De Zeven Provinciën (ship, 1909)
 The De Zeven Provinciën shortly after its completion in 1910.
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The De Zeven Provinciën was a coastal armored ship (Dutch: Pantserschip ) of the Dutch Navy , which was put into service before the First World War , in the interwar period was mainly on a colonial station in the Dutch East Indies and which was lost in the Second World War as a result of air raids and grounding . The single ship was named after the Republic of the Seven United Provinces (Dutch: Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Provinciën ); at the same time, it was the second ship in the history of the Dutch Navy to bear this name. The keel laying on the Rijkswerf in Amsterdam took place on February 7, 1908. After being launched on March 15, 1909, it was put into service on October 6, 1910. The ship was best known for a mutiny in 1933.
Technology and modifications
The De Zeven Provinciën was maximum 103.50 m long and 17.10 m wide. The ship represented an enlargement and a further development of the coastal armored ship Jacob van Heemskerck , which was launched in 1906. At the same time, the De Zeven Provinciën was the largest and last coastal armored ship of the Koninklijke Navy ever built . At the time of completion, the concept of these warships was already outdated and out of date , especially in the context of the dreadnought age that was just beginning .
Armament
The main artillery of De Zeven Provinciën consisted of two 28 cm L / 42.5 rapid fire guns supplied by Krupp . These cannons stood in front and aft of the superstructure in a single tower weighing around 195 tons . The guns were capable of firing an armor-piercing shell weighing 302 kilograms over a maximum distance of 16,100 m, with a rate of fire of around two rounds per minute. These were the heaviest shells ever fired from a Dutch warship. The ship also had four 15 cm L / 40 cannons, also produced by Krupp and provided with tower shields, which were housed in two swallow nests on either side of the hull. The bullet weight was 44.9 kilograms, the range was around 13,700 m.
The lighter armament consisted of ten individually mounted 7.5 cm L / 55 cannons on the main deck (five guns each could fire towards one side of the ship) and two 3.7 cm L / 23 rapid-fire cannons of the Hotchkiss model , who stood on both sides of the navigating bridge. In addition, there were two 08 machine guns and a mortar for landing operations on the ship. The ship had no torpedo armament.
The original armament of the ship was gradually reduced from 1935 onwards. By the beginning of 1941, all 15 cm guns as well as the 7.5 cm cannons and all light weapons were disembarked. Instead it received six 4-cm Flak L / 60 from Bofors (in single mounts) and six heavy 12.7-mm anti -aircraft machine guns in three twin mounts by early 1942 .
Machine system
The De Zeven Provinciën had at the beginning of eight coal-fired Werkspoor - Yarrow steam boiler and two vertically mounted triple expansion engines , the two waves were headed. During test drives, the ship reached a top speed of 16.27 kn (around 30 km / h) with a maximum engine output of 8,516 PSi . With a coal reserve of 872 tons, the ship had a sea endurance of up to 5,100 nautical miles (with an economical cruise of 8 knots) or 2,100 nautical miles (at a maximum speed of 16 knots).
In 1935/36 the machinery was completely modernized. Five of the eight boilers came off board and one of the two chimneys was removed. The remaining three boilers were converted to oil firing. The engine performance fell to 7,500 hp, but a maximum speed of around 14.5 kn was still achieved during test drives. The fuel supply was now up to 1,100 tons of oil.
Armor
The De Zeven Provinciën was protected with an up to 150 mm thick side armor, which extended over the entire length of the ship. Towards the 50 mm thick armored deck, the side armor tapered to 100 mm, but connected seamlessly to the armored deck at the transition. The heavy artillery guns of the main artillery were in single towers, the barbeds and front sides of which were protected by a 250 mm thick armor (the ceilings of the towers were 120 mm thick). With the exception of the command bridge, which had 200 mm armor protection, the other ship segments, including the swallow nests of the 15 cm cannons and the lighter guns, were only lightly or not at all armored against possible fragmentation.
period of service
Used in colonial service from 1910
After the commissioning, the De Zeven Provinciën moved to the Dutch East Indies via Gibraltar , Cape Town and Trincomalee at the end of 1910 . There the coastal armored ship was stationed in Surabaya from January 25, 1911 and completed colonial and representative services in the following years. In January 1912, during a maneuver off the east coast of Sumatra, near the island of Kundur , the ship ran into an underwater rock that was not entered on the nautical charts and suffered slight damage. After the ship had been emptied , including 500 tons of ammunition and coal, it could be made afloat again after a day. The damage was repaired in Singapore by early April 1912 . During the First World War , when the Netherlands had declared their neutrality at the start of the war in 1914 , the ship spent a relatively uneventful period of service as a station ship .
