SMS Comet (1860)
 The structurally identical basilisk
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The SMS Comet was the second ship of the Camaeleon class , a class of eight steam gunboats 1st class of the Royal Prussian and Imperial Navy .
Construction and service in the Prussian Navy
The Comet was laid down by the Royal Shipyard in Danzig on September 1, 1859 and was launched exactly one year later. The first commissioning took place on August 6, 1861, when the ship made a trip to the North Sea to visit the cities of Hamburg and Bremen together with Camaeleon , the second class gunboats, Fuchs , Jäger , Salamander and Scorpion as well as Amazone and Hela . After its completion it was decommissioned on October 12th in Gdansk.
The outbreak of the German-Danish War was the reason for the Comet's next commissioning in February 1864. She was moved to Dänholm and joined the 1st Flotilla Division there. In April, the existing first class gunboats were combined into a separate reserve division. On April 19, Comet suffered a slight collision with the flotilla leader ship Loreley . After participating in a fleet parade in front of King Wilhelm I and visiting Holstein ports, the ship was moved to Kiel . In August it helped to help the cricket that got stuck on the Trave , and in October it was busy measuring the Holstein coast of the Baltic Sea . The ship remained in service through the winter. After the Reserve Division was dissolved in March 1865, it carried out survey work in the North Sea. This task ended in the end of the year and Comet was decommissioned on December 8, 1865 on Dänholm.
In 1868 the ship was activated again. The need to monitor the fishing grounds off the German North Sea coast had arisen, and so Comet took up service on May 5th as the first fisheries protection ship. At the same time, it carried out minor surveying tasks until September 23. On this day the ship was taken out of service for the winter. In the following year, it performed the same tasks from April 1st to November 3rd. In 1870 the mission that began on April 20 was interrupted by the outbreak of the Franco-German War . The Comet was entrusted with the defense of the jade , but did not take part in any special operation and was decommissioned on April 29, 1871. A subsequent investigation revealed the need for a major repair, which was carried out by May 1872 at the Royal Shipyard in Danzig.
Service in the Imperial Navy
The first missions after the major repairs were carried out as part of wreck clearance services . After a severe storm flood in November 1872, many wrecks were suspected in the Baltic Sea to be found and sunk. Comet was used for this from December 1872 to January 1873 and March 1873. She had Harvey-type torpedoes and 19 men from the Wilhelmshaven torpedo department on board. In September and October of the same year the ship was used for test drives.
The assassination of the German consul in Saloniki as a result of an anti-European movement in the Ottoman Empire in 1876 gave Comet the opportunity to put Comet back into service in order to strengthen the units already in the eastern Mediterranean. On May 18, the gunboat left Kiel and met the tank training squadron in Gibraltar in early June . It reached Salonika three weeks later. At the end of July it replaced the Nautilus in Constantinople to serve as a stationary there together with Meteor until mid-November . Then Comet was moved via Saloniki to Smyrna , where it replaced SMS Pommerania on December 4th, but returned to Constantinople in mid-December, where the ship remained until the end of 1878 and thus also during the XI. Russo-Turkish war was present. On December 29, 1878, the ship sailed to Smyrna with a stopover in Mytilene and was back in Constantinople at the beginning of February 1879. The Comet remained stationed in the capital of the Ottoman Empire until September 3, 1879 , interrupted by target practice in the Sea of Marmara and a trip to the Danube Delta in June and July . On this day, the replacement for the gunboat arrived with the Loreley , which immediately began its journey home. On November 8th, it was finally decommissioned in Kiel.
In October and November 1880 the Comet was used to raise the Barbarossa , which was sunk during experiments , but this was done without official commissioning. From March 12 to May 5, 1881, the ship was again active in fisheries protection.
Whereabouts
After the last brief use in the spring of 1881, the Comet was finally decommissioned and removed from the list of warships on September 30 of that year. The hull was used as a hulk and depot ship and was scrapped after 1891 (the exact date is unknown).
The Adler gunboat was built between 1882 and 1884 to replace the Comet . It ran aground in the night of March 15-16, 1889 during a cyclone in the port of Apia .
Commanders
| August 6 to October 12, 1861 | Lieutenant for the sea, 1st class, Arendt |
| February to March 1864 | Corvette Captain Hassenstein |
| March 1864 to December 8, 1865 | Captain Christian Donner |
| April 21 to May 1, 1868 | Captain Friedrich von Hacke |
| May 5 to September 23, 1868 | Captain Friedrich von Hacke |
| April 1 to November 3, 1869 | Lieutenant to the sea Rudolf Hoffmann |
| April 20, 1870 - April 29, 1871 | Lieutenant Rudolf Hoffmann |
| December 1872 | Lieutenant to the sea Holtz |
| December 1872 to January 24, 1873 | Corvette Captain Heinrich Kühne |
| March 5-28, 1873 | Captain Franz Mensing |
| September 18 to October 11, 1873 | unknown |
| May 14, 1876 to September 1878 | Lieutenant / Corvette Captain Friedrich von Pawelsz |
| September 1878 to November 8, 1879 | Lieutenant Gustav von Senden-Bibran |
| March 12 to May 5, 1881 | Captain Lieutenant Baron von Erhardt |
literature
- Gröner, Erich / Dieter Jung / Martin Maass: The German warships 1815-1945 . tape 1 : Armored ships, ships of the line, battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, gunboats . Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-7637-4800-8 , p. 161 f .
- Hildebrand, Hans H. / Albert Röhr / Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships . Biographies - a mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present . tape 2 : Ship biographies from Baden to Eber . Mundus Verlag, Ratingen 1999, p. 184-186 .
Footnotes
- ↑ The designation of the lower officer ranks was set or changed in the years 1849, 1854 and 1864. On January 1, 1900, the names Fähnrich zur See, Leutnant zur See, Oberleutnant zur See and Kapitänleutnant, which are still in use today, were introduced.
- ↑ The rank corresponds to a lieutenant commander.
- ↑ a b The rank corresponds to a first lieutenant at sea.