SMS Koenigsberg (1905)
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The SMS Königsberg was a small cruiser of the Imperial Navy , the first of a series of four ships. In April 1914 she was put back into service for the East African Station. Although not very successful in the cruiser war, after the sinking of the British cruiser Pegasus off Zanzibar , she tied up considerable forces in front of her hiding place in the Rufiji estuary before she was sunk by her own crew on July 11, 1915 after severe destruction by enemy forces.
Mission history
Service before 1914
In times of peace, the Königsberg was often used to accompany the emperor. In April 1907, the trials were interrupted as accompanying cruisers of the Imperial Yacht Hohenzollern during Elbregatta, the Kiel Week , from June 3 to 6 at a meeting with the Tsar Nicholas II. , And in July 1907 on the northern tour to North Cape to serve. After completing the remaining test drives, the ship replaced the small cruiser Medusa or SMS Hamburg in the association of reconnaissance ships . From November 5, the Königsberg sailed together with the great cruiser Scharnhorst and the dispatch boat Sleipner in the imperial entourage to Great Britain and the Netherlands and brought Admiral Prince Heinrich of Prussia to the funeral ceremonies from December 17 to 20, 1907 with a delegation of the naval officer corps of the Swedish King Oskar II to Malmö .
In 1910 trips took place again to accompany the emperor: in March to Heligoland and from 8 to 27 May to Great Britain for the funeral of King Edward VII. From 8 March to 22 May 1911, the Königsberg served again as an escort cruiser for the imperial yacht to Venice (March 26, 1911) and Corfu (April 24, 1911) as well as a subsequent state visit by the imperial couple to George V , the new British king. On June 10, 1911, she was replaced by the Kolberg in the fleet and decommissioned on June 14.
From January 22 to June 19, 1913, the Königsberg was back in fleet service after some improvement work to replace the cruiser Mainz, which had failed due to a lengthy repair .
On April 1, 1914, she was put back into service to take over the East African station. On April 28th she left Wilhelmshaven, visited Almería on May 3rd to 5th, and on 7th / 8th May . then Cagliari and from May 9th to 12th Naples , where she met the flagship of the Mediterranean division , Goeben . On behalf of the head of the Mediterranean Division, she visited Mersin from May 15th to 17th and on May 18th and 19th. Alexandrette (now İskenderun ) in Turkey, before she reached Port Said on the 21st and passed the Suez Canal on the 23rd. The cruiser visited Aden from May 27 to 29 and reached Dar es Salaam on June 6, 1914 .
Service in East Africa from 1914
As a station ship, the Königsberg trained her little experienced crew with coastal trips and on July 31, as instructed, left the port of Dar es Salaam because of the threatened outbreak of war in order to wage cruiser warfare in the Indian Ocean . In front of the port of the main town of the German colony, she met the British Cape Squadron with the cruisers Astraea , Pegasus and Hyacinth , from which she apparently escaped with a few turns and at high speed to the south. In fact, however, the Königsberg ran north to the main shipping routes at the beginning of the First World War . On August 6, 1914, the British freighter City of Winchester was seized in the Gulf of Aden . Then the Königsberg met with the Reichspostdampfer Zieten , the Somali and other German ships at the exit of the Persian Gulf. The considered equipping of the Zieten to the auxiliary cruiser was omitted, among other things, because it had hardly any coal (should be bunkering in Aden according to the schedule and only had a four-day supply) and the coal procured by the Königsberg was only able to enable that to still approach neutral Portuguese East Africa . After the City of Winchester had gradually taken over coal supplies , it was finally sunk. Since no further ships were found in the Gulf of Aden, the cruiser ran to Majunga , where no ships were found, and then on September 3 to the Rufiji Delta, because the commander hoped to be able to supply himself with coal in the German colony. From there, at dawn on September 20, he attacked the British light cruiser Pegasus , which was anchored with engine damage in the port of Zanzibar , and was able to sink it. 38 British sailors were killed in this battle, in which the German cruiser is said to have fired around 300 rounds, while the Pegasus only fired around 50 because its fire control failed prematurely and the guns were also gradually destroyed.
