Wikipedia:Today's featured article/December 8, 2014

SMS Scharnhorst was an armored cruiser of the Imperial German Navy and the lead ship of her class. Named after the Prussian reformer General Gerhard von Scharnhorst, the ship entered service on 24 October 1907. After brief service with the High Seas Fleet in Germany in 1908, she was assigned in 1909 to the German East Asia Squadron based in Tsingtao, China, becoming the squadron flagship. Over the next five years, she went on several tours of Asian ports and was present in Japan for the coronation of the Taishō Emperor in 1912. After the outbreak of World War I, Scharnhorst and her sister ship SMS Gneisenau, accompanied by three light cruisers and several colliers, sailed across the Pacific Ocean—in the process evading the various Allied naval forces sent to intercept them—before arriving off the southern coast of South America. On 1 November 1914, Scharnhorst and the rest of the East Asia Squadron encountered and overpowered a British squadron at the Battle of Coronel. The stinging defeat prompted the British Admiralty to dispatch two battlecruisers to hunt down and destroy Scharnhorst's flotilla, which they accomplished at the Battle of the Falkland Islands on 8 December 1914. (Full article...)

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