HMCS Rainbow (1891)
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 HMS Rainbow (1910) |
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| Overview | |
| Type | Protected cruiser |
| Shipyard | |
| Keel laying | 1890 |
| Launch | March 25, 1891 |
| period of service |
1893 to 1909 Royal Navy |
| Commissioning | 4th August 1910 Royal Canadian Navy |
| Whereabouts | 1920 demolition |
| Technical specifications | |
| displacement |
3,600 ts |
| length |
overall: 95.7 m (314 ft ) |
| width |
13.3 m (43.5 ft) |
| Draft |
5.3 m (17.5 ft) |
| crew |
273-300 men |
| drive |
5 cylinder boilers 2 triple expansion machines 7,000 PSi, 2 shafts |
| speed |
18.5 kn , |
| Range |
8000 nm at 10 kn (535 t coal) |
| Armament |
2 × 6 inch-152 mm-L / 40 guns |
| Armor deck engine room command post |
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The HMCS Rainbow , initially HMS Rainbow , had been a small armored cruiser of the newly formed Royal Canadian Navy since 1910 . She was built from 1890 to 1893 as a 2nd class cruiser by the Palmers shipyard in Jarrow on Tyne (England) for the Royal Navy. She belonged to the Apollo class .
In 1917 the cruiser was decommissioned to recruit personnel to defend against German submarines in the Atlantic.
Building history
The Apollo-class was the largest class cruiser of the British Royal Navy . 21 of these small protected cruisers were built from 1889 to 1894 at ten different shipyards and were used in the Second Boer War and twelve in the First World War. The orders for the cruisers were placed on the basis of the British Naval Act of 1889.
The Rainbow was launched on March 25, 1891 as HMS Rainbow at the Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Company in Jarrow am Tyne as the second and fourteenth cruiser of this class built there. The shipyard built a total of three Apollo cruisers with the HMS Pique , the Rainbow and the HMS Retribution .
Calls
In 1893 the Rainbow was put into service. From 1895 to 1898 she was on the China station in Hong Kong and then from 1898 to 1899 with the Mediterranean fleet in Malta . From 1900 the Rainbow was not used that often and still carried out some training trips from England. From 1907 it was no longer used and finally decommissioned in 1909.
The Rainbow was delivered to the Royal Canadian Navy in 1910 and entered service in Portsmouth on August 4, 1910 as Her Majesty's Canadian Ship / HMCS Rainbow . In addition, the new navy received the 1st class cruiser HMCS Niobe . The two old cruisers were supposed to train crews. The Rainbow ran with a contracted crew of 300 men under Commander JDD Stewart, RN, from Portsmouth through the Strait of Magellan to the Canadian Pacific coast to Esquimalt , British Columbia , where she arrived on November 7, 1910, where she finally became the second Canadian warship because the Niobe had arrived on the Canadian east coast before her. The Rainbow was received by the sloop HMS Shearwater , which was stationed there by the Royal Navy. In addition to training, Rainbow carried out friendship visits and also took on fishery protection tasks. In 1911 she was given Commander Walter Hose, an officer of the Royal Canadian Navy as commandant, who had previously also served in the Royal Navy. However, there was a lack of crews as not all of the original crew extended their contracts and recruitment for Canadian personnel was slow. The cruiser's operational readiness suffered as a result. It only improved when citizens on the west coast founded a volunteer group in July 1913. However, this only found official recognition after the outbreak of war with the formation of the Royal Naval Canadian Volunteer Reserve .
In July 1914, the Rainbow was ordered to Vancouver to help resolve a conflict. The steamer Komagata Maru arrived there on May 23, carrying 354 Sikh immigrants from India who were not allowed to enter the country under the Canadian Immigration Act, as this law was intended to prevent immigration from South Asia in particular. The trip was planned by Indians living in Hong Kong, also to draw attention to the restrictive Canadian immigration law. Passengers were not allowed to go ashore, despite the fact that they were British citizens and many had previously served in the British Army. The ship remained in port for two months. The Rainbow , which arrived on July 19, was supposed to force the ship to return, which she finally managed on July 23, 1914. Only 24 passengers were allowed to enter Canada.