After this action, machine damage also occurred on the Königsberg . Since news of British reinforcements was received, the cruiser withdrew to the ramified delta of the Rufiji River on the coast of the German colony for repairs. The British had no information whatsoever that this river was navigable for ships of this size. Thus the Königsberg was temporarily undetectable. Spare parts were brought in overland so that repairs could be carried out in peace. The sinking of the Pegasus led to the delegation of the HMS Chatham and other modern cruisers to the East African coast to oppose the Koenigsberg superior cruisers. Then some negligence put the British on the trail of the cruiser they were looking for. During a search of the German merchant ship President in the port of Lindi by the Chatham , a receipt was found for the delivery of a cargo of coal to the Königsberg . The place Salale - a station in the Rufiji Delta - was also noted on it.
End in the Rufiji Delta
On October 30, 1914, Major Philip Jacobus Pretorius from Chatham was able to discover the masts of the Königsberg in the mangrove forest of the Delta. The masts had not been shortened accordingly. Now the ships of the Royal Navy ( the Weymouth - both originally part of the Mediterranean fleet - and the Dartmouth from the East Indies station were added to the Chatham until the 5th ) lay in front of the river mouth. These modern Town-class cruisers were superior to the Königsberg in every way. Exactly one day later the last spare parts arrived and the Königsberg was fully operational again. But now she was included in the delta.
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After November 1, 1914, the British cruisers, the Königsberg and the Somali began to fire in the delta. The Chatham shot at a very great distance without hitting the Königsberg directly, which retreated further into the delta. However, they set the Somali , which is closer to the sea, on fire by being hit in the coal cargo. The crew failed to put out the fire and the Somali burned out completely.
The British sank the steamer Newbridge as a block ship in one of the mouths and pretended to have laid mines in other arms of the delta. On November 19, an aircraft was used for the first time to clear the position of the Königsberg . Until they were sunk, ten machines were gradually used, six of which were lost.
Coastal posts initially prevented any attempt to come up the river in small boats. On March 7, 1915, the ship of the line Goliath arrived with the commander of the Cape Squadron, Sir Herbert Goodenough King-Hall , in front of the Rufiji Delta. The liner was activated for the Canal Squadron when the war broke out and then moved to India to the East Indies Station in the autumn to protect Indian troop transports to the Persian Gulf and East Africa from the German cruisers that were not yet under control at the time. She came to East Africa in a convoy and at the end of November 1914 had already shot at Dar es Salaam twice. For the first action in which the British controlled German merchant ships in the port, the then commandant of the Goliath , Henry Peel Ritchie , who was seriously wounded as head of the control group, was the first naval officer of the World War to receive a Victoria Cross in April 1915. After an overhaul in Simon's Town, South Africa, from December 1914 to February 1915, she was now the flagship of the Cape Squadron. The attempt to bombard the Königsberg was unsuccessful, as it was also outside the firing range of the Goliath , which the delta waters could not navigate. On March 25th, the Goliath was recalled to the Dardanelles. On April 1, she marched towards the Mediterranean and Admiral King-Hall switched to the cruiser Hyacinth .
Since precise information on the condition of the Königsberg was missing, the British Navy decided to have two of the monitors originally built for the Amazon , the Mersey and Severn , towed from the Mediterranean to East Africa, as they could penetrate the river delta due to their shallow draft. Both had previously been in action on the Flemish coast, where they had used up the guns on their front 6-inch twin turrets. They now had two single 6-inch Type VII guns fore and aft, and their howitzers were on the boat deck. They had arrived in Malta on March 29, en route to the Dardanelles with their sister ship the Humber . On April 28, the two monitors left Malta with four tugs, their base ship Trent and a coal steamer, reached Aden on May 15 and June 3, the now occupied island of Mafia off the Rufiji estuary, where the observation planes are now also stationed . The monitors carried out repairs, only released parts and superstructures required for the transfer and were secured against infantry fire.
