HDMS Niels Juel was a training ship built for the Royal Danish Navy between 1914 and 1923. Originally designed before World War I as a monitor, construction was slowed by the war and she was redesigned as a training cruiser. Completed in 1923 she made training cruises to the Black and Mediterranean Seas, South America and numerous shorter visits to ports in northern Europe. The ship often served as a flagship and occasionally was used as a royal yacht for visits to overseas possessions and other countries.
Niels Juel was extensively modernized in the mid-1930s and remained operational after Nazi Germany occupied Denmark in 1940. When the Germans attempted to seize the Danish Fleet in August 1943, the ship attempted to escape to Sweden, but was attacked and damaged by German bombers. She was deliberately run aground by her crew to deny the ship to the Germans, but Niels Juel was not badly damaged. The ship was refloated several months later and repaired by the Germans. They renamed her Nordland and used her as a training ship. She was scuttled by them in May 1945 and her wreck was salvaged in 1952.
Background
Niels Juel was originally intended to be an improved version of , a . Like that class, she had a very low freeboard, and was intended to be armed with two guns in single gun turrets fore and aft of the superstructure and a secondary armament of eight guns. The Danes ordered the main guns and their turrets from Krupp of Germany in July, a month before the start of World War I, but the order was suspended when the war began. After being laid down in September 1914, construction of the ship was severely delayed by shortages of labor and material and she was not launched until 1918.
Reports from battles between the British and the Germans caused the Danes to change her secondary armament to guns in 1917, but work stopped completely when the war ended on 11 November 1918. Danish politicians believed that the 30.5-centimeter guns could be viewed as provocative by their neighbors and they decided to convert the ship into an innocuous training ship by adding an extra deck to the existing hull and changing the main armament to guns. The new design was approved in 1920 and the ship was completed in 1923.
Description
Niels Juel had an overall length of and was long at the waterline. The ship had a beam of , and a mean draft of . She displaced at standard load and at deep load. Niels Juels crew numbered between 310 and 369 officers and sailors. Her hull was divided into 10 watertight compartments and it was fitted with a double bottom.
The ship had a pair of vertical triple-expansion steam engines, each driving a single three-bladed propeller, using steam provided by four Yarrow boilers with superheaters that operated at a temperature of . The forward pair of boilers were oil fired and the after pair were coal burning. The engines were designed to produce for a speed of . During her sea trials, they produced and Niels Juel reached a maximum speed of . The ship carried of fuel oil and of coal which gave a range of at .
Armament and fire control
The Navy had difficulties procuring the 15-centimeter guns that it wanted for the ship's main battery, rejecting proposals from French, British and Swedish manufacturers as unsatisfactory. Although Krupp was not allowed to deliver finished guns by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, it worked out a deal with the Swedish Bofors company, which would finish and deliver the guns to the Danes. Niels Juel mounted ten 15-centimeter P.K. L/45 guns, a pair side-by-side on the forecastle forward of the superstructure, three on each broadside amidships, and a superfiring pair aft of the superstructure, all protected by gun shields. The mounts had a range of elevation from -10° to +30° and the guns fired projectiles at a muzzle velocity of at a rate of five to seven rounds per minute. The guns had a range of .
A pair of A.B.K. L/30 anti-aircraft guns were mounted on a platform abaft the funnel. The mounts had a maximum elevation of 70° and the gun had an effective rate of fire of about 16 rounds per minute. Its projectiles were fired at a muzzle velocity of , which gave it a range of . The ship was fitted with a pair of submerged torpedo tubes, one on each broadside. The Type H torpedo had a warhead and a range of at .
The ship was provided with a pair of Zeiss stereoscopic rangefinders, one on the roof of the conning tower and the other on a platform abaft the mainmast. Data from the rangefinders was sent to the transmitting station located on the main deck beneath the conning tower, where it was converted into elevation and deflection data for use by the guns.