Raule (F 217)
 The Raule with her last armament
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The frigate Raule (F 217) of the German Navy was a training ship, named after Benjamin Raule (1634–1707), General Naval Director from Brandenburg . The ship was launched in 1941 as HMS Albrighton for the Royal Navy and was in service during World War II . From 1958 to 1967 the Raule served as a training ship for underwater weapons in the German Navy. In 1972 the Raule , last used as a target ship, was demolished.
history
In the service of the Royal Navy , the later Raule drove as a destroyer escort HMS Albrighton of the Hunt-Class Type III .
During the Second World War, the Albrighton arrived in the English Channel , where, together with four sister ships and eight motor torpedo boats , she prevented the relocation of the auxiliary cruiser Komet on the night of October 14, 1942, which sank with the entire crew after a torpedo hit , in the Bay of Biscay (27. / April 28, 1943 attack on a German escort) and during the landings near Dieppe ( Operation Jubilee ) and in Normandy (August 12, 1944: together with the Canadian 12th Support Group: battle against German outpost boats ; August: Battles with speedboats .) At the end of the war, after deployments in the North Sea, the ship was intended for use with the Eastern Fleet in the Indian Ocean , but was assigned to the reserve at the end of 1945. In this role the ship was in Gibraltar from 1953 to 1955 .
Starting in 1956, the Federal Republic of Germany procured seven lying escort ships of the Royal Navy as part of the rearmament, which for the sake of simplicity were summarized under the generic term School Frigates Class 138 , although they were by no means all identical, because they were three Hunt escort destroyers of the types II and III (2) and four Black Swan type sloops .
Federal Navy
The German Navy took over the Albrighton as a school frigate Raule (F217 ). The predecessor of its name was the clearance boat companion Raule of the Kriegsmarine . This ship was created in May 1940 by converting the minesweeper M 133 (built in 1919). It had served as a tender from 1922 to 1930 (from 1929 as a watch ). On May 9, 1942, it was lost after a collision near Boulogne .
The school frigate Raule was put into service on May 14, 1959 for the Naval Underwater Weapons School. From autumn 1961 the Raule served as a cadet training ship. From January 8 to March 17, 1962, she made a long spring voyage to the Mediterranean with the sister ship Brommy . The Brommy was damaged in Dover , which was called as a port of refuge during a heavy storm, and remained behind for repairs in Gravesend , so that the Raule carried out the onward journey via Brest , Gibraltar , Messina and Piraeus before she met the sister ship again in Saloniki . Both frigates then ran together via Malta , Gibraltar and Brest until March 17, 1963 back to Flensburg.
Decommissioned from May 30, 1962 to November 2, 1964, the Raule was rebuilt at Howaldtswerke in Hamburg. In the bow position it received a four-barreled 37.5 cm Bofors U-hunt launcher and a modern 40 mm Bofors gun. The submarine launchers were also used on the new buildings of the German Navy (destroyers of class 101 / 101A , frigates of class F120 , submarines of class 420 ). In the next few years the training took place mainly in the western Baltic Sea, in the Kattegat and Skagerrak . Trips abroad took the school frigate to Ireland, Norway and the Netherlands.
On December 20, 1967, the Raule was finally decommissioned. It was used as a target ship for a short time in 1970/1971 and was then scrapped in Hamburg after a heavy hit .
The callsign of the frigate Raule was DBVG.
Individual evidence
- ^ Rohwer, p. 292
- ^ Rohwer, p. 353
- ^ Rohwer: Chronik des Maritime War 1939–1945, p. 276
- ^ Rohwer, p. 472
- ^ Rohwer, p. 471
- ↑ a b Hildebrand: School frigate Raule , Vol. V, p. 75f.
literature
- Günter Kroschel, Klaus-Jürgen Steindorff: The German Navy 1955–1985, ships and aircraft . Wilhelmshaven 1985, Verlag Lohse - Eissing, ISBN 3-920602-30-7 .
- Keyword: School frigate Raule , in: Hans H. Hildebrand / Albert Röhr / Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships. Biographies - a mirror of marine history from 1815 to the present, 7 volumes in one volume , Ratingen o. J. [1983], Vol. 5, pp. 75f.
- Jürgen Rohwer , Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronicle of the Naval War 1939-1945 , Manfred Pawlak VerlagsGmbH (Herrsching 1968), ISBN 3-88199-009-7
