HMS Pegasus (1897)
|
|
|---|---|
| Pelorus class | |
 HMS Pegasus |
|
| Overview | |
| Type | Protected cruiser III class |
| units | 11 of the Pelorus class |
| Shipyard | |
| Order | 1893 |
| Keel laying | May 1896 |
| Launch | March 4, 1897 |
| delivery | January 17, 1899 |
| Namesake | winged horse in Greek mythology |
| Whereabouts | Sunk off Zanzibar on September 20, 1914 |
| Technical specifications | |
| displacement |
2135 ts , max. 2740 ts |
| length |
WL. 91.5 m (300 ft) |
| width |
11.13 m (36.5 ft) |
| Draft |
5.18 m (17 ft) |
| crew |
224 men |
| drive |
|
| speed |
20 kn |
| Armament |
|
| Armor |
Gun shields:
Deck:
Command tower:
|
The sixth HMS Pegasus the Royal Navy was one of eleven protected cruisers of Pelorus class . Commissioned in 1899, it belonged to the Australian station from 1905 and from March 1913 to the British squadron in South Africa, whose station area also included East Africa. She was sunk by the German small cruiser SMS Königsberg on September 20, 1914 in the port of Zanzibar .
Building history
The HMS Pegasus was the fourth protected 3rd class cruiser of the Pelorus class, which was ordered by the Royal Navy from 1893 in the Spencer Program and was a further development of the Pearl class . The first of eleven, the HMS Pelorus , entered service in 1897. The class was equipped with various boilers for test purposes, some of which did not prove themselves at all.
In 1914 three of the cruisers, the HMS Pandora in 1913, as well as HMS Perseus and HMS Prometheus in 1914, had already been canceled. Although the class was considered technically obsolete by 1904, the remaining eight cruisers were still in service in 1914, but were to be scrapped in 1915. HMS Pactolus and HMS Pomone with particularly unreliable Blechynden boilers were first decommissioned, but were still used as stationary.
The Pelorus- class ships
The cruisers served in less important foreign stations to protect British interests more like a gunboat and not as part of the battle fleet.
see table below
The Pegasus
The Pegasus , built at Palmers Shipbuilding in Jarrow on the Tyne, entered service with the Royal Navy in 1899. In the acceptance tests, she achieved 21.2 knots with a power of 7134 ihp and was the fastest ship in the class.
On March 18, 1899, she left Plymouth for the southeast coast of America, but was withdrawn after only two months because she probably had problems with her water tube boilers . Then she came to the Mediterranean, where she did service in November 1902 with seven ships of the line, four other cruisers ( HMS Aboukir , HMS Hermione , HMS Intrepid and the sister ship HMS Pandora ) and 28 destroyers.
From March 1905 the Pegasus served on Australia Station , on which the flagship HMS Euryalus was replaced by the HMS Powerful in December and the sister ship HMS Psyche had served since 1903, which was later taken over by the Royal Australian Navy . After her, the sister ships HMS Pioneer , HMS Prometheus and HMS Pyramus and the stronger HMS, later HMAS Encounter and the old cruiser HMS Cambrian of the Astraea class , which arrived at the end of 1905 and which was to become the last flagship of the Royal Navy on the station, were used Relocated Australia Station before the Australian Navy assumed responsibility in October 1913. The station's flagship for the Powerful was the armored cruiser HMS Drake until January 1913. The station also included survey ships such as the sloop HMS Fantome and the HMS Sealark and, as a training ship, the sloop HMS Torch . The Pegasus was overhauled several times in Australia and was back in service since March 1909. A test in July is said to have produced completely inadequate speed results. Another overhaul took place in Sydney from March to September 1911.
