r/HistoryPorn • u/BostonLesbian • 14h ago
Kriegsmarine Deutschland-class pre-dreadnought battleship Schleswig-Holstein, firing at close range at Polish positions on Westerplatte - in the first hours of the German invasion of Poland, on September 1st, 1939. [800 x 533]
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u/Spudtron98 7h ago
This attack was a seriously low blow, even by Nazi standards. They had that ship hanging around in the port ahead of time like nothing was happening, and as soon as the invasion commenced they brought the guns around and just started blowing the crap out of the city without warning.
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u/blacknwhiteknight 7h ago
If you want to see their even lowest low, check out what they did to this town just a few minutes earlier.
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u/IAmSnort 9h ago
A quick video about the Deutschland class ships. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RfZtbFQV0-E
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u/Marine__0311 7h ago
There's a couple of movies about the Polish outpost's resistance. They held out for a week against overwhelming odds.
One's called Westerplatte Resists made in 1967. The other one was made in 2013 and is called 1939 Battle of Westerplatte. You can rent the latter on Amazon Prime or see it for free on Tubi.
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u/WaldenFont 6h ago
My grandpa is in this picture. He had been part of the crew since 1937 and went on the training cruises around Africa and to the Caribbean. I still have a some trinkets he got in Africa, but his amazing photo albums were stolen from my grandmother’s house when she had dementia.
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u/iboneyandivory 2h ago
Writer Patrick O'Brian, in one of his excellent Master and Commander books, has a passage about how a frigate of the 1800's, is of course a ship, but laying just offshore, it's also a nearly unsinkable floating gun battery that can stand off and reduce most structures to rubble. It's easy to see that power in this picture.
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u/mcfarmer72 14h ago
We played a school in Iowa called Schleswig-Holstein.
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u/_ElBee_ 10h ago edited 9h ago
Schleswig-Holstein is one of the German federal states, located between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. The country of Denmark borders it to the North.
One reason for the fact that there is a school in Iowa named after Schleswig-Holstein, is that a major part of the state's population can be traced back to immigrants of German origin.
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u/borderreaver 8h ago
Do americans actually learn anything in their schools or are they just for shooting in?
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u/isecore 14h ago edited 9h ago
SMS Schleswig-Holstein was laid down in 1905 and commissioned into service almost three years later. She was the last of the five pre-dreadnought Deutschland-class of battleships built by the Kaiserliche Marine. She saw action at the battle of Jutland in 1916 during WW1 but was relegated to guard duty afterwards and decommissioned in late 1917. She was one of the few battleships not scrapped due to the treaty of Versailles and was pressed into active duty during the 1920s. In 1935 she was converted into a training ship.
After the events depicted starting WW2 she spent most of the war as a training ship. In 1944 she was reactivated as a battleship. This was since she was still fitted with coal-fired boilers and Germany was running low on oil to fuel the more modern ships. She was meant to be refitted in late 1944 but foundered after being hit by RAF bombers on December 18th 1944. Her final fate was being towed into the gulf of Finland to be used as long-range target practice by the Soviet navy. Last used as target practice around 1966, the remains are now submerged.
Her bell survived and is located in the collection of the Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr in Dresden since 1990.