Rechinul (submarine)
Rechinul (left) and Marsuinul (right) in the harbor in 1944
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The NMS Rechinul (also in the spelling Requinul , German: "Hai") was a 1941 launched submarine of the Romanian Navy . It was the second and last submarine built in Romania and only served a few months in the Black Sea during World War II in 1944 . In 1944 the Soviet Union confiscated the boat and added it to their Black Sea fleet as the TS-1 . In 1951 she returned the boat, which was taken out of service there in 1959.
Construction and technical data
The Romanian government planned and ordered the first submarine in Italy in the naval construction program of 1927, but was not able to put the Delfinul into service until 1936 . In the next construction program of 1937 three more submarines were planned, two of which were ordered. The construction was awarded to the Dutch Ingenieurskantoor voor Scheepsbouw (IvS), a Dutch front organization of the German Reichsmarine, and was designated there as Project 298 . The development of the half-sister ship Marsuinul also ran under this name .
The ship was in Romania at the shipyard "Santieri Galati" in Galaţi under the hull number 930 in 1938 to set keel and with the technical support of the AG Weser built where the boat was prefabricated in parts. The launch took place on May 4 or May 25, 1941 under the name Rechinul and the designation S2 . It took until the summer of 1943 for the boat to be completed and, according to various statements, to be handed over to the Romanian Navy either in May or August 1943.
As with her half-sister ship, the Marsuinul , there are different information about the dimensions and the technology. Her length was 58.00 meters, she was 5.60 meters wide and had a draft of 3.60 meters. The displacement was 585 ts above water and 789 ts submerged. It was a submarine with a combined drive from diesel and electric motors. The two diesel engines from the manufacturer MAN together delivered an output of 1,840 hp. The two Brown Boveri electric motors together delivered an output of 860 hp. The boat had two shafts that drove two screws . It reached a speed of 16.0 knots over water , 7 knots under water and had a range of 7,000 nautical miles. The boat had a diving depth of 110 meters. The crew consisted of 45 officers and men.
For the emerged mission the armament consisted of a 20mm anti-aircraft gun , several references also indicate an 88mm deck gun . The boat had six torpedo tubes (four in the bow, two in the stern). In addition, the Rechinul was designed as a mine- layer and could accommodate 40 mines .
Use as Romanian Rechinul
With the delivery to the Navy and the official commissioning on May 9, 1943, the boat was not yet ready for use. After tests, training of the crew and the running-in of the boat, it was not classified as operational until April 1944. Until Romania changed sides from the Axis powers to the Allies in August of that year, the boat made two enemy voyages. On both trips, the reconnaissance and attack capabilities, but not the mine-laying capabilities of the boat, were used.
The first patrol began on April 20 and lasted until May 15, 1944. The task was to observe the ship traffic at the port of Zonguldak on the Turkish coast, over which Turkish coal was exported. In the event that Turkey joins the Allies, the port was to be attacked - but this did not happen. On April 28, the boat was ordered to the Soviet base in Batumi , which it reached the next day. Two previously reported Soviet cruisers were not sighted. The following day, a plane attacked the Rechinul without success. On May 3, she sighted two large warships but did not attack. Without any further contact with the enemy, the boat returned and reached Constana on May 15, 1944.
The second patrol lasted from June 15 to July 29, 1944 and was a reconnaissance mission to the port of Novorossiysk on the edge of the Caucasus . After reaching the target area, the boat was repeatedly searched for and attacked by Soviet aircraft and surface forces in the following weeks, most recently on July 24th. Three days later, on July 27, the boat received the order to return and reached Constana on July 29, 1944.
Soviet boat TS-1 and again Romanian Rechinul
When the coup d'état took place in Romania on August 23, 1944 and the country then continued fighting on the side of the Allies, the Rechinul was in Constana . A few days later, on August 29th, Soviet forces occupied the boat and, like all Romanian naval units, confiscated it on September 5th. On October 20, the boat was put into service in the Soviet Black Sea Fleet as TS-1 . Over the next few years the identification changed several times: in August 1947 to N-39 and again in June 1949 to S-39 . But it did not last long in the Soviet fleet: the boat was taken out of service on July 3, 1951 and returned to Romania in August 1951.
In the Romanian Navy, the boat was given the name Rechinul back. Given the secrecy during the Cold War , the further trail of the boats is lost. All that is known is that it is said to have been retired in 1959.
literature
- Robert Gardiner / Roger Chesneau: Conway's All the world's fighting ships 1922-1946 , Conway Maritime Press, London 1980, ISBN 0-8317-0303-2 .
- Erminio Bagnasco: Submarines in World War II - Technology - Class - Types. A comprehensive encyclopedia , Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-613-01252-9 .
- Harald Fock: Fleet Chronicle. The active warships involved in both world wars and their whereabouts , Koehler's publishing company, revised and expanded version Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-7822-0788-2 .
- Jürgen Rohwer , Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronik des Seekrieges 1939-1945 , edited by the working group for military research and by the library for contemporary history , Manfred Pawlak Verlagsgesellschaft, Herrsching o. J. [1968], ISBN 3-88199-0097 , extended online version under : http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/chronik.htm .
- Cristian Craciunoiu, Mark Axworthy: Romanian Minelaying Operations in the Second World War , in: Robert Gardiner (Ed.): Warship 1991, Conway Maritime Press, London, ISBN 0-85177-582-9 , pp. 146-159.
- Eberhard Rössler : The German submarines and their shipyards. Volume 1: Submarine construction until the end of World War I, constructions for foreign countries and the years 1935–1945 (part 1) , Bernard and Graefe Verlag, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-7637-5213-7 .
- Pierre Hervieux: The Royal Romanian Navy at War, 1941-1944 , in: Warship 2001-2002, Conway Maritime Press, London 2002, ISBN 978-0851779010 .
- Mikhail Monakov, Jürgen Rohwer: Stalin's Ocean-going Fleet: Soviet Naval Strategy and Shipbuilding Programs, 1935–1953 , Taylor & Francis, London 2001, ISBN 978-0714644486 .
- Nicolae Koslinski, Raymond Stănescu: Marina Română în Al Doilea Razboi Mondial: 1939–1945 , Volumul II, Editura Făt-Frumos, București 1997. ISBN 973-552-033-8 .
Web links
- Information about the ship in Navypedia
- Information about the ship in Navypedia
- NMS Rechinul , WorldWar2.ro
Footnotes
- ↑ NMS is the abbreviation for "Nava Majestǎţii Sale" and was the name prefix of Romanian ships from 1881 to 1947. NMS means "His Majesty's Ship".
- ↑ Gardiner, pp. 359f.
- ↑ a b c Rössler, p. 96
- ↑ Craciunoiu, Axworthy, p. 146
- ↑ a b Gardiner, p. 361
- ↑ Hervieux, p. 83
- ↑ NMS Marsuinul, worldwar2.ro
- ↑ Rössler, p. 241
- ↑ Bagnasco, p. 289
- ^ Klepsch, p. 145
- ↑ a b c NMS Rechinul, worldwar2.ro
- ↑ Craciunoiu, Axworthy, p. 157
- ↑ Rohwer: naval warfare , 5.5.- 03.06.1944 Black Sea
- ↑ TS-1 submarine (1943/1944) , navypedia.org
- ↑ Rohwer: naval warfare , 23.8.- 11.9.1944 Black Sea / Danube
- ↑ Monakov, p. 274
- ↑ Fock, p. 215, which states the Soviet identifier S-4 and has not yet been returned.