At the end of 1918 the De Zeven Provinciën moved back to the Netherlands, where the ship took the route across the Pacific and visited Hawaii and, after passing the Panama Canal in February 1919, New York . The ship reached Den Helder on April 19, 1919 . After an extensive overhaul and training trips, De Zeven Provinciën relocated to the Dutch East Indies again on November 9, 1921. In the following years the ship served there as an artillery training ship and again completed an uneventful colonial and training service. During this time, the later Rear Admiral Karel Doorman , in World War II commander of the Allied ABDA fleet , served on board the ship.
The mutiny on De Zeven Provinciën in 1933
History and causes
At the beginning of the 1930s , the economic and financial situation of the Netherlands and its citizens deteriorated in the context of the global economic crisis . One consequence of this was that the Royal Navy was also forced to make savings - including cuts in wages . When it was announced in January 1933 that the sailors of standing on colonial station ships cuts of up to 18 percent had to accept (in two consecutive steps), there were initial displeasure expressions, among others, almost a mutiny aboard the light cruiser Java would have led and which also led to protest demonstrations in the port of Surabaya . The situation was also tense on board De Zeven Provinciën , which at that time was sailing with a mixed crew of 141 Dutch and 256 Indonesian seamen, especially among the Indonesian crew ranks. This mood was favored by the fact that the quality of the food on board was comparatively poor and that there were also nationalist sympathizers of the Perserikatan Nasional Indonesia (PNI) among the Indonesian seafarers (see the history of the Indonesian War of Independence ).
The beginning of the mutiny
On the evening of February 3, 1933, the De Zeven Provinciën was anchored off Banda Aceh in Sumatra . The commander, Kapitein-Luitenant ter Zee P. Eikenboom, as well as the majority of the officers and men were on shore leave at this time, so that the crew consisted of (still) 16 officers, 34 European seamen and 140 Indonesians that evening . Around 1 a.m., the ship's command was not yet on board again, around 50 Indonesian seamen overpowered the Dutch officers who were still on board and brought numerous firearms and bayonets under their control. During the uprising, however, there were no dead or injured on board, the officers were locked below deck without resistance. The mutineers, who were soon joined by the majority of the Dutch ranks, sent an open radio message at around 3 a.m. in which they declared that no one would be harmed, that they intended to run to Surabaya and that the undertaking against the pay cuts should be protested. The anchors were then hoisted and the ship set course for the Strait of Malacca . It turned out that the Indonesian crew ranks, who were not instructed by the appointed officers, had problems operating the machine. As a result, the De Zeven Provinciën reached a speed of only 7 to 8 knots.
The suppression of the mutiny
When the commander of De Zeven Provinciën , Kapitein-luitenant ter Zee P. Eikenboom, returned from shore leave on the morning of February 4, 1933 and found that the ship had left, he and nine of his officers as well as local police units boarded the little one Aldebaran patrol boat in pursuit. Almost at the same time put the Dutch fleet management, in consultation with the Governor General Dutch East Indies , Bonifacius Cornelis de Jonge , from Surabaya in a flotilla consisting of the light cruiser Java , the destroyers Evertsen and Piet Hein and two submarines , the Mutineer ship on.
On the morning of February 10, 1933, this squadron placed De Zeven Provinciën about twelve nautical miles northwest of the Sunda Strait . A Fokker C.XI-w aircraft of the cruiser Java flew over the ironclad and threw a bomb in front of the bow . Ultimately, the mutineers were asked to raise a white flag and surrender within ten minutes. After the mutineers had announced that they did not intend to surrender and still intended to run to Surabaya for the purpose of protest, the on-board machine of the Java flew over the ironclad again and dropped a 100-kilogram bomb. The bomb hit between the navigating bridge and the forward chimney. The explosion killed 19 people immediately (including the Indonesian leaders of the mutiny) and wounded eleven, and a fire broke out on board. Four of the injured died later in the hospital, so that a total of 23 fatalities were to be mourned. In the confusion after the bomb hit , a command from the cruiser Java boarded the ship without any further use of weapons. The surviving mutineers were brought off board and initially locked up on the Java . The De Zeven Provinciën was escorted by the other ships to Surabaya and there, with the start of the repair of the damage caused by the fire and the bomb, was initially decommissioned in February 1933.
