Name: Scharnhorst
Namesake: Gerhard von Scharnhorst
Ordered: 1904
Laid down: January 1905
Launched: 22 March 1906
Commissioned: 24 October 1907
Fate: Sunk in action, First Battle of the Falkland Islands, 8 December 1914
General characteristics
Class and type: Scharnhorst class armored cruiser
Displacement: 12,781 tons
Length: 144.6 meters (474.7 ft) overall
143.8 meters (472 ft) waterline
Beam: 21.6 meters (71 ft)
Draft: 8.4 meters (27 feet 6 inches)
Propulsion: 18 Schulz Thornycroft Boilers 3 shaft Triple expansion engines
27,759 ihp (trials)
Speed: 22.7 knots (42 km/h)
Complement: 764
Armament: 8 × 21 cm (8.2 in) (2 × 2, 4 × 1)
6 × 15 cm (5.9 in) (6 × 1)
18 × 88 mm/35 cal (3.45 in)(18 × 1)
4 × 450 mm (17.7 in) torpedo tubes
SMS Scharnhorst was an 11,616 ton armored cruiser of the Imperial German Navy, built at the Blohm & Voss Shipyard in Hamburg, Germany. She was named after the Prussian reformer general Gerhard von Scharnhorst and commissioned on 24 October 1907.
In one of her first voyages in 1909, she ran aground, and took several months to repair. When the First World War broke out, she was Admiral Maximilian von Spee's flagship in the German East Asian Cruiser Squadron. This squadron consisted of Scharnhorst, her sister ship Gneisenau, and the light cruisers Dresden, Emden, Nürnberg, and Leipzig. The squadron split with Emden, which broke off to range the Indian Ocean, engaging in attacks on enemy commercial and troop transports with great success. The remainder of the squadron crossed the Pacific and on 1 November 1914, engaged and sank the two British cruisers Good Hope and Monmouth at the Battle of Coronel, off the coast of Chile.
On 8 December 1914, the five cruisers of the squadron attempted to attack Stanley in the Falkland Islands with the intention of obtaining coal. They were unaware of the presence of a force under Vice Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee, including two British battlecruisers HMS Invincible and HMS Inflexible, and several light cruisers, which had arrived only the previous day. In the ensuing Battle of the Falkland Islands, Scharnhorst was lost with her entire crew, together with all of her squadron except the Dresden, which was sunk 3 months later off Valparaíso, Chile.
References
Jane's Fighting Ships of World War I (Jane's Publishing, London, 1919)
Robert Gardiner, ed., Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships 1860-1905 (Conway Maritime Press, London, 1979)
Hanson W. Baldwin, World War I: An Outline History (Harper and Row, New York, 1962)
Robert K. Massie, Castles Of Steel (Ballantine Books, 2003)
Falkland Is SG1005,6. SG594