CHAPTER 01 -- BATTERY GNEISENAU
Chapter 01: BATTERY GNEISENAU
Back in the day, no self-respecting naval base would be caught dead without some sort of fixed land defenses. Seacoast fortifications, usually a number of medium or heavy caliber guns arranged in batteries, were primarily designed to defend against amphibious assaults or offshore bombardments. In more modern times, one case in point was the surprise attack launched by the Japanese Fleet against Port Arthur in 1905, while a more controversial example was the bombardment of the French Fleet in the harbor of Mers el Kebir in 1940.
Seacoast defenses could be found in almost every nation – especially among the great powers – and the Imperial Germany of 1914 was no exception. Strategic points along Germany’s North Sea coast were fortified with emplacements for numerous heavy guns, while the island of Heligoland, in the German Bight, became one of the most heavily armed and fortified pieces of real estate in the region.
It was plain to me that the first thing my naval dockyard needed was a coast defense battery. But finding a way to put one in the game was the problem. There were no guns in the game, nor were there big concrete walls and ramparts to make the modern fortifications.
Eventually, I arrived at a plan that was partly based on the United States Endicott Period coastal defenses (1895 – 1905), the French Maginot Line (1929 - 1938), and the WW II Atlantic Wall defenses (1940 – 1944). It is comprised of three parts; (1) the “camp” – resembling a US Coast Artillery base circa 1917 – (2) a tunnel system much like the Maginot Line – and (3) the guns.
Since I could not “BAT” my own guns, I was going to have to enlist the help of someone more talented. And it was imperative that my “guns” be as simple as possible so it would not be too much of a burden to make them. I quickly discarded the notion of the open emplacement guns and the mechanically complicated “disappearing guns” used by the United States.
That narrowed it down to this…
The turret was the easiest thing to “BAT”, and it did have historical precedence. This is the “Caesar” turret taken from the Battlecruiser Gneisenau in 1942. The ship had been wrecked by RAF Bomber Command while in dry dock at Kiel, and it was decided to scrap the hulk and use the guns for coastal defense. The turret was installed on a concrete apron over a rock-cut shaft housing the turret workings and joined to a tunnel complex of ammunition magazines and other underground support installations. It still stands guard over the Norwegian Trondheimsfjord – as a museum.
After a spirited “sales pitch”, @mattb325 VERY generously agreed to make the BAT, and “Battery Gneisenau” became a reality. I cannot stress how important his participation has been to me – on so many levels. Without first securing the gun turret, I would never have begun pulling all the other elements together to proceed with the “Imperial Dockyard” project.
THE BEGINNING
The map, of course, is a LARGE tile, and started out flat and green. I aligned the shore with the adjacent tile to the north, and carved out enough “sea room” to begin work. Using the “digger” lots, I lowered a large area of terrain all across the map to a height of about 15 meters above sea level. This would make it much easier to work with large numbers of different docks, piers, quays, and seawalls that would be placed in future.
The shore battery had to be placed first, since it’s size and shape would determine the placement of the remaining dockyard elements. The extreme upper right of the map seemed best, so I began raising hills to conceal the Coast Artillery base and protect the labyrinth of tunnels. During the process of raising and smoothing the terrain, I was careful to make sure there would be level places on the front side of the hill (overlooking the sea) to install the guns so that they would have clear fields of fire. I then “roughed-in” the landscape and began work on “the camp”.
This is an overview of Battery Gneisenau looking east, toward the sea. The “camp” is built behind the hill mass to conceal and shelter it from ships at sea. The hill protects the tunnel systems that house ammunition magazines, barracks, mess halls, fresh water wells, machine shops, fire control plots, wireless and telegraph communications, etc, etc. And just over the hill you can make out the gun turrets on their concrete aprons. The road and rail line into the dockyard has been stubbed in, and the beginnings of the base security fence is off to the left.
In this night shot, there is very little lighting – and in war time, even this would be extinguished.
This view shows the composition of “the camp’ a bit better. The camp itself, is of secondary importance to the mission of serving the guns in battle, and is a bit “rustic” and certainly “Spartan” in its accommodations. The roads are dirt – easier to hide from the air, and easier to repair shell damage. All the barracks (left of railroad) and “out-buildings” are built of wood – adequate for accommodation and cheap to replace if damaged.
