SMS Gneisenau - Service History

Service History

Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, the former Chief of the General Staff, christened the ship at her commissioning on 6 March 1908. Captain Franz von Hipper was the ship's first commanding officer; he took command of the ship the day she was commissioned. He was tasked with conducting the ship's shakedown cruise, which lasted from 26 March to the middle of July. She officially joined the fleet on 12 July. The ship then departed for Asia, though Hipper left the ship and went on to command the I Torpedo-boat Division in Kiel. Gneisenau was assigned to the Ostasiengeschwader (East Asia Squadron), where in 1910 she joined Scharnhorst, which had been assigned to the unit the previous year. The two ships formed the core of the squadron, with Scharnhorst serving as the flagship. The pair were crack gunnery ships; Gneisenau won the Kaiser's Cup four times during her career: twice while in German waters in 1908 and 1909 and twice in Asia in 1910 and 1911, and Scharnhorst's finished in second place in 1913 and 1914.

In June 1914, the annual summer cruise of the East Asia Squadron began; Gneisenau rendezvoused with Scharnhorst in Nagasaki, Japan, where they received a full supply of coal. They then sailed south, arriving in Truk in early July where they restocked their coal supplies. While en route, they received news of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. On 17 July, the East Asia Squadron arrived in Ponape in the Caroline Islands. Here, von Spee had access to the German radio network, where he learned of the Austro-Hungarian declaration of war on Serbia and the Russian mobilization. On 31 July, word came that the German ultimatum, which demanded the demobilization of Russia's armies, was set to expire. Von Spee ordered his ships be stripped for war. On 2 August, Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered German mobilization against France and Russia.