Bombardment of Copenhagen (1807)
With a bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 , the British Royal Navy forced the surrender of almost all of the rest of the fleet of Denmark, which was neutral during the coalition wars . The Royal Navy had already destroyed or hijacked a large part of the fleet in a first sea battle off Copenhagen in 1801 .
course
Although Denmark was neutral in 1807, it threatened to come under the influence of Napoleon and the rebuilt Danish fleet to again become the enemy of Great Britain. On August 16, 1807, the British attacked Copenhagen under Admiral James Gambier . This time, in addition to the fleet, 17,000 soldiers were deployed to besiege the city. Admiral Gambier had the place bombarded from September 2nd to 5th and set it on fire as planned. On September 7th, the Danish commander Ernst Peymann surrendered . To avert total annihilation, the entire Danish fleet had to be delivered to Great Britain. About 30 percent of the city was destroyed and 2,000 civilians were killed in the war.
In Copenhagen, a cannon ball half embedded in a wall commemorates the event.
"To copenhagen"
After these two attacks, the English term to copenhagen emerged, which describes a naval attack on an enemy, largely defenseless fleet in the port. Shortly before the First World War , the British admiral Sir John Fisher proposed to copenhagen the German fleet , by which he meant an attack on Wilhelmshaven with the aim of destroying the deep-sea fleet in the port. That was rejected by the political leadership.
During World War II the British fleet in 1940 undertook actually then with the operation Catapult but a similar attempt in the port of Mers-el-Kebir lying French fleet off was largely neutralized by the French fleet with great human losses.
literature
- Thomas Munch-Petersen: Defying Napoleon. How Britain bombarded Copenhagen and seized the Danish Fleet in 1807. Sutton Publishing, 2007. (English)
- Johann Peter Hebel : The Bombardment of Copenhagen. In: Poetic Works. Munich 1961, pp. 165-168.
