SMS Regensburg
 The Strasbourg 1920
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SMS Regensburg was a small cruiser of the Imperial Navy . She was the second and last ship of the Graudenz class . After serving in the fleet from 1915 to 1918, the ship had to be delivered to France in 1920.
As Strasbourg , the ship was in service with the French Navy from 1922 to 1929 . It then served as a residential ship in Lorient , where it was confiscated by the German Wehrmacht in 1940 and sunk in the port in 1944.
history
The Lord Mayor of Regensburg , Hofrat Bleyer, christened the ship on April 25, 1914. The commissioning was on January 3, 1915. On March 10, 1915, the tests were finished.
First World War
The ship came to the 2nd reconnaissance group. It mainly took part in advances in the North and Baltic Seas and accompanied mine operations .
On March 23, 1915, the Regensburg , together with her sister ship Graudenz and the small cruisers Stralsund and Rostock, participated in the bombardment of Palanga in what is now Lithuania . This was supposed to relieve the city of Memel , located south of Palanga . In May 1915, the Regensburg accompanied mining companies on the Doggerbank . In August 1915 the ship was then back in the Baltic Sea and took part - together with the ships of the II Reconnaissance Group and the I Squadron - in several forays into the Gulf of Riga . Here Andreasburg and Cape Ristna with its lighthouse on the island of Dagö were shot at. In September 1915, Regensburg moved back to the North Sea, where it took part in the trade war in the Skagerrak and Kattegat , among other things .
In the spring of 1916 she undertook various forays to the west or north and accompanied several mining operations to the Hoofden and Amrumbank . On April 25, 1916, under the orders of Rear Admiral Friedrich Boedicker , Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth were shelled. The II reconnaissance group got into combat with British light cruisers . In the Skagerrakschlacht the Regensburg was the flagship of the II. Leader of the torpedo boats ( Commodore Heinrich). On the morning of June 1, 1916, she helped take over the crew from the sinking battle cruiser Lützow . From July 1916, the cruiser undertook with the II and IV reconnaissance group forays into the northern North Sea and west to the island of Schiermonnikoog . Several similar ventures followed by the end of 1916. So that was Regensburg to the in and on November 5, 1916, while Horns Reef stranded submarines U 20 and U 30 to help.
From March to July 1917, the ship was thoroughly overhauled in the Kaiserliche Werft in Kiel and fitted with seven 15-cm guns. After that, the Regensburg flagship of the IV. Reconnaissance Group. In this function, she took part in securing various mining associations and in the occupation of the Baltic Islands ( Ösel companies). From November 1917 the ship was back in service in the North Sea. Until May 1918 it drove the usual missions. In the late summer of 1918, Regensburg secured mine clearance work in the Gulf of Finland in preparation for the occupation of Kronstadt and Saint Petersburg (see “ Keystone Operation ”).
post war period
On November 7, 1918, the ship was decommissioned in Glücksburg . On the orders of the Reichsmarinamt it was made ready for action again and moved to Wilhelmshaven on November 17th . There it was overhauled in the Imperial Shipyard and all weapons were removed. The Regensburg not had to deal with in the internment of Scapa Flow . In the following period she made several trips in the course of the armistice negotiations. In January 1919 she led the liner Baden , which still had to be delivered to Scapa Flow, and returned with its crew to Kiel. In May 1919 the Regensburg had to transfer two submarine pressure docks to Harwich .
In French service
On May 19, 1920 the Regensburg was finally decommissioned and delivered to France on June 4, 1920 as the ship J. There she was put into service in May 1922 as Strasbourg with the 3rd Division of Light Cruisers of the Mediterranean Fleet, where two other former German cruisers served, the Metz ex Königsberg and the Mulhouse ex Stralsund . The Strasbourg took part in the mission in Turkey in 1922/23 and in the mission off the Moroccan coast in 1925 . The division was in December 1926 in "2. Division ”and transferred to the Atlantic fleet in Brest in August 1928 .
