LITMIR.BIZ

      Ostfriesland in American service

      German warship naming practice of the time used states and regions for battleships. Accordingly, Ostfriesland was named after East Frisia, a region along Germany’s North Sea coast. Like her predecessors in the Nassau class, Ostfriesland’s main armament was arranged in hexagon fashion, with turrets fore and aft and four wing turrets. This meant that Ostfriesland only had a broadside of eight 12” guns, the same as the much smaller USS Michigan. The Brazilian São Paulo and the Argentinian Rivadavia each had ten-gun broadsides, and the Hungarian Szent Istvan and Italian Dante Alighieri each managed a twelve-gun broadside on a smaller displacement than the German ship. However, like all German ships, Ostfriesland was very well armored, and capable of sustaining a great deal of damage.

      Ostfriesland’s career mirrored that of the rest of the High Seas Fleet. It was thought at the time that encounters at sea were particularly susceptible to what became known as the Lanchester Equations, in which numerical advantage has exponential, rather than additive, effect. A naval battle, unlike a land battle, suffers from relatively few natural impediments. Thus, it was thought that any encounter would quickly become a match of competing battle lines. In such a match, the side with more heavy guns would cause damage above ratio to the other fleet. A small numerical advantage would mean a large victory; if sixteen ships met thirteen, the ships would not simply cancel each other out, and the smaller side would be devastated at a relatively light cost to the larger. Because the High Seas Fleet could never match the Grand Fleet in numbers, its admirals were loath to sortie.

      The only major clash between the dreadnoughts of the two fleets came at the end of May, 1916, at the Battle of Jutland. Ostfriesland played a relatively small part in the battle, taking no damage but probably scoring a hit on HMS Warspite. On the way back to port, Ostfriesland hit a mine, but did not suffer crippling damage. The High Seas Fleet made only a couple more minor sorties, and mutinied when ordered on a near-suicide mission in late 1918.

      A fairly old ship, Ostfriesland escaped internment at Scapa Flow at the end of the war. The surviving German fleet was parceled out among the great powers, with Ostfriesland going to the United States. A forty-two-year-old US Army aviator, Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell, had been arguing since the end of the war that aircraft could destroy surface naval units. In July of 1921, US military authorities allowed him to put this to the test. Along with a number of other naval units, including the pre-dreadnoughts Alabama and Iowa, Ostfriesland was attacked by successive waves of US Army Air Force bombers.