Jutland: The Baltic Sea
A German Coastal Defense Navy
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
April 2025

Jutland: Baltic Sea is an expansion book for Great War at Sea: Jutland, adding German, Swedish and Russian ships planned but not completed. It’s all brand new, making use of those Swedish and Russian ships in Jutland 2e plus 80 new pieces.

Prior to the accession of Wilhelm II as German Emperor, the newly-formed Imperial Navy had a clear goal: to serve as a coast-defense force, guarding the army’s rear and flanks in any future European war. In 1859, the Dutch-born Admiral Jan Schröder, the head of the naval administration, laid out a defensive scheme based on a fleet of coastal gunboats backed by troops held in reserve behind the coastline.

That plan, heavily revised, would be the basis of German naval thinking for the next two decades, even as the new Imperial Navy acquired ironclad battleships. These ships were always described as “frigates,” to mollify the faction in the Reichstag that did not want the expense of supporting a true blue-water navy.

The Improved Sea Piglet

That impulse eventually led to the construction of the Siegfried-class coast-defense ships, small and ungainly vessels looking more like bathtub toys than warships, derisively called the “Sea Piglets” by German sailors. (We describe these ridiculous little tubs in Golden Journal No. 57: Coast Defenders). As the 20th Century dawned, Navy State Secretary Alfred von Tirpitz obtained funding to have the eight little ships totally rebuilt: cut in half, lengthened, and given new boilers and much larger coal bunkers.

The original Sea Piglet.

Tirpitz had just taken office, and found that he needed ships for fleet maneuvers. Without enough battleships, he had the Sea Piglets rebuilt to fill the role, which they did with some success. That also cost a great deal of money, but this is the nature of government spending; it doesn’t run “like a business,” and any politician who claims that it can be is either ignorant or deceitful (or both). Tirpitz knew that any money saved (by, for example, renting civilian steamers to play the role of battleships) would not redound to his own department to build more battleships. That’s not how government works. And so, he essentially squandered 20 million marks, slightly more than needed to build a new Nassau-class dreadnought, to rebuild the worthless coast-defense ships, knowing that those marks could not be re-directed to a new dreadnought and would only be wasted on something like the Imperial railways or pay for civil servants (most government expenses were borne at the state level, not the Empire’s).

The Construction Department, charged with rebuilding the Sea Piglets, pointed out that for very little additional expense, their armament could be upgraded from three old 240mm (9.4-inch) guns to two brand-new 280mm (11-inch) guns. The improvements in range and striking power would be much greater than the simple caliber increase suggests; the Sea Piglets would actually have some effectiveness as warships.

The Improved Sea Piglet.

Tirpitz rejected this as well, for similar reasons. An effective Sea Piglet might be classed as a battleship, despite weighing in at just 4,200 tons’ displacement. And such a ship would then count against the fleet size specified in the new Naval Law.

The Ziu class included in Jutland: Baltic Sea is the Improved Sea Piglet rejected by Tirpitz, presented as new construction rather than rebuilt versions of the existing ships (that’s so you can have more ships to play with). She displaces about 4,500 tons, slightly more than the original version, with the same hull and engines and painfully weak protection scheme.

The 28cm SK/L4 would have armed the Improved Sea Piglet.

The difference lies in the armament. Germany did not deploy a single-gun turret for the 280mm gun (Model 28cm/40) introduced in 1904, that would have armed the Improved Sea Piglets. But the Construction Department did sketch such a mount for the abortive 1904 small dreadnought project (that would eventually become, in enlarged form, the Nassau class dreadnoughts). Maximum range would go from 14,000 yards to 20,000 yards, though the bigger gun would fire only a slightly heavier shell (240 kilograms vs. 215 kilograms).

An Improved Sea Piglet would still be a useless warship; Tirpitz was right to reject the project, though for the wrong reasons. In a logical world, the little ships should never have been rebuilt at all. But then as now, this is not a logical world.

The Greek Coast Defense Ship

In July 1912, the Royal Hellenic Navy ordered an unusual ship from the AG Vulkan shipyard in Hamburg. This “armor-clad,” as the Greeks called it, would be about the same size as their new armored cruiser Giorgios Averoff, displacing 13,000 tons. She would have a top speed of 21 knots, driven by a pair of turbines, and 250mm of armor (slightly less than 10 inches) on her belt and main gun turrets - somewhat less than true battleships of her time.

Salamis as originally envisioned.

To save money, the Greeks bought the main guns, secondary guns, and main battery turrets from Bethlehem Steel in the United States. Their ship, to be named Salamis, would carry six 14-inch guns, in three twin turrets, all on the main deck. The design had no super-firing arrangement, with one turret each positioned fore and aft, and one amidships. She was a rather unattractive ship.

Urged on by the Greeks, A.G. Vulkan laid down the ship as soon as the contract had been signed and the down payment collected. But in December, the Greeks grew disenchanted with their ship. Their Ottoman Turkish rivals had laid down a British-built true dreadnought in 1911, with eight 13.5-inch guns. She would be more powerful, and infinitely more prestigious, than the strange Greek armor-clad ship.

Salamis as re-designed.

Construction halted on the Greek ship in December. The Greeks wanted Salamis re-designed as a dreadnought, and A.G. Vulkan dutifully took down the work already completed and collected more drachmas from their customer. They laid down the ship again in July 1913, this time to a design featuring eight 14-inch guns, in pairs of super-firing twin turrets located fore and aft. She would now displace 19,500 tons, and carry more engine power as well to boost her speed to 23 knots. She would not, however, carry any more armor; Salamis would be notably under-protected, had she been completed.

That would never happen. Work continued even after the First World War broke out, with the hull launching in November 1914. Construction finally stopped a month later, when the German government finally got around to mobilizing the shipyards for wartime work. With her main armament still in the United States, and eventually sold out from under the Greeks by Bethlehem Steel’s chairman Charles M. Schwab (no relation to the currently-alive financier), A.G. Vulkan could not have completed the ship while the wear continued. The German Navy considered her completion with German-made weapons not a worthwhile investment of labor and materials. After protracted legal action, the Greek government paid a settlement to A.G. Vulkan, who retained the incomplete hull and scrapped her in 1932.

Jutland: Baltic Sea includes the original Salamis design, under German colors and classed as a coast-defense ship. Named Njörd to follow the convention of coast-defense ships named after Nordic deities, she’s armed with Krupp-made 350mm (13.8-inch) guns, the weapon intended for the Mackensen-class battle cruisers. She’s not a very good fighting ship, but she does exist in the game as she did not in reality. Salamis as re-designed appears in our Risk Fleet book, as a German ship under the name Wrede.

Greece wasted a great deal of money (11 million drachmas) on her dreadnought dreams, and never did get a dreadnought out of it. Salamis would not have been a very good fighting ship even as re-designed, and the German Navy was probably right not to waste more resources on the project, even if they did fumble shutting down construction in August 1914.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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