HMS Warrior (1905)
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The HMS Warrior ("Warrior") was an armored cruiser of the Royal Navy. He was the lead ship of the Warrior class named after him .
During the First World War , the Warrior was initially stationed in the Mediterranean and took part in the pursuit of the Goeben and the Breslau . From December 1914 she was part of the Grand Fleet . In the Battle of the Skagerrak , she was badly damaged and incapable of maneuvering, and sank on her march back while being towed by HMS Engadine.
history
The first two ships of the Duke of Edinburgh class still had a battery of 152 mm guns in very deep casemates. The four successor units launched in 1905 instead received four 191 mm type Mk II guns in single turrets at the same height as the 234 mm side turrets. The Warrior was launched on November 25, 1905 at the Pembroke shipyard , which had also built the original Duke of Edinburgh , and was the last ship of the class to be launched on December 12, 1907.
The Warrior , like the three sister ships, initially joined the 5th cruiser squadron of the Home Fleet , all of which were transferred to the 2nd cruiser squadron in 1909. In 1913 she moved to the Mediterranean Fleet .
War effort
At the beginning of the First World War, the Warrior in the Mediterranean belonged to the 1st cruiser squadron under Admiral Ernest Troubridge on the somewhat more modern Defense together with the two half-sister ships Duke of Edinburgh and Black Prince . Troubridge participated unsuccessfully in the hunt for the Goeben and Breslau of the German Mediterranean Division when he withdrew his squadron to the Greek coast while the Germans were coaling after the bombardment of Algerian ports in Messina . He assumed the Germans would run into the Adriatic and made a half-hearted decision to take them to the Aegean. So the two German ships were able to escape to Constantinople without a fight . His commander in chief, Admiral Milne, developed even less ambition with his more modern battlecruisers in the pursuit of the German Mediterranean division under Rear Admiral Wilhelm Souchon .
On August 16, 1914, the ship took part with the Defense and destroyers in the advance of the French fleet with three battleships, ten older liners, three cruisers and destroyers in the Adriatic in order to provoke the Austrian fleet into a battle. However, only the light cruiser Zenta and the destroyer Ulan were exposed , which were firing at Antivari . The Zenta was sunk by the French ships of the line, the Ulan escaped. Then the Warrior moved to the Suez Canal to protect it against a possible attack by Turkish troops. On November 6, 1914, she moved to Gibraltar and then in November with the Black Prince and Duke of Edinburgh, who were also relocated there after a deployment in the Red Sea , as the flagship of a newly formed West Africa squadron under Rear Admiral John de Robeck , which was intended to secure a feared breakthrough of the German cruiser squadron under Maximilian von Spee was formed in the Atlantic, to Sierra Leone . Even before the German squadron was destroyed in a naval battle off the Falkland Islands at the beginning of December, the squadron was disbanded on November 19, 1914, as the battle cruisers Invincible and Inflexible have since been relocated to the South Atlantic. The armored cruisers were withdrawn to the Grand Fleet, where the Warrior was assigned to the 2nd cruiser squadron as a replacement for the sister ship Achilles , which had been damaged by an artillery accident, and was now on duty with the sister ships Cochrane and Natal .
The end of the warrior
In the Skagerrak Battle, the Warrior was part of the 1st cruiser squadron under Rear Admiral Sir Robert Arbuthnot on the Defense , to which the half-sister ships Duke of Edinburgh and Black Prince also belonged. They ran in front of the Grand Fleet battleships on the right wing and appeared on the battlefield around 7:00 p.m. They tried to pursue the cruisers of the German II reconnaissance group, ran in front of the British battle cruisers and forced the Lion to an evasive maneuver. During the pursuit they came across Wiesbaden , which had already broken down , and was now fired upon when the battle cruiser Derfflinger and the ships of III. Squadron appeared and took fire and hit the two top ships of the squadron. The Defense sank at 7:20 p.m. with no survivors. The Warrior received at least fifteen 11-inch and six 6-inch hits, burned, and had severe water ingress. It escaped sinking because the Germans switched to the Warspite as their target, which ran two full circles through a jammed rudder within sight and range of the Germans.
The burning warrior ran west while the other armored cruisers tried to join the 2nd cruiser squadron. While the Duke of Edinburgh succeeded in doing this, the Black Prince , who was also hit and greatly reduced in speed, lost touch , ran into the German squadrons during the night and was also sunk with the entire crew in the first hours of June 1.
The Warrior heading west was towed by the Engadine seaplane carrier at around 10:00 p.m. When the weather got worse, she sank deeper and deeper, and the former canal ferry went alongside the cruiser and took over the surviving 743 men. At 9:25 a.m. on June 1, the Warrior was abandoned and sank shortly afterwards. 67 men died on the Warrior .
literature
- Geoffrey Bennett: The Skagerrak Battle. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-453-00618-6 .
- John Campbell: Jutland: An Analysis of the Fighting. Conway Maritime Press, London 1998, ISBN 1-55821-759-2 .
- Roger Chesneau (Ed.), Eugene M. Kolesnik (Ed.), John Roberts, HC Timewell: Warships of the World 1860 to 1905. Volume 1: Great Britain / Germany. Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Koblenz 1983, ISBN 3-7637-5402-4 .
- Paul G. Halpern: A naval history of World War I. Routledge, London 1995, ISBN 978-1-85728-498-0 .
- Arthur J. Marder: From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, 1904-1919. III: Jutland and After, May 1916 - December 1916. Oxford University Press, (Second ed.) London 1978, ISBN 0-19-215841-4 .
Web links
Footnotes
- ^ Hugh and David Lyon / Siegfried Greiner: Warships from 1900 to today, technology and use . Buch und Zeit Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Cologne 1979, p. 45 .
- ↑ 7.5 "/ 50 Mk.II
- ↑ 9.2 "/ 47 Mk.X
- ↑ Many sources mention 1906, despite the last launch date
- ^ Halpern, p. 56
- ↑ Halpern, p. 95.
- ↑ Campbell, pp. 181f.
- ^ Bennett, p. 123.
- ↑ Campbell, pp. 152f.
- ↑ Bennett, p. 125.
- ^ Campbell, p. 319.
- ↑ Navy casuality list