SMS Amazone (1900)
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SMS Amazone , the second ship of the Imperial Navy with this name, was a light cruiser of the Imperial and then the Imperial Navy .
Building history
The Amazone was the third Gazelle- class ship built at the Germania shipyard . The keel was laid in December 1899 shortly after the launch of the sister ship SMS nymph . The launch took place on October 6, 1900 in Kiel . On October 15, 1901, the ship was commissioned for the first time under Corvette Captain Ludwig Bruch as the seventh and last ship in the first series.
The cruiser, displacing a maximum of 3,082 t, was 104.8 m long, 12.2 m wide and was able to run at 9,018 PSi on two screws in the test at 21.3 knots and was thus somewhat slower than the planned 21.5 knots. He had the standard armament of his class with ten 10.5 cm L / 40 rapid fire guns , ten 3.7 cm automatic cannons and two 45 cm torpedo tubes . The normal manning was 257 men.
First missions
On December 21, 1901, the Amazone was taken over as a reconnaissance cruiser in the fleet. During the first big association trip she was rammed behind the foremast by the liner SMS Kaiser Wilhelm II . She remained buoyant, the repair of the damage dragged on in the shipyard until July 1902. Another damage occurred as early as September when she was practicing an “board on board” maneuver with the hospital ship Hansa as part of the autumn maneuvers . The need to stay in the shipyard again prevented the cruiser from being sent to Venezuela .
When the Association of Reconnaissance Ships was created on March 1, 1903 as a new command post, the Amazon was assigned to it.
The cruiser's reputation for being the most accident-prone ship in the fleet was further strengthened when the Amazon ran aground on June 2, 1903 on the Atlantic voyage of the 1st Squadron in Brest , which she was supposed to call at as a postman. The damage was limited because - as planned for such cases - only part of the loose keel broke off. She was released again during the flood, and the proceedings against the commanding officer and navigational officer ended with both of them being arrested.
From 1904 the cruiser was often used in the reconnaissance association as the lead ship of the 1st torpedo boat flotilla. On August 12, 1904, the ship suffered its next accident when it was rammed by the Russian barque Anna on the Kiel Fjord . On March 3, 1905, there was a collision with the torpedo boat D 6 , which was brought in by the cruiser. He himself had to go to the shipyard for repairs for three weeks. On September 28, 1905, the Amazone left the association of reconnaissance ships, in which it was replaced by the small cruiser SMS Berlin , which also took over the crew. The Amazon was assigned to the reserve.
War effort
On August 2, 1914, the Amazon was put back into service and assigned to the Baltic Sea Coast Guard Division. She took part in the activities of the detached admiral in the eastern Baltic Sea, for example hauled the old SM U 3 to Dagerort , supported forces of the army in the Memel area and shelled the Lithuanian coast. On August 26, she and the V 26 torpedo boat recovered over 300 wounded and crew members from SMS Magdeburg, which ran aground near Odensholm on the Estonian north coast . On 9/10 In October she dragged the U- 25 submarine , which had broken down with machinery, back to Danzig. Because of its low speed, the Amazon often stayed behind when it came to advances and was transferred to the western Baltic Sea at the end of the year, including securing the Saßnitz - Trelleborg ferry .
From March 1916 to March 1917 it was used by the submarine school for targeting. In August 1916 she gave up the 10.5 cm guns and was armed with six 8.8 cm rapid-fire guns. After that she was a barge in Kiel until the end of the war .
Service in the Reichsmarine
The old cruiser was modernized from 1921 to 1923 by the naval shipyard in Wilhelmshaven . Instead of the sweeping ram, it received a modern cruiser bow and a new foremast.
On December 1, 1923, the modernized Amazone, now armed with former submarine cannons, was put into service and assigned to the light naval forces of the North Sea. In 1925 she made her first trip abroad to Rotterdam and also went to Norway. In 1926 she took part in the fleet voyage with the fleet flagship Schleswig-Holstein into the Mediterranean from May 14th, the Atlantic and Spain voyage lasting until June 17, and in which all large units of the naval command of the Imperial Navy took part: the ships of the line Hanover , Alsace and Hessen and the sister ship of the Amazone , the cruiser nymph of the Baltic Sea station, took part in the voyage. The Amazone visited with Schleswig-Holstein and Hesse , among others, from 22 to 30 May Palma de Mallorca . It was the first big trip of an association of the Reichsmarine. In 1927 she took part in the fleet voyage from March 29 to June 16 in the Atlantic, on which the ships involved called at different ports in groups. The Amazon was different from the first planning Pontevedra of 2 to 5 April, since the nymph in Ferrol had to fix damage to the steering gear. On April 9th she ran into the port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife together with the former school cruiser Berlin , from where she marched on to Cape Verde in Porta da Praia on the 18th . The next port for the cruiser was La Luz near Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and on May 11th she met again in Madeira with the Berlin , which however went back to sea earlier, first to a Portuguese sailor, then to the German steamer Help Cuba . On May 24th, in Ponta Delgada , Azores , the Amazon met the Berlin again with her protégé who had been brought to safety. Then the Amazon visited Seville with her sister ship Nymphe at the beginning of June , before the trip ended with a stay in Lisbon and a parade of the four ships of the line and three cruisers in front of the Portuguese President. In 1928 the Amazone visited Norway and in 1929 Gothenburg was the last foreign port .
On January 15, 1930 the Amazone was finally decommissioned and replaced by the new light cruiser Cologne .
Whereabouts
On March 31, 1931, the Amazon was removed from the list of warships. After the official end of her service, she was a houseboat with the submarine acceptance commission in Kiel. From October 6, 1939, the former cruiser was used as a ship by the test command for new warships (U-Boats group).
After 1945 it was used again as a living room in Bremen . The idea of converting it into a youth hostel was never realized. In 1954 the ship was broken up in Hamburg .
Commanders
| November 15, 1901 to September 1902 | Corvette Captain / Frigate Captain Ludwig Bruch |
| October 1902 to April 1904 | Corvette Captain / Frigate Captain Gerhard Gerdes |
| April 1904 to May 1904 | Corvette Captain Leberecht Maaß |
| May 1904 to April 1905 | Corvette Captain / Frigate Captain Rudolf Berger |
| April to May 1905 | Corvette Captain Leberecht Maaß |
| May to September 28, 1905 | Frigate Captain Rudolf Berger |
| August 2, 1914 to October 1914 | Corvette Captain Johannes Horn |
| October 1914 to March 14, 1917 | Corvette Captain / Frigate Captain Max Lutter |
| December 1, 1923 to March 23, 1925 | Sea captain Walter Gladisch |
| March 24, 1925 to September 23, 1926 | Sea captain Eduard Eichel |
| September 24, 1926 to September 27, 1927 | Frigate Captain Alfred Saalwächter |
| September 28, 1927 to October 11, 1929 | Frigate captain / sea captain Albrecht Meißner |
| October 12, 1929 to January 15, 1930 | Frigate Captain Ludwig von Schröder |
Known crew members
- Bernhard Rogge (1899–1982), was from 1957 to 1962 as Rear Admiral in command of Defense Area I.
literature
- Hans H. Hildebrand / Albert Röhr / Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships: Biographies - a mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present. Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, Herford.
- Alfred G. Nagel: Amazon memory from the time when three navies became. Commission publisher Walter G. Mühlau, Kiel.