Rolf Krake (F342)

**Rolf Octopus**
	The later Rolf Krake; as Calpe during WWII
Ship data
flag	from 1954: Denmark United Kingdom ;
other ship names	HMS Calpe until 1954
Ship type	Escort destroyer ; frigate
class	Hunt class, Type II; Esbern snare class
Callsign	OUEB
Shipyard	Swan Hunter , Wallsend
Build number	1595
Order	December 1939
Keel laying	June 12, 1940
Launch	April 28, 1941
takeover	November 24, 1941
reactivation	October 18, 1954 Denmark
Decommissioning	1962 out of service
Whereabouts	1966 demolition in Sweden
Ship dimensions and crew
length	85.34 m ( Lüa ) 80.5 m ( Lpp )
width	9.61 m
Draft	Max. 4.42 m
displacement	1,050 ts standard; ; 1,625 ts maximum
crew	168 men
Machine system
machine	2 Admiralty boilers , ; 2 Parsons turbines
Machine ; performance	19,000 PSw
Top ; speed	23.8 kn (44 km / h)
propeller	2
Armament
	3 × 2 102 mm L / 45 Mk XVI guns ; 1 × 4 2pdr 40mm flak ; 2, sp. 4 - Oerlikon 20 mm automatic cannons ; 30 to 60 depth charges , 2 launchers; 1954:; 2 × 2 102mm L / 45 Mk XVI guns; 4 - 40 mm L / 60 Bofors cannons ; 50 depth charges, 4 launchers, 2 ramps;
Sensors
	Radar , sonar

The frigate Rolf Krake (F342) of the Royal Danish Navy was in service from 1954 to 1962. The ship was created as a destroyer escort Calpe of the 86-unit Hunt class of the Royal Navy . This the ship had used from 1942 in the Second World War.
After several years in the reserve , the destroyer escort was loaned to Denmark in 1952 with two sister ships , which, after modernization, took the ships into service in 1954 as frigates of the Esbern Snare class and finally bought them. The former Calpe came into service with the Danish Navy on October 18, 1954 as the last of the three ships as Rolf Krake (F342), which previously had the former HMS Blackmore as Esbern Snarre (F341) and the former HMS Exmoor (II) as Valdemar Sejr put into service in February and June.
When the Rolf Krake was decommissioned, the type began to be discarded in the Danish Navy. In 1966 the three frigates were sold for demolition.

History of the ship

The HMS Calpe (L71) belonged to the second group of Hunt escort destroyers. These 36 ships were ordered immediately after the war began. She was ordered in December 1939 from the Swan Hunter shipyard in Wallsend , which received eight construction contracts for destroyers of this variant. In total, the shipyard produced the largest number of this class with 16 ships.
The keel of the Calpe was laid as a new building with hull number 1595 on June 12, 1940 as the sixth Hunt II ship . The name of the ship was the Latin name for the Rock of Gibraltar . The name Calpe had been used in the Royal Navy from 1802 onwards by the Spanish prize San Josef (a Polacca ). The new destroyer escort was launched on April 28, 1941 and was delivered to the Royal Navy on December 11, 1941, which had previously received over twenty ships of the new variant.

Mission history

The Calpe was awarded the Battle Honors "Dieppe 1942", "English Channel 1942", "North Africa 1942-43", "Mediterranean 1943", "Sicily 1943", "Salerno 1943", "Aegean 1943" and "South France 1944" " excellent.
During her break-in period with the Home Fleet, the Calpe was used as a backup for mine-laying operations, to protect the British east coast and by convoys in the north-western access routes. In March 1942, the destroyer escort was assigned to the "1st Destroyer Flotilla" in Portsmouth, which performed security tasks in the English Channel and the southern North Sea. On the night of April 5, 1942, the Calpe shelled the French port of Saint-Jean-de-Luz near the border with Spain. The destroyer escort had approached the coast under the Spanish flag and only changed flag shortly before the fire opened.
The ship was then equipped for the amphibious assault on Dieppe ( Operation Jubilee ) as headquarters and fighter lead ship. During the landing on August 19, 1942, six British and Polish Slazaks were used as further Hunt destroyers, of which Fernie and Brocklesby were damaged by artillery and Berkeley by aerial bombs. Only the latter was very badly damaged and was sunk by the sister ship Albrighton when the Allies withdrew . The Calpe was the lead ship of the attack with the commander of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division and the commander of the deployed Navy units on board. She also served as a medical ship that took over a large number of wounded and provided first aid. During the operation she was hit by a bomb that killed nine of the crew of the destroyer escort.
In October 1942, the Calpe was assigned to the Navy units for the Allied landing in North Africa. She moved to Gibraltar in a convoy . When Operation Torch began in November , it was assigned to the Central Task Force . After landing, the ship was briefly overhauled at home and then moved back to North Africa. They secured the supply convoys for the advancing Allied troops, and fought attempts to supply or evacuate the last bridgehead of the Central Powers near Tunis . Further security tasks followed during the Allied landings in Sicily and Salerno . From November, Calpe formed a flotilla stationed in Malta with six British and two Polish Hunt destroyers for convoy security in the central and western Mediterranean.

