Doggerbank (ship, 1926)
 still as Speybank
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The Doggerbank ( Schiff 53 ) was a former British cargo ship called Speybank , which was seized by the German auxiliary cruiser Atlantis in the Second World War and sent as a prize to Bordeaux in occupied France , then used by the Navy as a mine ship and blockade breaker and finally by the German U- Boat U 43 was accidentally sunk.
Construction and technical data
The Speybank ran on 25 February 1926 on the shipyard of Harland & Wolff in Glasgow with the hull number 686 for the London shipping company Bank Line from the stack . She was 133.7 m long (128.92 m in the waterline ) and 16.41 m wide, had a draft of 7.8 m and was measured at 5,154 GRT . The machinery consisted of two single-acting 6-cylinder four-stroke diesel engines from Harland & Wolff and two propellers that produced 2,400 hp and a top speed of 11 knots .
German pinch
On the evening of January 31, 1941, the Speybank was in the Indian Ocean north of Madagascar near the Seychelles with a cargo of manganese ore , rubber , tea and teak on its way from Cochin to New York when it was discovered and seized by the German auxiliary cruiser Atlantis . In view of the valuable cargo and the fact that the Speybank had enough fuel and provisions on board to sail as far as France, the commandant of the Atlantis , Captain Bernhard Rogge , ordered a prize squad on board and ordered him to wait for the time being stay and serve as a scout for the auxiliary cruiser.
The Speybank stayed near the Atlantis until March 21 , where it also took part in several meetings with the heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer , the blockade breaker Tannenfels and the Norwegian tanker Ketty Brøvig , which was attacked by the Atlantis on February 2 . On March 21, the ship, camouflaged as its own sister ship Springbank , was sent on its way to Europe under the command of Leutnant zur See Paul Schneidewind, the first officer on watch on the Tannenfels . The ship reached the southern French port of Bordeaux on May 10, 1941.
Mine ship Doggerbank
In the Forges et Chantiers de la Gironde shipyard in Bordeaux, at Schneidewind's suggestion, the ship was equipped to become a mineship and submarine supplier in order to operate in distant sea areas. The ship received a 10.5 cm L / 45 cannon and two 20 mm anti-aircraft guns and then took 280 mines of various types in La Pallice (155 EMC and 55 EMF for its own use and 70 TMB to be passed on to submarines) and 50 torpedoes for submarines on board. Mine rails were not installed. The bunker stock was 1,030 tons of diesel fuel to enable a long stay at sea. The crew consisted of 108 men. The ship was renamed Doggerbank ; the ship management was carried out by the German steam shipping company "Hansa" .
On January 21, 1942, the Dogger Bank ran out, accompanied by the submarine U 432 , to lay mines near Cape Town and Cape Agulhas and then continue to Japan . This time the ship was camouflaged as the Levernbank , another sister ship of the Speybank . On March 2, 1942, on the high seas, it was commissioned as an auxiliary warship with the designation Schiff 53 . The camouflage worked when the ship was asked for name, origin and destination on March 12th, 13th and again on March 14th, first by a South African aircraft, then by the light cruiser Durban and finally by the British auxiliary cruiser Cheshire . The first mine locks ( Operation Copenhagen ) were on 12./13. March, with 60 mines off Cape Town and 15 near Cape Agulhas. Then the Doggerbank first withdrew to the South Atlantic to avoid further controls on Allied ships, especially since the first ship losses had occurred on the mines it had laid. It was not until the night of April 16-17, again off Cape Agulhas, that they laid 80 more mines in five sections ( Operation Cairo ). On one of the mines laid near Cape Agulhas, the British freighter Soudan (6677 GRT) sank from the WS 18 convoy and the destroyer depot ship HMS HECLA (10,850 ts) was badly damaged on May 15, 1941. The Dutch freighter Alcyone sank on the Doggerbank mines off Cape Town on March 16, 1941 . On May 2, the British freighter Dalfram and on May 4, the Dutch freighter Mangkalihat (ex Lindenfels ) were damaged by mine hits.
This ended the mining operations even though mines were still on board. The Dogger Bank then first met on June 21 in the South Atlantic with the auxiliary cruiser Michel and the supply tanker Charlotte Schliemann ; in the process, she supplied the Michel with provisions and ammunition and at the same time took over 124 sailors from ships that the Michel had sunk. Another 68 prisoners of war came from Charlotte Schliemann , who had taken them over from the auxiliary cruiser Stier . After a week in the company of Michel and Charlotte Schliemann , the Dogger Bank drove through the Indian Ocean to Jakarta and from there to Yokohama , where it arrived on August 19, 1942.
Blockade breaker Doggerbank
The auxiliary cruiser Thor and the two supply ships Leuthen and Uckermark were already in Yokohama . On November 30th, while cleaning an oil tank on the Uckermark , there was an explosion and a major fire that not only destroyed the Uckermark , but also the Leuthen and the Thor . Only the Dogger Bank was spared.
