World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseAdmiral Scheer was a Deutschland class heavy cruiser named after Admiral Reinhard Scheer, the victor of Battle of Jutland in 1916. Almost two years after Captain Wilhelm Marschall took over as her first skipper, she was sent to Spain to evacuate German civilians during the country's civil war. She also delivered German weapons to Francisco Franco's Nationalist forces. On 31 May 1937 she bombarded Republican installations at Almería in reprisal for an air attack on the heavy cruiser Deutschland two days earlier. The actions in the Spanish Civil War prepared her crew for actions in the military phase of WW2 that began in Sep 1939.

ww2dbaseAlong with the other heavy cruisers in her class, Admiral Scheer was considered a ship with revolutionary designs. She was laid down with the philosophy that she must be faster than ships with superior firepower, while she must also achieve superior firepower against ships faster than her. The result was a class of ships that were well suited for merchant raiding missions.

ww2dbaseOn 4 Sep 1939, Admiral Scheer was attacked by British bombers at Wilhelmshaven. She took down four bombers with her anti-aircraft guns and suffered minor damage from three bombs. On 14 Oct 1940 under the command of Captain Theodor Kranke she left for a raiding mission; she sank six ships on 5 Nov during her first engagement with a British merchant convoy. She continued on to sink ten more ships during the course of the next few months, venturing as far as the Indian Ocean with her oiler ship Nordmark. She returned to Kiel on 1 Apr 1941 after a 46,000-nautical mile journey.

ww2dbaseOn 2 Jul 1942 she was sent on a sortie again, searching for convoys in the North Atlantic transporting supplies to Russia. She bombarded the Russian meteorological station at Cape Zhelaniya on 25 August, and then sank the armed ice breaker Aleksandr Sibiryakov, though she failed her primary mission of finding a convoy known in the vicinity. She went on to bombard a radio station at Novy Dikson before returning to Wilhelmshaven without any kills to report.

ww2dbaseIn the fall of 1944 Admiral Scheer provided coastal fire support to retreating army units on the Sorvemaa Peninsula in the Baltic Sea. In Jan and Feb 1945 she provided some bombardment support. At the night of 9 Apr 1945, she was attacked and sank by 300 British Royal Air Force bombers while in port at Kiel.

Heavy Cruiser Admiral Scheer Interactive Map

Photographs

Admiral Scheer Operational Timeline