USS Wainwright (DD-419)

From December 10, she secured the military convoy KMS34 with the half-sisters Tynedale and Holcombe and the US destroyers Niblack , Benson and Wainwright . At around 7.10 a.m. on December 12, a wren torpedo from U 593 hit Tynedale , which was securing the convoy and sank northwest of Bougie to 37 ° 10 ′ N , 6 ° 5 ′ E. 72 crew members died in the sinking of this destroyer escort, 82 men were rescued. The attacking submarine was pursued by some security vehicles and was able to torpedo the Holcombe with a wren at around 2:45 p.m. , which sank in less than five minutes northeast of Bougie to 37 ° 20 ' N , 5 ° 30' E. 84 men died on it; The American Niblack was able to take 80 survivors on board. After a 32-hour chase, depth charges from the American Wainwright and Calpe severely damaged the submarine and brought it to the surface. The German crew cleared the boat and let it sink. The 51 men on board were rescued by the pursuers. The badly damaged submarine sank on December 13, 1943 to 37 ° 38 ' N , 5 ° 58' E , which could not be prevented by a boarding party of the Wainwright . In August 1944, the Calpe secured the AMI convoy from Oran to the landing area of Operation Dragoon in southern France together with the Hunt destroyers Catterick (Type III) and Cleveland (Type I) and three American minesweepers. After the successful landing of American troops, the destroyer returned under British command to secure the Allied operations. In the second half of September, the destroyer escort was assigned with another five British and four Greek Hunt destroyers part of the British Aegean Force , which supported the occupation of other islands in the Aegean Sea.
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Calpe left Malta in 1945 on the way to Malaya

Then the destroyer escort should be used in the Eastern Fleet . A major overhaul of the ship was carried out in Tunisia and Malta from December 1944 to April 1945. Before this mission, the Calpe returned to Chatham to allow the crew to take short vacations. In June 1945 the ship then moved through the Mediterranean to Trincomalee to support the planned landings in Malaya in the 14th Destroyer Flotilla . The operation Zipper was because of the atomic bombing of Japan now made as planned does not take more.

Post-war use

Calpe then remained in action in the Indian Ocean and did not return home until November 1946, where the ship was assigned to the " Reserve " and laid up first in Sheerness , then in Portsmouth. On February 8, 1952, the ship was loaned to the Danish Navy for nine years together with two sister ships .

Frigate Rolf Krake

The agreement on the delivery of the three ships took place on February 28, 1952 for a period of nine years. The former Calpe was the last of the three ships to arrive in Copenhagen on December 20, 1952. The final conversion for use in the Danish fleet took place at the Calpe from August 1953 to September 1954 at Aarhus Flydedok & Maskinkompagni ; on October 18, 1954, she was the last of the three ships to enter the service of the Danish Navy as Rolf Krake (F342), which previously had the former HMS Blackmore as Esbern Snarre (F341) and the former HMS Exmoor (II) as Valdemar Sejr (F343 ) had taken service in February and June 1954. The three ships, now referred to as frigates , were bought by Denmark after being converted at Danish shipyards and commissioned.
Before that, from 1863 to 1907 the Danish Navy had owned a Rolf Krake monitor , named after a legendary king from the early days of Denmark . Due to its use in the German-Danish War , this Rolf octopus was also relatively well known in Germany.

Nakskov became the godfather town of the frigate in May 1954 . On September 28, 1955, the Rolf Krake left Korsør with 30 police officers on board to stop the unrest there in Klaksvig on the Faroe Islands . The frigate arrived there on October 1, along with the war boats Skarven and Ertholm one to the rebellion of Klaksvík to end. The unrest was triggered by the resignation of the chief doctor of the local hospital, Olaf Halvorsen. He had belonged to the Danish Nazi party Danmarks Nationalsocialistiske Arbejderparti (DNSAP). It remained unclear whether he had offered himself to the Nazis after 1940. The community as an employer wanted to hold on to the doctor; The main point of contention was the extent of Faroese independence from the Danish mother country. The Rolf Krake was replaced on site by the frigate Holger Danske (ex HMCS Monnow ) at the end of November . On September 4, 1957, the frigate rescued the severely damaged speedboat Flyvefisken , which had collided with the Högen speedboat . The boat was attached to the side of the frigate because the severely damaged boat would probably not have survived a normal towing process. In the summer of 1958, the Rolf Krake accompanied the Danish King Frederik IX. on a visiting trip to Finland . After a mission in fishery protection off the Faroe Islands in the winter of 1961/62, the Rolf Krake was the first ship of the class to be taken out of service on April 10, 1962 and sold to Ystad in Sweden for demolition in October 1966 .

