SMS Posen
SMS Posen was one of four battleships in the, the first dreadnoughts built for the German Imperial Navy. The ship was laid down at the Germaniawerft shipyard in Kiel on 11 June 1907, launched on 12 December 1908, and commissioned into the High Seas Fleet on 31 May 1910. She was equipped with a main battery of twelve guns in six twin turrets in an unusual hexagonal arrangement.
The ship served with her three sister ships for the majority of World War I. She saw extensive service in the North Sea, where she took part in several fleet sorties. These culminated in the Battle of Jutland on 31 May – 1 June 1916, where Posen was heavily engaged in night-fighting against British light forces. In the confusion, the ship accidentally rammed the light cruiser, which suffered serious damage and was scuttled later in the night.
The ship also conducted several deployments to the Baltic Sea against the Russian Navy. In the first of these, Posen supported a German naval assault in the Battle of the Gulf of Riga. The ship was sent back to the Baltic in 1918 to support the White Finns in the Finnish Civil War. At the end of the war, Posen remained in Germany while the majority of the fleet was interned in Scapa Flow. In 1919, following the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow, she was ceded to the British as a replacement for the ships that had been sunk. She was then sent to ship-breakers in the Netherlands and scrapped in 1922.
Design
Design work on the Nassau class began in late 1903 in the context of the Anglo-German naval arms race; at the time, battleships of foreign navies had begun to carry increasingly heavy secondary batteries, including Italian and American ships with guns and British ships with guns, outclassing the previous German battleships of the with their secondaries. German designers initially considered ships equipped with secondary guns, but erroneous reports in early 1904 that the British s would be equipped with a secondary battery of guns prompted them to consider an even more powerful ship armed with an all-big-gun armament consisting of eight guns. Over the next two years, the design was refined into a larger vessel with twelve of the guns, by which time Britain had launched the all-big-gun battleship.Characteristics
Posen was long, wide, and had a draft of. She displaced with a standard load, and fully laden. She had a flush deck and a ram bow, a common feature for warships of the period. Posen had a fairly small superstructure, consisting primarily of forward and aft conning towers. She was fitted with a pair of pole masts for signaling and observation purposes. The ship had a crew of 40 officers and 968 enlisted men.Posen retained 3-shaft triple expansion engines instead of the more advanced turbine engines. Steam was provided to the engines by twelve coal-fired water-tube boilers, which were vented through two funnels. Her propulsion system was rated at and provided a top speed of. She had a cruising radius of at a speed of.
Posen carried a main battery of twelve SK L/45 guns in six gun turrets arranged in an unusual hexagonal configuration. One was placed forward, another toward the stern, and the remaining four were placed on the wings, two per broadside. Her secondary armament consisted of twelve SK L/45 guns, mounted in casemates located amidships. Close-range defense against torpedo boats was provided by a tertiary battery of sixteen SK L/45 guns, which were also mounted in casemates. Later in her career, two of the 8.8 cm guns were replaced with high-angle Flak mountings of the same caliber for defense against aircraft. The ship was also armed with six submerged torpedo tubes. One tube was mounted in the bow, another in the stern, and two on each broadside, on either ends of the torpedo bulkhead.
The ship's hull was protected by heavy armor plate consisting of Krupp cemented steel. The belt armor along the sides of the hull was thick in the central portion, tapering down to at the bow. The belt was reinforced by an armored deck that angled downward at the sides to connect to the bottom edge of the belt. The deck was on the flat portion, while the sloped sides increased in thickness to. Posens main battery turrets had 28 cm of Krupp steel on their faces. Her forward conning tower had of armor plate on the sides, while the aft tower received only on the sides.
