HMS Calypso (D61)
 The calypso
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The HMS Calypso (D61) was a British C-class light cruiser of the subtype Caledon . The ship came into service with the Royal Navy in 1917 and was used in the Baltic Sea around the turn of 1918/1919 to protect the Baltic states. In 1919 and 1920 she supported White Troops in the Russian Civil War on the coast of the Black Sea . During the Second World War , the HMS Calypso was sunk in 1940 by the Italian submarine Alpino Bagnolini . She was the first British ship to be sunk by the Italian Navy during World War II.
Building history
The HMS Calypso was the second C-class cruiser completed at Hawthorn, Leslie & Company in Hebburn on the Tyne . Her keel was laid in February 1916 and she was put into service in June 1917. She belonged to the 5th subgroup of the class, usually referred to as the Caledon class, whose four ships were ordered from various shipyards in December 1915. They differed from the previous cruisers of the class by changing their superstructures. The two-funneled ships had five 6-inch guns, but only one bow gun and not two overlapping bow guns like later units. Only the rear guns were arranged like this. The other two guns were also installed on the midship line in front of and behind the funnels. The front one (between the chimney and the bridge structure) had only a limited fire area.
The two 3-inch anti-aircraft guns were placed next to the front funnel.
Mission history
The four cruisers were jokingly called "Tyrwhitt's Dreadnoughts" because they were initially assigned to the " Harwich Force " under Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt , where they formed the 6th Light Cruiser Squadron.
The second naval battle near Heligoland
Shortly after commissioning, the Calypso was involved in the so-called Second Skirmish near Helgoland on November 17, 1917 , when she attacked minesweepers of the Imperial Navy with her sister ship HMS Caledon and HMS Galatea . These withdrew to the second reconnaissance group under Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter with the small cruisers SMS Königsberg II , Nürnberg II , Frankfurt and Pillau .
The battleships SMS Kaiserin and SMS Kaiser under sea captain Kurt Graßhoff , which are also at sea as cover forces, also intervened in the battle from a great distance. The three light cruisers took up action with the German battleships, expecting the British battlecruisers HMS Tiger , HMS Renown and HMS Repulse and the large cruisers HMS Courageous and HMS Glorious to arrive soon. The Calypso was given by the Empress a heavy hit in the bridge of there all including the commander killed (10 dead). Courageous and Glorious were the first ships with heavy artillery to intervene on the British side. For the two later aircraft carriers , it was the only battle as a cruiser. Although they fired 92 and 57 rounds, respectively, they scored only one insignificant hit on the Pillau . The German ships also missed the almost 400 rounds of their medium artillery. On the Glorious , the left gun in the bow turret also failed due to shrapnel. When the Repulse under Captain William Boyle also intervened in the battle, the German ships of the line withdrew into the protection of their minefields. The Repulse fired 54 more rounds with its heavy artillery at the German ships and scored a hit on the Königsberg , which significantly reduced its speed. The Germans lost only the mine sweeper Kehdingen in the battle .
Use in the Baltic Sea
The British 6th Light Cruiser Squadron under Rear Admiral Edwyn Alexander-Sinclair was at the request of the Estonian government after the delivery of the German high seas fleet with five light cruisers ( Calypso , her sister ships Cassandra and Caradoc , the Ceres and the Cardiff as flagship) and nine destroyers in the Sent to the Baltic Sea to supply the Estonians with weapons (6,500 rifles, 200 machine guns and two field guns) and to prevent the Soviet fleet from intervening in the civil war in the Baltic states. On November 22nd, 1918, the association left Rosyth and ran via Copenhagen and Libau (26th) to November 27th to Reval .