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The monitors' first attack took place on July 6, 1915, during which their tugs for emergencies, three small whalers to secure against mines and the cruisers Weymouth and Pyramus crossed the bar in front of the mouth of the Rufiji. The cruisers fired at the ground troops of the Germans in the delta and tried to turn off recognized gun positions and observation posts. The monitors were anchored about 9 km away from the Königsberg and attempted from 6.30 a.m. under the direction of two observation aircraft to hit the German cruiser with indirect artillery fire. This returned fire and was directed from an observation post set up on land. He hit the Mersey several times and put its bow gun out of action after about an hour. Due to the failure of an aircraft and the damage suffered, the British withdrew. They fired 635 rounds and scored six hits. Six people died on the Mersey . The hits on the Königsberg in turn caused minor team losses, the combat capability remained unaffected.
The attack was repeated on July 11 at around noon, this time the Severn going a mile further upriver. The different positions made it difficult for the observers of the Koenigsberg to assess their hit pattern, while the monitors shot alternately to make it easier for the aircraft to assign them, and the Severn also achieved more effect at the shorter distance. After several heavy hits with considerable personnel losses, fires started in the aft ship of the Königsberg . Due to a lack of ammunition, she had to cease fire around 1.40 p.m. The commander, Frigate Captain Max Looff , ordered the crew to go ashore, taking all the wounded with them and salvaging the gun locks, and ordered his ship to be blown up. Even badly wounded, he was the last to leave the cruiser. After the ignition of two torpedo heads, which tore a leak in the forecastle below the waterline, the ship lay over and sank to the upper deck at 7 ° 51 ′ 40 ″ S , 39 ° 15 ′ 0 ″ E. . At 5.45 p.m., the Königsberg flag and pennant were taken down. In their last stand they had 33 dead, while the British had only a few injured. The monitors disappeared around 4 p.m. and were shot at by the bank guns of the Delta department. In the shallow water, the deck of the sunken cruiser remained above the waterline, and so the ship could be cannibalized after the British withdrew. The recovery of the material, especially the guns, lasted until September 18. The crew was brought to Dar es Salaam in groups by land .
A ship of the line , nine cruisers, two monitors and an auxiliary cruiser were temporarily deployed against the Königsberg . During the attempts to observe the air, six of the aircraft that were brought in were worn out, all of which turned out to be unsuitable or unsuitable for the tropics.
Aftermath
The crew of the Königsberg was integrated into the German East Africa Protection Force under General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck . Only 32 of them returned to Germany in 1919.
The Königsberg cannons were recovered using the cargo harness of the coastal steamer Hedwig and were then used by the protection force. For this purpose they were converted into field artillery and distributed over the entire colony. They were the largest artillery pieces in the land war in East Africa . Two Königsberg cannons were used on the Graf Goetzen barge , which sailed on Lake Tanganyika .
The British had also recovered the guns from the sunk Pegasus and converted them for land warfare. The Königsberg and Pegasus guns fired at each other again during the fighting for Kondoa-Irangi in June 1916. During their retreat between March 1916 and October 1917, the Schutztruppe gradually lost these large weapons or gradually gave them up. There was hardly any ammunition left for it, and von Lettow-Vorbeck had to switch to a more agile way of fighting. The transport of the guns required up to 400 carriers in the impassable areas .
The wreck of the Königsberg lay in the shallow water of the Rufiji estuary and could be seen for decades at low tide until it sank in the silt. A 10.5 cm cannon from Königsberg and a 10.2 cm cannon from Pegasus stand side by side in front of Fort Jesus in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa , where they were set up during the British colonial era. Two other captured Königsberg guns are set up in Pretoria (South Africa) and Jinja (Uganda).
Philatelic meaning
The postage stamp inventory of the Königsberg naval ship mail was used up together with the inventory of the seagull in German East Africa. These are ordinary postage stamps from the Germania issue of the German Empire for 3, 5, 10, 20 and 50 Pf. And 1 mark. Due to the war-related isolation of German East Africa, there was a shortage of postage stamps from German East Africa, which was offset by various temporary measures. The postage stamps from the naval ship inventory, which were not normally valid in German East Africa, were also used for this purpose. The stamps were distributed to eight medium-sized post offices, where they were used up on parcel cards in the back office. These stamps are known among philatelists under the term " Königsberg edition".