consequences
In the following years 40 mutineers were sentenced by Dutch military courts to prison terms, some of them several years. The trials dragged on until 1934. The commandant of De Zeven Provinciën , Kapitein-luitenant ter Zee P. Eikenboom, and several of his officers were sentenced to imprisonment for neglect of duty - since they had not returned to the ship the same evening but the next morning; Eikenboom himself received four months' imprisonment and was also released from the Navy. The mutiny also had a strong echo in Dutch politics. While right-wing politicians, such as Hendrikus Colijn , would have considered an even tougher military approach and even the sinking of the ship to be justified, communist politicians, such as Henk Sneevliet , declared their solidarity with the mutineers. As a result, in the years that followed, the Dutch Navy suspended seafarers suspected of belonging to socialist or communist groups. The De Zeven Provinciën itself was renamed Soerabaia , as the name of the ship also evoked a revolution (the Republic of the Seven United Provinces had emerged from a revolt against Philip II of Spain in 1581) and remained in Surabaya until 1936 .
The National Socialist Movement (NSB) used the mutiny for their propaganda. She saw or claimed an attack on the Dutch fleet and at the same time on the Dutch colonial empire . Large parts of the Dutch population shared this view, also against the background that there had been communist uprisings in Java and Sumatra in 1926/27, which were only put down after heavy fighting.
Service from 1936 to 1942
After the Soerabaia was completely overhauled and rebuilt in 1935/36, among other things, the machinery was converted to oil firing and the armament was converted (see above), followed by a rather uneventful period of service. In the years that followed, the Soerabaia was only used as a training ship and was used to train air defense teams . The number of crew members had been greatly reduced; in the end there was only a core crew of 176 sailors on the ship.
After the outbreak of the war in the Pacific and the associated advance of Japanese troops towards the Dutch East Indies , the coastal armored ship took part in the occupation of Portuguese Timor by Australian and Dutch troops between 14 and 17 December 1941 . The Soerabaia secured a troop transport of 650 soldiers from Kupang to Dili . This occupation was implemented despite Portugal's neutrality in order to counteract a possible weakening of the defense of the Dutch East Indies (Portuguese Timor was virtually undefended). Subsequently, the coastal tank remained in Surabaya and was used as a stationary anti-aircraft ship.
Whereabouts
On February 18, 1942, the Soerabaia was hit by a 250-kilogram bomb during an attack by Japanese G4M bombers on Surabaya . The bomb penetrated the armored deck and detonated deep inside the ship, causing significant water ingress. Three seamen were killed and around 20 others were wounded. The old ship sank on a level keel in the shallow harbor water, with the light guns still operational. After the Japanese conquered Java and the Dutch troops surrendered on March 9, 1942, the wreck fell into Japanese hands.
The Soerabaia - temporarily used to generate electricity and again damaged by close-up impacts during US air raids in 1943 - remained in a semi-submerged state in Surabaya until the beginning of 1944, before the Japanese lifted the ship and tried to move it towards Balikpapan . In doing so, however, the tug got into the foothills of the Djamoengan Reef , which is about 60 nautical miles east of Surabaya , and the coastal armored ship , which was only temporarily sealed, sank again after touching the ground. The place of the sinking is about five nautical miles north of the reef. The ship is still there today.
literature
- Blom, Johannes CH: De muiterij ob De Zeven Provinciën. Reacties en followed in Nederland . Amsterdam University Press (Amsterdam Academic Archive), Amsterdam 2005.
- Boshart, Maud / Bakker, Bert (eds.): De muiterij op De Zeven Provinciën . Publishing house HJA Hofland, Amsterdam 1978.
- Chesneau, Roger / Kolesnik, Eugene M. (Eds.): Conway's All The World's Fighting Ships 1860 - 1905 . New York (NY) 1979.
- Grabner, Sigrid : What happened on the "Zeven Provinciën"? , Military Publishing House , Berlin 1980
- Guttridge, Leonard F .: Mutiny. A history of naval insurrection . Naval Institute Press, Annapolis (MD) 1992.
Web links
- Dutch warships in World War II (English).
- The De Zeven Provinciën at Navypedia (English).
- Royal Navy homepage: February 4, 1933 - De muiterij op Hr. Ms. De Zeven Provinciën (Dutch)
Footnotes
- ↑ Guttridge, Leonard F .: Mutiny. A history of naval insurrection . Naval Institute Press, Annapolis (MD) 1992, p. 208.
- ↑ Guttridge, Leonard F .: Mutiny , S. 208th
- ↑ http://www.netherlandsnavy.nl/
- ^ Heinrich August Winkler (2011): History of the West: The time of the world wars 1914-1945 , p. 419 f.
- ↑ http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/41-12.htm
- ↑ http://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?134089