War & conflict · Inventions & technology

Obsolete before she ever fired a shot in anger

SMS Roon was a German armored cruiser built in the early 1900s as part of a naval buildup meant to strengthen the fleet against Britain, and named after the Prussian field marshal Albrecht von Roon. She carried four heavy guns and a substantial secondary battery, and could reach just over 21 knots, but her design was overtaken almost as soon as she entered service in 1906 by the appearance of the British battlecruiser, a faster, more heavily armed type that made all such armored cruisers outdated. Roon spent her peacetime career with the fleet's scouting forces, occasionally serving as a flagship, running through training cruises in the Atlantic, and once representing Germany at an exposition in the United States. By 1911 she was considered surplus enough to be decommissioned and placed in reserve.

The outbreak of war in 1914 brought her back into service with the scouting groups screening the German coast and escorting the fleet's battlecruisers during raids on the English coast, including the shelling of towns along the North Sea, though she avoided direct combat in those operations. Considered too slow and lightly armored for the North Sea against the British Grand Fleet, she was sent to the Baltic in 1915 to face the weaker Russian navy, where she took part in landings, bombardments, and a notable clash near the Åland Islands that saw her damaged in an artillery duel before withdrawing. She continued operating there through attempts to force the Gulf of Riga and shelling Russian positions, narrowly escaping torpedo attacks along the way.

The sinking of a sister ship to a British submarine convinced German commanders that such old cruisers were too vulnerable to keep at sea, and Roon was withdrawn from active duty in early 1916. She spent the rest of the war as a training and accommodation ship at Kiel, and late in the conflict there were plans to rebuild her as a seaplane carrier able to launch several aircraft, replacing her heavy guns with lighter armament. Those plans were abandoned once the war ended, since the navy had come to rely on airships rather than seaplanes for reconnaissance. She was struck from the naval register in 1920 and broken up for scrap the following year.

Before the war she crossed the Atlantic to represent Germany at the 1907 Jamestown Exposition in the United States — one of the more peaceable episodes in a career that saw almost no combat.

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