After the outbreak of the Chinese Revolution , the Admiralty decided to send her and her sister ship Prometheus to China Station as the first reinforcement, where the two cruisers left Sydney on November 15, 1911. Prometheus had boiler problems early on and finally only reached Hong Kong in tow from the Cambrian who had been sent to help , while the Pegasus , whose crew had been reinforced by crews from the Pyramus shipyard , made her voyage without any problems and ran from Hong Kong immediately to Shanghai , where she was was damaged when entering on December 18 at a sunken junk, which was possibly intended to obstruct the path of incoming British warships. Nevertheless, she moved further upstream to replace the sloop HMS Clio . The crew switched from the Australian warmth to the coldness of China. The Pegasus did not return to Australia, but returned to England in November 1912, as the Australian Navy replaced the Royal Navy's Australia Station. Her last high crew share of Australians was sent to the Cambrians , who returned to Australia again in the summer of 1912, or they were released back home by mail ship. After being overhauled in Devonport , the Pegasus moved to South Africa. Because of the frequent failures of the Pelorus class, the sense of a renewed repair was questioned in parliament.
In March 1913, the Pegasus finally moved to Africa to the Cape of Good Hope Station to the Cape Squadron, where it replaced its sister ship HMS Pandora , which was sold for demolition on return. Pegasus moved off the Somali coast in February 1914 to support troop movements from Kismayo until it was replaced by the HMS Astraea . She remained in service with the Cape Squadron until the outbreak of war in 1914.
War effort
At the end of July 1914, the British Cape Squadron was on a routine march to Mauritius with the cruisers HMS Astraea , HMS Pegasus and HMS Hyacinth as flagship , when radio messages from the Admiralty sent the Commander Rear Admiral Sir Herbert Goodenough King-Hall (1862–1935, most recently Admiral) pointed out the imminent danger of war. To observe the newly arrived small cruiser Königsberg , he assembled the squadron at Diego Suarez and marched to Dar es Salaam . As instructed, the Königsberg left the port of the capital of the German colony on July 30, 1914 because of the threat of war to wage cruiser warfare in the Indian Ocean . She passed HMS Astraea and then the flagship HMS Hyacinth , which she apparently escaped through a few turns and at high speed to the south. The slightly more protruding HMS Pegasus could not intervene at all. The old British cruisers all no longer reached 20 knots, while the Königsberg was able to hold 22 knots for a longer period, albeit at the expense of the coal supply. The German cruiser actually turned north to the main shipping routes in the Gulf of Aden at the beginning of the First World War . HMS Astraea and HMS Pegasus controlled the German coastal places and sent boats to secluded bays even before the outbreak of war.
Control of the East African coast
On August 8th the first armed act between Germans and British in German East Africa came when the Astraea and Pegasus entered Dar es Salaam and attacked the radio mast there. The German governor Heinrich Schnee had a white flag hoisted after seven shots and left the city on a train to Morogoro . He declared the port places of the colony to be open cities and urged the officials to make appropriate arrangements with the British. When the commander of the protection force , Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck , marched back into Dar es Salaam with his soldiers in the absence of the governor on the evening of August 8, all he saw was the British ships sailing out to sea. Lettow-Vorbeck wanted to fight and tie up as many British forces as possible, while the governor tried to keep the colony out of the armed conflict in accordance with the Congo Act . This attitude was shared by parts of the population and the representatives of the DOAL .
Pegasus appeared on December 12th / 13th. On the 15th and 15th of August back in Dar es Salaam to continue the negotiations and to prevent the DOAL imperial mail steamer Feldmarschall , König and Tabora from being made usable for the Germans. The latter, which was issued as a hospital ship and whose equipment for the auxiliary cruiser had once been planned, was searched several times.
On August 17, the Pegasus then appeared in front of Tanga to make similar agreements with the local administration and to shut down the steamer Markgraf with regard to the supply of German trade troublemakers. While this attempt was still successful, the next one failed on August 23, before Bagamojo , when, in the presence of a field company of the protection force, negotiations were broken off and the Pegasus fired thirty shots into the village.
Destruction off Zanzibar
The unexpected return of the Königsberg to the colony on September 3rd changed the attitude on the German side. It was now agreed that the German warship should be supported. On September 8, the Pegasus was able to confiscate five barges and one small tug in Tanga for the last time.
On September 19, the Königsberg left her hiding place in the Rufidji Delta in the evening and attacked the Pegasus anchored off Zanzibar in the early morning of the 20th , which was lying there to repair boiler and machine problems. The Germans opened fire from a considerable distance because they did not recognize the actual enemy. Her exact fire put the Pegasus out of action in eight minutes, so her commanding officer, Commander Ingles, showed the white flag to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. The little cruiser sank after little resistance. 38 deaths and 55, some seriously wounded, were mourned. The hospital ship Gascon and the Clan Macrae came to the aid of the survivors. The Germans also shot at the land radio system, but not the merchant ships present.
