While Stein's efforts were directed more towards civil affairs, he also furthered the progress of the military reforms which are connected more especially with the name of Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst.

St Mary's Church contains a memorial to the men of who lost their lives in HMS Monmouth, which was sunk with all hands on 1 November 1914, by German cruisers SMS Scharnhorst and SMS Gneisenau off the Chilean Coast at the Battle of Coronel ; the church hosts an annual service in remembrance.

Invincible and Inflexible engaged Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, while Sturdee detached his cruisers to chase Leipzig and Nürnberg.

Admiral Bertram Ramsay later wrote, " In my opinion the gallant sortie of these six Swordfish aircraft constitutes one of the finest exhibitions of self-sacrifice and devotion to duty the war had ever witnessed ", while Admiral Otto Ciliax in the Scharnhorst described " The mothball attack of a handful of ancient planes, piloted by men whose bravery surpasses any other action by either side that day ".

Scharnhorst and Gneisenau followed, between 1904 and 1908, and cost an estimated for 20. 3 million GM.

A classic fast torpedo boat action was the Channel Dash in February 1942 when German E-boats and destroyers defended the flotilla of Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Prinz Eugen and several smaller ships against RN MTBs.

The power of a battleship in protecting a convoy was also dramatically illustrated when the German warships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, carrying 11 " guns, came upon an eastbound British convoy of 41 ships, HX-106 in the North Atlantic on February 8, 1941.

In late May 1940, Raeder ordered the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau into action off Norway's North Cape.

Both the Scharnhorst ( only recently repaired from earlier damage in the Norwegian operation ) and Gneisenau were torpedoed by British submarines in these prestige manoeuvres ; they would not be ready for operations in the Atlantic again until the end of December.

An even more harsher assessment of Raeder's decision to send the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off the North Cape came from Murray and Millet, who wrote: " The Seekriegsleitung ... had lost none of its ability to confuse strategy with bureaucratic interest.

In late May, worried that German successes in France and Norway might bring the war to an end before his battle cruisers saw action, Raeder committed the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau to a raid off Norway's North Cape.

During the North Cape raid, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau sank the British carrier HMS Glorious and two destroyers, but the damage that put those ships out of action for six months when they were needed for a possible invasion of Britain easily outweighed the loss of the Glorious.

In January 1941, Raeder launched the successful Operation Berlin, where the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst were sent out on a raid into the North Atlantic.

Accordingly, Raeder planned the Channel Dash of February 1942 that saw the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau make the run from Brest to Norway.

* 1937, Passenger-cargo ship Gneisenau, sistership of Scharnhorst but with steam turbine propulsion contrary to Scharnhorst ´ s turboelectric propulsion

On 28 May, Hitler called a meeting of his service chiefs where he ordered an acceleration of U-boat construction and brought forward the construction of his first two battleships, Bismarck and Tirpitz, to spring 1940, and demanded that the increase in the firepower of the pocket battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau be accelerated.

John Wheeler-Bennett wrote in 1967: " To such a nadir of supine degradation had come the child of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and Moltke.

At the beginning of hostilities the East Asia squadron was dispersed on routine inspection missions at Pacific colonies, with the armored cruisers SMS Scharnhorst and SMS Gneisenau at Ponape in the Caroline Islands.

Having thus learned of the occupation of German Samoa by the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, who at the request of Great Britain had performed their “ great and urgent imperial service ,” von Spee rushed toward Samoa with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau intent on doing damage to British and Dominion ships at anchor.

In the ensuing Battle of the Falkland Islands, Spee's flagship, Scharnhorst, together with Gneisenau, Nürnberg and SMS Leipzig were all lost, together with some 2, 200 German sailors, including Spee himself and his two sons.

Both the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau were armed with eight 8-inch guns each, which gave them an overwhelming advantage in range and firepower.

Von Spee ordered full speed so that Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Leipzig were approaching the British at, with the slower light cruisers Dresden and Nürnberg some way behind.

On 3 November, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Nürnberg entered Valparaiso harbour and were welcomed as heroes by the German population.

Despite initial success by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in striking Invincible, the British capital ships suffered little damage, thanks to their heavier armour.

