SMS Panther (1901)
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SMS Panther was a Iltis class gunboat ofthe Imperial Navy that, like all of her sisters, was deployed in foreign service. Sister ships were SMS Iltis , SMS Jaguar , SMS Tiger , SMS Luchs , and SMS Eber .
The Panther became famous for the so-called “ Panther Jump to Agadir ” when it docked at the coal bunker in Agadir during the second Moroccan crisis in 1911, triggering fears of German intervention in France and England.
The Panther was launched on April 1, 1901 in the Imperial Shipyard in Danzig . It was scrapped in 1931.
The kuk Kriegsmarine had a ship of the same name, the small cruiser SMS Panther from 1885.
Service in the Imperial Navy
On March 15, 1902, the Panther gunboat entered service as the fifth boat in the Iltis class. The first duty after the arrival was the visit to the industrial and trade exhibition in Düsseldorf on June 7, 1902 together with the dispatch boat SMS Sleipner (ex S 97 , 440 t, built in 1900). The great interest of the population in a ship of the Imperial Navy so deep inland led to an extension of the visit to July 3 and on the march back down the Rhine to another two-day stay in Duisburg, so that the Panthers did not return until July 13 Wilhelmshaven arrived. On July 31, she left for the American station assigned to her and arrived on August 30, 1902 in Saint Thomas, which was then still Danish . Immediately afterwards she was involved in her first military actions.
Marcomannia incident
During the Markomannia incident on September 6, 1902, the Panther sank the Haitian gunboat Crête-à-Pierrot , which was controlled by insurgents and had been blown up by its commander, in retaliation for the detachment of the HAPAG steamer Markomannia (3,335 GRT, Bj . 1890) final.
Service on the American station
After the situation in Haiti had calmed down, the gunboat made a journey 160 nm upstream on the Orinoco to Ciudad Bolívar in October 1902 . Then the conflict between Venezuela and the German Reich came to a head. On December 16, the German ships were combined to form the East American Cruiser Division in order to ensure a more effective and tighter command. The commander of the large cruiser SMS Vineta , Captain Scheder, was appointed commodore of the division. On December 20th, the British government declared the blockade of the Venezuelan ports. Both Germany and Italy followed suit. Vice-Admiral Archibald Douglas on the HMS Ariadne took command of the warships involved in the three countries . On the German side, in addition to the Vineta, the small cruisers SMS Gazelle and SMS Falke , the Panthers , the training ships and former cruiser frigates SMS Charlotte and SMS Stosch as well as the confiscated Venezuelan gunboat Restaurador were involved. In addition, the HAPAG Sibiria steamer was used as a coal steamer. On January 4, 1903, German landing corps occupied the port of Puerto Cabello and the ships lying in the roadstead. After the Panther was shot at by Fort San Carlos when it entered Maracaibo on January 17 and had to break off the fight due to a jam on the front 10.5 cm gun, the Vineta went there and covered the fort with 20 21- cm grenades as well as 86 of the caliber 15 cm. There was no resistance because the fort had been hastily abandoned by its crew. A diplomatic solution to the conflict soon followed.
A first visit to Canada followed in July 1903 with the squadron from the American station. The gunboat had previously been overhauled in Newport News in April 1903 , and another major overhaul was carried out there in the spring of the following year. On November 27, 1905, the so-called Itajahy incident occurred in southern Brazil. A sailor had held a carousing party with a German traveler and then deserted. Several crew members, some in civilian clothes, went ashore and searched for the deserter, who was found and brought on board, without consulting the police. Press reports about his alleged kidnapping and an interrogation with the use of force are offset by a contradicting statement by the person concerned in front of German diplomats. The incident was the first "Panther Affair" ("Caso Panther"). The Brazilian envoy complained about the commandant, Count von Saurma-Jeltsch, in the Foreign Office. The Brazilian cruiser Almirante Barroso was also ordered to watch the panthers . The Brazilian public seems to have feared too strong an influence of the German Empire in Brazil at the time, especially by the German emigrants living in southern Brazil.
As a now individually operating station ship, a trip to the Río de la Plata followed in February 1906 and on this, the Río Paraná and the Río Paraguay until shortly before Asunción with a visit by the commander to the President of Paraguay . The Panther then marched north again through the station area and drove on the Saint Lawrence River to Montreal in May . In December 1906, together with the small cruiser SMS Bremen, she tried in vain to salvage the run-up HAPAG cruise ship Princess Victoria Luise . On August 5, 1907, the Panther then left the American station according to orders to change to the African station.
The "panther jump to Agadir"
On September 3, 1907, the Panther reached Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and with it its new station area, which extended over the German possessions in West Africa ( Togo and Cameroon ) to German South West Africa , today's Namibia . She commuted in the station area, carried out surveying work primarily in Cameroon and usually carried out her docking times and repairs in Cape Town .
On October 9, 1910, an accident occurred off Kribi when a dinghy capsized. Six crew members died.
In 1911 the boat was stationed in Cameroon, and it had been planned since the previous year to order it to be overhauled in Germany. As usual, on the long journey home, a stop at the coal bunker in Morocco was necessary and planned. At the request of the Admiralty on March 8, 1911, whether there were any concerns about calling at Casablanca or Mogador , the Foreign Office recommended bunkering in Agadir , in the south of the country and far from the French area of operation at the time. This was intended to prevent further political escalation on the one hand, and to show the flag on the other.
