destroyer screen's skirmishes as contact with the whole Grand Fleet, turned for home. Fleet advances in April, May and October 1915 achieved nothing. In March 1916 she was reduced to serving as a target for U-boat practice.

At Jutland on 31 May 1916 she was the second ship of IV Division, II Battle Squadron under Rear Admiral Franz Mauve, second from last in the German line with only her sister Schleswig-Holstein astern. During the Run to the North the Deutschlands simply could not keep up with the dreadnoughts and fell behind, and when Scheer executed the Gefechtskehrtwendung — the simultaneous 180-degree turn of every ship in the line — Mauve's squadron ended up on the disengaged side. Their slowness was a strategic liability: had Scheer turned straight for home, he would have had to abandon them.

Later that day the pre-dreadnoughts earned their nickname. With I Scouting Group's battlecruisers hard pressed, the 'five-minute ships' steamed between the opposing battlecruiser squadrons to draw fire. In the darkness they could barely make out a target and their own shooting was ineffective; the British scored several hits on the German ships, and a near miss from a large-calibre gun sprayed splinters across Schlesien's deck, killing one man and wounding another. Mauve turned eight points south and the British did not pursue. That night she and Schleswig-Holstein fell in behind the battered Von der Tann and Derfflinger and took British destroyer attacks as the fleet punched through to Horns Reef by 04:00 on 1 June.

Jutland settled the question of what pre-dreadnoughts were worth in a fleet action, and they were left behind when the High Seas Fleet next sortied on 18 August. Schlesien went back to picket duty at the mouth of the Elbe, served as a U-boat target and a Danish Straits guard ship and icebreaker, and on 27 July 1917 was withdrawn to train engine-room personnel. Converted for cadet training in 1918 with her main and secondary guns stripped out for use ashore, she was at Kiel during the mutiny of November 1918 and left port on the 5th still flying the Imperial flag after most of the harbour had hoisted the red one.

Article 181 of the Treaty of Versailles let the new Reichsmarine keep eight obsolete battleships for coastal defence, and Schlesien was one. She sat in reserve at first, still carrying only the 10.5 cm and 8.8 cm guns of her cadet-ship conversion. When Braunschweig and Hannover wore out in the mid-1920s and the Deutschland-class replacements were still years away, the navy rearmed and modernised her in 1926–27: her 28 cm guns went back in, 15 cm guns replaced the old 17 cm in the casemates, the fore funnel was removed and its boilers ducted into an enlarged one, and a heavy pole mast went up.

From 1 March 1927 she served as flagship of the Commander of Naval Forces in the North Sea, based at Wilhelmshaven, and President Hindenburg reviewed the fleet from her in May and again that September. There were Atlantic cruises in 1928 and 1929, a solo training cruise to the Mediterranean in 1930 during which her senior officers met Victor Emmanuel III at Messina, Norway in 1931 and Iceland in 1933. Kapitän zur See Wilhelm Canaris, later head of the Abwehr, commanded her for two years from September 1932.

The heavy cruiser Deutschland took over as flagship on 10 December 1933, and Schlesien became a cadet training ship again in 1935 — more anti-aircraft guns, new and more efficient boilers, and the space they saved turned into cadet berths and an instruction room, her complement recast as 29 officers, 559 sailors and 214 cadets. She took cadets to Cape Verde, then on a tour of North, Central and South America in 1936–37, and on further cruises to 1939. A call at Cork produced a small international incident when James Hickey declined to greet the Germans in protest at the German press's treatment of the recently dead Pope Pius XI.

The Second World War found her still a training ship. From 21 to 27 September 1939 she bombarded Polish artillery positions around Hel and Jastarnia, after which six of her 15 cm guns were taken out to arm the raider Pinguin. She broke ice in the Baltic to let U-boats operate from January to March 1940, escorted minesweepers in the Little Belt during Operation Weserübung in April, and was deactivated in August for want of crew. Reactivated in April 1941, she and Schleswig-Holstein covered the minelayers sealing the Baltic against a Soviet breakout that never came.

Fuel shortages kept her to limited Baltic training through 1943 and 1944 while her anti-aircraft battery was rebuilt repeatedly — twin 37 mm mounts beside the bridge in 1943, then two 40 mm and twenty 20 mm guns in early 1944, then four heavy 10.5 cm guns replacing the old 8.8s atop the aft superstructure and two more abreast the bridge, along with FuMO-25 search radar and a FuMB-6 detection set on the foremast.

Her last weeks were spent on the collapsing eastern Baltic coast. She moved from Danzig to Gotenhafen and on to Sopot between 15 and 21 March 1945 giving gunfire support, then carried more than 1,000 wounded soldiers from Sopot to Swinemünde, restocked her ammunition, and stayed to shell the advancing Soviet 2nd Shock Army. On 2 May she was ordered to protect the Peenebrücke bridge linking Wolgast to the island of Usedom.

Early on 3 May, steaming south of Greifswalder Oie, she struck a British air-dropped mine; two men were killed and the flooding was serious. The destroyer Z39 towed her back to Swinemünde, and there her crew scuttled her in shallow water so that she could not be sunk by air attack and capsize — superstructure and main battery still standing above the surface, her anti-aircraft guns defending the city through the last days of the war. An East German firm demolished and scrapped the wreck in place between 1949 and 1956, and pieces of her were still visible in 1970.