HMS Godetia (K226)
 HMS Godetia (K226)
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The HMS Godetia (K226) was a British sloop of Flower Class of 1941, in the Second World War with Belgian crew and the Belgian flag as part of the Royal Navy Section Belge was used as escort ship for supply convoys. The ship was originally christened HMS Dart , but the name changed after the sinking of the first Flower-class corvette named Godetia (K72). After the liberation of their country, Belgium returned the ship to Great Britain. In 1947 the Godetia was scrapped.
Construction and technical data
The Godetia was commissioned on August 24, 1940 and laid down at John Crown & Sons Ltd in Sunderland on January 15, 1941. When it was launched on September 24, 1941, it was named Dart after the river Dart of the same name in Devon . She did not keep this name for long - even before the commissioning on February 23, 1942, her name was changed to Godetia - a summer azalea ("Godetia amoena"). She was after the loss of the first Godetia (K72) on September 6, 1940 in a collision with the freighter Marsa, the second ship of the Flower class with this name.
Her length was 62.5 meters, she was 10.1 meters wide and had a maximum draft of 4.15 meters. The displacement was 925 tons standard and 1170 tons maximum. The drive consisted of a triple expansion machine with two boilers, which achieved 2750 hp and acted on one screw. With that she reached a top speed of 16.5 knots. The range was 3500 nautical miles at 12 knots.
It was armed with a 4-inch Mk.IX gun (equivalent to 102 mm), two 20-mm Oerlikon cannons and a Hedgehog launcher, four Mk.II depth charges and two drop rails for 40 depth charges. In the course of the war, the armament was adapted to the changing requirements. The crew strength was 85 to 109 officers and men.
history
Even before commissioning, the Godetia was handed over to the newly founded Royal Navy Section Belge (RNSB) on February 12, 1942 . This formed the naval forces of the "Free Belgian Armed Forces". The crew consisted mainly of Belgian fishermen who had previously been trained on the Quentin Roosevelt . Even if the ship still belonged to the Royal Navy, it carried the Belgian flag.
First of all, the new crew was trained for the task of securing the convoy. This happened from February to April 1942 in western Scotland off the coast of Tobermory , the capital of the Isle of Mull . The Godetia was used in convoy protection from the start and helped protect 70 convoys - in the Atlantic, on the American coast and the Caribbean, in the Mediterranean and during the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944.
In April 1942 she was the first to escort convoy ON 87 from Liverpool to New York, then commuted between New York and the Dutch West Indies until June, between Trinidad, Aruba and Key West from July to August, and between Guantanamo and New York in August and September. In December she left American waters, escorted convoy TMF 1 from Trinidad to Gibraltar from December 28, 1942 to January 14, 1943 and witnessed her first attack by German submarines in the battle of the Atlantic.
The convoy, consisting of nine tankers, was accompanied by the "Escort Group 5", at that time consisting of the destroyer Havelock and the corvettes Pimpernel , Saxifrage and the Godetia . After a Catalina of the VP-53 from Trinidad discovered and reported the German submarine U 124 on December 28, the Godetia succeeded in forcing the boat to submerge and thus prevent it from attacking. A few days later, on January 3, 1943, U 514 discovered the convoy and damaged the tanker British Vigilance , which was later sunk by U 105 . Further submarines were brought up to the convoy, of which the Godetia first prevented U 575 from attacking on January 9 and then damaged U 134 with depth charges. On January 11, she rescued the survivors of the tanker British Dominion northwest of the Canary Islands and brought them to Gibraltar.
In 1943, on January 17th, the securing of the convoy MKS 5 from Bougie in Algeria to Liverpool. The Godetia spent three weeks there doing repairs and maintenance. From February to June she then secured convoys between Liverpool and New York or Halifax with the “Escort Group 5”. On March 17, she rescued the crew of the trawler HMS Campobello , which had previously been damaged by ice drift on the St. Lawrence River, and on March 18, the survivors of the freighters Port Auckland and Zouave , who had been torpedoed by U 305 . On June 24th, she accompanied convoy KMS 18B from the Clyde in Great Britain to the Mediterranean Sea for Operation Husky , the Allied invasion of Sicily, and arrived there in time for the start of the invasion on July 10th. In July / August, further securing of the convoy led from Hampton Roads to Port Said , back from Gibraltar to the rendezvous with the convoy SL 135 from Freetown to Great Britain. In September the ship went to the shipyard in Greenock . In October she took part in the "Operation Alacrity", the establishment of Allied air bases on the Portuguese Azores islands of Faval and Terceira. The Godetia belonged again to the Escort Group 5 as a backup group. From November on, the Atlantic route from Liverpool to New England on the American east coast and back was again on the way.