Service history
Posen was ordered under the provisional name Ersatz Baden, as a replacement for the, one of the elderly s. She was laid down on 11 June 1907 at the Germaniawerft shipyard in Kiel. As with her sister, construction proceeded under absolute secrecy; detachments of soldiers guarded the shipyard and also guarded contractors that supplied building materials, such as Krupp. The ship was launched a year and a half later, on 12 December 1908. Wilhelm August Hans von Waldow-Reitzenstein, the president of the ship's namesake province gave a speech at her launching, and Posen was christened by Johanna von Radolin, the wife of Hugo Fürst von Radolin, a German diplomat who hailed from Posen. Initial trials were conducted through April 1910, followed by final fitting-out in May. The ship was commissioned into the fleet on 31 May, under the command of Kapitän zur See Otto Back. Sea trials were conducted afterward and completed by 27 August. In total, her construction cost the German government 36,920,000 marks.After completing her trials in August 1910, Posen left Kiel for Wilhelmshaven, where she arrived on 7 September. As the German Imperial Navy had chronic shortages of trained sailors, many of the crew were then assigned to other ships. These crewmembers were replaced with personnel from the old pre-dreadnought battleship, which was decommissioned on 20 September. After their commissioning, all four Nassau-class ships served as a unit, II Division of I Battle Squadron, with Posen as the divisional flagship. The ships participated in a training cruise in the Baltic Sea late in 1910.
Over the next four years, Posen participated in several training exercises with the rest of the fleet before the outbreak of war. In 1911, Konteradmiral Karl Zimmermann hoisted his flag aboard Posen. In March that year, the fleet conducted exercises in the Skagerrak and Kattegat, and further exercises were held in May. Posen and the rest of the fleet received British and American naval squadrons at Kiel in June and July, after which the fleet took its annual summer cruise to Norway. The year's autumn maneuvers were confined to the Baltic and the Kattegat. Another fleet review was held afterward, during the exercises for a visiting Austro-Hungarian delegation that included Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Admiral Rudolf Montecuccoli.
The next year followed a similar pattern until mid-1912, when the summer cruise was confined to the Baltic due to the Agadir Crisis; the naval command sought to avoid exposing the fleet during the period of heightened tension with Britain and France. The September exercises were conducted off Helgoland in the North Sea; the following month, KzS Richard Lange relieved Back as the ship's commander. Another winter cruise into the Baltic followed at the end of the year. The training program for 1913 proceeded in much the same pattern as in previous years. The training schedule returned to normal for 1913 and 1914, and the summer cruises again went to Norway. For the 1914 cruise, the fleet departed for Norwegian waters on 14 July, some two weeks after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The probability of war cut the cruise short; Posen and the rest of the fleet were back in Wilhelmshaven by 29 July.
World War I
At midnight on 4 August, the United Kingdom declared war on Germany. Posen and the rest of the fleet conducted several advances into the North Sea to support Rear Admiral Franz von Hipper's I Scouting Group battlecruisers. The battlecruisers raided British coastal towns in an attempt to lure out portions of the Grand Fleet where they could be destroyed by the High Seas Fleet. The first such operation was the raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby on 15–16 December 1914. On the evening of 15 December, the German battle fleet of 12 dreadnoughts—including Posen and her three sisters—and eight pre-dreadnoughts came to within of an isolated squadron of six British battleships. Skirmishes between the rival destroyer screens in the darkness convinced the German fleet commander, Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl, that he was faced with the Grand Fleet, now deployed in its battle formation. Under orders from Kaiser Wilhelm II to avoid risking the fleet unnecessarily, Ingenohl broke off the engagement and turned the battlefleet back toward Germany.Posen next took part in the fleet advance on 24 January 1915 to support I Scouting Group after it had been ambushed by the British 1st and 2nd Battlecruiser Squadrons during the Battle of Dogger Bank, though she again saw no action, as the battle had ended before the High Seas Fleet arrived late in the afternoon. Following the loss of the armored cruiser at the Battle of Dogger Bank, the Kaiser removed Ingenohl from his post on 2 February. Admiral Hugo von Pohl replaced him as commander of the fleet. Pohl conducted a series of fleet advances in 1915 in which Posen took part; in the first one on 29–30 March, the fleet steamed out to the north of Terschelling and return without incident. Another followed on 17–18 April, where the fleet covered a mining operation by II Scouting Group. Three days later, on 21–22 April, the High Seas Fleet advanced towards the Dogger Bank, though again failed to meet any British forces. In mid-May, Posen entered the shipyard for periodic maintenance, which was completed in time for the next fleet operation. The fleet next went to sea on 29–30 May, advancing as far as Schiermonnikoog before being forced to turn back by inclement weather. On 10 August, the fleet steamed to the north of Helgoland to cover the return of the auxiliary cruiser.