SMS Seydlitz / German fleet wrecks

SMS Seydlitz was a battlecruiser of the German Kaiserliche Marine, built at Hamburg, ordered in 1910 and commissioned in May 1913 — the fourth battlecruiser built for the High Seas Fleet, named after Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz. She represented the culmination of the first generation of German battlecruisers that had begun with Von der Tann in 1906, with a redesigned propulsion system, an improved armour layout, and a displacement of 24,988 tonnes, some 3,000 tonnes heavier than the Moltke class before her.

She fought at Dogger Bank in January 1915, where a 13.5-inch shell from the British battlecruiser Lion struck her rearmost turret and very nearly caused a magazine explosion that would have destroyed the ship. The safety measures imposed across the German fleet after that near-miss are the reason she survived what happened at Jutland.

At Jutland on 31 May 1916 she was hit twenty-one times by large-calibre shells, one of which penetrated the working chamber of the aft superfiring turret. The resulting fire destroyed the turret; the post-Dogger Bank precautions prevented a catastrophe. She was also torpedoed, taking in over 5,300 tonnes of water and losing freeboard to 2.5 metres, and had to be lightened significantly to cross the Jade Bar. She gave as well as she took. Early in that battle, salvos from Seydlitz and the battlecruiser Derfflinger destroyed the British battlecruiser Queen Mary in seconds.

Getting home took three days. Both gyro-compasses failed and the light cruiser Pillau was sent to guide her; by the afternoon of 1 June her bow was nearly submerged and the only remaining buoyancy forward was the broadside torpedo room. She was turned around and steamed astern to relieve pressure on the strained bulkheads, and two pump steamers arriving alongside stabilised the flooding. She had taken on at most 5,308 tonnes of water.

In August 1915 she had been transferred with Moltke and Von der Tann to the Baltic, screening the German force that attempted to clear the Gulf of Riga. Her role there was to keep Russian reinforcements out of the operation rather than to fight. In April 1916 she struck a mine off Norderney which tore a fifteen-metre hole in her hull just abaft the starboard broadside torpedo tube. Eleven men were killed and 1,400 short tons of water entered the ship, and she was out of service for over a month.

Like the rest of the German battlecruisers that survived the war, she was interned at Scapa Flow in 1918. The fleet remained in captivity through the negotiations that produced the Treaty of Versailles. Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter believed the British intended to seize the German ships on 21 June 1919, the deadline for Germany to sign the treaty. He did not know the deadline had been extended by two days. On the morning of 21 June the British fleet left Scapa Flow to conduct training manoeuvres, and at 11:20 Reuter transmitted the order to scuttle. Seydlitz slipped beneath the surface at 13:50.

She came to rest on her side on the bottom in 22 metres of water and was frequently mistaken for a small island. In that condition she was sold as scrap to the salvage firm of Cox and Danks, led by Ernest Cox, along with a battleship and twenty-six destroyers.

Raising her was difficult and became a small piece of theatre. She sank again during the first attempt, wrecking most of the salvage equipment. Cox tried again and arranged for news cameras to be present at the moment of success; the plan nearly failed when she was accidentally refloated while he was on holiday in Switzerland, whereupon he told the workers to sink her again and returned to Britain to be there when she was raised a third time.

She was raised on 2 November 1928 and towed south, still inverted, to be scrapped at Rosyth by 1930. Her bell is on display at the Laboe Naval Memorial, and one of her 15 cm guns, removed in 1916, was later mounted aboard the commerce raider Kormoran during the Second World War.