War effort
The Rainbow was the only Canadian warship on the Pacific coast in 1914. They secured the west coast against a feared advance by German naval forces. In the beginning, two small cruisers were expected , as the Leipzig had just arrived on the Mexican Pacific coast to replace the Nürnberg . In fact, because of the critical situation , the Nürnberg immediately returned to the East Asia Squadron and only the Leipzig remained on the North American Pacific coast and first ran north to San Francisco . The Rainbow received contradicting orders, prepared for a battle with the more modern cruiser looking for prey off the California coast from August 11 to 18, but primarily only secured the withdrawal of the British sloops Shearwater and Algerine from Mexico to Canada and waited the announced reinforcement of the station by the light cruiser Newcastle from China Station . The German cruiser finally disappeared to the south after receiving news of a reinforcement of the Canadian station from China and of the imminent entry into the war by Japan, which had already stationed the armored cruiser Izumo on the Mexican coast. The Rainbow remained the largest warship of the Entente on the North American west coast, as the Japanese units continued south and a British cruiser did not arrive either. The Canadian station was only strengthened by the takeover of the British gunboats Shearwater and Algerine and the purchase of two submarines ( CC-1 and CC-2 ) from Seattle , which were under construction there for Chile . In February 1916, the Rainbow took over a cargo of Russian gold bars at sea from a Japanese warship, which the Russian government brought to safety in Canada. The Rainbow brought the gold to Vancouver, from where it was transported by train to Ottawa under strong security.
End of use of the Rainbow
In 1917 the war against the German submarines in the Atlantic became of paramount importance. Efforts were made to bring as many ships into service as possible to defend against them and this required a lot of personnel. The Canadian government and the Admiralty agreed to decommission the Rainbow on May 8, 1917 and to transfer their crew to the Atlantic coast to use them there.
The old ship was used again as a depot ship from June 1917 and then sold to Seattle for demolition in 1920.
Fate of the sister ships
The seven cruisers Latona , Apollo , Intrepid , Iphigenia , Andromache , Naiad and Thetis had been converted into miners from 1907 and were stationed in Dover when the war began .
Brilliant and Sirius were reactivated as cruisers in 1914, as was the Sappho for a time , which had served as a tender for the flagship of the Grand Fleet . The Spartan , also classified as a tender, only served as a residential ship.
Some of the cruisers came into the public spotlight in April 1918 when they were used as block ships against the German bases in Flanders . The attack on Ostend failed, the one on Zeebrugge did not have the desired success either, as it only briefly blocked the port entrance.
The two sister ships of the Rainbow , the Pique and the Retribution , which were also built by Palmers , had already been sold for demolition in 1911.
swell
literature
- Geoffrey Bennett: The Sea Battles of Coronel and Falklands. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-453-01141-4 .
- JJ Colledge, Ben Warlow: Ships of the Royal Navy: the complete record of all fighting ships of the Royal Navy , Chatham, London (1969, Rev.ed. 2006), ISBN 978-1-86176-281-8 .
- Arnold Kludas : The History of German Passenger Shipping 1850 to 1990 . Ernst Kabel Verlag, 1986.
- Keneth R. Macpherson, John Burgess: The Ships of Canada's Naval Forces 1910-1981 , Collins Publishers (Second Printing, 1982), ISBN 0-00-216856-1
Web links
- World War 1 Naval Combat
- History of War
- Article on the HMCS Rainbow CFB Esquimalt Naval & Military Museum
Individual evidence
- ↑ 3,040 GRT, 1890 as Stubbenhuk to the Hansa Line in Hamburg, 1894 to 1913 then with Hapag as Sicilia , deployed to Canada, 1901 also from Italy, 1902 to 1904 also with emigrants from Odessa to New York, from 1905 then freighter ( Kludas, Vol. I, p. 155.)
- ↑ Apologies from the Canadian Government 2010
- ^ Komagata Maru Incident
- ↑ The Original Rainbow Warrior ( Memento of the original from October 11, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Marc Milner in Legion Magazine May / June 2004
- ↑ Shearwater , 1900, 980 ts, 13 kn, 6-102 mm
- ↑ Algerine , 1895, 1,050 ts, 13 kn, 6-102 mm
- ↑ Bennett, pp. 44, 104.
- ↑ CC1 and CC2 - British Columbia's Submarine Fleet ( Memento of the original from June 26, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Rainbow's Bullion Run ( Memento of the original from August 24, 2012 on WebCite ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. CFB Esquimalt Naval & Military Museum
