Odenwald (ship, 1923)
.jpg) The Odenwald 1941
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The second Odenwald of the Hamburg-American Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft (Hapag) was a diesel-powered freighter built in 1923 by the Deutsche Werft in Hamburg. In 1935 it was renamed Aswan when it was mainly used on the west coast of America.
From 1939 it was called again Odenwald . When the war began, the ship sought refuge in Japan and was laid up there. In 1941 the Odenwald was used as a blockade breaker to Europe.
On November 6, 1941, the cruiser USS Omaha and the destroyer USS Somers captured the Odenwald in the South Atlantic , which had disguised itself as the American merchant ship Willmoto . Hitler mentioned the fate of the Odenwald in his declaration of war by Germany and Italy on the United States .
history
Hapag received a series of ten freighters from its affiliated Deutsche Werft in Hamburg-Finkenwärder, the names of which ended in -wald and resumed the names of the West India freighters from the prewar period. The shipyard, which specializes in series production, delivered similar ships to foreign clients such as the Dutch shipping company van Nievelt or the Norwegian shipping company Wilh. Wilhelmsen .
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Hapag's first Odenwald was a freighter of the West India Service, which was taken over by the Danish shipping company Det Østasiatiske Kompagni in 1907 and which was built in 1904 as St. Jan by the Flensburger Schiffbau-Gesellschaft . In 1914 in San Juan de Puerto Rico on August 9, she supported SMS Karlsruhe in taking over coal within the permitted time limits. In 1917 the first Odenwald was confiscated by the US and then used as the USS Newport News (AK-3) before being scrapped in 1925.
After the Spreewald, the new Odenwald was the second motor ship in the Hapag series. The very similar Tiradentes of the Norwegian shipping company Wilhelmsen (4960 BRT, 8857 tdw) was the first ship of the yard with this propulsion concept to be delivered in September 1922.
Like her sister ship Spreewald , the Odenwald was also used on various routes across the Atlantic. When both ships were primarily used on the route to the South American Pacific coast, the Odenwald was renamed Aswan from March 30, 1935 to October 2, 1938 . On her 41st voyage, the Odenwald left Hamburg in April 1939 and went to Japan via ports in the Philippines. On August 12, 1939, she left Nagoya for Los Angeles . On August 26, 1939, at position 44 ° 7 ′ 0 ″ N , 146 ° 31 ′ 0 ″ W near the North American west coast, she received the news of the impending outbreak of war. She was somewhat camouflaged and ran back to Japan, where she arrived in Yokohama on September 15 . The ship was unloaded and the mostly Chinese crew dismissed. Since the captain Reinhold Duelcke fell ill, he was replaced on July 17, 1941 by Gerhart Loers, who, as captain of the Eisenach of North German Lloyd, had sunk his ship himself in Puntarenas (Costa Rica) at the end of March 1941 .
War fate of the Odenwald
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In 1941 the Odenwald was used as the seventh blockade breaker to Europe. With a cargo of 3857 t of rubber and a newly formed crew, she left Yokohama on August 21 . In addition to the rubber cargo, parts of the cargo from various ships that had remained in Japan were sent home on the Odenwald . At that time, three ships ( Ermland , Ole Jacob , Regensburg ) had made this trip. Anneliese Essberger , who had set out before her in June, reached Bordeaux on September 10th. Only the Elbe was discovered and sunk on June 6, 1941 near the Azores by aircraft of the HMS Eagle , which were looking for the Bismarck . The Regensburg that followed her reached southern France, but Ramses , who was then set on the march , was ordered back.
On November 6, 1941, the hijacked cruiser USS Omaha with the destroyer USS Somers in the South Atlantic Ocean east of Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago roughly on the position 0 ° 40 '0 " N , 28 ° 4' 0" W the Odenwald , which had disguised itself as the American merchant ship Willmoto . The crew of the Odenwald tried to sink their ship when they realized that the American ships were sending a boat to inspect their ship. Attempts were also made to make the waves unusable by blasting them.
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The American prize command managed to get the engines going again and to control the water ingress caused by the Germans. The American association, which was supposed to be calling at Recife , decided to run to Trinidad with the captured Odenwald so as not to include neutral Brazil in their action. Finally, the USN ships brought the Odenwald to Puerto Rico .
Since the USA was not officially at war with the German Reich, the incident was presented as a rescue and rescue operation and led from 1947 to 1951 to a legal dispute between the owners of the Odenwald and the USA (Hamburg-American Line and Swiss Bank Corp. versus US).
Prize money is said to have been paid for the last time for the capture of the Odenwald .
An interesting detail is that the first Odenwald was also the subject of intervention by American authorities before the USA entered the war on March 21, 1915 when it left the port of San Juan de Puerto Rico without clearing papers , stopped with a cannon shot and boarded by US marines has been.
Under the US flag
The Odenwald was made available by the United States, which joined the war in December, as Blenheim under the War Shipping Administration of the shipping company Waterman Steamship Co. in New Orleans . On January 8, 1945, she was in Antwerp when a V 2 hit the quay next to her and severely damaged the ship. Fortunately, there were only 20 (some seriously) injured and no deaths.
literature
- Arnold Kludas : The History of German Passenger Shipping Vol. III Leap growth 1900 to 1914 , Writings of the German Shipping Museum, Volume 20.
- Arnold Kludas: The History of German Passenger Shipping Vol. IV Destruction and Rebirth 1914 to 1930 , Writings of the German Maritime Museum, Volume 21.
- James L. Mooney (Ed.): American Naval Fighting Ships , Volume 7, T – V, Defense Dept., Navy, Naval Historical Center, reprint 1991.
Web links
- Blockade breakers
- "November 4-6, 1941 South Atlantic"
- several USN documents on the Odenwald
- James J. Martin: Pearl Harbor: Antecedents, Background and Consequences , footnote 5 on the position of Cabinet Members Stimson and Knox
- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Nov 20, 1947, p. 12: Ex-Gobs Get $ 520,000 Cash Prize Money
- Description of the American legal situation after renewed interest in prize money in the fight against Somali pirates and the liberation of very valuable ships
- Bruce Thompson: Solving the Piracy Problem
Individual evidence
- ↑ Tiradentes , sold in 1950 to Germany , as Vogtland to 1956 for the shipping company H. Vogemann in service
- ↑ Report on MS Odenwald ( Memento from August 3, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ FBI investigations into the origin of the goods ( Memento from May 5, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Nov. 20, 1947, p. 12: Ex-Gobs Get $ 520,000 Cash Prize Money
- ↑ Mooney, p. 127 Theodore E. Chandler
- ↑ Johannes Reiling: Germany, Safe for Democracy ?: German-American Relations , Franz Steiner Verlag (1997), ISBN 978-3-515-07213-7 , p. 165, note 458