The 9,100-ton armored cruiser Yorck (1905) exemplified the lean hauteur of the type. Bundesarchiv
ACHTUNG! |
|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Imperial German Navy carried its design pattern down to the second flight of warships and addressed their special design challenges with a series of progressively more ambitious designs. There is a recognizable blood line that runs through these ships, and a clear progression from relatively clumsy effort to an impressively potent solution. In times when the German navy rolled out five battleships every few years, it proceeded with one armored cruiser every few years until their shipwrights had got the hang of producing successful ships of this type.
By the time this happened with the 12,500-ton Scharnhorst class in 1907 (left), Britain had advanced to the first dreadnought battlecruisers, making the Scharnhorsts instantaneously obsolete. However, in colonial warfare they remained potent warships, challenging and besting a British cruiser squadron with two older armored cruisers in it at the Battle of Coronel (Nov. 1914). How over-matched they were by the much faster battlecruisers was marked in a payback defeat a month later at the Falkland Islands.
While nearly all the ships on these pages were sunk in war, this does not mean the German armored cruisers were tremendously inferior to their Royal Navy counterparts at the time they were built. Aside from the marked inferiority in numbers and their considerably different armament schemes, these were good warships of their type, and quite survivable, as their endurance under terrible punishment at the Falklands and the Dogger Bank proved. They were simply leapfrogged by developments in design, rendered obsolete overnight. The same could be said for the British armored cruisers -- large, heavily armed ships, too slow and too thinly protected to run with the battlecruisers. The armored cruiser was vulnerable to subs, mines, 11" and 12" shell. Many ships of this type litter the floor of the Seven Seas to this day.
Use our handy nav panel above to choose the armored cruiser of your liking.
