Graf spee and Gneisenau

I heard that you can use cellu-caly to form the water.

The Battlecruiser was intended to be a fast raider. I tis less heavily armored than a Battleship. It combines speed and firepower to hit hard and fast and then get out. A Battlecruiser is faster than a Battleship. A battleship is designed to slug it out with other Battleships. It is heavily armored and has greater firepowere but generally slower. The Iowa and North Carolina class battleships were desinged to keep up with Carrier task force while still retaining armor and firepower.

David

the graf spee is a pocket battleship latter reclassified somewhat as a heavy cruiser. the gneisenau is a battle cruiser designed to take on heavy cruisers & down.

Graf spee is definatly a battleship, it has about 30 inviduale guns, including its manin arsenal two three barrel canons (below)

Some anti-aircraft guns I beleive.

And its 8 single barrel canons, which also help me idetify him.

Lanche in 1936, it was one of the first battleship to have fought two days after the war, unfortunatly it was scuttel by its own captain off the coast of montevideo, many of its equipement has been remove by axies and allies, some are on dispaly.

What I don't get it is that is sank in shalow water (like seen above) but today its mostly been destroy and is in deep water, how?

Interestingly enough, the British classified the Graf Spee as a Pocket Battleship (her main guns are only 11inch). 

About a year after the Graf Spee was lost, all of her sister ships were reclassified as Heavy Cruisers. 

Pocket battleship? whats that, is it a small class battleship?

One of my favorite and best battlecruiser made is Revell Gneisenau, a real german beauty.

More heavily arme than the Graf spee, but its long thin body made it fast, then it must be a battlecruiser. Unfortunatly is was sunk on purpose as blockship in 1945, almost survive the war.

Basically yes, The Graf Spee had large calibre guns on a 12000 tons standard displacement. Calling her a Battleship because of the size of the guns was a bit generous. Most Battleships carried guns larger.& had done since before the First World War. Something had to be sacrificed to get 6 11" guns onto a ship this small & a lot of it came from armour, or a distinct lack of. She only had a belt 80mm thick, which in naval gunfire terms, left her very vulnerable.

Look at the damage that the British Cruisers inflicted on her at the Battle of the River Plate. Two were 6" cruisers & 1 was an 8" cruiser. She also wasn't the quickest ship in the world at 28 knots. At least 2 knots slower than a regular cruiser & about all she could outrun were the Royal Navy First World War vintage Battleships.

Had her or any of her sisters run into one of the British Battlecruisers or the KGV's, it would have been a very one sided fight. Too slow to run away, heavilly outgunned & armour that could be easily penetrated.

When they sunk the Gneisenau as a blockship in 1945, she was already pretty much a wreck. RAF bombers had caught her in dock in 1942 & the fire that resulted burned out a large part of the ship. Do agree though that the Scarnhost/Gneisenau were beautiful ships.

 

The Graf Spee, Admiral Scheer and Deutschland were designated "Panzerschiff" by the Germans.  the British referred to them as "Pocket Battleships" in reference to their relatively diminutive size (they could fit in your pocket).  After the Graf Spee was scuttled at Montevideo, when it was realized that this class of warship was far from invincible, Hitler ordered the Deutschland renamed (to Lutzow), so that no ship named after the nation of Germany could ever be sunk.

They were intended to be commerce raiders - able to outgun or outrun any merchant ship, escort, or "Q-ship" (heavily-armed ship disguised as a cargo ship) they were likely to encounter. 

Graf Spee was one of those construction anomolies that became hard to categorize in the WW2 era. If compared to the pre-dreadnought battleships of the late 1890s and early 20th century he was a formidable opponent. He and his classmates could also have outrun if not outfought the early dreadnoughts. There were also many second class or coastal battleships still in service in the years between the world wars, through WW2. Among others, the Swedes and Finns employed them. They were armed similarly to the Graf Spee but were much slower. The UK used monitors during WW2 for coastal bombardment, this was a slow, ungainly class of barge-like ships with heavy guns. So it can be quite confusing to categorize many of the ships of the period. The USN did its own share of this with the Alaska class of "large cruisers" as they were categorized. Many consider this class to be America's only completed battlecruisers. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were really under gunned battleships similar in protection and armament to the French Dunkerque and Strasbourg or some of the older Italian ships. As much as we all like to be able to come up with nice little niches that fit our preconceptions of what ships should be or fit our national prejudices of what they should be or look like it is far more productive to look at the intended mission of the vessel in question. Graf Spee was clearly a commerce raider never inteded to slug it out with any other large naval vessel. He was supposed to hit merchant ships and run away causing the target navy to expend slim resources protecting commerce. Ships of this type could cause trouble and expense far out of proportion to their actual value in combat. This is the usual strategy of a country with a small navy unable to take on the larger navy of its opponents.

What about some Wow! you guys really know your ship

What about battles that the bad boy fought in?

if the bad boy is the graf spee then the only real battle besides sinking a number of merchant ships was "the battle of the river plate". she was just a 1 "battle" ship.

