HMAS Albatross

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The HMAS Albatross
The HMAS Albatross
Overview
Type Seaplane carrier
workshop ship (1944)
Passenger ship (1949)
Shipyard

Cockatoo Docks and Engineering Company,
Cockatoo Island

Keel laying April 16, 1926
Launch February 23, 1928
Namesake Albatross , sea bird of the southern hemisphere
Commissioning January 23, 1929
Decommissioning April 26, 1933
Whereabouts
Scrapped 1938 to 1945 Royal Navy 1954
Technical specifications
displacement

4800 ts
6350 ts maximum

length

135.2 m (443 ft 7 in) above sea level

width

18.0 m (58 ft) hull
23.7 m (77 ft 9 in) swallow nests

Draft

5.1 m (16 ft 11.5 in)

crew

29 RAN + 8 RAAF officers
375 RAN + 38 RAAF men

drive

4 Yarrow boiler
Parsons turbines
12,000 HP, 2 shafts

speed

22 kn

Range

4280 nm at 22 kn
7900 nm at 10 kn

Armament

4 × 120 mm-Mk.VIII-SK
2 × 2 pdr (40 mm) -Flak
4 × .303 (7.7 mm) - Vickers machine guns
20 × 7.7 mm- Lewis MG
(five twin weapons)
4 × 3-pdr salute guns

Planes

9

The HMAS Albatross was a seaplane carrier of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN). The Albatross was built by the Cockatoo Island Dockyard during the 1920s and entered service in 1929. The ship had problems with the planes assigned to her:

  • the amphibious aircraft for which it was designed had been retired when the ship came into service;
  • the successor model could not be catapulted ;
  • the new aircraft developed for the Albatross did not enter service until the Albatross had already been assigned to the reserve.

The Albatross , which has been in reserve since 1933 , was traded in to the British Royal Navy in 1938 as part of the cruiser procurement program for the RAN. As HMS  Albatross , she supported escort and surveillance measures in the South Atlantic and, from mid-1942, in the Indian Ocean . From the end of 1943 to the spring of 1944 the ship was converted into a "Landing Ship (Engineering)" to support the landing in Normandy . It was used there to repair landing craft and other support units. In August 1946 the ship was sold to civilian owners. Rebuilt, it came into service as a passenger ship in 1949 under the name Hellenic Prince . After being used as a troop transport to Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising in 1953 , the ship was scrapped the following year.

Building history

In 1925 the Governor General Lord Stonehaven is said to have announced the acquisition of a seaplane carrier, to the surprise of the affected Australian armed forces RAN and RAAF. The decision to procure such a ship was triggered by high unemployment and the desire for public contracts. It was also recognized that Australia would not be able to procure and man an aircraft carrier. The Australian Commonwealth Naval Board requested the British Admiralty to draft a basic seaplane carrier that would have a top speed of 20  knots (kn) and would cost no more than £ 400,000 if contracted to a British shipyard.

RAAF Fairey IIID seaplane

The design developed by the Admiralty was based on the Royal Navy's first aircraft mother ship, the Ark Royal from 1914, and took into account a use of the Fairey III D seaplane, which was part of the "No. 101 Flight “of the Royal Australian Air Force was used for the RAN. The Albatross should be able to accommodate nine of these aircraft: six as active emergency aircraft and three as reserve aircraft. All machines were to be accommodated in three hangars in the hull, which led to the unusually high freeboard of the forward hull. The drive system, crew quarters and bridge therefore had to be located in the rear half of the ship. To be able to use the machines, three large cranes were provided.

The keel of the new building was laid on April 16, 1926 at the "Cockatoo Docks and Engineering Company" on Cockatoo Island . On February 23, 1928 it was launched as the Albatross by the wife of the Governor General Baron Stonehaven of Ury. The ship displaced 4,800 ts, was 443 feet (ft) 7 in (135.2 m) long, was up to 77 ft 9 in (23.7 m) wide, and had a draft of 16 ft 11.5 in (5.17 m). Driven by Parsons geared turbines which could produce up to 12,000 HP on two shafts with four Yarrow boilers , the Albatross reached 22 kn and exceeded the design speed of 20 kn. At top speed she had a range of 4,280 nautical miles (nm), and at the planned cruising speed of 10 kn she could cover 7,900 nm. The fuel oil supply was 942 tons of oil. The ship also had tanks for 37,700 liters of aviation fuel.

