Germany (submarine)
.jpg) As U 155 at Tower Bridge, London
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
The Deutschland was a German merchant submarine from the time of the First World War with a payload of 1,000 tons of cargo, later a successful submarine cruiser as the U 155 of the Imperial Navy .
history
On November 8, 1915, the Bremen wholesale merchant Alfred Lohmann (Lohmann & Co), the shipping company Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL) and the Deutsche Bank founded the new Deutsche Ozean-Reederei GmbH (DOR) based in Bremen . They were supposed to manage cargo-carrying submarines , the Germany first . The purpose was to break through the British naval blockade in the North Sea .
U-Germany , designed and built under chief engineer Rudolf Erbach, was launched on March 28, 1916 under construction number 200 and entered in the merchant shipping register. With the establishment, it cost about 4 million marks. The pressure hull was built by the Flensburger Schiffbau-Gesellschaft , while the prefabricated construction was carried out on the Friedr. Krupp Germania shipyard in Kiel .
In tonnage certificate 791 were BRT and 414 NRT entered. Six more merchant submarines were commissioned, but with the exception of the Bremen , they became artillery submarines before their first use as merchant submarines due to the increased naval blockade of the Royal Navy and the USA's entry into the war in 1917. Boats, so-called submarine cruisers, were converted.
Technical specifications
The boat was driven by two six-cylinder four-stroke diesel engines with 400 HP each and reached a speed of max. 10 kn over water and max. 6.7 kts when diving . The range at 10 knots above water was around 12,000 nautical miles. She had a crew of 29 men.
Travel as a merchant ship
First journey
The first trip started on June 16, 1916 in Wilhelmshaven. The boat set out on June 23, 1916 with officers from Norddeutscher Lloyd under Captain Paul König and carried an important cargo for the United States of 163 tons of dyes (e.g. alizarin ) and pharmaceutical preparations ( Salvarsan ) worth 60 million. Mark of the inking units vorm. Master Lucius & Brüning AG as well as bank and diplomatic mail. The Deutschland was the first submarine to cross the Atlantic .
She reached Baltimore on July 9, 1916 and took over her return load there, consisting of 348 t of rubber (client: Nordmann, Rassmann & Co., Hamburg, partly intended for Hungary), 341 t of nickel and 93 t of tin , which was urgent were needed in Germany. It reached Bremerhaven on August 25, 1916 . She had covered a total of 8,450 nm, 190 nm of which was diving. The profit from the cargo, driven by the lack of raw materials, was 17.5 million marks (more than four times the construction costs).
At the time, the American chemical industry was unable to manufacture the materials supplied and was therefore dependent on supplies from Germany. The return freight covered the needs of the German war industry for several months, but overall had no major impact on the German economy, which was suffering from the British blockade.
Second trip
On October 10, 1916, the Deutschland left again with a cargo of dyes, chemicals, medicines, securities, precious stones and mail , this time from Bremen. New London , Connecticut, was reached on November 1, 1916.
During the planned return voyage, which started on November 17, 1916, an incident occurred in the port of New London: During an unfortunate maneuver one of the assisting tugs ( T. A. Scott ) was rammed by the Germany and sank, five of its crew members drowned. After Germany's innocence had been established , a security deposit of 348,000 marks had been paid and the minor damage had been repaired, the submarine was allowed to sail on November 21, 1916. The cargo on the return trip consisted of 378 tons of rubber, 188 tons of nickel, 146 tons of iron alloy, 76 tons of tin and silver bars valued at $ 140,000. The submarine arrived back in Wesermünde (now Bremerhaven ) on December 10, 1916 .
Another fate
A third trip, which was planned for January 1917, was no longer started because the USA entered the war. On February 10, 1917, the U-merchant ship Deutschland was deleted from the shipping register.
U-cruiser SM U 155
The Deutschland was taken over by the Imperial Navy, converted into a submarine cruiser in the Kaiserliche Werft Wilhelmshaven and finally put into service on February 19, 1917 as the U 155 .
The conversion to a U-cruiser led to the following technical changes:
- Displacement: 1503 t ↓ / 1080 t ↑
- Max. Speed: 12.4 kn ↑ / 5.2 kn ↓
- Range: 25,000 nm at 5.5 kn ↑ / 65 nm at 3 kn ↓
- Bunker volume: up to 328 t fuel oil
- Immersion depth: 50 m in 50–80 s
- Armament:
- 6 torpedo tubes (up to 24 torpedoes on the upper deck) until 1918
- Artillery: 2 × 15-cm SK L / 40 from the ship of the line SMS Zähringen (until 1918), then 2 × 15-cm Utof C16 L / 45
- Crew: 6 officers + 50 non-commissioned officers / men and prize- winning command : 1 officer + 19 non-commissioned officers / men
The U-cruiser was impaired due to its weak motorization, which did not allow the pursuit of fast commercial steamers. Nevertheless, 42 ships with 121,328 GRT were sunk on three patrols and another ship with 1,338 GRT was damaged.
