Ilja Muromez (ship, 1915)

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The Ilya Muromez ( Russian Илья Муромец ) was a Russian icebreaker that sailed under the French flag as Pollux from 1922 .

Construction and technical data

The ship, a single ship , was built for the Imperial Russian Navy at the Neptune shipyard by Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson in Walker ( Newcastle-on-Tyne ). It went there with the hull number 994 on 25 November 1915 from the pile and was delivered in December 1915th It was named after the Russian Bogatyr Ilya Muromets . It was 64.20 m ( Lüa ) or 61 m ( LzdL ) long and 15.50 m wide, had a draft of 6 m , was measured with 1664 GRT and 672 NRT and displaced 2461 t . Two alternating triple expansion steam engines from Swan Hunter, fed by six steam boilers , developed a total of 4000 hp and enabled a top speed of 14 knots with two screws . 367 tons of coal could be bunkered , which enabled an action radius of 2300 nautical miles at 8 kn cruising speed or 1470 nm at 14 kn.

Russian Navy

The ship served in the Black Sea Fleet . During the Russian Civil War it was armed with four 10 cm cannons and two 37 mm anti-aircraft guns. After Lenin's self-scuttling order in 1918, the Ilya Muromets went over to the White Army of General Wrangel and was incorporated into the so-called " Russian Squadron ". In November 1920 she moved with the other units of the "White Fleet" to Constantinople , where she arrived on December 10 with the two submarines Tjulen ( Russian Тюлень ) and Burewestnik ( Russian Буревестник ) in tow . On December 15, she had to come to the aid of the aircraft mother ship Almas , which was moored in the Gulf of Corinth with engine damage, which she then brought in tow to Argostoli on December 17 and finally to Bizerta in what was then the French protectorate of Tunisia on December 25 . There the Ilya Muromets was interned with the entire Russian squadron . On January 7, 1921, she ran again from Bizerta to bring the unfinished tanker Baku ( Russian Баку ) to Bizerta, with whom she arrived there on February 15.

French Navy

In April 1922 the French Navy took possession of the ship as part of payment for the costs incurred during the internment of the squadron and renamed it Pollux . In April 1924 the Pollux left Bizerta and towed the deep-sea tug Tschernomor ( Russian Черномор ) , which was also taken over by France and sold to the Union Maritime Francaise, to Brest . Initially used as a tug and mother ship for seaplanes , the Pollux was converted into a mine-layer in Lorient in 1929 , which could hold up to 236 mines .

On July 4, 1932, ran Pollux of their best-known peace mission when they made during the 2nd International Polar Year , the 15 members of the French Greenland expedition and their equipment from Brest in the then Scoresby Sund called Fjord brought on the east coast of Greenland where she arrived on July 26th. A year later, on August 16, 1933, she picked up the men and brought them back to Brest on August 27.

After the start of the Second World War , she took part in the mining of the Flemish waters in September 1939 . On March 22, 1940, she arrived in Harwich with the supply ship Jules Verne and the submarines Antiope , La Sybille and Amazone of the Diane class , where the five ships formed the core of the so-called "Groupe Jules Verne" now under British control ( French) and the "10th Submarine Flotilla" (British); In mid-April, the four submarines of the Circé class Doris , Thétis , Circé and Calypso as well as the Orphée of the Diane class followed. In June 1940, the Pollux was involved in the laying of mine barriers between Dover and Ostend . It also served as a supply for the patrol boat flotillas stationed in Cherbourg .

On July 3, 1940, the ship was in the course of Operation Grasp , located French ships were seized in all British ports, from the Royal Navy in Portsmouth repossessed and then from this as radar - training ship used.

After the end of the war, the Pollux was returned to France on July 5, 1946 in Cherbourg. After several years as a trailer , she was towed from Cherbourg to Lorient on August 9, 1950, where the Hulk then served as a barge under the new name Télémaque from March 24, 1952 . The old ship was decommissioned on July 22nd, 1963 and sold in 1964 and scrapped in Lorient.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Ilya Muromets in tynebuiltships
  2. ↑ Brise-glace Ilya Muromets - Pollux
  3. ↑ Founded in October 1922 to sell ships and other material from the French Navy that were no longer needed; Liquidated in 1934. ( L'Union Française Maritime - Liquidation flotte d'état )
  4. ↑ The Tschernomor served from 1924 to 1936 as the sea rescue tug Iroise .
  5. ^ L'année polaire se termine à Brest
  6. ↑ Film about the expedition (19 minutes, French)
  7. ↑ Geirr H. Haarr: No Room for Mistakes: British and Allied Submarine Warfare 1939-1940. Seaforth Publishing, Barnsley (UK), 2015, ISBN 978-1-84832-206-6 , p. 231

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