Despite the very tight restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, over the years from 1926 to 1943, the German Navy developed its new naval force. The ambition brings into being the so-called “Pocket Battleships”, a warship class that succeeded in bypassing international naval treaties to give Germany its naval power back.
The German Imperial Navy had sought a struggle with the long-established supremacy of the Royal Navy under Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz immediately prior to World War 1. This attempt to outdo the British Navy was, after all, the personal initiative of a man – Kaiser Wilhelm II – who was one of the last building blocks in the web of alliances which was to culminate in the First World War. Despite the scale of the plans, the German High Seas Fleet remained in practice underutilized, and the Battle of Jutland became its most noteworthy encounter. Then, after the war, the Germans were made to give up their fleet post. The fleet was scuttled on 21 June 1919 by order of the German Admiral Ludwig von Reuter to prevent the British from seizing it: a melancholy conclusion to the saga of the High Seas Fleet.
Disregard for the Versailles Treaty restrictions began under the Weimar Republic, well before the Nazis came to power, as Germany began to re-militarize. The Deutschland-class cruisers, commissioned between 1929 and 1936:. While smaller, they were heavily armored and armed somewhat akin to larger battleships. They had a displacement varying between 10,600 to 12,340 tonnes – much greater than the 10,000 tonnage maximum set by the Washington Treaty – however, they utilized leavening techniques that included welding and shaping hulls for diesel-centric propulsion.
However, the cruisers’ armament marked a point of distinctiveness within the class. Each carried an armament of six 11-inch guns, representative of more of a battleship caliber—however, hence, British naval observers labeled the class as “Pocket Battleships”. Essentially, what this class combined was the speed of a cruiser—up to 28 knots—with the capital ship firepower which made them very dangerous commerce raiders.
The two pocket battleships, Deutschland and Admiral Scheer, saw their first actual fighting during the Spanish Civil War. When Spain’s Republicans bombed the Deutschland with a plane and alarmed him, Hitler decided to have Admiral Scheer bombard the port of Almería. That was already their operational history; their real test was World War II.
With the coming of war, all three pocket battleships—Deutschland (later renamed Lützow), Admiral Scheer, and Admiral Graf Spee—were employed as commerce raiders. In 1940, Lützow took part in a German invasion of Norway, and it was there that she damaged a British submarine. The Lutzow went on to carry out raids on merchant shipping and convoys of the Allies even after repair, eventually serving as a gun battery against the Soviet advance.
The most successful surface raider, however, was Admiral Scheer, with 113,223 GRT sunk during a 161-day cruise. She afterward served as a training ship and finally supported shore operations against the Soviets. Struck by mobile bombs during a British air raid on Kiel in April 1945, she capsized in port; her wreck is now buried near the city’s current port facilities.
The most famous of these pocket battleships was the Admiral Graf Spee, which operated in the South Atlantic at the beginning of the war. While on commerce raiding, she sank nine ships totaling 50,089 GRT from September to December 1939. This led the British and French navies to dispatch a task force, which produced the first naval battle of World War II, the Battle of the River Plate on 13 December 1939. It inflicted heavy damage on the British ships, but it itself received damage and was forced to retire to the port of Montevideo. Unable to break out to sea and refuse to become a prisoner, Captain Hans Wilhelm Langsdorff ordered the ship to be scuttled on 17 December 1939 and committed suicide three days later in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
It was the legacy of these pocket battleships that went on to stand for Germany’s ingenuity at sea and how far it would go in flouting the post-World War I restrictions. Taken together, these ships would be an important not decisive part in the early naval battles over the course of World War II and now represent one of the more interesting chapters in naval history.