The Strasbourg was at this time in the North Sea . To participate in the rescue effort for Umberto Nobile's airship Italia , the French Navy had dispatched a Latham 47 flying boat. The French crew , who were not familiar with the conditions in the Arctic , were joined by the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen and his pilot Leif Dietrichson . Since June 18, 1928, the machine was lost between Norway and Spitsbergen . As a result, Strasbourg , which had just arrived in Quiberon from Corinth, was ordered on June 20 to make an aid trip to the North Sea. She picked up equipment and supplies in Brest and Cherbourg and reached Tromsø , the last departure point for the Latham, on June 29th. She arrived in Svalbard on July 1st. In the meantime, the Italians' camp (“Red Tent”) had been discovered on June 20th, and Nobile was the only one who had been flown out on June 23rd. The Strasbourg turned out to be unsuitable for the waters around Svalbard with its many icebergs. The cruiser itself could not search much, and no relevant information on the whereabouts of the French machine was found either. So he ran back to Harstad to take care of himself there on July 20th. On July 22nd he was back in Tromsø, where the next day the tanker Durance , which left France on July 16, arrived with two small frightening flying boats of the type FBA 17 , which gave the cruiser good search opportunities.
The Strasbourg then continued the search under Rear Admiral Herr, supported by the fisheries protection vessel Quentin Roosevelt , another French ship and the Norwegian Navy. On September 17, 1928, they were withdrawn after 80 days in the Arctic, as all the signs found indicated a total loss of the machine with Amundsen. The Strasbourg had only found one support swimmer for the Latham. On the way back she visited Bergen and Reykjavík and arrived back in Brest in mid-October. With a distance of over 33,000 nm in five months, she had set a new record for a French warship.
The Strasbourg was transferred to the reserve in December 1929.
On December 15, 1936, the former Regensburg was deleted from the list of warships. After the occupation of France in 1940, the Germans towed the old cruiser to Lorient , where it served as a barge during the construction of the submarine bunkers there . In 1944 it was sunk in front of the submarine base in order to prevent torpedo attacks against its gates and to serve as a fixed point for a safety net. The wreck of Regensburg is still in position 47 ° 43 '31 " N , 3 ° 22' 9" W .
The same fate suffered the former Stralsund , which the Germans also found in Brest as an unwrecked remnant of the last French cruiser Mulhouse .
Commanders
| January 3 to March 1915 | Frigate captain / sea captain Ernst Ewers | 1873-1940 | Rear admiral |
| March to August 1915 | Sea captain Wilhelm Widenmann | 1871-1955 | |
| August 1915 to February 1917 | Corvette / frigate captain Bruno Heuberer | 1873-1935 | |
| February to September 1917 | Frigate Captain Otto Seidensticker | 1874- | |
| September 1917 to August 1918 | Frigate Captain Wolfgang Wegener | 1875-1956 | Vice admiral |
| August 7th to November 7th 1918 | Frigate Captain Karl Keller | 1875-1943 | |
| November 17, 1918 to May 19, 1920 | Corvette Captain Albert Gayer | 1881-1930 | Rear admiral |
Trivia
The best-known crew member of Regensburg is likely to have been the future naval writer Fritz-Otto Busch , who served as an artillery officer on the cruiser in 1917/18.
literature
- Hans H. Hildebrand, Albert Röhr, Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships: Biographies - a mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present . Koehler, Herford.
- Gerhard Koop, Klaus-Peter Schmolke: Small cruisers 1903-1918, Bremen to Cologne class . Volume 12 ship classes and ship types of the German Navy , Bernard & Graefe, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-7637-6252-3
Web links
Footnotes
- ↑ [1] ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF file; 2.17 MB) and [2] ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF file; 2.04 MB) contemporary newspaper article on the trip of the Strasbourg (French)
- ↑ Website for the booty cruisers (French)
