Armored Cruiser - Post-World War I: Panzerschiffe and End

Post-World War I: Panzerschiffe and End

After the end of World War I, many of the surviving armored cruisers were sold for scrap. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 placed strict limits on the numbers of "capital ships" possessed by the navies of the great powers. A "capital ship" was defined as any vessel of over 10,000 tons displacement or with guns over 8in caliber, and several more armored cruisers were decommissioned to comply with the terms of the treaty. The London Naval Treaty of 1930 introduced further limits on cruiser tonnage. Only a small number of armored cruisers survived these limitations, though a handful saw action in World War II.

The armored cruiser enjoyed a brief and limited resurgence in the late 1920s and early 1930s, albeit for mainly political reasons, with the three panzerschiffe (literally "armored ships") that Germany built, the Deutschland, Admiral Scheer, and Admiral Graf Spee. The German Navy, renamed the Reichsmarine after the end of World War I, chose the name for this class with great care. Although in French the term effectively described a battleship, in German the term referred to the armored cruiser, which had been considered a class below capital ships. The impression the Reichsmarine attempted to give by using it was that it was developing a modest vessel in line with the Treaty of Versailles. According to this treaty, which Germany signed at the end of World War I, the Reichsmarine could replace the six pre-dreadnoughts it had been left as capital ships when they were twenty years old. New vessels were to displace at most 10,000 long tons (10,000 t); gun calibers for these ships was not regulated.

The Allies, who at this time were limited to building vessels of 35,000 long tons (36,000 t) by the Washington Naval Treaty and subsequent agreements, assumed that with the 10,000-ton limit, only coastal defense ships similar to those operated by the Scandinavian navies could be built. Instead, Germany built a trio of ships fast enough to evade most enemy capital ships, armed with larger main guns than permitted for cruisers built under the Washington and London Naval Treaties. Though they were stated to displace 10,000 long tons (10,000 t), the panzerschiffe actually displaced 10,600 to 12,340 long tons (10,800 to 12,540 t) at standard displacement. Despite this violation, their design incorporated several radical innovations to save weight, such as welding (which saved 15 percent in hull weight) and all-diesel propulsion (which failed to save weight but gave the ships substantial range). Due to their heavy armament of six 28 cm (11 in) guns, the British began referring to the vessels as "pocket battleships". The Kriegsmarine reclassified them as heavy cruisers in February 1940. None of them survived World War II.

One late-design armored cruiser is still considered to be in active duty: the Hellenic Navy's Georgios Averof, constructed in 1909–1911, is preserved as a museum in Palaio Faliro, Greece.