Graf Spee (F 215)

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Count Spee p1
Ship data
flag United KingdomUnited Kingdom (Naval War Flag) United Kingdom of Germany
GermanyGermany (naval war flag) 
other ship names
  • flamingo
Ship type Sloop training
ship
class Black Swan class
Shipyard Yarrow Shipbuilders , Glasgow
Build number 1716
Keel laying May 26, 1938
Launch April 18, 1939
Commissioning November 3, 1939 ( RN )
February 21, 1959 ( German Navy )
Decommissioning July 31, 1964
Whereabouts Sold for scrapping in 1967
Ship dimensions and crew
length
91.34 m ( Lüa )
width 11.43 m
Draft Max. 3.35 m
displacement 1,925  ts
 
crew 180 men
Machine system
machine 3 boilers
2 Parsons turbines
Top
speed 		20 kn (37 km / h)
Armament from 1939

last

The frigate Graf Spee (F 215) of the German Navy was a training ship . The ship was launched in 1939 as HMS Flamingo for the Royal Navy and was used during the Second World War. From 1959 to 1964 the Graf Spee served as a cadet training ship for the German Navy. In autumn 1967 it was sold to Hamburg for demolition. The ship was named after the head of the East Asian Squadron of the Imperial Navy, Vice Admiral Maximilian von Spee (1861-1914).

History of the ship

The Flamingo 1949

The later Graf Spee was on 26 May 1938, Yarrow Shipbuilders in Glasgow as a sloop of Black Swan class Keel-laying and ran on 18 April 1939 as Flamingo launched. She was completed shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War on November 3, 1939 as the first ship of the class before the HMS Black Swan , which was built at the same shipyard . During her service time in the Royal Navy, she received the tactical IDs L18, U18 and F18. At first she did escort service in the North Sea.

War missions in the Royal Navy

On April 8, she was sent to the units of the Royal Navy off Norway to strengthen their air defense capabilities, which tried to prevent the occupation of Norway by the Germans . On the 14th she took with the sloops Auckland , Black Swan and Bittern in Rosyth Royal Marines as well as anti-aircraft and searchlight units of the army for Åndalsnes on board ("Sickleforce"). Because of the bad weather, she had to seek refuge in Invergordon on the 15th and landed the marines in Andalsnes on the 17th and the guns and their operation in Ålesund . On April 24, she replaced the damaged cruiser Curacao as a guard and anti-aircraft ship in Andalsnes, where she was continuously attacked by the air force for the next two days. On the 26th, she was replaced by the sister ship Black Swan after the entire munitions stocks had been fired and returned to Great Britain. In May 1940 the Flamingo moved to the Mediterranean Fleet and was deployed from Port Sudan in the Red Sea until March 1941 .

At the end of April 1941, the sloop was used in the evacuation of Greece ("Operation Demon"), as was also the end of May in the evacuation of Crete , which was forced by the company Merkur . In July 1941, the Flamingo was damaged during a nightly supply trip to Tobruk, but could continue to be used until it was bombed on December 7, 1941 on the way to Tobruk.

Remaining as a stationary anti-aircraft battery in Suez, it was towed to Bombay in February 1943 and repaired there. Their heavy anti-aircraft machine guns were replaced by four individual 20mm Oerlikon cannons . She also received a radar device. The Flamingo was not ready for action again until January 1944 and was available to the Eastern Fleet for escort duties in the Indian Ocean.
In January and February 1945 she was used in landing operations on the Burmese coast and provided artillery support to the army troops with two Indian sloops. The work was finished in August 1945 and the ship was assigned to the reserve. For its war missions the sloop was awarded the Battle Honors North Sea 1939/40, Norway 1940, Greece 1941, Crete 1941, Lybia 1941 and Burma 1944/45.

In January 1949, the Flamingo was reactivated for use in the Persian Gulf and remained there until 1955.

German school frigate

As part of the rearmament, the Federal Republic of Germany took over a total of seven ships from the Royal Navy as school frigates in the construction phase of the Federal Navy, which for the sake of simplicity were grouped under the heading of class 138 school frigates , although they were by no means identical.

Germany took over the previous Sloop Flamingo as the only ship of the Black Swan class along with three similar ships of the so-called modified Black Swan class . It was commissioned in January 1959 as Graf Spee (F 215) for the Mürwik Naval School , where it was used for cadet training. 1961 changed the subordination to the command of the training ships .

The armament of the ship was changed several times during her service with the German Navy. The Flamingo / Graf Spee was delivered with two 102 mm twin guns at the bow, which were successively replaced. It is unclear whether it was also delivered with light anti-aircraft weapons. In the end, the Graf Spee had two twin 40 mm Bofors cannons one above the other at the bow and at the very end of the enlarged deck structure two single guns of this type next to each other.

During her service, she undertook a number of training trips abroad, often with her sister ship Hipper , which took her several times to American port cities, from Victoria (British Columbia) in the north to Valparaiso and Cape Horn in the South Pacific. In the old world, the ports called reached from Reykjavík in the north via Lomé in Togo and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in the south to Bangkok in the east. During her service with nine major training trips abroad, she had covered over 155,000 nautical miles and visited 68 ports in 36 countries.

After just five years, it was decommissioned on July 31, 1964. Considerations to convert the frigate into an air traffic control ship were not realized due to its age. The Graf Spee was sold to Hamburg on October 25, 1967 to be scrapped .

Other ships named Graf Spee

Several German warships were named after Maximilian Graf von Spee :

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rohwer: Chronicle of the naval war. P. 39.
  2. ^ Rohwer: Chronicle of the naval war. P. 41.
  3. ^ Rohwer, p. 120.
  4. ^ Rohwer, p. 127.
  5. ^ Rohwer, p. 144.
  6. ^ Rohwer, p. 193.
  7. ↑ a b Service history HMS Flamingo
  8. ↑ Rohwer, p 517f.
  9. ↑ Hildebrand: The German warships. Vol. III, p. 17.

literature

  • 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.
  • Günter Kroschel, Klaus-Jürgen Steindorff: The German Navy 1955–1985, ships and aircraft. Lohse-Eissing, Wilhelmshaven 1985, ISBN 3-920602-30-7 .

Web links