The armament of the ship consisted of four 4.7 inch (120 mm) Mk. VIII rapid fire cannons, two of which were set up at the same height in front of the aircraft deck in swallow nests , while the other two stood one above the other at the stern. This weapon was also developed for anti-aircraft defense. There were also four 2 pdr (40 mm) pom POM-based anti-aircraft guns , four 3-PDR - Hotchkiss -Salutgeschützen, four .303 in (7.7 mm) Vickers machine guns and twenty .303-in Lewis machine guns (ten individual weapons and 5 twin mounts). The ship's crew consisted of 29 naval officers, 375 seamen, 8 air force officers and 38 RAAF soldiers.

The Albatross was completed on December 21, 1928 and put into service by the RAN on January 23, 1929. The ship cost £ 1,200,000 to build.

RAAF Supermarine Seagull seaplane

However, the Fairey IIID machines had recently been retired and replaced by Supermarine Seagull Mk.III . However, the Seagull Mk.III were relatively unsuitable for use on the Albatross , as they were not stable enough to be catapulted. RAN and RAAF made a new requirement and Supermarine constructed the Seagull Mk.V for use by the Albatross , which was later adopted by the Royal Navy as Walrus . The Albatross went into reserve in 1933, two years before the first Mk.Vs came into service. Some machines were still used by the stationary Albatross . The new Seagulls were a little too high to be moved in the Albatross hangars . To solve this problem, special wagons were developed on which the machines could be moved with the chassis retracted.

Mission history

HMAS Albatross started on its first voyage a week after commissioning and visited Tasmania and Victoria . On April 11, 1929, she ran from Sydney to join Wyndham , Western Australia in the search for the missing Sir Charles Kingsford Smith and his Fokker F.VIIb-3m Southern Cross , who went missing on the way to England were. Before the Albatross reached the area to be searched, Smith was found, who had already made an emergency landing on the Glenelg River . At the beginning of July 1929, the ship made another voyage with the Governor General and his wife north within the Great Barrier Reef to Port Moresby and other ports in New Guinea . The ports of various islands were also called. In August, the ship and its guests were in Rabaul for a week , where the anniversary of the Australian occupation 15 years ago was also celebrated.

In November 1931 and again in September 1932, the drive system of the Albatross was damaged by sabotage . The acts of sabotage have been attributed to widespread unrest among seafarers; the RAN blamed communist influences, today's authors attribute it to the depression prevailing at the time, in which the cuts in salaries and other cuts mainly affected the seafarers and not the officers.

Albatross 1938

On April 26, 1933, the Albatross was decommissioned and assigned to the reserve. However, the ship anchored in Sydney Harbor was still used by the RAAF seaplanes. When the Australian government struggled to finance the purchase of the light cruiser HMS Apollo in 1938 , the British Admiralty accepted the Albatross as part of the payment for the future Hobart . The seaplane carrier was put back into service for transfer to England on April 19, 1938 and left Australia on July 11. His crew became part of the Hobart crew in Great Britain .

War effort

Actually, the Royal Navy had no need for a seaplane carrier. When the war began, the Albatross was stationed in Freetown in West Africa in order to be used with its aircraft for escort security, submarine hunting and air rescue in the Atlantic. On board she had six Supermarine Walrus of the FAA Squadron 710 and three reserve machines. The early loss of the HMS Courageous and HMS Glorious aircraft carriers in World War II opened up a longer period of use for the ship, although efforts were made to use more machines from different land bases. At Freetown, for example, Hastings airfield was expanded first for the Walrus and then for other surveillance aircraft. The Albatross was relatively seldom deployed at sea, but also managed the operations of the machines deployed from land and repaired on-board machines of passing warships. The ship's overhauls took place in Simonstown in 1941 and in Mobile, Alabama, in early 1942 .

In May 1942 the Albatross moved to Kilindini in the Indian Ocean to improve traffic to the Eastern Fleet . In July 1942, their planes gave air support for landing on the Mayotte archipelago before the occupation of Madagascar in September. Then she took up trade defense duties again until July 1943. The necessary overhauls took place in Durban or Bombay . The Albatross returned to Britain and was decommissioned in September.

