Pioneer (ship, 1934)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Pionier was a German reefer that was captured by the Navy in 1940, used as a troop transport and sunk by a British submarine in September 1940. In 2018 the wreck of the ship was discovered by a Danish expedition.

Construction and technical data

The ship was on November 2, 1933, the hull number 704 at the Bremer Vulkan shipbuilding and machine factory in Vegesack from the stack and was on 30 December 1933, the Hamburg shipping company F. Laeisz delivered. It was 114.9 m long and 13.66 m wide, had 7.3 m draft and 8.75 m side height and was measured with 3285 GRT and 1935 NRT . The total size of the cooling rooms was 3,700 m³, the load-bearing capacity was 2739 tdw . A 6-cylinder 2- stroke diesel engine from MAN developed 3600 hp and enabled a speed of 15.0 kn . The crew consisted of 35 men; up to 12 passengers could be taken.

history

Banana truck

The Pionier ( callsign DJML) was deployed with her home port of Hamburg for the African Fruit Compagnie (AFC), a subsidiary of the shipping company F. Laeisz, in the fruit trade between Hamburg and ports in West Africa . This mostly involved the transport of bananas loaded in Tiko from the AFC plantations in Cameroon , which were landed green in Hamburg and then brought to maturity by the AFC in its own ripening facilities and sold in its own fruit shops. However, some of the cargo also consisted of dried bananas, which were sold in Germany as so-called fig bananas .

Navy

View of the PIONIER (photo taken around 1939)

On August 24, 1939, shortly before the start of the Second World War , the Pioneer entered Tiko for a new banana takeover. There she received the warning of an imminent outbreak of war and she ran out on August 25th to Santa Isabel on the Spanish island of Fernando Póo off the coast of Cameroon , where she arrived on August 27th and had to destroy her already loaded bananas. The ship was in the Spanish colony until October 28th. Then it ran on secret routes to Las Palmas on the Canary Islands , which was reached on November 11, 1939. The last leg of the journey home began on December 12th and led the pioneers through the North Atlantic and the Denmark Strait to Narvik in Norway and finally to Hamburg on January 8, 1940.

On April 13, 1940 - immediately after the attack of the Wehrmacht in Denmark and Norway ( operation weserübung ) - which was pioneered by the Navy Department Hamburg collected and transport of troops and supplies to Norway for this purpose after Frederikshavn at Kattegat in North Jutland posted. Her first supply trip was on April 20 in convoy with the Togo and the Ahrensburg and secured by five torpedo boats , two fleet attendants and nine mine clearance boats from Frederikshavn to Larvik and Oslo . In the Skagerrak the convoy was attacked unsuccessfully by the British submarine HMS Triad , and while the Togo and Ahrensburg were sailing to Larvik, the pioneers reached Oslo in the evening with the torpedo boats Jaguar and Falke and three clearing boats. In the following weeks up to the end of May, the ship operated almost non-stop between Frederikshavn and Larvik with supplies of troops and material. In June and July - with a short break from July 4th to 8th for an overhaul in Frederikshavn Værft & Flydedok - the ship, like the former Norwegian passenger and car ferry Peter Wessel , operated on a shuttle service between Frederikshavn and Oslo. The pioneers spent August in Copenhagen installing an MES system . Another trip from Frederikshavn to Oslo followed on August 30th.

Sinking

The next trip was her last. On the evening of September 2, 1940, the Pionier , with a crew of 70 and an anti-aircraft gun crew and 753 Wehrmacht members returning from home leave on board, escorted and secured by two torpedo boats from Frederikshavn to Oslo. A few hours later, just after 21:00, it was by the British submarine Sturgeon about 15 nautical miles north of Skagen in heavy seas at position 57 ° 58 '  N , 10 ° 45'  O torpedoed and sunk. The boats of the 10th and 15th outpost flotillas , lying in Skagen and Frederikshavn, hurried to the sinking site and returned in the morning hours of September 3 with 175 survivors and 91 dead. The freighter Utlandshörn and its escort boats brought another 312 survivors and 152 dead to Frederikshavn in the afternoon. 93 people were reported missing, bringing the total number of victims to 336 dead and missing. A total of 487 people survived. 230 of the victims were buried on September 6, 1940 in the Frederikshavn military cemetery, the rest - including those who were subsequently driven along the coast - partly in Aalborg and partly in other places on Vendsyssel-Thy .

After this disaster, the Army High Command ordered that personnel transports to and from Norway should no longer be directed via Frederikshavn, but only via Sassnitz and Trelleborg . The ship connection from Frederikshavn or Aalborg to Norway was then only used to transport materials.

Footnotes

  1. ^ Wreck of the wanted German M / S Pioneer found in the Skagerrak. Retrieved September 6, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Pioneer, at www.historisches-marinearchiv.de ; in other places z. T. much different information about the machine. The sister ship Pelikan , also built a year later at Bremer Vulkan, had a 5-cylinder, 2-stroke diesel engine from Bremer Vulkan with 3,050 hp .

Web links

literature