Graf Spee was called a pocket battleship out of courtesy at first and from then onwards by tradition.   But there is no way she could be confused for any sort of real battleship at all.   If we cut through all the hype and all the attempts at obscuring basic truths with contrived definitions, then we find that we are left with the following:  a battleship is a ship that is fit to fight a sustained gunnery battle with other contempoary battleships.    As such a battleship must have armor that affords very serious degrees of protection from the big guns of other contemporary battelships, and she must also have guns heavy enough to afford a real chance of penetrating the armored citadal of other contempoary battleships.    At battle ranges the main guns of any other contemporary battleship can pierce the thickest of Graf Spee's armor like it wasn't there.     At likely battle ranges Graf Spee 11" guns stands a poor chance of penetratng the citadal armor of any contemporary battleships.     If she lingers in the presence of any enemy battleship, the Graf Spee is likely to become a chunky oil slick in very little time without having done much to her opponent in return.   She was no battleship.   Treating her like any sort of battleship is a sick joke on her crew.  

Gneisenau was called a battlecruiser also by tradition.  But she did not fit the definition of the classical battlecruiser, which was a large, battleship sized warship that retains battleship fire power, but achieves speed considerably in excess of most contempoary battleships by trading armor for engine power.    Gneisenau did not trade armor for engine power.   She had good engine power, making her marginally faster than most, but not all, contemporary battleships.   But she also had good armor, close to being the equal of half of the contempoary battleships.

She was not quite fully battleship sized, but she was not far off either.    With some charity, she could be said to possess minimal battleship firepower.   Her guns stands a modest chance of penetrating the citadal of some contemporary battleships on the short side of normal battle range.    So Gneisenau does seem to fit the concept of a pocket battleship - a smallish battleship - but a real battleship - very well indeed.    

Most importantly, Gneisenau can do what is expected of a battleship: she could last a long time in a gunnery battle against most contemporay battleships.   Her sister Scharnhorst proved that.

 

 

 

Graf Spee does not fit neatly into the catagories used by other major navies of the time.    But if you have to use a more meaningful term to specify exactly what sort of ship the Graf Spee is, then she is far closer to being a cruiser than anything else.   For get about speed.   That's a secondary trait to enable cruisers to do its cruiserly duties.    Forget about it's 11" guns.   The idea that cruisers should have 8" guns or less are just a arbitrary notion concocted to give Washington treaty some measurable standards to enforce.     What is a cruiser really?

A cruiser is a ship designed to cruise - to primarily operate independently for prolonged period of time as a scout, a commerce raider, or a trade route guardian, and to engage in gunnery battles mainly to fulfill these duties.    And a independent commerce raider is what Graf Spee was, and thus Graf Spee was a cruiser.   She may have tried to come at fullfilling a cruiser's duty using a different combination of characteristics than most cruisers of her era.   But she was still a ship intended to do cruiserly things.    So she was a cruiser.

   

What were battles than Gneisenau? surly a battleship that survive most of the war was in one, maybe it just ran away before it even started,

Just as 8" vs. 11" guns was an 'arbitrary notion', so is the idea of trying to fit the Graf Spee into a preconceived group of ship categories - battleship or cruiser, to be precise.  The Graf Spee class (actually the Deutschland class, but the original topic was the Graf Spee) was specifically categorized by Germany as Panzerschiffe - or, in English, Armored Ships.  This was, to the Germans, a specific class of warship.  The next highest class after that was Schlachtschiff, or Battle Ships.  This, to the Germans, included what the British would have called battlecruisers and battleships.  The term "Pocket Battleship" was spun by the Royal Navy - presumably to belittle the prowess or worth of the ships in the eye of the public.  The Germans never considered the Graf Spee a battleship in any sense of the word.  Dreadnought52, in their post above, stated quite succinctly the intent of the Graf Spee class.

As for battles fought by the Gnesienau, she spent a considerable amount of time in drydock from 1940-42, as she tended to have a knack for finding mines.  Along with Scharnhorst, she sank the HMS Glorious in 1940 during the British evacuation of Norway, along with her 2 destroyer escorts.  She also engaged in a few merchant raiding sorties.  She also made the Channel Run from Brest to Kiel, but in early 1942 she was hit in a bombing raid by the RAF and her entire bow section was blown off when a magazine was penetrated by a bomb.  The Germans planned on repairing her and replacing her main battery with 15" guns, but they never got a chance, as the Kriegsmarine fell into disfavor with Hitler after they repeatedly failed to even engage the Royal Navy in a significant action.  Her 11" main turrets were removed and used for coastal defense.

 

Calling Graf Spee an armored ship (Panzer Schiff) is also somewhat misleading.   Every cruiser of her size had some armor.   To call a ship a panzer schiff implies that somehow armor forms a singular trait of this class of ships.    If fact that could not be further from the truth.   Graf Spee had some armor, but not a whole lot of it.    About half of the world's 8" heavy cruisers had better armor than the Panzer Schiff.   No real battleship or battle cruiser of the 20th century is as lightly armored as the Graf Spee.   Even Fisher's comically under protected Courageous class "large light cruisers" of WWI was more strongly armored than the Graf Spee.