In their condition and with their armament of only two 10.5 cm quick-loading cannons and six 3.7 cm revolver cannons , the Panther did not pose any particular threat. It was a total of just under three weeks (from July 1 to July 20, 1911 ) before Agadir without taking any action on land. Before Agadir, the Panther was replaced by the small cruiser SMS Berlin and the Boar and then drove on to Germany, arriving in Hamburg on August 19, and then docking at her shipyard in Danzig . The journey of the panthers to Morocco triggered the second Moroccan crisis and heightened fears in Europe that war would break out.
Further missions
On January 5, 1912, the Panther started to leave for their station again. This was accompanied in Europe with massive anti-German press releases. A planned call from Antwerp was canceled and it ended up only calling at Southampton and Lisbon on the trip. A military operation took place in Monrovia after the outbreak of unrest in Liberia in November 1912 . There the Panther was used together with the sister ship Eber as the second station ship and the cruiser Bremen , which was ordered from South America . It was not until April 1913 that the Panther left Liberia as the last of the German ships and turned back to surveying tasks. Christmas 1913 and New Year's Eve were spent in front of Cameroon. It came to a meeting with the Eber and the so-called "Detached Division" under Rear Admiral Hubert von Rebeur-Paschwitz with the ships of the line SMS Kaiser and SMS König Albert as well as the small cruiser SMS Strasbourg , which crossed German South West Africa around Cape Horn to Valparaíso in Chile marched and then returned to Germany via Argentina and Brazil (December 9, 1913 to June 17, 1914).
On April 21, 1914, the Panther returned home for another overhaul and arrived in Danzig on May 13.
On July 9, 1914, she was again ready to march in Kiel. A deployment on the Mexican coast was considered. But the politically tense situation led to the decision not to leave the country, so that the Panther was assigned to the coastal defense division when the war began. On 23/24 August she towed the submarine SM U 3 up to the heights of Gotland for use against the Baltic fleet of the Russian Empire . After that it was mostly in Kiel- Friedrichsort . In August 1917 she became the flagship of the Ærøsund flotilla. Decommissioning followed on December 18, 1918.
Whereabouts
In July 1921 the old gunboat came into service with the Reichsmarine . Once disarmed, it should be used for training for the technically similar survey ship Meteor , which is coming into service . On December 15, 1926, it was finally decommissioned, but it was not until 1931 that it was removed from the fleet list and scrapped.
Commanders
| March 1902 | Corvette Captain Richard Eckermann (1862–1916) |
| June 1903 | Lieutenant Captain Hans Seebohm (1871–1945) on his behalf |
| July 1903 | Lieutenant Captain Paul Jantzen (1868–1912) promoted to Corvette Captain |
| June 1905 | Corvette Captain Count Walter von Saurma-Jeltsch (1868–1941) |
| March 1906 | Corvette Captain Wilhelm Timme (1867–1942) |
| October 31, 1907 to November 2, 1908 | Corvette Captain Theodor Fuchs (1868–1942) |
| November 1908 | Corvette Captain Wilhelm Most (1870–1918) |
| November 1909 | Corvette Captain Baron Karl von Müffling (1872–1952) |
| November 1910 to August 1911 | Corvette Captain Behnisch (1873–1913) |
| December 1911 | Corvette Captain Karl Heine (1874–1945) |
| November 1912 | Corvette Captain Witold Schnabel (1875–1936) |
| November 1913 | Corvette Captain Walter Förtsch (1875–1958) |
| May 1914 | Captain Heinrich Meyer (1882-19 ??) |
| July 1914 | Corvette Captain Walter Förtsch (1875–1958) |
| November 1914 | Corvette Captain Axel Walter (1873–1915) |
| May 1915 | Corvette Captain Carl Velten (1873–1937) |
| February 1916 | Lieutenant Captain Karl Pungs (1885–1943) |
| May 1916 | Corvette captain Carl Velten (1873–1937) promoted to frigate captain |
| October 1917 | Corvette Captain Günther Paschen (1880–1943) |
| December 1917 | Lieutenant Captain Georg-Günther Freiherr von Forstner (1882–1940) |
| January 1918 | Frigate Captain Carl Velten (1873–1937) |
| June 1918 | Oberleutnant zur See of the Reserve Ernst Lassen (1886–?) |
| August to December 1918 | Frigate Captain Friedrich Lüring (1876–1941) |
| July 1921 | Corvette Captain Fritz Conrad (1883–1944) |
| October 1924 to December 1926 | Captain Wilhelm Marschall (1886–1976) |
literature
- Hildebrand, Hans H .: The German warships: Biographies - a mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present . Koehler, Herford.
Web links
- SMS Panther in front of Agadir
- Gerhard Wiechmann: The Prussian-German Navy in Latin America 1866-1914 . Dissertation, 2000
- Image of the Haitian gunboat Crete a Pierot shortly before its sinking by SMS Panther on September 6, 1902 fotki.com
Footnotes
- ^ Wiechmann, p. 415
- ↑ SMS Panther in the English language Wikipedia with sources, also in Es- / Cz-wki
- ↑ technical data of the Barroso ( Memento of March 21, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Grave inscriptions in the German cemetery in Kribi
- ^ Telegram from the Admiralty dated June 26, 1911
- ^ Wiechmann, p. 408
- ↑ picture as survey ship
- ↑ http://www.shz.de/lokales/flensburger-tageblatt/ich-ging-ohne-furcht-in-den-tod-id108798.html
