SMS Niobe (1899)
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SMS Niobe was a Gazelle- class small cruiser ofthe Imperial Navy .
After the First World War, the long outdated Niobe remained with the Reichsmarine as a reserve ship , but was not put back into service, but instead struck off the list of ships in 1925 and sold to Yugoslavia without armament. There she was put into service as a school cruiser Damalcija after renovation . During the Second World War she came under the Italian flag as Cattaro and finally again under the German flag as Niobe before she ran aground at the end of 1943 and was sunk by British motor torpedo boats.
Imperial Navy
Pre-war missions
The Niobe was the first of five Gazelle- class cruisers that were built at Werft AG Weser in Bremen for the Imperial Navy. The keel was stretched on 30 August 1898 and the ship was running on 18 July 1899 by the stack after the first mayor of Bremen, it Dr. Pauli, named Niobe . A frigate had already carried this name from 1861 to 1890 . The new cruiser was put into service on June 25, 1900 for test drives until August 22, 1900.
First period of use
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On April 11, 1901 the commissioning into active service took place, first as a flotilla ship of the I. T- Flotilla . Its commanding officer was Reinhard Scheer , who later became the fleet chief , who commanded it again from April to June 1902. From the end of June she became the escort cruiser of the Hohenzollern Imperial Yacht on the annual Nordland voyage, which was prematurely canceled in 1901 due to the death of Empress Victoria - the mother of Emperor Wilhelm II . In September 1901, the Niobe was used again as an escort cruiser for the imperial yacht when Wilhelm II met with the Russian Tsar Nicholas II . In 1902 the cruiser was used again with the I. T-Flotilla from April to June. In 1903 he joined the newly created association of reconnaissance ships from April to June in the I. T-Flotilla - now under Franz Hipper - after a contemplated mission off Venezuela had been canceled.
On September 28, 1904, the cruiser was temporarily taken out of service. A major overhaul was carried out during the two following years in reserve.
Second period of use
On June 19, 1906, the Niobe was put back into service. She left Wilhelmshaven on July 9th and arrived at the cruiser squadron in East Asia on September 8th . She replaced her sister ship Thetis there and was temporarily the only larger ship besides the flagship Fürst Bismarck . Only in 1907 did the small cruisers Leipzig and Arcona arrive in East Asia. The Niobe accompanied the flagship on a visit to Japan in the summer of 1907.
On January 31, 1909, she began her return journey to Kiel in Tsingtau , where she arrived on March 21, until she was decommissioned again on March 31, 1909 in Danzig.
First World War
On August 2, 1914, the Niobe was also put back into service as part of the mobilization . Until September 5, 1915, she was deployed in the coast guard service in the German Bight , with her commanders often leading the port flotilla of the Jade and Weser at the same time. The Niobe remained in service with a reduced crew from September 1915 and served primarily as an office ship for various staffs, mostly for the Commander of Securing the North Sea (BSN). On February 3, 1919, she was finally decommissioned.
Commanders
| June 25 to August 22, 1900 | Corvette Captain Heinrich Bredow |
| April 11 to June 26, 1901 | Corvette Captain Reinhard Scheer |
| June 27 to September 1901 | Corvette Captain Joachim von Oriola |
| October 1, 1901 to April 1, 1902 | Captain Felix Schultz (reduced crew) |
| April 1 to July 2, 1902 | Corvette Captain Reinhard Scheer |
| July 2 to September 1902 | Frigate Captain Carl Schönfelder |
| September 1902 to April 1903 | Corvette Captain Heinrich Saß |
| April to June 1903 | Corvette Captain Franz Hipper |
| June 30th to September 30th 1903 | Corvette Captain Heinrich Saß |
| October 1903 | Corvette Captain Christian Schütz |
| October to November 1903 | Captain Adalbert Kinel (deputy) |
| November 1903 to January 1904 | Captain Karl Heuser (deputy) |
| January 28th to September 28th 1904 | Corvette Captain / Frigate Captain Fritz Hoffmann |
| June 19, 1906 to July 1907 | Corvette captain / frigate captain Max Witschel |
| July 1907 to September 1908 | Corvette Captain Hugo Langemak |
| September to November 1908 | Frigate Captain Baron Gottfried von Dalwigk zu Lichtenfels |
| November 1908 to March 31, 1909 | Frigate Captain Carl Hollweg |
| August 2, 1914 to May 1915 | Frigate Captain Max Kühne |
| May to September 8, 1915 | Sea captain Ernst Ewers |
| September 8, 1915 to January 1916 | Captain Fritz Gruenhagen (reduced crew) |
| January 1916 to December 1917 | Oberleutnant zur See Karl Seydel (reduced crew) |
| December 1917 to January 1918 | Corvette Captain Wilhelm Prentzel (reduced crew) |
| January to August 1918 | Corvette Captain Edgar Angermann (reduced crew) |
| August 1918 to February 3, 1919 | unknown (reduced crew) |
Imperial Navy
Since the ship did not have to be delivered to the Allies after the end of the war, it remained in the possession of the Imperial Navy as a reserve ship . It was finally deleted from the list of warships in June 1925 and then sold unarmed to Yugoslavia as a "tour ship".
Yugoslav Navy: School cruiser Dalmacija (1926–1941)
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The ship was acquired by the Yugoslav Navy through middlemen in 1926 and converted into the school cruiser Dalmacija by 1927 . In 1930 the cruiser was modernized.
Changed technical data
- Displacement: 2,360 tons
- Armament:
- 6 anti-aircraft guns caliber 8.4 cm
- 4 guns of 4.7 cm caliber
- 2 MGs
- Crew: 300 men
Second World War
During the attack of the Axis powers on Yugoslavia in World War II , the Dalmacija was captured by Italy on April 17, 1941 in the port of Kotor and taken under the name of Cattaro in the Italian Navy . Since the ship was already quite used up at this point, it was classified as a gunboat and assigned to the artillery school in Pola . Between 1942 and 1943 she fired at positions of Yugoslav partisans and served as a target ship for the submarine school and the Italian torpedo pilots from Gorizia. On July 31, 1942, the RN Cattaro was attacked by a British submarine south of Premantura, but the enemy torpedoes did not hit the target, as the enemy commander had probably underestimated the draft or the speed of the old cruiser.
After the collapse of fascist Italy in 1943, the cruiser was captured by German troops in the port of Pola on September 9, 1943 and taken into service with the German navy . The original idea was to give the cruiser the traditional Austro-Hungarian name Zenta after it was taken over by the Navy , after which Admiral Adria Vice Admiral Lietzmann personally suggested the name Novara . Both names came from former cruisers of the Austrian Navy , but the ship got its original name Niobe back on the instructions of the High Command of the Navy . The cruiser was used with a German-Croatian crew by the Navy in the Adriatic .
Whereabouts
On December 19, 1943, the Niobe ran aground off the Adriatic island of Silba and was abandoned by its crew. The British motor torpedo boats MTB 226 and MTB 228 finally destroyed the ship, which was stuck in shallow water, on December 22, 1943. The wreck was scrapped after 1949.
Footnotes
- ↑ Dr. Z. Freivogel: Marine-Arsenal Volume 40 - Navy in the Adriatic 1941–45. ISBN 3-7909-0640-9 .
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.
Web links
- SMS Niobe on deutsche-schutzgebiete.de
- Data Gazelle class on worldwar1.co.uk (Engl.)
- SMS Niobe on battleships-cruisers.co.uk (Engl.)
- The Gazelle class on historyofwar.org
- School cruiser Dalmacija