U 155 remained in action until November 13, 1918 . The surrender to Great Britain took place on November 24, 1918 , and in 1922 the submarine was canceled at Morecambe .
literature
- Paul König : The journey of Germany . Ullstein & Co, Berlin 1916.
- Jan Heitmann : Underwater into the new world. Commercial submarines and imperial submarine cruisers in the field of tension between politics and warfare. Berlin-Verlag Spitz , Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-87061-788-8 (= university series - history , also dissertation Uni Hamburg 1996).
- Eberhard Rössler : The German submarines and transport submarines . Bernard & Graefe, Bonn 2003, ISBN 3-7637-6246-9 .
- Joachim Schröder: The "blockade breaker". The transport submarine Germany and its risky use in the First World War , in: Clausewitz , Das Magazin für Militärgeschichte, 6 (2012), pp. 60–65.
- Hartmut Schwerdfeger, Erik Herlyn: The merchant submarines "Germany" and "Bremen". The adventure of sensational ocean crossings. (A forgotten chapter in seafaring) . Kurz-Schönholtz and Ziesemer Verlag, Bremen 1997, ISBN 3-931148-99-8 .
- Bodo Herzog : German U-Boats 1906–1966 . Karl-Müller, Erlangen 1999, ISBN 3-86070-036-7 .
- Bruno Bock: Kiel - the only city in the world in which so far underwater cargo ships have been built • A memory of the merchant submarines "U-Deutschland" and "U-Bremen" . In: Schiffahrt international , issue 6/1983, pp. 231–243, Koehlers Verlags-GmbH, Herford 1983, ISSN 0342-491X .
- Artur Brehmer: The daring voyage of the "Deutschland". Berthold Siegmund, Berlin 1916. ( digitized version )
Web links
Footnotes
- ↑ Bruno Bock: Kiel - the only city in the world in which so far underwater cargo ships have been built • A memory of the merchant submarines "U-Deutschland" and "U-Bremen" . In: Schiffahrt international , issue 6/1983, p. 233
- ↑ Bodo Herzog: German U-Boats 1906–1966 . Karl-Müller-Verlag, Erlangen 1999, ISBN 3-86070-036-7 , p. 54
.svg){kind=small}
Submarines : U 1 | U 2 | U 3 | U 4 | U 5 | U 6 | U 7 | U 8 | U 9 | U 10 | U 11 | U 12 | U 13 | U 14 | U 15 | U 16 | U 17 | U 18 | U 19 | U 20 | U 21 | U 22 | U 23 | U 24 | U 25 | U 26 | U 27 | U 28 | U 29 | U 30 | U 31 | U 32 | U 33 | U 34 | U 35 | U 36 | U 37 | U 38 | U 39 | U 40 | U 41 | U 42 | U 43 | U 44 | U 45 | U 46 | U 47 | U 48 | U 49 | U 50 | U 51 | U 52 | U 53 | U 54 | U 55 | U 56 | U 57 | U 58 | U 59 | U 60 | U 61 | U 62 | U 63 | U 64 | U 65 | U 66 | U 67 | U 68 | U 69 | U 70 | U 71 | U 72 | U 73 | U 74 | U 75 | U 76 | U 77 | U 78 | U 79 | U 80 | U 81 | U 82 | U 83 | U 84 | U 85 | U 86 | U 87 | U 88 | U 89 | U 90 | U 91 | U 92 | U 93 | U 94 | U 95 | U 96 | U 97 | U 98 | U 99 | U 100 | U 101 | U 102 | U 103 | U 104 | U 105 | U 106 | U 107 | U 108 | U 109 | U 110 | U 111 | U 112 | U 113 | U 114 | U 115 | U 116 | U 117 | U 118 | U 119 | U 120 | U 121 | U 122 | U 123 | U 124 | U 125 | U 126 | U 127 | U 128 | U 129 | U 130 | U 131 | U 132 | U 133 | U 134 | U 135 | U 136 | U 137 | U 138 | U 139 | U 140 | U 141 | U 142 | U 143 | U 144 | U 145 | U 146 | U 147 | U 148 | U 149 | U 150 | U 151 | U 152 | U 153 | U 154 | U 155 | U 156 | U 157 | U 158 | U 159 | U 160 | U 161 | U 162 | U 163 | U 164 | U 165 | U 166 | U 167