Castor (ship, 1939)

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The Castor 1942

The Castor was the largest and most powerful icebreaker in the German Navy during World War II . He was sunk in 1945, raised in 1951, and then served under the name Peresvet ( Russian Пересвет ) from 1956 to 1970 in the Soviet Union .

Construction and technical data

The ship was in 1938 at the shipyard of Schichau works in Gdansk laid down on and ran there on 15 July 1939 by the stack . After the final equipment at Schichau in Königsberg , it was put into service on October 15, 1941. It was 83 m (waterline) or 90 m (over all) long and 21 m wide, had a draft of 6.02 / 6.78 m and a water displacement of 5150 t (standard) and 6271 t (fully equipped). Four Wagner steam boilers and three standing triple expansion steam engines with a total of 9600 PSi resulted in a top speed of 15 knots over two screws . Under the bow was a third screw, as it had proven itself when the ice breaking in the Baltic Sea . The armament consisted of four anti-aircraft guns , against the war, there were four 10.5-cm Flak 39 in twin guns .

Navy

The Castor , which was rebuilt several times up to 1945, served in the Baltic Sea and in Danish and Norwegian waters as an icebreaker, tugboat and escort boat and, most recently, in 1945 also for the evacuation of German refugees from East Prussia and Pomerania . The ship was sunk on March 15, 1945 off Warnemünde by bombs during an air raid. The superstructures protruded from the water in the first post-war winter, but were then shaved off by the ice drift.

Soviet Union

The ship was not lifted until 1951. In March 1953 it was towed to the VEB shipyard Neptun in Rostock , where it was almost completely rebuilt at the request of the Soviet Union and lasted until 1956. In May 1956 it was put into service under the new name Peresvet by the Soviet Navy , which initially used it in the Baltic Sea. In the autumn of 1957, the Pereswet then moved in a convoy with other icebreakers, escort destroyers and U-fighters of the Riga class via the Northern Sea Route to the Far East to the Pacific Fleet . The ship served there until it was retired in the spring of 1970. It was placed on the rocky beach on Reineke Island ( Russian Остров Рейнеке , Ostrow Reineke) southwest of Vladivostok and served there for a long time as a target for the naval forces of the Pacific Fleet. Its rusted hull is still there today.

Footnotes

  1. ^ Martin Schmidtke: Baltic Sea Rescue Operation 1944/1945. Bernard & Graefe, Bonn, 2006, ISBN 3-7637-6263-9 , p. 136
  2. ↑ The ship did not run into a mine, as stated in some places.
  3. ↑ A new icebreaker called Pereswet , part of the Dobrynya Nikitich class ("Project 97"), entered service in the Northern Fleet in 1970 and was given this traditional name.
  4. ↑ Photo of the rusting wreck

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