Well , well ...... the picture of this battleship is a stunning one.... Peter, I tried enough , you know.. but really unable to . bviously I just can't guess.Basically there are thousands of such stuffs there,probably a navy-personnel can put detail.
My original 1942 Janes Fighting Ships comes in handy. The main gun turrets were typical of german naval design, observe there were three guns per; secondary armament placement quite distinctive. The rest was easy. Open book, find Germany, flip page, flip page, repeat as necessary. Voila! Truth be known I suspected all along Scharnhorst class, obviously not Bismarck class and not one of the "pocket" battleships, so what else could it be? Of course, it could be Scharnhorst but I vote for Gneisenau. In either case the photo shows the ship before the bow was modernized and the flared cap added to the funnel.
that's a good eye, the bow and the funnel stack, but I have several books on german ships and you are right it is not of the bismark class or the pocket battleship class, so it tells me that this pic ws taken in the mid thirties and from my info. scharnhost was the older one over the gneisenau, so my vote is Scharnhorst.
Except both of them were modified with the "atlantic bow" and flared funnel cap. I suppose the cap had some mechanical value, the modified bow was because of their, both, awful sea-keeping manners. Really too hard to tell unless someone has an original which positively identifies the photo as one or the other, they both were once in that configuration.
Thank you, Peter. I suppose, had I been wrong on my first try, you would have given me a "close, but no cigar."