During an exploration in the Gulf of Finland , the Cassandra ran into an unknown German minefield on the night of December 5 and sank. The destroyers Vendetta and Westminster managed to save 430 Cassandra men . Calypso took over the survivors of the sister ship and brought them (accompanied by the destroyers Westminster and Verulam, which were damaged by a collision on the 6th ) to Great Britain, but returned immediately to the Baltic Sea alone. Because of a crisis in Latvia , the British commander split up and ran to Riga with Cardiff , Ceres and destroyers . On December 24, 1918, the destroyers Wakeful , Vortigern and Vendetta brought down the Soviet Russian destroyer Spartak (ex Kapitan Miklucho-Maklaj , Kapitan Kingsbergen ) , who had lost both screws by touching the ground while on the run. The British towed the Soviet destroyer to Reval. On the 25th, another Soviet Russian destroyer was discovered, attacked by Calypso , Caradoc and Wakeful and captured without resistance. The captured Awtroil and the introduced Spartak were handed over to Estonia on January 2, 1919 as the core of their own fleet and served as Lennuk and Vambola of the Estonian Navy until both boats were sold to Peru in 1933 . The British units visited on 1/2. January 1919 Helsinki and transferred Finnish volunteers to Estonia, gave from January 4th Estonian troops from the sea artillery support in the Narva area and were replaced by the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron under Rear Admiral Walter Cowan in early January 1919 . The ice conditions did not allow any further operations in the Gulf of Finland. The new squadron remained in Copenhagen and only sent ships to Libau regularly.
Use in the Mediterranean fleet
In March 1919, the Calypso ran into the Mediterranean, where she was subordinated to the 3rd Light Cruiser Squadron of the Mediterranean Fleet . She moved on to the Black Sea and arrived off Sevastopol in March . In the area of Crimea , the French and Greeks supported the White troops. The Calypso replaced the Ceres as a British observer. On April 5, 1919, the British battleship HMS Marlborough arrived to bring the Romanovs living in Yalta around the Tsar's mother Maria Feodorovna to safety. The Calypso also had large numbers of refugees on board at times. The cruiser remained off the Crimea as the ship of the oldest British naval officer. When the white troops withdrew to the Kerch peninsula , the calypso went to the Sea of Azov to support the whites from there. When the Marlborough returned, she supported them on the front line to the Kerch Peninsula until June 18, while Calypso tried the same tasks for the area from the side of the Sea of Azov with a small monitor and destroyers. At the end of June the cruiser was back in Malta and visited Fiume from July 14, 1919 . On July 31st, the Calypso arrived in Gibraltar . At the beginning of 1920 she was back in the Black Sea, left Theodosia on March 28 , went to Novorossiysk and was then back in Malta on October 23, 1920. On March 11, 1921, she visited Constantinople . In autumn of that year she was in the western Mediterranean and was overtaken in Malta from November 1921. On August 31, 1922, the Calypso was put back into service.
In December 1922, the Calypso rescued part of the Greek royal family after the military coup of September 11, 1922, which forced the Greek King Constantine I to abdicate. The king's brother, Andrew of Greece , was also threatened as the military junta under Nikolaos Plastiras initiated trials of those officers it believed to be responsible for the defeat in the war against Turkey . The king's brothers serving in the army were also accused. Andreas had recently commanded a division. His wife Alice von Battenberg , daughter of the former First Sea Lord Louis Mountbatten and related to the British royal family, asked for help and the British King George V ordered his relatives to be rescued, as he did in Crimea in 1918. The Calypso took in Corfu , the family residence, the prince, his wife, four daughters and their 18 month old son Philip in an orange crate as a bed on board. The family was taken to Brindisi , from where they took the train to Paris . Little Philip became Philip Mountbatten, the Duke of Edinburgh later the consort of Queen Elizabeth II.
The Calypso remained in the Mediterranean until a major overhaul planned in England. She left Malta on April 25, 1932, visited Gibraltar again on April 29, and arrived in Chatham on May 5, 1932 . In October, the cruiser moved to Plymouth , where it remained as part of the reserve fleet until August 1939.