The year 1944 began with extensive repairs that lasted until the end of April. From April she trained for the Allied landing in Normandy. After the landing began on June 6, 1944, it led supply convoys from England to the continent until September. On December 16, 1944, the Belgians returned the Godetia to the Royal Navy in the West Hartlepool naval port in Scotland, as they were using their crew to secure the liberated Belgian ports.
After the return, the Royal Navy continued to use the Godetia with a British crew and used it again to secure the convoy. Between February and May 1945, she escorted 18 convoys on the British coast between Milford Haven in Wales and Southend in Essex on the Thames estuary. In October 1945 she was removed from the fleet register. On May 22, 1947, the ship was finally sold and then scrapped in Grays .
literature
- Robert Gardiner / Roger Chesneau: Conway's All the world's fighting ships 1922-1946 , Conway Maritime Press, London 1980, ISBN 0-8317-0303-2 .
- Harald Fock : Fleet Chronicle. The active warships involved in both world wars and their whereabouts , Koehler's publishing company, revised and expanded version Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-7822-0788-2 .
- Donald A. Bertke, Gordon Smith, Don Kindell / Naval-history.net: World War II Sea War - Volume 8: Guadalcanal secured , Bertke Publications, Dayton / Ohio 2015, ISBN 978-1-937470-13-5 .
- Donald A. Bertke, Gordon Smith, Don Kindell / Naval-history.net: World War II Sea War - Volume 9: Wolfpacks Muzzled , Bertke Publications, Dayton / Ohio 2016, ISBN 978-1-937470-16-6 .
Web links
- http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/chronik.htm , accessed on July 16, 2017
- http://www.naval-history.net/xDKEscorts20Cor-Flower05.htm#Godetia , accessed on July 16, 2017
- http://www.convoyweb.org.uk/hague/index.html , accessed on July 16, 2017
- http://uboat.net/allies/warships/ship/4765.html , accessed July 16, 2017
- http://www.navypedia.org/ships/belgium/be_es_godetia.htm , accessed on July 16, 2017
- http://www.belgian-navy.be/t1206p15-k226-godetia , accessed on July 17, 2017
- http://www.marine-mra-klm.be/hms_godetia__k226__244.htm , accessed on July 18, 2017
- http://marinebelge.be/godetia%201.html , accessed on July 27, 2017
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gardiner, p. 62, http://uboat.net/allies/warships/ship/4765.html , http://www.navypedia.org/ships/belgium/be_es_godetia.htm , on Godetia (K72): Fock , P. 224, http://uboat.net/allies/warships/ship/4764.html
- ↑ http://www.marine-mra-klm.be/hms_godetia__k226__244.htm
- ↑ http://www.naval-history.net/xDKEscorts20Cor-Flower05.htm#Godetia , http://www.convoyweb.org.uk/hague/index.html , http: //www.marine-mra-klm .be / hms_godetia__k226__244.htm
- ↑ Bertke, Volume 8, p. 33, http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/42-12.htm
- ↑ http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/43-01.htm , Bertke, Volume 8, pp. 182f., Http://uboat.net/allies/warships/ship/4765.html
- ↑ Bertke, Volume 9, p. 34f., Http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/43-03.htm , http://uboat.net/allies/warships/ship/4765.html
- ↑ cf. also http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/43-10.htm
- ↑ http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/44-06.htm
- ↑ http://www.marine-mra-klm.be/hms_godetia__k226__244.htm
- ↑ http://www.convoyweb.org.uk/hague/index.html
- ↑ http://www.marine-mra-klm.be/hms_godetia__k226__244.htm , http://uboat.net/allies/warships/ship/4765.html