The cannons of the Pegasus
Six of the eight guns on the Pegasus were recovered. Two were used as Peggy III and Peggy IV in the 1916 land offensive of the British forces . At times they are said to have faced cannons from the Königsberg near Kondoa-Irangi .
Of the remaining four, two remained in Zanzibar, one gun was mounted on the Lake Victoria steamer Winifred and the last 10.2 cm gun came to Mombasa , where it is now in the Fort Jesus Museum there alongside a 10.5 cm -Canon the Königsberg can be visited.
Pelorus class table
| Surname | Launch | Shipyard | fate |
|---|---|---|---|
| HMS Proserpine | December 5, 1896 | RNDy Devonport , Plymouth | 1914 Kanalgeschwader, Egypt, sold for demolition on November 30, 1919 |
| HMS Pelorus | December 15, 1896 | RNDy Sheerness | 1914 Securing Bristol Channel, Gibraltar, sold for demolition on May 6, 1920 |
| HMS Pactolus | December 21, 1896 | Armstrong , Elswick , Tyne | 1914 Submarine depot ship , sold for demolition on October 25, 1921 |
| HMS Pegasus | March 4, 1897 | Palmers , Jarrow , Tyne | Sunk off Zanzibar on September 20, 1914 |
| HMS Pyramus | May 15, 1897 | Palmers | 1914 New Zealand, sold for demolition on April 21, 1920 |
| HMS Perseus | July 15, 1897 | Earle's Shipbuilding , Hull | sold for demolition on May 26, 1914 |
| HMS Pomone | November 25, 1897 | RNDy Sheerness | 1914 Dartmouth training ship , sold for demolition in June 1922 |
| HMS, HMAS Psyche | July 19, 1898 | RNDy Devonport | 1914 New Zealand, sold to Australia on July 1, 1915, sold for demolition in June 1922 |
| HMS Prometheus | October 20, 1898 | Earle's Shipbuilding | sold for demolition on May 28, 1914 |
| HMS, HMAS Pioneer | June 28, 1899 | RNDy Chatham | sold to Australia on March 1, 1913, July 1, 1915, scuttled on February 19, 1931 |
| HMS Pandora | 17th January 1900 | RNDy Portsmouth | sold for demolition in July 1913 |
RNDy: Royal Navy Dockyard
swell
literature
- Carl Herbert: War voyages of German merchant ships . Broschek & Co, Hamburg 1934.
- 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 German Africa Lines 1880 to 1945 . Verlag Gerhard Stalling, 1975, ISBN 3-7979-1867-4 .
- Arnold Kludas : The History of German Passenger Shipping 1850 to 1990 . Ernst Kabel Verlag, 1986.
- Arnold Kludas : The ships of the North German Lloyd 1857 to 1919 . Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, 1991, ISBN 3-7822-0524-3 .
- Reinhard Karl Lochner: Battle in the Rufuji Delta , 1987, Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich, ISBN 3-453-02420-6
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Robert Gardiner (Ed.): Conway's All the world fighting ships. 1860-1905, London, Conway Maritime Press. 1979 ISBN 0-85177-133-5 , p. 83
- Jump up ↑ Pelorus class on worldwar1.co
- ↑ Discussion in Parliament
- ↑ Information on the strength of the Mediterranean fleet in Parliament
- ↑ Churchill refuses to provide information about the Pegasus test
- ^ Voyage of the Pegasus The Mercury, March 1, 1912
- ↑ Churchill still considers Pegasus suitable for subordinate tasks
-
↑ Bj. 1893, 4360 t, 19.5 knots, 2-152mm guns, 8-120mm guns,
HMS Astraea on battleships-cruisers.co and Astraea class on historyofwar.org and Astraea class on worldwar1.co - ^ HMS Pegasus on historyofwar.org
- ↑ HMS Hyacinth on historyofwar.org and highflyer class on worldwar1.co and as Hermes class on battleships-cruisers.co