Jutland 2e:
The Sea Piglets
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
March 2025

For Germany, now and in the future, the only naval question is how small our fleet can be, not how large. - Leo von Caprivi, chief of the German Imperial Admiralty, 1888.

Caprivi would eventually lose his job at the Admiralty, thanks to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s desire for battleships, and later revive his career as Chancellor. But during his brief (1883-1888) turn helming the German Navy (still termed “chief” during his tenure), he set out what he believed to be a clear vision. Germany should possess only a coast-defense navy suitable for protecting the army’s sea-side flank in any future war. Financial and human resources should go to the army, and Britain should always be Germany’s ally.

Since 1868, Germany had built ironclad battleships, with at least one of them always under construction. That gave the Empire a motley fleet of broadside ironclads and barely seaworthy “sortie corvettes,” none of them very good fighting ships. Caprivi proposed a new series of ships, much smaller than previous German capital ships, suitable for defending the entrances to the Kiel Canal, just beginning construction. They would have modern steel construction and steel armor, and be seaworthy in the North Sea under any conditions.

Proposed designs ranged from a tiny coast-defense ship displacing but 2,500 tons with two 210mm (8.2-inch) guns, to a large battleship coming in at 10,000 tons with seven 305mm (12-inch) guns. Caprivi chose the smallest, enlarged to carry a third, larger gun. Caprivi sought an eventual fleet of ten such ships, with the first, named Siegfried, ordered under the 1887 budget and laid down in 1888, at the private shipyard Germaniawerft in Kiel.

Siegfried, as originally built, displaced 3,500 tons, and had three 240mm (9.4-inch) guns. The extra heavy gun was crammed onto the ship by placing two of them in open barbettes side-by-side forward; the third was carried aft, also in an open barbette mount (the open barbettes would be replaced during construction with dome-shaped turrets). In theory, this would give greater firepower in the ship’s forward arc, which would prove useful in ramming attacks. She had four torpedo tubes, one under the waterline at the bow, and one on each side and at the stern in swivel mounts above the waterline. To defend against enemy torpedo boats, she also had a half-dozen 88mm guns.

She had all-steel construction, a first for a major German warship, with belt armor 240mm thick; the first three ships had compound steel and the latter vessels Krupp armor; neither type was as effective as the steel armor applied to later battleships. As with most German warships, the steel armor was backed by teak. She introduced the “honeycomb” concept of internal protection and had a double bottom and eight watertight compartments, quite a few for such a small ship.

Siegfried in action, in this pre-war postcard painting. This never happened.

Siegfried would also be painfully slow, even by the standards of 1887, making just 14 knots. She was the first German warship to feature the then-new triple-expansion engine, two of them each in its own separate engine room, power by four fire-tube boilers. The ships’ small size greatly limited their coal bunkers, which in turn gave them extremely short range. Given their mission of defending the canal entrances and the German North Sea ports, Caprivi did not consider this a serious drawback.

For what she was, Siegfried turned out to be a very good little ship. She handled well, and had little trouble with all but the worst North Sea swells; she could plow through them safely, though at the cost of even more speed. She did roll rather ponderously; that and their weird appearance earned the class the label “Meerschweinchen” (Sea Piglets). The 24cm SK L/35 offered a good rate of fire (two rounds per minute), facilitated by their single mounts. Her crew of 20 officers and 256 men was rather large, considering her size.

Siegfried’s small size and inoffensive nature also made her sisters easier to get through the Reichstag. Initially tagged as “fourth-class armored ships,” they would later be officially termed “coastal armored ships” but known within the Navy and the Reichstag as “coast defenders.” Aided by the “coast defender” tag, Caprivi’s program of one ship per year sailed through until the 1893-94 budget, when cost overruns with the Brandenburg-class battleships caused a Reichstag backlash that cancelled the last two ships.

Odin, pre-reconstruction, steams through the Kiel Canal, 1899.