Commanders
| April 6, 1907 to September 30, 1908 | Corvette Captain / Frigate Captain Otto Philipp |
| October 1, 1908 to November 30, 1909 | Frigate Captain Adolf Kloebe |
| December 1, 1909 to September 1910 | Frigate captain / sea captain Adolf von Trotha |
| September 1910 to June 14, 1911 | Corvette Captain / Frigate Captain Paul Heinrich |
| January 22 to June 19, 1913 | Frigate Captain Heinrich Retzmann |
| April 1, 1914 to July 11, 1915 | Frigate Captain Max Looff |
The Königsberg off the coast of German East Africa
Wreck of the Koenigsberg
Crew in front of the sunken Königsberg
A Königsberg gun at the Union Buildings in Pretoria
The Königsberg in the harbor
See also
literature
- RA Burt: British Battleships 1889-1904. Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland 1988, ISBN 0-87021-061-0
- Peter Eckart: Navy blue and khaki. The hero fight of the cruiser Königsberg. Stuttgart 1938.
- 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.
- Volker Lohse: The SMS "Königsberg" guns in East Africa. In: Zeitschrift für Heereskunde. 1985, 319, pp. 78-81.
- Reinhard Karl Lochner: Fight in the Rufiji Delta. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-453-02420-6 .
- Max Looff: Cruise and Bush Fight. With SMS "Königsberg" in German East Africa. 2nd expanded edition, Berlin 1929.
- Kevin Patience: Koenigsberg. A German East Africa raider. Bahrain 2001.
- Herbert Stock: SMS Königsberg. The last German cruiser on the East African station in World War 1914. Fate and philatelic considerations. West Berlin 1973.
- Chapter "Königsberg". In: John Walter: Pirates of the Emperor. German trade destroyers 1914–1918. Stuttgart 1994, pp. 112-128.
- Richard Wenig: SMS Königsberg. In monsoons and Pori. Berlin 1938.
- Richard Wenig: SMS Königsberg - Last fight in German East Africa. 155 pages, Melchior Verlag; Edition: Based on the original edition from 1938 (January 27, 2010), ISBN 3941555340 .
Web links
- SMS Königsberg on deutsche-schutzgebiete.de
- Detailed article in War Times Journal (Engl.)
- SMS Königsberg on worldwar1.co.uk (Engl.)
- SMS Königsberg on battleships-cruisers.co.uk (engl.)
- Richard O'Neil: SMS KÖNIGSBERG: Sea Wolf in Lair. (Detailed report on the enclosure and sinking of the Königsberg from a British perspective, many pictures of the damaged cruiser)
- KONIGSBERG. A German East African Raider (engl.)
- Golf Dornseif, SMS KÖNIGSBERG - Agony in the Rufiji Delta (detailed report on the end in the Rufiji Delta ; PDF; 2.4 MB)
Footnotes
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^ According to Hildebrand et al .: Single ship, ordered as a Bremen -class cruiser , then plan changed;
Nuremberg class with Stuttgart and Stettin higher displacement and 2 m longer. - ↑ Bj. 1893, 4,360 t, 19.5 knots, two 15.2 cm guns, eight 12.0 cm guns, HMS Astraea on battleships-cruisers.com
- ↑ Bj. 1897, 2,740 t, 20 knots, 8 10.2 cm guns, HMS Pegasus on historyofwar.org
- ↑ Bj. 1898, 5,600 t, 20 knots, eleven 15.2 cm guns, HMS Hyacinth on historyofwar.org
- ^ RA Burt: British Battleships 1889-1904. Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland 1988, ISBN 0-87021-061-0 , p. 158
- ↑ According to Hildebrand et al. The German warships were hit four times.
- ↑ Report by Admiral King-Hall on the destruction of the Königsberg
- ↑ Hildebrand et al. The German warships give different numbers: 19 dead, 21 seriously and 24 slightly wounded.
- ↑ Hedwig , 571 GRT, 8.5 kn, built near Stülcken in 1913, in Tanga in August 1914 , in July 1915 in the Rufidji Delta, sunk there in October.
- ↑ Richard O'Neil: SMS KÖNIGSBERG: Sea Wolf Lair. , last paragraph