The Danish Hunt frigates

Surname	ex HMS	Shipyard	Keel laying	Launch	In service	Arrival DK	in service	Final fate
F341 Esbern Snarre	Blackmore (L43)	Stephen & Sons , BNr. 579	02/10/40	2.12.41	04/14/42	9/6/52	02/15/1954	4.1965 a. D., 9.1966 sold for demolition
F342 Rolf Krake	Calpe (L71)	Swan Hunter , No. 1595	06/12/40	04/28/41	12/11/41	12/29/52	10/18/1954	1962 a. D., 10.1966 sold for demolition
F343 Valdemar Sejr	Exmoor II (L08)	Swan Hunter, No. 1593	6/7/40	3/12/41 as Burton	10/18/41	10/18/52	06/21/1954	1962 a. D., 10.1966 sold for demolition

As the first of the three former Hunt destroyers, the former Blackmore entered service in the Danish fleet in early 1954 as Esbern Snare (F341) in early September 1954. The frigate was named after the Danish nobleman and military leader Esbern Snare (1127–1204). His name had previously been used by an armored corvette in the Danish Navy from 1862 to 1923 .
The Blackmore , ordered from A. Stephen & Sons in Glasgow shortly after the outbreak of World War II , was in service with the Royal Navy from April 1942, was awarded the Battle Honors Atlantic 1943, Salerno 1943, Adriatic 1944 and South France 1944 and was last with the Eastern Fleet off Malaya . Returned to Great Britain from the Far East at the end of 1945, the destroyer escort was part of the Royal Navy reserve until 1952.

Frigate Esbern Snare (F341) comes to the Tirpitzmole for the Kieler Woche 1963

A conversion and modernization of the ship took place on the Orlogsværftet in Copenhagen, in mid-February 1954 the ship, now referred to as a frigate, was the first of the class to enter service with the Kongelige Danske Marine . Together with her sister ship Valdemar Sejr , she visited the Soviet Union in August 1956 for the first fleet visit of the Danish Navy in Russia since 1909. The ship was the only one of the three Danish Hunt frigates to undergo a major overhaul in 1961/62. After that, the frigate was mostly used in fisheries protection, but also accompanied the Danish king on a visit to the Faroe Islands and Norway in the summer of 1963. In 1964 she took part in a Danish fleet visit to Poland. On January 9, 1965, the frigate was decommissioned as the last of its class and then sold as the first of its class on September 2, 1966 for demolition, which then took place in Sweden.
Since 2005, the Danish Navy has again had a ship of this name with the support ship Esbern Snare (L17) (6,600 ts). Together with their sister ship Absalon (L16) they are the largest units in the Danish fleet.

As the third ship of the British Hunt class, the Danish Navy had the frigate Valdemar Sejr (F343) . Like the Rolf Krake built by Swan Hunter, this ship was launched as HMS Burton and was used as the second HMS Exmoor (L08) by the Royal Navy in World War II from October 1941. Awarded the Battle Honors Atlantic 1941–42, Libya 1942, Sicily 1943, Salerno 1943, Aegean 1943 and Mediterranean 1944. The ship used in 1945 against the Germans who remained in the Aegean Sea, like the two aforementioned ships, was also intended to fight the Japanese in Malaya be used, but this was not done because of the end of the war. Also in reserve until 1952, it was given to Denmark, where it arrived on October 8, 1952.
The conversion of the ship, now named Valdemar Sejr (F343), took place at Frederikshavn Værft . The ship was named after Waldemar II (1170 to 1241) “the winner”, Duke of Schleswig (1182–1202) and King of Denmark (1202–1241). Two ships of the line (1798–1807 and 1830–1864) were named after him. After the conversion for service in the Danish Navy, the ship, like the two sister ships, had three 102 mm twin guns, four individual 40 mm automatic cannons and depth charges. The power of the engine system on the three ships was limited to 19,000 hp and still enabled a top speed of 23.8 knots . The service time of the Valdemar Sejr was like that of the two sister ships in the Danish service without any major highlights. With the sister ship Esbern Snare , she carried out the first Danish fleet visit to the Soviet Union in August 1956. At the end of her service life, the frigate was used as a storage and accommodation ship for the Danish submarine flotilla and was decommissioned on October 13, 1962 as the second boat of the class. On October 26, 1966, the former destroyer escort was sold for demolition together with its sister ship Rolf Krake , which ended the use of the former British destroyer escorts of the Hunt class in the Danish fleet.

swell

John English: The Hunts: a history of the design, development and careers of 86 destroyers of this class built for the Royal and Allied Navies during World War II , World Ship Society, Cumbria 1987, ISBN 0-905617-44-4
Norman Friedman: British Destroyers: From Earliest Days to the Second World War , Seaforth Publishing (Barnsley 2009), ISBN 978-1-84832-049-9 .
Antony Preston: Destroyers , Hamlyn, ISBN 0-600-32955-0
Jürgen Rohwer , Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronicle of the naval war 1939-1945 , Manfred Pawlak Verlagsgesellschaft, Herrsching, 1968 ISBN 3-88199-009-7
MJ Whitley: Destroyers of World War 2 , Naval Institute Press, Annapolis (1988), ISBN 0-87021-326-1