Durostor (ship, 1911)
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The Durostor was a cargo ship built in 1911 that sailed as the Russian St. Petersburg until 1914 and was then sold to Romania. During the First World War it served as a transporter in the Russian Navy and from 1918 on it was again a cargo ship in Romania. During the Second World War , the Romanian Navy used the ship as a mine-layer , from 1941 it was chartered by the German Navy as a transport and sunk by Soviet bombers in May 1944. The name of the ship comes from the district of the same name on the Bulgarian border, which was abolished in 1938.
Construction and technical data
The ship was at the shipyard Kjøbenhavns Flydedok & Skibsværft A / S from Burmeister & Wain in Copenhagen under the hull number 89 to set keel . The launch took place in May 1911 under the name St. Petersburg , the completion also took place in 1911.
It was 66.14 meters long, 10.36 meters wide and had a draft of 4.90 meters. It was measured with 1309 GRT or 764 NRT and had a load capacity of 1395 tdw. The drive consisted of a triple expansion machine with an output of 800 hp . This acted on one screw , the ship reached a speed of 12.0 knots . Instead of being armed, as a mine-layer she only carried an unspecified number of mines .
history
Until the end of the First World War
After delivery by the shipyard, St. Petersburg was registered in St. Petersburg as the home port and was used in freight traffic from 1911 to 1914 by "Russian East Asiatic SS Co. Ltd." - a subsidiary of the Danish Det Østasiatiske Kompagni founded in 1899 . As early as 1914, the shipping company sold the ship to the "Baltic Line", which in turn sold it to the Romanian state shipping company Serviciul Maritim Român (SMR) in the same year . There it was named Durostor .
When Romania entered the war on the side of the Entente , the Romanian government made the Durostor available to the Russian Navy - in the same framework as it left other ships ( Romania , Regele Carol I and others) to Russia. The Russian Navy used the ship for transport tasks in the Black Sea. In 1918 the ship returned to its Romanian home port of Constana .
Between the wars and the Second World War
After the end of the First World War, the shipping company Serviciul Maritim Român used the Durostor again in freight traffic. In view of the Soviet claims to Bessarabia, Romania declared partial mobilization in March 1939 and planned to convert the Durostor into a mine ship . Although this conversion is said not to have been implemented, the Romanian Navy used the ship to lay mine barriers. She was not armed, only an unspecified number of mines.
After the Soviet ultimatum of June 26, 1940 to Romania to cede Bessarabia , northern Bukovina and the Herza region , the Romanian navy decided to lay mine barriers in the mouth of the Danube and thus keep the Soviet navy away. The first mine barrier was placed near Sulina from June 30 to July 3, 1940 . In addition to the Aurora , the Durostor were also involved . Another mine lock at Sulina followed in January 1941, when the minesweeper Remus Lepri ran into its own mines and sank.
At the time of Romania's entry into the war on the side of the Axis Powers in June 1941, Durostor belonged to the 4th (miner) group together with the miner Amiral Murgescu . Other uses of the Durostor as a mine ship are not recorded; the ship is said to have been held in reserve. During the operations of the Durostor it had been found that the deck of the ship was unsuitable for a mine ship. The last mention as "mine-layer" comes from the war diary of the German naval mission Romania from August 1, 1941, when the Durostor was badly damaged in a Soviet air raid.
In 1941, the Durostor returned to the merchant fleet and was chartered out to the German Navy for transport. It is mentioned during a convoy of the mine- layer Amiral Murgescu on January 1st / 2nd. November 1942, which secured the two ships Danubius and Durostor between Cape Tendra and Sfântu Gheorghe . A few weeks later, on December 17, 1942, the Durostor was the target of a Soviet submarine attack: East of Tuzla the boat M-62 torpedoed the convoy with the Durostor . However, both torpedoes shot missed the target.
Only when the Crimea was evacuated in April and May 1944 did the Durostor reappear in the sources shortly before its sinking: The Durostor was one of the numerous ships that belonged to the German-Romanian transports between the enclosed fortress Sevastopol in the Crimea and Constancea . The ship was sunk by bombs on May 12, 1944 in an attack by twelve Soviet Petlyakov Pe-2 bombers.
literature
- Reinhart Schmelzkopf: Foreign ships in German hands 1939–1945 . Strandgut-Verlag, Cuxhaven 2004
- Elmar B. Potter, Chester W. Nimitz , Jürgen Rohwer: Seemacht. From antiquity to the present . Manfred Pawlak Verlagsgesellschaft, Herrsching 1982, ISBN 3-88199-082-8 .
- Pierre Hervieux: The Royal Romanian Navy at War, 1941-1944 . In: Warship 2001-2002 . Conway Maritime Press, London.
- Cristian Craciunoiu, Mark Axworthy: Romanian Minelaying Operations in the Second World War . In: Robert Gardiner (Ed.): Warship 1991 . Conway Maritime Press, London, ISBN 0-85177-582-9 , pp. 146-159.
- Nicolae Koslinski, Raymond Stanescu: Marina Română în Al Doilea Razboi Mondial: 1939–1945 . Editura Făt-Frumos, Bucharest 1997, ISBN 973-552-033-8 .
- Robert Forczyk : Where the Iron Crosses Grow, the Crimea 1941-1944 . Osprey Publishing 2014 / E-Book, Kindle Edition ISBN 978-1-78200-625-1 . ( Preview in Google Book Search)
Web links
- Lloyd's of London (1939-1940). "Navires a Vapeur et a Moteurs": plimsollshipdata.org (PDF) accessed December 30, 2017
- navypedia.org.Retrieved December 30, 2017
- m.ziuaconstanta.ro (photo), accessed December 31, 2017
- snesejler.dk accessed on December 31, 2017
- mariners-l.co.uk.Retrieved December 31, 2017
- binnenschifferforum.de (photo from 1943), accessed on December 31, 2017
- naval-encyclopedia.com. Retrieved December 28, 2017
- worldwar2.ro accessed on December 28, 2017
Individual evidence
- ↑ plimsollshipdata.org (PDF) Schmelzkopf, p. 68, snesejler.dk mariners-l.co.uk navypedia.org
- ↑ Schmelzkopf, p. 68, m.ziuaconstanta.ro
- ↑ Schmelzkopf, p. 68, navypedia.org
- ↑ Sobanski, p. 44, worldwar2.ro worldwar2.ro
- ↑ wlb-stuttgart.de Bertke, Vol. 4, p. 72, Craciunoiu, p. 147, submarine-at-war.ru tapatalk.com
- ↑ ligamilitarilor.ro wlb-stuttgart.de Bertke Vol. 8, p. 77, uboat.net
- ↑ Craciunoiu, p. 157, wlb-stuttgart.de wlb-stuttgart.de wlb-stuttgart.de naval-encyclopedia.com Forczyk (e-book)