SMS Strassburg

On 16 August, some two weeks after the outbreak of World War I, Strassburg and Stralsund conducted a sweep into the Hoofden to search for British reconnaissance forces. The two cruisers encountered a group of sixteen British destroyers and a light cruiser at a distance of about 10,000 m (33,000 ft). Significantly outnumbered, the two German cruisers broke contact and returned to port.[8]

German sketch showing maneuvers and actions of Straßburg at the Battle of Helgoland

Strassburg was heavily engaged at the Battle of Heligoland Bight less than two weeks later, on 28 August. British battlecruisers and light cruisers raided the German reconnaissance screen commanded by Rear Admiral Leberecht Maass in the Heligoland Bight. Strassburg was the first German cruiser to leave port to reinforce the German reconnaissance forces. At 11:00, she encountered the badly damaged British cruiser HMS Arethusa, which had been hit several times by Stettin and SMS Frauenlob. Strassburg attacked Arethusa, but was driven off by the 1st Destroyer Flotilla. She lost contact with the British in the mist, but located them again after 13:10 from the sound of British gunfire that destroyed the cruiser Mainz.Along with Cöln, she badly damaged three British destroyers—Laertes, Laurel, and Liberty—before being driven off again. Shortly thereafter, the British battlecruisers intervened and sank Ariadne and Maass's flagship Cöln. Strassburg and the rest of the surviving light cruisers retreated into the haze and were reinforced by the battlecruisers of the I Scouting Group.[9]

Strassburg was present during the raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby on 15–16 December, as part of the screening force for the battlecruisers of Rear Admiral Franz von Hipper's I Scouting Group. After completing the bombardment of the towns, the Germans began to withdraw, though British forces moved to intercept them. Strassburg, two of the other screening cruisers, and two flotillas of torpedo boats steamed between two British squadrons. In the heavy mist, which reduced visibility to less than 4,000 yd (3,700 m), only her sister ship Stralsund was spotted, though only briefly. The Germans were able to use the bad weather to cover their withdrawal.[10] The ship had been transferred to the Baltic by 1916, and so missed the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916.[11]

By 1917, she was assigned to the VI Scouting Group, which saw action during Operation Albion against the Russian naval forces in the Gulf of Riga. At 06:00 on 14 October 1917, Strassburg, Kolberg, and Augsburg left Libau to escort minesweeping operations in the Gulf of Riga. They were attacked by Russian 12-inch (300 mm) coastal guns on their approach and were temporarily forced to turn away. By 08:45, however, they had anchored off the Mikailovsk Bank and the minesweepers began to clear a path in the minefields. Two days later, Strassburg and Kolberg joined the dreadnoughts König and Kronprinz for a sweep of the Gulf of Riga. In the ensuing Battle of Moon Sound, the battleships destroyed the old pre-dreadnought Slava and forced the pre-dreadnought Grazhdanin to leave the Gulf. On 21 October, Strassburg and the battleship Markgraf were tasked with assaulting the island of Kyno. The two ships bombarded the island; Strassburg expended approximately 55 rounds on the port of Salismünde. On 31 October, Strassburg carried the first military governor of the captured islands from Libau to Arensburg.[12]

By October 1918, Strassburg was assigned to the IV Scouting Group, which was to participate in a final, climactic attack by the High Seas Fleet. Admirals Reinhard Scheer and Hipper intended to inflict as much damage as possible on the British navy, in order to secure a better bargaining position for Germany, whatever the cost to the fleet.[13] On the morning of 27 October, days before the operation was scheduled to begin, around 45 crew members from Strassburg's engine room slipped over the side of the ship and went into Wilhelmshaven. The crewmen had to be rounded up and returned to the ship, after which the IV Scouting Group moved to Cuxhaven. Here, men from all six cruisers in the unit refused to work in protest of the war, and in support of the armistice proposed by Prince Maximilian. On the morning of 29 October 1918, the order was given to sail from Wilhelmshaven the following day. Starting on the night of 29 October, sailors on Thüringen and then on several other battleships mutinied. The unrest ultimately forced Hipper and Scheer to cancel the operation.[14][13] In early November, Strassburg and Brummer steamed to Sassnitz. There, the commander of Strassburg took command of the naval forces in the port and invited a sailor's council to be formed to assist in controlling the forces there.[15]

After the war, Strassburg served briefly with the reorganized Reichsmarine in 1919. She was stricken from the naval register on 10 March 1920 and ceded to Italy as a war prize. She was transferred under the name "O" on 20 July 1920 in the French port of Cherbourg.[4] Strassburg was commissioned into the Italian Regia Marina (Royal Navy) on 2 June 1925 and her name was changed to Taranto, initially classed as a scout. Her two 8.8 cm anti-aircraft guns were replaced with two Italian 3-inch /40 anti-aircraft guns.[16][17] She also had her superfiring 15 cm gun moved amidships, but in 1926 it was moved back to clear room for a platform to hold a scout plane. She initially carried a Macchi M.7, which was later replaced by a CANT 25AR.[18]

From May 1926, Taranto was deployed to the Red Sea to patrol Italian East Africa, where she served as the flagship of the colonial flotilla there. She remained there until January 1927. Taranto was reclassified as a cruiser on 19 July 1929, and that year she joined the other two ex-German cruisers, Ancona and Bari and the ex-German destroyer Premuda as the Scout Division of the 1st Squadron, based in La Spezia. In 1931, her M.7 seaplane was replaced with the CANT 24AR seaplane. Another tour in East Africa followed from September 1935 to 1936. After returning to Italy, she underwent a refit that involved removing her forward two boilers and the funnel that vented them. This reduced her power to 13,000 shp (9,700 kW) and top speed to 21 kn (39 km/h; 24 mph),[17][19] though by World War II only 18 knots (33 km/h; 21 mph) could be maintained. Eight 20 mm (0.79 in) /65 and ten 13.2 mm (0.52 in) machine guns were added for close-range anti-aircraft defense.[16]

In early July 1940, Taranto, the auxiliary cruiser Barletta, the minelayer Vieste, and the destroyers Carlo Mirabello and Augusto Riboty laid a series of minefields in the Gulf of Taranto and in the southern Adriatic, totaling 2,335 mines.[20] She was thereafter assigned to the Forza Navale Speciale (Special Naval Force) along with the other ex-German cruiser still in Italian service, Bari. The FNS was slated to take part in an amphibious invasion of the British island of Malta in 1942, but the operation was cancelled.[17] The ship was transferred to Livorno on 26 February and reduced to a training ship.[21] She was decommissioned in December in La Spezia and was scuttled there on 9 September 1943 a day after the armistice that ended the war for Italy was declared to prevent her from being seized by the Germans, who rapidly moved to occupy the country after Italy surrendered. The Germans captured the ship and re-floated her, though she was sunk by Allied bombers on 23 October. The Germans re-floated the ship again, and again she was sunk by bombers, on 23 September 1944 in the outer La Spezia roadstead, where the Germans had moved the hulk to block one of the entrances to the Gulf of La Spezia. Taranto was ultimately raised and broken up for scrap in 1946–1947.[16][17]