Five more ships would be built to the Siegfried design, and then two more to an improved version that reduced the length of the armored belt and thereby lowered their weight and increased their speed to a blazing 15 knots. All of them carried the names of mythical Germanic heroes or dieties.

Alfred Tirpitz, the Navy’s new State Secretary, took over in 1897 with a battle fleet owning four modern battleships (the costly Brandenburg class) and a collection of aging garbage scows. That was not enough to allow maneuvers to test his theories of fleet tactics, and the coast defenders could not remain at sea long enough to meaningfully participate in exercises with the bigger ships.

It would be many years before the fleet had enough battleships to do that, and so Tirpitz turned to the time-tested expedient of rebuilding ships when denied funds for new ones. The coast defenders would be rebuilt to increase their bunkerage and therefore their range. Displacement increased to 4,500 tons, while bunker capacity and range more than doubled. In 1898 Hagen, commissioned just four years earlier (the last of the Siegfried group of six ships), returned to the Imperial Dockyard at Kiel where she had been built.

Odin fires a salute in this 1902 lithograph.

The shipyard completely tore her apart, lengthening the ship to provide more bunker space and replacing the fire-tube boilers with more efficient water-tube versions. But Tirpitz rejected proposals to upgrade her armament to a pair of 280mm guns in single turrets fore and aft; while this would have made them more useful fighting ships, it also would have made them easily mistaken for battleships. The State Secretary did not want to jeopardize his plans for a large battle fleet of large modern ships, and so not for the last time, he insisted on a less-capable ship for purely political reasons.

All of the ships went through the conversion process between 1898 and 1904; Siegfried briefly received oil-fired boilers but these proved very inefficient and she reverted to coal power. Tirpitz had his practice ships, without anyone mistaking them for real battleships. The reconstructions cost approximately 20 million marks for all eight ships; one new Braunschweig-class battleship cost 24 million marks. As real battleships came into service, the Sea Piglets went into retirement following the autumn maneuvers of 1909.

While slowly rusting away, the eight coast defenders once again served Tirpitz’s schemes; for budgetary purposes, the nine dreadnoughts of the Helgoland and Kaiser classes represented replacements for the litter of Sea Piglets plus the ancient ironclad Oldenburg, somehow defying the cutting torches as a depot ship in Kiel.

Frithjof seen in 1929 at Helsinki, as the freighter Hamburg.

With the outbreak of war in August 1914, the eight coast defenders came out of mothballs and received reservist crews. Fleet commander Friedrich von Ingenohl did not want them manned, much less sent to sea, but took them on the earliest missions of the High Seas Fleet following a direct order from Kaiser Wilhelm II. Tirpitz had claimed them to be first-line units when this suited his purpose, and his emperor had believed him. Fortunately for the 2,200 reservists aboard the Sea Piglets, they did not encounter the British, and in September 1914 they were withdrawn from the High Seas Fleet and reverted to coast-defense duties. Seven of them would be retired in January 1916 to serve as barracks ships; Beowulf alone soldiered on and even fired her guns in anger during the May 1915 bombardment of Windau in Russian Lithuania. After helping train submarine crews, Beowulf participated in the 1918 German intervention in Finland and remained active until the end of the war.

All eight were left in German hands after the war, but stricken in 1919. Five would be scrapped, but Hamburg shipping magnate Arnold Bernstein bought three Sea Piglets and converted them for use as freighters - massive wartime losses had put a premium on merchant ships. They served in that role for another decade before meeting the cutting torches.

There’s a trope out there that claims some sort of inherent efficiency in the German war machine. This is not at all true, and the Siegfried class is a prime example. Presented with one useless ship, the German Navy proceeded to build seven more of them, and to do so over eight years, well after everyone in the Admiralty knew the Sea Piglets to have no military value. And then they spent still more money rebuilding them. No one died aboard a Sea Piglet during the war, which is likely their sole redeeming quality.

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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, three children, and his new puppy. His Iron Dog, Leopold,would have fitted flash baffles on his ships.

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