 Graf Spee is really a slow, relatively modestly armored, but quite heavily armed cruiser.   

 

In fact I believe a couple of Gneisenau's 11" turrets can still be seen where they were sited in WWII.

She and Scharnhorst were amongst the most beautiful of capital ships, ever ( once they got their North atlantic bows ).

Oh my, looks like Gneisenau didn't had much luck, unlike the graf spee, she went down is fame, not long ago they recover the german eagle on the stern, normaly this was remove before combat but not the Graf spee, now this is on diplay in the museum in montevideo.

I'll post pictures of my models soon, thanks.

What is going on here? Clearly the eagle on the stern is not the same as the eagle reportably in the museum. 

I think it could be the same eagle.   The photo of the eagle in the museum seems to have been  taken from below, so wings, which are thrown back to fit the taper of the ship's stern, looks like it's drooping.

Didn't you hear me, I said it was the same eagle, they extracted from the graf wreck and place it in display.

Correcting myself. 

It could well be the same eagle, if the museum one was photographed from below, as stated above, but it sure would be nice to have a human there for scale. 

T-rex wrote:

Didn't you hear me, I said it was the same eagle, they extracted from the graf wreck and place it in display.

 

I was respondingto Yankee Clipper, who doubted whether the Eagle in the museum was the same one shown in the ship photo.

 

Well, it could have been damaged when the ship was scuttled, or if part of the ship settled in top of it after it sank.

I got some first try photos of both ships, try to indentify the "unknow ship".

Here's the unkow ship, at back there the Gneisenau, but the close up didn't work.

Here's a good view of Graf and Gneisenau, notice I use Gneisenau box cover for dispaly on top.

From front to back, unknow ship, graf, and Gneisenau.

I'll get better pictures of each ship but Tell me what you of them now.

alumni72 wrote:

Well, it could have been damaged when the ship was scuttled, or if part of the ship settled in top of it after it sank.

She did get quite warm, I would suspect that the heat did some alterations to it.

I don't know man, those eagles look like different castings to me entirely. Look at the 'hooks' at the tops of the wings, and the feather spread at the trailing edges... if there was heat damage, then the wings wouldn't simply droop in perfect shape, there'd be deformation all over the wing surface.

that is a british warship, either an updated qe class bb or the updated bc renown. the turrets are of ww1 time period, appears to have a walrus aircraft & has the updated superstructure of the kg5 class

Hi

Now that I'm back from colon cancer surgury, I'M BACK !!!!!  At the time the first dreadnoughts{H.M.S. Dreadnought & the American Carolina class} were being built. Ad. Jackie Fisher first concieved the idea of the "Battlecruiser". It was planed as a ship with BIG guns{12" at first, then up to 15" during the "Great War", with one being built with 2-18" guns.}, and whatever battleship she could not out shoot, with lighter armour she could out run with more powerfull engines. The battlecruiser as planed by the Brits had a much larger engineering section, thus most battles cruisers where longer than battleships being built in the same timeframe. They were designed to replace the older class's of "Armoured Cruisers".

At the WWI "Battle off the Dogger Bank", a force of German ships including Battlecruisers, one Armoured Cruiser{the Blucher}, took on a British force that included the Battlecruiser "Invincible" fought it out. The Germans retired but the Blucher which was designed similar design as the deadnought type ships, was only armed with 8.1" guns. The British Battlecruisers were armed with 12" guns, no contest. The Blucher was easily overwhelmed by the bigger guns. Just as Ad. Graf Spee's squadron of older Armoured Cruisers were overwhelmed by the Invicible and one of her sister ships at the "First Battle of the Falklands" at the earlier part of the war.

However at the "Battle of Jutland", the British had 3 Battlecruisers blow up while they fought it out with German Battleships.

The German counterpart of the British Battlecruiser, were of similar large size, but the Germans gave their Battlecruisers more armour than their British counterparts{German guns started at 11" and grew to 15" in later models}.

The Graf Spee and her sisters ships were officialy classed as "Armoured Cruisers", but the armour did not stand up well to well aimed shots of British 6" and 8" guns.

Likewise the Scharnhost Class Battlecruisers were built along the lines of their WWI ancesters, also with 9/11" guns. But it was planned to when war broke out to enlarge both ships from 9/11" guns, to 8/15" guns as used in the Bismarck Class Battleships. Lucky for the Brits that never happened.

Steve H.

P.S. There are those that claim, that the Bismarck was heavily engaging the Prince of Wales. That the shot that blew up the Battlecruiser Hood came from the Heavy Cruiser Prinze Eugen. Intriging huh?

The British Battlecruiser with 2 18in. guns was the HMS Corageous, later modified to a aircraft carrier (HMS Corageous sunk during the battle of Norway by the German battlecruisers Scharnhost and Gnesiaue. sorry about the spelling.) It claims to be the most heavily armed carrier before it was removed to make way for a larger flght deck.

edit>I think my carriers are mixed up and that it was the HMS Glorius that was sunk off Norway.

David