On December 17, she left for Europe under the command of Paul Schneidewind. On board were a cargo of fats, fish oil and 7,000 tons of rubber as well as more than 200 former crew members of the Thor and the surviving crew of the Uckermark . There were a total of 365 men on board. The journey went via Kobe , Saigon (where tobacco was unloaded and a large load of rubber was taken on board), Singapore (where no diesel fuel was available) to Jakarta, where diesel could finally be bunkered. On January 10, 1943, it went from there without incident through the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope and then north through the South Atlantic.
On March 3, 1943, the Dogger Bank was already in the mid-Atlantic, around 1,000 nautical miles west of the Canary Islands . There she was sighted shortly before 10 p.m. by the German U- 43 submarine , which she believed to be a British Dunedin Star- class ship . Since the Doggerbank was sailing earlier than expected and also not in the section of the lake that was intended for German blockade breakers from Japan, U 43 shot three torpedoes at it. All three met, and the ship dropped within three minutes at the position 29 ° 10 '0 " N , 34 ° 10' 0" W . Around 200 of the seafarers on board were probably killed immediately. Since the Dogger Bank had not sent a distress signal, the German naval war command remained in the dark for days about the whereabouts of the ship. When the facts became clear, the commander of U 43 , Oberleutnant zur See Hans-Joachim Schwandtke, was instructed to delete the relevant entries from his boat's war diary.
26 days later, on March 29, 1943, the Spanish tanker Campoamor found a small boat (4 m long and 1.80 m wide) with the only survivor of the Dogger Bank , Fritz Kürt, and brought him to Aruba , where he was initially treated and was then brought to the United States as a prisoner of war. Kürt's statements after his rescue were contradicting and at least partially implausible, so that later different versions of the fate of the last 15 men in the small boat came into circulation.
literature
- Charles Gibson: The Ship with Five Names. Abelard-Schumann, London et al. 1965.
- Charles Gibson: Death of a Phantom Raider. The Gamble That Triumphed and Failed, Atlantic, 19424-3. Robert Hale, London 1987, ISBN 0-7090-2947-0 .
- Hans Herlin : The last man from the "Dogger Bank". Authentic report of a drama in the Atlantic (= Bastei-Lübbe-Taschenbuch 10590). Bastei Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1985, ISBN 3-404-10590-7 .
- Karl von Kutzleben, Wilhelm Schroeder, Jochen Brennecke : Mine ships 1939–1945. The mysterious missions of the “midnight squadron”. Köhler, Herford 1974, ISBN 3-7822-0098-5 .
- John R. Stilgoe: Lifeboat. University of Virginia Press, Charlotteville VA et al. 2003, ISBN 0-8139-2221-6 , pp. 256-260.
- James E. Wise, Jr .: Sole Survivors of the Sea. Naval Institute Press, Annapolis MD 2008, ISBN 978-1-59114-943-9 , pp. 19-26.
- Zvonimir Freivogel: German auxiliary cruiser of the Second World War. Pirates on the oceans. Motorbuch Verlag 2003, ISBN 3-613-02288-5 , pp. 144-148.
- Peter H. Block: The last man - sinking of the auxiliary warship Doggerbank . In: SCHIFF Classic, magazine for shipping and marine history eV of the DGSM , issue: 1/2018, pp. 28–35.
Web links
- Speybank / Doggerbank at Deutsche Dampfschifffahrts-Gesellschaft "HANSA", with photos
- Speybank at Shipping Times
- Doggerbank on uboat.net
- The Doggerbank story
- Mackenzie J Gregory: The Auxiliary German Minelayer Doggerbank
Footnotes
- ↑ The Speybank belonged to the Inverbank class and had 17 sister ships.
- ↑ The naval mines of the Kriegsmarine were named with a three-digit combination of letters, the first two letters denoting the functionality and the third the execution of the mine. EM were anchor mines for sea depths of up to 700 m with contact detonators , TM were anchor mines with magnetic and contact detonators for use from submarines.
- ↑ wlb-stuttgart.de
- ↑ wlb-stuttgart.de
- ↑ The 55 EMF mines were thrown overboard on May 28th after the naval war command announced that they were defective.
- ↑ 54 from the British Patella , 22 from the British Lylepark , 32 from the Norwegian Kattegat and 16 from the American Connecticut .
- ↑ They came from the British Gemstone and the Panamanian Stanvack Calcutta .
- ↑ The Leuthen was the former Australian combined ship Nankin , which the Thor had brought up on May 10, 1942 and sent as a prize to Yokohama to serve as a reserve for German surface units. See also: http://www.far-eastern-heroes.org.uk/Experiences_of_Cecil_Saunders/html/ss_nankin.htm