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German super-dreadnought battleship Bayern, completed June 1916. Like the contemporary Queen Elizabeths, Baden and Bayern mounted eight 38-cm (15-in) guns in centerline twin turrets. They compared very favorably with their British competitors. Extremely well-protected and well-compartmented hulls are a good place to start comparing. Gunnery was always a German strong point, and the 15"/45 SK L/45 guns and turret machinery were a credit to Germany's precision engineering. Seen above in a shot taken during trials, Bayern and her sister were the last dreadnought battleships to join the Kaiser's fleet in WWI, and the only 15"-gunned vessels in the German Navy prior to the Bismarck and Tirpitz of 1939. Do the math: two German super-dreads versus ten British (plus four British 15-inch battlecruisers and seven more a-building): Despite a creditable effort, Germany had lost the naval arms race. The two remaining members of the class, having been laid down in 1914, were partially completed at war's end; both had been launched in 1916-17. They were to have been called Sachsen and Württemberg.
Specifications for the Bayern class:
Dimensions: 590'7" OA x 98'5" x 30'10" Displacement: 32,200 tons deep laden. Armament: (8) 15"/45 (4×2); (16) 5.9"/45 in single mounts; and (10) 3.5" guns; (4) 24mm AA; (5) 24" torpedo tubes (610 mm). Armor: Krupp type. Belt: 15.75"/4.7"; turrets: 15.75"/3.94"; conning tower: 15.75"; deck: 4"/1.18" Fuel capacity: 1,000 tons of coal, 200 tons of oil. Maximum: 4,800 tons of coal. Propulsion: 14 coal-fired Schulz-Thornycroft boilers; (3) geared turbines developing 55,967 SHP, triple screw. Speed: 22 kts. Tactical radius: 5,000 nm @ 12 kts. Crew: 1,187 - 1,271.
Metric specifications:
Dimensions: 180m x 30m x 9.39m Displacement: 32,200 tons deep laden. Armament: (8) 38 cm/45 (4x2); (16) 15 cm/45 in single mounts; (10) 88 mm guns in single mounts; (5) 61 cm torpedo tubes. Armor: Krupp type. Belt: 350/120 mm; turrets: 350/100 mm; conning tower: 400 mm; deck: 102/30 mm. Fuel capacity: 1,000 tons of coal, 200 tons of oil. Maximum: 4,800 tons of coal. Propulsion: 14 coal-fired Schulz-Thornycroft boilers; (3) geared turbines developing 41,734.6 kW, triple screw. Speed: 41 km/hr. Tactical radius: 9,300 km @ 22 km/hr. Crew: 1,187 - 1,271.
At right, the Baden on trials. Accepted into the High Seas Fleet in Oct. 1916, she was the only one of her class to see significant combat. After Jutland, there were only a few sorties of the High Seas Fleet against Britain. However, in late 1917, Germany put pressure on Russia through significant offensives by land and sea. These lightning attacks forced the hapless revolutionaries in Petersburg to sue for peace. Part of the eastern offensive was a campaign capturing the Gulf of Riga in present-day Latvia. Baden was part of this Baltic offensive in Oct. 1917, but suffered significant mine damage. Badly flooded, the ship had to be towed from the scene to Kiel dockyard for repairs, in a touch-and-go operation that took 19 days.
These ships represented the acme of German battleship design in WWI. They compared well to the British "R class," their closest contemporaries. Compared to the British ships, they had both pluses and minuses. Their engineeering plants contained a pioneering first, geared turbines, allowing greater efficiency: it allowed the turbines to spin at their most efficient speed and the screws to spin at theirs, propellers requiring a much lower speed since the 1600 rpm and up produced by a turbine would lash the water into foam and not allow the propeller blades to find a "grip" to push the ship forward -- a phenomenon known as cavitation, which had bedeviled turbine-driven ships since the first experiments of Charles Parsons in the 1890s. By solving this problem, turbine gearing became the wave of the future; by WWII, virtually all new naval construction incorporated this feature.
However, the British Queen Elizabeths and "R" class ships had made the switch to oil fuel. The Bayern class ships relied on coal -- abundantly available in German home and occupied territories. Most navies abandoned coal within ten years of the end of WWI, swapping the back-breaking and filthy labor of coaling ship and stoking furnaces for the comparative ease of oozing oil. The Bayerns were slightly shorter than their British counterparts and a full 2 knots slower (though the British ships never reached their design speed of 25 kts, being instead reliable 23-knotters with occasional surges to 24½). The German ships fired a smaller 15" shell which achieved greater muzzle velocity, but proved less accurate at extreme range. These were still enormously powerful weapons, their projectiles nearly twice the size of the 11" ordnance with which Germany began he War. As with all German dreadnoughts, the watertight subdivision of the Baden class made these vessels extremely difficult to sink, as shown by the Baden's odyssey described above. Aside from these fine points of difference, the German and British super-dreadnoughts were quite evenly matched. Of course, with the blockade and the standing orders to remain in port, neither German ship could boast a fully trained, seasoned crew to equal the British. It is uncertain what the outcome of a clash between British and German 15-inch ships would have been.
When the U.S. declared war on Germany in April 1917 -- an act the Kaiser invited by proclaiming unrestricted submarine warfare earlier that year -- it tilted the suface-ship balance even further in favor of the Allies. Baden and Bayern were part of the fleet surrendered to the British at war's end, and ended up scuttled by their own crews, two of the 15 German dreadnoughts sunk in the cold waters of Scapa Flow on June 21, 1919. A handful of these vessels were salvaged more than ten years later; Bayern was one of these, patched up by divers and then refloated bottom side up (below). Her triple screws and twin rudders -- the standard arrangement in the German fleet, carried over into the Kriegsmarine's WWII capital ships -- lay obscenely exposed while her hull was being cut away.
Although they garnered little glory and hsd little effect on the outcome of the First World War, these ships' influence resonated into the Second. When the time came for Germany to build full-scale battleships again, the Kriegsmarine's architects borrowed heavily from the Bayern class in developing the Bismarck and Tirpitz, while adding important technologies that had developed since 1918, such as radar and oil fuel.
Bayern moves out of the fitting-out berth under her own power, her decks black with spectators. It must have seemed to some that here was the advanced weapon that would win the war for Germany. Enlarge | |
Aerial view of Bayern soon after commissioning in 1916. She must have seemed an invincible warship, her huge bulk and gigantic guns dwarfing all else at Wilhelsmhaven. | |
Aerial view of Baden at target practice reveals details of the ship's idiosyncratic superstructure. Details such as the small rangefinder on C turret, the casemate secondary gun mountings, the vast belted hull with nary a scuttle showing, and the arrangement of bridge and conn, all are evident for modeler and aficionado alike. Enlarge | |
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Relevant Weblinks:
- The Ships' 38 cm/45 Cal. SK L/45 Guns
- Comparison With the British 15"/42 Mk. I Guns
- German Dreadnoughts List
- The Scuttling of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow - 6/21/1919
- Visit British Dreadnoughts List
- Return to British Battlecruisers List
- Germany's Spending on the Naval Arms Race
- Lay in a Course for Global Site Nav
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