Named for the region of East Frisia , Ostfriesland ' s keel was laid in October at the Kaiserliche Werft dockyard in Wilhelmshaven.
She was launched on 30 September and was commissioned into the fleet on 1 August The ship was equipped with twelve This included the Battle of Jutland on 31 May β 1 June , the largest naval battle of the war.
The ship also saw action in the Baltic Sea against the Russian Navy. She was present during the unsuccessful first incursion into the Gulf of Riga in August The four Helgoland -class ships were allowed to remain in Germany, however, and were therefore spared the destruction of the fleet in Scapa Flow. Ostfriesland and her sisters were eventually ceded to the victorious Allied powers as war reparations ; Ostfriesland was transferred to the United States Navy.
She was sunk during air power trials off the Virginia Capes in July Many senior officers in the German Kaiserliche Marine Imperial Navy acknowledged that the Nassau -class battleships , armed with 28 cm 11 in guns, were inferior to their British counterparts that carried They sought to incorporate guns of the latter caliber in the next battleship design, though the significant increase in cost from the pre-dreadnought Deutschland -class battleships to the dreadnought Nassau class precluded another major qualitative increase until the budget year, two years after the first Nassau s were ordered.
The design staff experimented with a variety of gun turret arrangements, including superfiring layouts like the American South Carolina class , but they ultimately settled on the same hexagonal arrangement of the Nassau s. The ship was Ostfriesland had a flush deck and minimal superstructure that consisted primarily of a large, armored conning tower forward and a smaller, secondary conning position further aft.
