 Blitz in the 1880s or 1890s
| |
| History | |
|---|---|
 German Empire | |
| Name | Blitz |
| Builder | Norddeutsche Schiffbau-Gesellschaft, Kiel |
| Laid down | 1881 |
| Launched | 26 August 1882 |
| Commissioned | 28 March 1883 |
| Stricken | 8 March 1921 |
| Fate | Scrapped, 1921 |
| General characteristics | |
| Class and type | Blitz-class aviso |
| Displacement | |
| Length | 78.43 m (257 ft 4 in) o/a |
| Beam | 9.90 m (32 ft 6 in) |
| Draft | 4.22 m (13 ft 10 in) |
| Installed power |
|
| Propulsion | |
| Speed | 15.7 knots (29.1 km/h; 18.1 mph) |
| Range | 2,440 nmi (4,520 km; 2,810 mi) at 9 kn (17 km/h; 10 mph) |
| Complement |
|
| Armament |
|
SMS Blitz was an aviso of the German Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy) built in the early 1880s. She was the lead ship of her class, which included one other vessel, SMS Pfeil. Her primary offensive armament consisted of a bow-mounted torpedo tube, and she was armed with a battery of light guns to defend herself against torpedo boats, a sign of the growing importance of torpedoes as effective weapons in the period. The Blitz class featured a number of innovations in German warship design: they were the first steel hulled warships and the first cruiser-type ships to discard traditional sailing rigs.
For much of her career, Blitz served as a flotilla leader for groups of torpedo boats. In the 1880s, these duties included conducting demonstrations of torpedo boat capabilities under the direction of Alfred von Tirpitz, then the head of torpedo development in the German Navy, who frequently used Blitz as his flagship. She also made numerous trips abroad, including several occasions escorting members of the House of Hohenzollern on visits to Britain, Russia, and elsewhere. By the 1890s, she began to be used in a variety of secondary roles in addition to her normal duties, including as a fisheries protection vessel, a training ship, and a tender. She began to operate as a dedicated tender for various units in the German fleet in the early 1900s.
The ship's activities during World War I are unclear, with one historian stating she was employed as a coastal defense vessel until 1915 and then as a tender until the end of the war in 1918, and another trio of historians who state that she remained in service as a tender for the fleet's battleships through 1917, took part in Operation Albion in the Baltic Sea in October 1917, and was slated to participate in Operation Schlußstein, the occupation of St. Petersburg, Russia in August 1918 before the operation was cancelled. Blitz was struck from the naval register in March 1921 and subsequently broken up.