The central feature is the rail siding. Most of the supplies for daily operation of the camp would be unloaded here, while the powder and shells for the big guns would be backed into the protective tunnel system and unloaded directly into the magazines.
To the right and left of the siding you can see additional munitions bunkers dug into the hillsides.
Below and right of the railroad there is an Officer’s Barracks / Mess – no need for the “patrician” officers to eat and sleep with the troops. And beyond that, the Battery Commander’s offices.
It should be noted that the tunnel system inside the hill has everything required to feed and house the battery personnel as well as to make repairs to the facility and its’ machinery and gunnery systems. In the event of conflict, the out-buildings would be evacuated and the gun crews and support troops mustered at their battle-stations in the tunnels.
Here are some “detail shots”…
The Battery Commander’s office and the Officers Barracks / Mess are from the old PEG Army Base sets, while the sailors and Navy vehicles are from the PEG SNM sets. I simply took the old lots and “re-purposed” them by adding props and modifying the lots. I owe many thanks to the people at PEG. Their Army Base and SNM Collection provided a great deal of excellent material with which to work.
In this one, you see “Morning Formation”. One turret gun crew has formed up for “inspection” (at top), while another gun crew (at bottom) has been formed for their “physical exercise” period. Presumably, a third gun crew is on “Stand To” at their guns, while yet a fourth crew could be performing maintenance on their stations.
The deliberately plain rail siding was assembled from Paeng’s “Grunge” concrete – modified for lights and people. The cranes are “Bi-Pin” props and the steam locomotive is from PEG – modified to actually have “steam”. Not sure, but I think the dirt roads are “Newman Inc. Rural Farm Roads” – modified to remove some of their vegetation to make MMP work easier. The rest of the landscape has been filled in with MMP work and my own custom “Tree Filler” lots.
The support troops and some of the gun crews have been detailed to unload this “night train”. One thing is certain about the military – you never wait until daylight. You can always sleep tomorrow night!
At the top of this picture, you see one of the Auxiliary bunkers outside the main tunnel system. There is a second one on the opposite side of the compound. A reserve supply of ammunition is stored in the bunkers in the event of emergency. It should be noted that this one holds the heavy projectiles – 11 inch and 672 pounds.
On the opposite side is the Auxiliary Bunker where the powder charges are stored. There are two kinds of charges stored in separate sections of this bunker. The three elements – shell, fore charge, and main charge, are always stored separately until firing.
This is the PEG Small Ammunition Bunker from their Army Base series. I opened the lot in EDITOR and pushed the bunker prop to the rear until it hung off the base of the lot. That creates a somewhat “overhanging prop” situation. When placed against a slope, the rear appears to disappear underground. BINGO-! You have a buried bunker.
Night shot of the Powder bunker.
It should be noted here, that almost all German shore batteries were armed with the same naval cannon mounted on their battleships.
When a battleship was ordered from the builder’s yard, an order for the main guns would also be placed with a Gun Foundry. Constructing large, rifled guns was a long and intricate process requiring sufficient lead time to guarantee delivery by the ship's launch date. Usually, there were ten or twelve main guns on a battleship with an equal number of “spare” barrels to replace gun tubes worn through use (target practice) or damaged in accidents or battle.
For construction of shore batteries, the naval cannon could be ordered and mounted on less complicated carriages designed to operate in fortifications. During wartime, it might be expedient to use the “spare” battleship barrels to strengthen coastal defenses more quickly. In the case of “Battery Gneisenau”, the gun turret and all it’s workings were taken from a battlecruiser and transplanted to a land installation.
Unlike other navies using bagged powder charges, the Kaiserliche Marine used a combination. In the loading sequence of the 11 inch gun, the projectile (shell) was rammed home, followed by the fore-charge of 53 pounds of powder in a silk bag, which was followed by the main powder charge of 165 pounds in a brass casing. The Germans felt that handling the powder in brass casings was much safer (turret fires) and permitted a faster rate of fire. Unfortunately, a fully charged casing would have been too hard to handle with manual ramming, so the smaller silk bag charge was deemed an acceptable risk. (After battle evidence indicates that when a gun turret was hit by shell fire, the brass cased charges were less likely to "cook-off".)
This painting by Claus Bergen shows SMS Seydlitz in action at Jutland. Note the brass casings being ejected from the aft turret.
