HMCS Ottawa (H60)
.jpg) The Ottawa
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The HMCS Ottawa (H60) was a destroyer for the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II . She was commissioned by the Royal Navy in 1932 as HMS Crusader (H60) and belonged to the C-Class of the Royal Navy, which comprised only five ships (instead of the usual nine) . The British Labor Government wanted to document its readiness for disarmament by halving the usual class size. Because the class did not fit into the structure of the Royal Navy , their ships were left to the Canadian Navy from 1937.
With her sister ship Comet , the HMS Crusader was handed over to the Royal Canadian Navy on June 15, 1938 and at the same time renamed HMCS Ottawa . During the war, the ship was primarily used in the North Atlantic to secure British trade, until it was sunk by the German submarine U 91 on September 14, 1942 .
History of the ship
The later HMCS Ottawa (H60) was ordered on July 15, 1930 from the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard as part of the 1929 construction program. The ship was laid down on September 12, 1930 and named HMS Crusader when it was launched on September 30, 1931. The keel was laid and launched on the same day as the sister ship HMS Comet .
The HMS Crusader was the second ship in the Royal Navy to bear this name. It had previously been given to a Tribal-class destroyer built by J. Samuel White in Cowes in 1909 , which was sold for demolition in 1920.
The new Crusader was completed on May 2, 1932 and first came to the "2nd Destroyer Flotilla" at Home Fleet . During the Abyssinia crisis , the destroyer was relocated to the Mediterranean in August 1935 in order to observe the behavior of the Italian fleet with the flotilla from September for six months in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean . After its return and an overhaul, the ship drove during the early phase of the Spanish Civil War in the Bay of Biscay for neutrality surveillance, which was supposed to prevent arms deliveries to one of the warring parties. To do this, she evacuated British citizens from the Spanish ports on the Bay of Biscay during the first months of the war.
From January 1937, the destroyer served as an escort ship for the aircraft carrier Courageous with the Home Fleet. The destroyer was then handed over to the Royal Canadian Navy and commissioned as HMCS Ottawa on June 15, 1938 during the overhaul in Sheerness . On August 20, she began her acceptance tests with the sister ship Restigouche , from October she moved together with the sister ship via Halifax to Esquimalt on the Pacific coast, where they arrived on November 7th. In October 1939, the Ottawa moved to Halifax as the third of the four destroyers used in the Pacific . At the time, these were the largest and most modern units in the Royal Canadian Navy.
Operations in World War II
Ottawa, moved from the Pacific coast to Halifax after the war began, arrived there on November 7, 1939 and was used as an escort for convoys in the North Atlantic . When the decision was made in May 1940 to deploy the majority of Canadian destroyers from the British Isles because the submarine danger was much greater there and the ships were needed there more urgently, the Ottawa was not operational after the collision with a tug did not move to the other side of the Atlantic until the end of August 1940. They were used there in the area of the “North Western Approaches” with Greenock as the basis. The sinking of the Italian submarine R.Smg. Comandante Faà di Bruno of the Marcello class in November 1940 on the west coast of Scotland was later assigned to the Ottawa and the HMS Harvester . When it was decided in the spring of 1941 to move the Canadian ships back to the east coast of Canada in order to strengthen the security of the merchant ships in this area, the Ottawa only followed in June. She was assigned to the "Newfoundland Escort Force" of the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), which accompanied the North Atlantic convoys from Newfoundland to the middle of the Atlantic.
The destroyer became the lead ship of a Canadian escort group, which escorted the convoys to the middle of the Atlantic. In this function he was in continuous use in 1941/42. During one such escort, HMCS Ottawa was sunk by U 91 on September 13, 1942 west of St. John's , Newfoundland , with two torpedo hits . When "Ocean Escort Groups" were set up in April 1942, the Ottawa lead destroyer of the Canadian EG C.4, which with the former USN destroyer HMCS St. Francis and four corvettes of the Flower class, was on May 10th in Halifax of the convoy SC 85 (62 ships) took over and escorted to England until June 14th. The anti -submarine and anti-aircraft armament was reinforced for this purpose at the expense of the main guns and the torpedo tubes.
Loss of Ottawa
On September 14, 1942, the Ottawa was defending convoy ON 127 (32 ships) with EG C.4 (ex US destroyer HMCS St. Croix and four corvettes) against the U-boat group Vorwärts (13 U- Boats) torpedoed by the German submarine U 91 500 nautical miles east of St. John's on Newfoundland . The maneuverable destroyer was hit by a second torpedo after ten minutes and then sank within another ten minutes to 47 ° 55 ′ 0 ″ N , 43 ° 27 ′ 0 ″ W . 114 men of the crew lost their lives, 69 castaways could still be rescued. Of the 34 castaways of the British tanker Empire Oil , who had rescued the Ottawa on the 11th, 18 died. In the German pack, all boats had been shot before the Ottawa was sunk and had sunk seven ships and damaged four in several missed shots.
Renewed use of the name
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In mid-May 1943, the Royal Canadian Navy took over the destroyer HMS Griffin from the Royal Navy , renaming it HMCS Ottawa (H31). He served with the RCN until December 1945 and was then scrapped. The first new building was the HMCS Ottawa (DDH 229) of the St. Laurent class in the Royal Canadian Navy from 1956 . The fourth HMCS Ottawa (FFH 341) is a Halifax-class frigate delivered in 1996 .
literature
- Marc Milner: Canada's Navy: The First Century. University of Toronto Press, 2010, ISBN 0802096042 .
- Jürgen Rohwer , Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronicle of the naval war 1939-1945. Manfred Pawlak VerlagsGmbH (Herrsching 1968), ISBN 3-88199-0097 .
- Michael J. Whitley: Destroyers of World War Two. An international encyclopedia. Arms and Armor Press, London et al. 1988, ISBN 0-85368-910-5 .
Web links
- Chronicle of naval warfare 1939–1945
- Service history HMCS Ottawa
- HMCS Ottawa (I) (H60)
- HMCS OTTAWA (1st) (H60)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Millner: Canada's Navy: The First Century. P. 87f.
- ^ Rohwer, p. 238
- ↑ Rohwer, p. 280
- ↑ HMCS OTTAWA (2nd) (H31)
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