Workshop ship

From October 1943 to April 1944, the Albatross was significantly rebuilt to serve as Landing Ship Engineering (LSE) during the landing in Normandy . For this mission, their anti-aircraft armament was significantly reinforced. The old light anti-aircraft weapons were replaced by two quadruple pom-pom and six 20mm Oerlikon twin guns. Initially, after being put back into service, it was in the Thames estuary as part of the diversionary maneuvers. On June 8, 1944, she moved to the Gooseberry 5 in front of Sword Beach near Ouistreham to provide repair options, support the air defense and train own bombers. The relocation took place immediately after landing when a storm largely destroyed the Allies' plans. Their repair work in front of Sword saved 79 vehicles from total loss and brought 132 back into service at the bridgehead. In July the Albatross was withdrawn to Portsmouth to be replenished and to give the crew a break

The next mission off Normandy took place at Juno Beach . On August 11, the Albatross was hit by a torpedo off Courseulles-sur-Mervon , causing considerable damage and killing 66 men. The Dutch tug Zwarte Zee (1933, 793 GRT, 4200 HP diesel engine) hauled the Albatross to Portsmouth, where it was decommissioned. The repairs lasted until the beginning of 1945 and HMS Albatross came into service again as a stationary supply ship for minesweepers until August 3, 1945, as a complete restoration no longer seemed sensible.

Civilian use

Hellenic Prince

The Albatross was sold to a British company for civil use on August 19, 1946. The first plan to convert the ship into a luxury passenger ship failed because of the excessive effort. Another plan then saw its use as a floating amusement theater under the name Pride of Torquay in front of the seaside resort of Torquay . This plan was not completed either. Finally, on November 14, 1948, the British-Greek Yannoulatos Group bought the ship and named it Hellenic Prince on the occasion of the birth of the British heir to the throne on that day and his Greek descent. The conversion to a passenger ship now took place in Barry (Wales) .

In 1949, the ship was chartered by the International Refugee Organization (IRO) to transport refugees from Europe to Australia. The refugees were Displaced Persons , Europeans who had been forced laborers by the Axis powers and who did not want to return to their home countries. The passengers of the maiden voyage of the Hellenic Prince were taken on board on November 8, 1949 in Naples and came from the Bagnoli refugee camp and had decided to emigrate to Australia. On December 5, 1949, the Hellenic Prince arrived with 1,000 passengers, 97 of them children, in her original home port and place of origin, Sydney. In 1953 the Hellenic Prince was last used as a troop transport to Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising .

On August 12, 1954, the ship then arrived in Hong Kong to be scrapped there.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b ANAM, Flying Stations , p. 16
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Cassells: The Capital Ships: their battles and their badges , p. 12
  3. ^ Cassells, p. 11
  4. ↑ a b ANAM, p. 17
  5. ↑ ANAM, p. 18ff.
  6. ↑ ANAM, p. 18f.
  7. ↑ a b Frame & Baker, Mutiny! , P. 125
  8. ↑ ANAM, p. 18
  9. ↑ Sturtivant: Squadrons FAA , p. 40f.
  10. ↑ a b c d e f g h Mason: HMS Albatross Seaplane Tender
  11. ↑ Sword Beach (Gooseberry 5); formed from the block ships: Becheville , Courbet , Dover Hill , HMS Durban , Empire Defiance ex Iserlohn (1909), Empire Tamar , Empire Tana , Forbin and Hr. Ms. Sumatra .
  12. ↑ Cassells, pp. 12f.
  13. ↑ a b Royal Australian Navy, HMAS Albatross (I)
  14. ↑ a b c d e Cassells, p. 13

literature

  • Australian Naval Aviation Museum (ANAM): Flying Stations: A Story of Australian Naval Aviation , Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW (1998), ISBN 1-86448-846-8
  • Vic Cassells: The Capital Ships: their battles and their badges , Simon & Schuster, East Roseville, NSW (2000), ISBN 0-7318-0941-6
  • Tom Frame / Kevin Baker: Mutiny! Naval Insurrections in Australia and New Zealand , Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards, NSW (2000), ISBN 1-86508-351-8
  • Ray Sturtivant: The Squadrons of the Fleet Air Arm , Air Britain publication, Tonbidge, Kent (1984), ISBN 0-85130-120-7 .

Web links

Commons : HMAS / HMS Albatross Seaplane Carrier  - Collection of images, videos and audio files