Crete (ship, 1930)

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The Kreta was a French mail and passenger ship taken into possession by the German Navy in 1943 , which was converted to a fighter command ship, but was sunk shortly after it was commissioned in September 1943.

Passenger ship Ile de Beauté

The ship was built in 1930 at the Deschimag shipyard in Bremen as part of German reparations in kind for the French shipping company Compagnie de Navigation Fraissinet and used in the liner service from Marseille to Corsica under the name Ile de Beauté . The ship was 97 m long and 13.2 m wide, had a draft of 5.2 m and was measured at 2,600 GRT . Two steam turbines gave it a top speed of 20 knots . The ship had a sweeping Maier bow and was also called paquebot-yacht (passenger ship yacht) because of its elegant silhouette .

Hunter guide ship Crete

The Ile de Beauté was taken over by the German occupying forces in Marseille on January 18, 1943 as part of the Laval-Kaufmann Agreement . It was transferred to the Navy and converted into a fighter command ship under the new name of Crete . For this purpose, it was equipped with a Freya AN radio measuring device and a Würzburg 39T fire control radar . It also received very strong anti-aircraft armament, consisting of two 10.5 cm anti-aircraft guns , two 7.5 cm anti-aircraft guns and seven 20 mm anti-aircraft quadruples . The crew numbered 230 men, about a quarter of whom were Air Force personnel.

The renovation was completed at the end of August 1943. When the test drives were then to be carried out, the ceasefire announced by Italy on September 8, 1943 resulted in a drastically changed strategic situation, and the ship was initially used to evacuate German troops from Corsica.

Only a few days later, on the afternoon of September 21, 1943, when securing a mine- laying company belonging to the mine ship Brandenburg , both the Brandenburg and the Crete were in the Tyrrhenian Sea about seven nautical miles northeast of the island of Capraia at position 43 ° 8 ′ 0 ″  N , 9 ° 58 '0 "  O coordinates: 43 ° 8' 0"  N , 9 ° 58 '0 "  O by the British submarine HMS Unseen by torpedoes sunk. A total of 30 men lost their lives on the two ships; 486 survivors were picked up by the accompanying mine clearance boats R 189 and R 201 and brought to Livorno .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Compagnie de Navigation Fraissinet, Marseilles ( Memento of December 6, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ http://www.navypedia.org/ships/germany/ger_conc_fds.htm
  3. ↑ http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/43-09.htm
  4. ↑ HMS Unseen (P51), at uboat.net

Web links

literature

  • Dieter Jung, Berndt Wenzel, Arno Abendroth: The ships and boats of the German sea pilots 1912-1976. Motor Buch Verlag, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-87943-469-7
  • Conway's All the world's fighting ships, 1922-1946. Conway Maritime Press, London 1980, ISBN 0-85177-146-7 , p. 254.
  • Kurt Petsch: Togo night hunting guide ship. 1943-45. The history of the ship and its crew, based on official and private diaries, memories and photographs . Preussischer Militär-Verlag, Reutlingen 1988, ISBN 3-927292-00-1 .