The German battleships Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and cruiser Prinz Eugen sailed from Brest, France, up the English Channel to Kiel, Germany.

During their stay, the German East Asia Squadron, including the armored cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and the light cruisers Dresden, Leipzig, Emden and rendezvoused off Hanga Roa.

In this battle, Scharnhorst received a wound in the foot, not in itself grave, but soon made mortal by the fatigues of the retreat to Dresden, and he succumbed to it on 28 June 1813 at Prague, where he had travelled to negotiate with Schwarzenberg and Radetzky for the armed intervention of Austria.

Scharnhorst points out that the patron in Try and Trust, for example, conceals a " sad secret " from which he is redeemed only after saving the hero's life.

Just two shells had struck Scharnhorst, neither of which exploded: one 6-inch shell hit above the armour belt and penetrated to a storeroom where, in von Spee's words, " the creature just lay there as a kind of greeting.

By direct application to Napoleon, Scharnhorst evaded the decree of 26 September 1810, which required all foreigners to leave the Prussian service forthwith, but when in 1811 – 1812 France forced Prussia into an alliance against Russia and Prussia despatched an auxiliary army to serve under Napoleon's orders, Scharnhorst left Berlin on unlimited leave of absence.

On 9 April, the British battlecruiser exchanged artillery salvos with the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which were screening the destroyers, causing light damage to Gneisenau.

It was preceded by Operation Berlin, a highly successful sortie by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau which ended in March 1941.

The original plan was to have both ships involved in the operation, but Scharnhorst was undergoing heavy repairs to her engines, and Gneisenau had just suffered a damaging torpedo hit days before which put her out of action for 6 months.

The Channel Dash, ( codenamed Operation Cerberus by the Germans ), was a major naval engagement during World War II in which a German Kriegsmarine squadron consisting of both Scharnhorst class battleships, and heavy cruiser along with escorts, ran a British blockade and successfully sailed from Brest in Brittany to their home bases in Germany via the English Channel.

* Scharnhorst effect, a hypothetical phenomenon in which light signals travel faster between two closely spaced conducting plates than in a normal vacuum

On 12 February 1942 off the coast of England, 32 year old Lieutenant Commander Esmonde led a detachment of six Fairey Swordfish in an attack on the two German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen ( which had already managed to get from Brest without hindrance ).

He flew Spitfires in World War II on many defensive and offensive missions, including an attack on the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, culminating in " big wing " fighter sweeps over France, on one of which, in March 1942, he was shot down and was caught by the Gestapo, twice being sentenced to death before being " rescued " by the German Luftwaffe, and shipped off to Stalag Luft III.

Excellence in this case is derived in part from the tradition of Gerhard von Scharnhorst, Carl von Clausewitz and Helmuth von Moltke and was based upon the premise that hard-and-fast rules had no place in the environment of war, which was the realm of human emotion, friction, chance and uncertainty.

The Scharnhorst effect is a hypothetical phenomenon in which light signals travel faster than c between two closely spaced conducting plates.

They were not able to show that the wavefront velocity exceeds c ( which would imply superluminal signaling ) but argued that it is plausible .< ref name = Scharnhorst >

This change in light's speed is too small to be detected with current technology, which prevents the Scharnhorst effect from being tested at this time.

Erich Bey ( 23 March 1898 – 26 December 1943 ) was a German naval officer who most notably served as a commander of the Kriegsmarine's destroyer forces and commanded the battleship Scharnhorst in the Battle of North Cape on 26 December 1943, during which the German ship was sunk.

Initially, Bey had five destroyers ( which were superior to the escorting British destroyers in terms of firepower ), but concerning poor weather, heavy seas and inadequate Luftwaffe reconnaissance, and his inability to locate the convoy, lead to the detachment of his destroyers, which opened Scharnhorst to torpedo attacks.

Although the success of the operation was seen as an embarrassment to the British because the ships were able to pass through the English Channel almost undetected ( though both Scharnhorst and Gneisenau struck a minefield en route ), the transfer from Brest to Germany eliminated the threat they had posed to Allied shipping in the Atlantic, that dissipated until Scharnhorsts chase for Convoy JW 55B, which eventually culminated in the Battle of North Cape and her demise at the hands of.