Lofjord (ship, 1938)

The Lofjord was a former Norwegian combined ship , which was first used by the German Air Force and then by the Navy as a barge and finally by the Air Force as a target ship during the Second World War .

Combined ship Black Prince

The ship was built at the Akers Mekaniske Verksted shipyard in Oslo with hull number 473 and was launched there on December 22, 1937 under the name Black Prince . The ship was 117.58 m long and 16.15 m wide, had a draft of 5.64 m and was measured with 5039 GRT and 2935 NRT . It had a mast with loading gear fore and aft and a funnel. The propulsion system consisted of two 9-cylinder 2-stroke diesel engines from Burmeister & Wain with a total of 7,000 hp , which enabled a speed of 18 knots via two 4-bladed propellers . The ship had a deadweight of 5800 tons and space for 290 passengers . The crew consisted of 73 men.

The Black Prince was delivered in May 1938 and put into service in June 1938 by A / S Ganger Rolf (Fred Olsen Line) in Oslo. Like her sister ship Black Watch , launched in June 1938 , she served the Oslo- Kristiansand - Newcastle route . When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, both ships were laid up in Oslo .

Auxiliary ship Lofjord

The Black Prince was taken over by the Wehrmacht on April 28, 1940 after the German occupation of Norway . She then served the Air Force as a barge in the port of Oslo from August 24, 1940 . On March 31, 1941, she was handed over to the Kriegsmarineienststelle (KMD) Oslo and then used by the Kriegsmarine as a barge, initially for a short time in Oslo, then from May 15, 1941 as a living quarters and a ship for the 25th U-Flotilla in Danzig. On September 11, 1941, the ship was renamed Lofjord .

On December 14, 1941 at 3 a.m., for unknown reasons, a large fire broke out on the ship lying in Danzig-Neufahrwasser. Most of it burned out and 28 people, mostly submarine men, were killed.

In November 1942, the Navy and the Air Force agreed to make the ship available to the Air Force as a target ship for special bombs after the machinery had been expanded, and to aground it for this purpose off Nykøbing Sjælland in the restricted area of the Melby firing range north of the island of Zealand . However, the Gotenhafen naval arsenal found the ship and the machinery in such good condition that the use of the ship for bombing attempts was not responsible, it did not carry out the order to expand the machinery, and instead applied to the OKM to repair the ship in January 1943 . The OKM remained unimpressed, but in mid-April the ship was still in Gotenhafen without a shipyard having been found to carry out the work. It was not until May 11 that the OKM informed the Air Force that the Deutsche Werke branch in Gotenhafen would carry out the expansion of the machinery. It was not until July 22, 1943 that the Lofjord north of Melby was aground. There it served the Air Force as a target for its pilot training.

After the war, the Hulk was scrapped in Antwerp in November 1951 .

Footnotes

↑ The Black Watch , 1940 taken over by the Navy and used as a residential and depot ship was on May 4, 1945 when Harstad by British bombers sunk. ( http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/45-05.htm )
^ The 25th U-Flotilla (without its own boats) was responsible for several weeks of torpedo firing training for the crews of newly commissioned submarines.

Web links

literature

Rainer Busch & Hans-Joachim Röll: The U-Boat War 1939-1945; Volume II: U-boat construction in German shipyards from September 1939 - May 1945. ES Mittler & Sohn, Hamburg / Berlin / Bonn, ISBN 3-8132-0512-6

[1] The Black Watch , 1940 taken over by the Navy and used as a residential and depot ship was on May 4, 1945 when Harstad by British bombers sunk. ( http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/45-05.htm )

[2] The 25th U-Flotilla (without its own boats) was responsible for several weeks of torpedo firing training for the crews of newly commissioned submarines.