SMS Condor
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The SMS Condor was a cruiser IV class of the Imperial Navy . In 1899 the ship was classified as a small cruiser and finally reclassified as a gunboat in 1913 .
construction
The sinking of the gunboat Eber on March 16, 1889 made a replacement necessary. The Reichstag provided the necessary financial resources in the budget for 1890/91. In the same year, the Hamburg shipyard Blohm & Voss received the order to build the unprotected cruiser Ersatz Eber . It was the first order from the Imperial Navy for the shipyard. The launch took place on February 23, 1892. After a baptismal address by the head of the Baltic Sea Naval Station , Vice Admiral Wilhelm Schröder, the shipyard director of Wilhelmshaven , sea captain Conrad von Bodenhausen , baptized the ship in the name of Condor .
commitment
The Condor was first put into service on December 9, 1892 , to be transferred to Wilhelmshaven for final equipment. The test drives began six days later and lasted, with one interruption, from January 21 to February 21, 1893, until April 28, 1893. The cruiser then remained in the reserve.
It was not until October 2, 1894 that the Condor was put back into service to replace the Möwe in the German colony of East Africa . From mid-December 1894 until New Year 1895, the cruiser lay in front of Lourenço Marques and then went to German East Africa. On June 27th a meeting with the cormorant took place in Delagoa Bay . From August 3 to November 16, the annual overhaul was carried out in Durban despite diplomatic tensions between Germany and Great Britain . In January 1896, as a result of the Jameson Raid , the Condor was back in front of Lourenço Marques. After a brief visit to the Seychelles in June, a three-month stay in Cape Town followed at the end of August . Due to an attack on the German consul, the ship was again in front of Lourenço Marques from December 11, 1896 to February 2, 1897.
In the following years the Condor commuted repeatedly between German East Africa and South Africa. During the Second Boer War , additional diplomatic and military tasks came to the ship. Among other things, German merchant ships had to be protected from attacks by British warships. Relations between the German Empire and Great Britain were considerably strained by the events during the Boer War, so the Condor was seized by British warships on January 7, 1900 and transferred to the port of Durban in the British-South African colony of Natal and after arms deliveries for the Buren has been searched. At this time, the members of the Second Aid Expedition of the German Red Cross Associations and an ambulance troop, which had been equipped by a private company in Antwerp, were on board.
The Condor began her voyage home on January 3, 1901, during which she provided assistance to the German steamer Mawska, which got into distress in the North Sea on March 3 . After the decommissioning on March 23, the ship underwent a major overhaul.
The Condor was put back into service on April 1, 1903 to replace the Cormoran in the South Seas. Both ships met in Singapore on June 26th . The Condor had thus reached its extensive station area, where it undertook numerous cruises over the next ten years. In the summer of 1904, the cruiser was used to put down unrest in German Samoa . In early September 1905, the Condor visited Honolulu with the governor of the colony, Wilhelm Solf , on board . In September and October 1908, riots were put down in several of the Marshall Islands , in which the Jaguar was also involved. In August 1909 the Condor had to look for the government steamer Seestern , which had disappeared between Herbertshöhe and Brisbane , but was unsuccessful.
In July 1910 the Condor met with the Scharnhorst and the small cruisers Nürnberg and Emden in front of Apia . Together with the Emden and the Cormorant , the Sokehs uprising on Ponape was suppressed in January 1911 . From May 20th to October 1st of the same year, the Imperial Tsingtau shipyard carried out a major overhaul of the Condor . In November, the ship was in the Palau Islands in order to be able to quickly receive messages from the radio station on Yap during the Second Moroccan Crisis . From 1912, the stationary in the South Seas were increasingly used to survey the coast of the German colonies, which is why the surveying staff was increased. On December 3, the ship set out from Simpsonhafen under the command of Corvette Captain Konrad Mommsen to reach the German Kaiserin Augusta River Expedition in Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land on December 11, 1912, anchoring at their base camp for two days .246 nautical miles upstream. The Condor returned to Simpsonhafen on December 18.
The Condor was reclassified on January 8, 1913 as the first ship of her class to the gunboat. During a repair carried out in Tsingtau in May, the now heavy wear on the hull was discovered. The Condor therefore received the order to travel home in November. The run-up German steamer Zanzibar had to be protected from looting and towed free off the Moroccan coast . After her return, the Condor was decommissioned on March 30, 1914 in Danzig .
Whereabouts
Due to her age and the extremely low combat value of the unarmored ship, the Condor was not put into service when the First World War broke out . From 1916 the ship served as a mining hulk in Friedrichsort . The Condor was removed from the list of warships on November 18, 1920. After it was sold on April 8, 1921, it was scrapped in Hamburg that same year.
The small cruiser Strasbourg launched in 1911 was built to replace the Condor .
Commanders
| December 9, 1892 to January 21, 1893 | Corvette Captain Wilhelm Gertz |
| February 21 to April 28, 1893 | Corvette Captain Max Jaeckel |
| October 2, 1894 to February 1895 | Corvette Captain Ernst Broeker |
| February to April 1895 | Lieutenant Max Wilken |
| April 1895 to June 1896 | Corvette Captain Friedrich Follenius |
| June 1896 to March 1898 | Corvette Captain Hans Meyer |
| March 1898 to December 1899 | Corvette Captain August von Dassel |
| December 1899 to March 23, 1901 | Corvette Captain Georg Friedrich Scheibel |
| April 1, 1903 to April 1905 | Corvette Captain Gustav Kirchhoff |
| April 1905 to May 1907 | Corvette Captain / Frigate Captain Alfred Begas |
| May 1907 to April 1909 | Corvette Captain / Frigate Captain Georg Ahlert |
| April 1909 to October 1910 | Corvette Captain / Frigate Captain Otto Kranzbühler |
| November 20, 1910 to April 7, 1912 | Corvette Captain Hans Bene |
| April 1912 to March 30, 1914 | Corvette Captain / Frigate Captain Konrad Mommsen |
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. 124 .
- 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, S. 189-191 .
Footnotes
- ↑ The Coron Chronicle - the 20th Century: 1900–1903 . S. 8. Coron-Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, ISBN 3-577-17101-4 .
- ^ The Imperial Navy and the Empress Augusta River Expedition 1912/13. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on April 23, 2014 ; Retrieved May 25, 2014 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