Moving on to the second element of the battery – the underground tunnel complex – here are the entrances. The original idea was to make a single, wide and thick concrete face (about 12 squares across) in which, would be embedded the mouths of the tunnels leading into the hillside, and rendered as an “overhanging prop”. It could then be placed so that the rear would disappear into the hill. This would have resembled the “Ouvrages” (works) of the Maginot Line and, from a “Batting” perspective, would have been fairly simple.
For various reasons (including Covid-19), that proved impossible. But @mattb325 suggested I investigate the WMP / Doc Rorlach tunnels as a reasonable substitute, and several of our conscientious members managed to get them posted to the exchange at just the right moment. (@Tyberius06 – Now you know why I was so desperate to get them. THANX.)
The two “wing tunnels” are obviously for roads and could not be modified to remove the offending characteristics. But I managed to find a way to lay the dirt road pieces into the tunnel mouth so they serve admirably as truck and troop entrances. But the main entrance in the center is a little gem! This one is tasked with providing the rail entrance for the ammunition and heavy stores. By a stroke of luck, this structure actually resembles some of the work done by the US Army Corps Of Engineers in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Note the careful MMP work to blend the rear of the lots into the hillside.
Crossing over the hill, with the heart of the battery safely buried underneath, we find the gun positions. The top two turrets face north to cover the sea approaches to Schillig Roads and its’ large LNG port facilities. But all four turrets have a wide arc of fire covering the mouth of the Jade Estuary to the east. The turrets are equipped with the excellent 28cm (11 inch) SK L/50 gun – quick-firing with a remarkable range, often deemed equal, if not superior to, the British 12 inch weapon.
I used Paeng’s “Grunge” concrete to make the aprons around the turrets. The aprons serve a twofold purpose; First, to provide additional protection for the workings below the turret, and second, to reduce the dust from firing. The blast effect of such large guns could easily raise a dust cloud big enough to obscure the target, while providing an aiming point for enemy gunners.
I opted for a semi-rocky coastline since the headland would be more exposed to wave action and erosion. Those are a variety of PEG Boulders and NBVC rocks. The landscape is filled in with my custom Tree Filler lots and MMP work -- a good deal of it by @Girafe (He is the "Master" of vegetation). The Paeng concrete pads are very MMP-friendly and you can see the small brush and vines creeping across the edges. (I tend to use a lot of "ground cover" -- mostly "Seasonal Carnations" -- which look a lot like creeping vines, and such.) The firing positions are absolutely level, and about 30 meters above sea level.
In this night shot, you see the lights, which during wartime would be extinguished. But during peace time, a guard would be posted when the gunners were not on site. Even on a naval base, a battle-ready weapon of that magnitude should never be left unattended.
Offshore, three Kaiser Class battleships of the First Battle Squadron are returning from gunnery practice off the mouth of the Jade. In line ahead formation are SMS Kaiserin, SMS Friedrich der Grosse, and SMS Konig Albert. Konig Albert scored the lowest of the three, and her Captain will be buying the champagne at the Officer’s Club, tonight.
Unfortunately, this scene had to be created rather close to the edge of the map tile, so I have provided some detailed close-ups of the Kaiser Class battleship SMS Prinzregent Luitpold at a temporary mooring in the Coaling Basin.
As a special note: It is only with the hard work and cheerful cooperation of @Barroco Hispano that this project has become reality. His warships are absolutely stunning works of 3D art of the highest quality – and the “Stars” of the show. All of my creative ingenuity and “lateral thinking” merely provided the “scenery” to showcase the “talent”.
Just outside the battery compound, a small railroad siding services the battery. Incoming cars and the out-going empties are parked here until the switching locomotives can deal with them. A railroad crane is parked here permanently in the event one of the battery cranes suffers a breakdown.
The siding is put together with modified Paeng “grunge” concrete pads. The railway crane is from SM2. And the trackside buildings are “re-lotted” from SFBT.
And last, but not least – a Shore Patrol detail tasked with fence patrol. They appear to be investigating suspicious boot tracks in the road. Who knows? The tracks might possibly have been left by Sydney Reilley – “Ace Of Spies” – trying to find out how the Kaiser defends his naval base.
Comments and critiques are requested and will be gratefully accepted. And any questions will be answered promptly to the best of my ability.
THANK YOU for your visit !
Next time…...”The North Ship Channel”.
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