Kosma Minin (ship, 1916)

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The Kosma Minin 1920 in the White Sea; from General Miller's photo album

The Kosma Minin ( Russian Козьма Минин ) was a Russian deep-sea icebreaker who sailed under the French flag as Castor from 1922 .

Construction and technical data

The ship was built on behalf of the Imperial Russian Navy at the Neptune shipyard by Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson in Walker ( Newcastle-on-Tyne ), with mostly Russian shipyard workers. It went there with the hull number 1020 on 29 August 1916 from the pile and was delivered in November 1916th The ship was named after the Russian national hero Kosma Minin , one of the leaders of the Russian popular uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian occupation at the beginning of the 17th century. It was 75.6 m ( Lüa ) or 74.6 m ( LzdL ) long and 17.4 m wide and had a draft of 6.4 m empty or 8.4 m fully equipped. It was measured at 2156 GRT and displaced 3150 t (standard). Two alternating triple expansion steam engines from Swan Hunter, fed by six steam boilers , developed a total of 4400 hp and enabled a top speed of 14.5 knots with two screws . A third, somewhat smaller triple expansion steam engine of 2000 hp drove the bow thruster located under the bow, as it had proven itself when the ice was breaking in the Baltic Sea . 686 tons of coal were bunkered be what a range of 4,500 nautical miles allowed at 10 knots cruising speed.

Russian Navy

She served in the Arctic Flotilla with home port Arkhangelsk , where she arrived at the end of November 1916. Her sister ship Fürst Poscharski ( Russian Князь Пожа́рский ), built at the same shipyard, followed a month later. However, even these two ships were hardly able to significantly influence the convoy traffic between Arkhangelsk and the Barents Sea in the winter months of 1917/18 and 1918/19.

In the summer of 1919, during the Russian Civil War , the ship was in Great Britain for repairs . It only returned to Arkhangelsk towards the end of the year. After the withdrawal of the foreign intervention troops from northern Russia in August 1919, the ship played a special role in the final collapse of the local white resistance against the Bolsheviks. On February 19, 1920, the commander of went white in the northern region, Lieutenant General Yevgeny Miller and about 600 other refugees, mostly military and their families, aboard the Kosma Minin and of her in tow taken Avisos Jaroslawna and left Arkhangelsk. In the thick ice, however , the Yaroslavna had to be left behind after taking over her passengers and crew and her 75 mm gun; she was recovered a few days later by the icebreaker Canada ( Russian Канада ), whose crew did not want to join the escape from Arkhangelsk, and dragged back to Arkhangelsk. On her onward voyage, the Kosma Minin encountered three harbor icebreakers stuck in the ice on the evening of February 20 and took over their staff, passengers, coal and food supplies during the course of the night. On the morning of the 21st she fought a short artillery duel with the Canada , which has since emerged , but was able to continue undamaged after the Canada withdrew . It reached Hammerfest on February 25th and Tromsø on the evening of February 26th, where the first of around 800 refugees were taken ashore and cared for. The ship then went on to Hommelvik near Trondheim , where the rest of the refugees disembarked.

French Navy

Five weeks later, on April 1, 1920, the Kosma Minin arrived in Liverpool . From Great Britain, the ship went on to Cherbourg in France in September , where it was interned on December 29, 1920 . ( On December 1, 1920, the French Council of Ministers approved the transfer of the White Army fleet, which had fled the Black Sea , to Bizerte in what was then the French protectorate of Tunisia and its internment there.) In April 1922, the French Navy took possession of the ship after a Offered sale to Canada had not materialized and renamed it Castor . The ship, initially used as a tug and mother ship for seaplanes , was converted into a mine- layer in Lorient in 1927-1929 , which could hold up to 268 mines . During the conversion, the bow thruster was removed and the Castor was armed with four 10 cm cannons and two 37 mm flak .

At the time of the Compiègne armistice in June 1940, which ended the German campaign in the west , the Castor , which had served as a submarine supplier in the Mediterranean , was in Bizerte. There it was disarmed and hung up on October 10, 1940 . On December 8, 1942, it fell into German hands in the course of the German-Italian Tunisian campaign and was then handed over to the Italian Regia Marina , re-armed and renamed FR 60 . Already on May 6, 1943, the day before the 9th Infantry Division of the US Army captured Bizerte , the ship was self- sunk in Lake Bizerte . The wreck was lifted by the French Navy in 1946 and towed into Sebra Bay ( 37 ° 15 ′ 41 ″  N , 9 ° 51 ′ 25 ″  E ). On August 12, 1947, it was cleared for scrapping and then scrapped.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Vladimir Grigorievich Andrienko: Icebreaking fleet of Russia, 1860s - 1918 ; P. 423-425: § 5.3: Sea icebreakers "Kozma Minin" and "Prince Pozharsky"
  2. ↑ Kosma Minin, at tynebuiltships
  3. ↑ 26 photos of the arrival of the ship in Hommelvik
  4. ↑ George Bolotenko: The icebreaker Mikula Selianinovich (1916-1937): To Russia and back . In: The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord , Volume XII, No. 3, July 2002, pp. 17-42 (here: 38)
  5. ^ Jacques Vichot: Repertoire des Navires de Guerre Français . Association des Amis du Musée National de la Marine, Paris, 1967

Web links

literature

  • Vladimir Grigorievich Andrienko: Ледокольный флот России 1860-е - 1918 гг. ( Russian icebreaker fleet, 1860s - 1918 ), Paulsen, Moscow, 2009, ISBN 9785-98797-037-9 , pp. 423-425