The ship was stationed off the west coast of Mexico at the outbreak of war in 1914. She soon joined Admiral Maximilian von Spee's East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron, and participated in the Battle of Coronel, where the German cruiser squadron virtually wiped out the Royal Navy force sent to stop them.
SMS Leipzig was sunk at the Battle of the Falkland Islands a month later, where greatly superior British forces sank all but one of von Spee's cruisers.
SMSLeipzig was a light cruiser, of the Bremen class commissioned in 1906 into the German Imperial Navy.
Admiral Spee's squadron of two armored cruisers (SMS Scharnhorst and SMS Gneisenau) and three light cruisers, appearing at Port Stanley for a planned raid on the port installations, was caught by surprise by the presence of the faster and more powerful battlecruisers and was destroyed at the Battle of the Falkland Islands.
SMSLeipzig was caught and sunk several hours after the start of the engagement by the faster and more heavily gunned British light cruisers HMS Cornwall and HMS Glasgow.
The SMS Dresden was a German Kaiserliche Marine light cruiser of the Dresden class, commissioned in 1908.
Together with SMSLeipzig she damaged and forced the escape of the British cruiser HMS Glasgow.
Approximately one month later, SMS Dresden was the only German cruiser to escape at the disastrous Battle of the Falkland Islands, her turbine engines proving faster than her expansion-engined squadron mates.
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