Use in World War II
At the beginning of the Second World War , the Calypso was activated. On August 26, 1939, she arrived in Scapa Flow and ran out on August 31 for the first patrol trip between the Orkneys and Norway . On September 3, she was assigned to the newly formed 7th cruiser squadron, which also included the sister ship Caledon and the cruisers Diomede and Dragon . With the 12th cruiser squadron they provided the "Northern Patrol" between Scotland and Iceland from September 6th , whereby five cruisers should always be at sea. On September 24, 1939, the Calypso discovered the Minden des NDL, coming from Rio de Janeiro, near the Faroe Islands , whose crew sank the ship before it could be occupied by the Calypso or the Dunedin , which had also arrived . On October 9, she was involved when the Belfast landed the German South American steamer Cap Norte , which also had many reservists from South America on board. In October, Sullom Voe became the main base of the Calypso , which served mainly between the Orkneys and the Faroe Islands. On November 18, Loch Ewe became the new base of the cruiser, which brought the consul Hendrik Fisser north of the Faroe Islands on November 22 . The following day it became known that the British auxiliary cruiser Rawalpindi had been sunk and the Calypso took part in the search for the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and was sent to the Norwegian coast near the Utvaer beacon . On December 1, the Calypso was relocated to Newcastle-upon-Tyne for an overhaul and after its completion on the 21st moved to Plymouth to be prepared for a mission in the Mediterranean. The Calypso set sail on December 24th , spent a night in Gibraltar on the 27th and arrived in Malta on the last day of the year, where she was assigned to the 3rd cruiser squadron. In the spring of 1940 she moved to Alexandria in the eastern Mediterranean .
The end of the calypso
Shortly after Italy entered the war , the Calypso was with the British Mediterranean fleet looking for Italian ships to supply Libya. About 50 miles south of Cape Lithion in Crete , she was hit by the torpedo of the Italian submarine Alpino Bagnolini under Franco Tosoni Pittoni . More than two hours after the hit, the Calypso sank on June 12, 1940 at 0:59 a.m. at position 34 ° 3 ' N , 24 ° 5' E. . 39 Calypso men died in the sinking. Most of the survivors were rescued by the destroyer Dainty and taken to Alexandria. The sister ship Caledon was also involved in the rescue of survivors.
The Calypso was the first British ship to be sunk by the Italian Navy during World War II.
literature
- JJ Colledge, Ben Warlow: Ships of the Royal Navy: The Complete Record of all Fighting Ships of the Royal Navy. Chatham London (Rev.ed. 2006), ISBN 978-1-86176-281-8 .
- Hans H. Hildebrand / Albert Röhr / Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships: Biographies - a mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present , Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, Herford,
- Arnold Kludas : The ships of the North German Lloyd 1920 to 1970. Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, 1992, ISBN 3-7822-0534-0 .
- Jürgen Rohwer , Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronicle of the naval war 1939-1945. Manfred Pawlak Verlag, Herrsching 1968, ISBN 3-88199-009-7 .
Web links
- Caledon Class Light Cruisers
- Englannin laivastotoimet Itämerllä 1918 - 1921
- Operations in the Crimea 1919
- Caradoc , p. 128ff.
- Caledon Class - 3 Ships extracted from Jane's Fighting Ships © for 1919
- HMS Calypso Service history WWII
- HMS Calypso at Uboat.net
Footnotes
- ↑ Hildebrand, Vol. 4, p. 10
- ^ Queen, Estonians honor Britain's 'forgotten fleet'
- ↑ naval review 1922, p. 128 ff. (PDF; 10.4 MB)
- ↑ The Times (London), December 4, 1922, p. 12
- ^ Rohwer: Sea War. August 31 - September 7, 1939, North Sea.
- ^ Rohwer: Sea War. 3rd - 28th September 1939, North Sea.
- ↑ Kludas, p. 10, TS Minden , (1921 / reconstruction 1939) 4301 GRT, 14.5 kn, she left Rio on September 6th to break through to Germany
- ^ Rohwer: Sea War. 12-23 November 1939, North Atlantic .
- ^ Rohwer: Sea War. 21.-27. November 1939, North Atlantic.
- ↑ Rohwer, p. 53
- ^ Rohwer: Sea War. 4th - 21st June 1940, Mediterranean.
Caroline group: HMS Caroline | HMS Carysfort | HMS Cleopatra | HMS Comus | HMS Conquest | HMS Cordelia
Calliope Group: HMS Calliope | HMS Champion
Cambrian Group: HMS Cambrian | HMS Canterbury | HMS Castor | HMS Constance
Centaur Group: HMS Centaur | HMS Concord
Caledon Group: HMS Caledon | HMS Calypso | HMS Cassandra | HMS Caradoc
Ceres Group: HMS Cardiff | HMS Ceres | HMS Coventry | HMS Curacoa | HMS Curlew
Carlisle Group: HMS Cairo | HMS Calcutta | HMS Capetown | HMS Carlisle | HMS Colombo