Buzzard (ship, 1940)
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The Bussard (SP 21) was the second of three slingshot ships built for the German Air Force . She succeeded the Sperber (SP 11) launched in 1938 and was followed by her sister ship Falke (SP 22), which was commissioned in November 1942 .
Construction and technical data
The buzzard was in 1940 when F. Schichau shipyard in Pillau with the hull number 1500 from the stack and was put into service on May 1, 1942nd She was 98.3 m long and 14.0 m wide, had a 2.33 m draft , and displaced 2,040 tons (standard). It was almost twice as big as the sparrowhawk . Two 8-cylinder, 4-stroke diesel engines from KHD gave it 1,800 hp; with its two Voith Schneider propellers , it reached a top speed of 12 knots . The operating range , with a total bunker supply of 230 tons of diesel oil, was 2900 nautical miles at 12 knots cruising speed or 4400 nautical miles at 10 knots. The ship had a long, flat upper deck with a 20-ton Heinkel - Catapult for Thu 18 - Thu, 24 - and BV 138 - flying boats and a 20-ton crane company Kampnagel and was first with three, as of January 1944 armed five 20 mm anti- aircraft guns. The ship could bunker up to 120 tons of aircraft kerosene. The crew consisted of three officers and 51 men.
The starting sling could catapult aircraft with a takeoff weight of up to 20 tons and accelerate them within 2.5 seconds with up to 4 g , so that at the end of the catapult process they reached a speed of 180 km / h. The ship could accommodate up to three Do 18, Do 24 or BV 138 aircraft at the same time.
history
The Bussard was put into service on May 1, 1942 and immediately commanded to Aalborg in Denmark . Later she was to the north coast of Norway moved where their flying boats, the convoy of the Allies to Murmansk tried to track down. About the turn of 1943/44 the ship was overhauled, whereby u. a. the anti-aircraft armament was reinforced by two additional 20 mm guns. From May 1944 the Bussard was stationed in Trondheim and then from September 1944 in Tromsø , where she served various maritime reconnaissance groups and coastal aviation groups as a catapult ship and tender and came into British hands at the end of the war.
The ship was taken over by the US Navy as spoils of war on February 22, 1946 in Kristiansand (Norway) . In 1947 it was sold to the Belgian company Heygen in Gent , which renamed it Ahoy . In the summer of 1950 it was bought by the Dutch company Boele & Osterwijk NV in Rotterdam and converted into a suction dredger at NV Scheepswerven by Schram & Zn. In Papendrecht . The further fate is not known.
literature
- Simon Mitterhuber: The German catapult aircraft and slingshot ships , Bernard & Graefe, Bonn, 2004, ISBN 3-7637-6244-2
- Erich Gröner : The German warships 1815–1945 ; Volume 7.