SMS forward (1899)
 |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
.svg){kind=small}
The SMS Vorwärts was a river gunboat of the Imperial Navy . The ship was built in 1899 by the Farnham, Boyd & Co. shipyard in Shanghai as the Woochow passenger river steamer . In 1901 it was bought by the German Reich and used in China until 1910 .
technology
The forward was a cross- rib steel structure with a maximum displacement of 406 t. The ship was 47.7 m long, the waterline was 47.0 m. The greatest width of the hull was 7.5 m. At maximum displacement, the ship had a draft of 1.46 m forward and 2.2 m aft. The hull was divided into five watertight compartments , but had no double floor or additional armor. The ship's power supply was provided by a generator that produced a voltage of 60 V and an output of 4.8 kW .
The crew of the forward consisted of 36 people. It consisted of three officers, 30 men and three Chinese auxiliaries.
Propulsion system
The gunboat was powered by two standing two-cylinder composite steam engines, each acting on a screw with a diameter of 1.1 m. With an output of 500 PSi, the engine system was able to accelerate the ship to a speed of 11 knots . A cylinder boiler with three furnaces and a heating surface of 119 m² supplied the necessary steam . This generated a vapor pressure of 8.5 atmospheres .
Armament
The armament of the Vorwärts consisted of two rapid-loading cannons with protective shields , caliber 5 cm L / 40 , for which 423 rounds of ammunition were carried. There were also two heavy machine guns on board.
commitment
After its completion, the boat was sold as a Woochow by the shipping company Hongkong, Canton & Macao Steamboat Ltd. operated as a passenger ship. In the course of the Boxer Rebellion , it was sold to Shanghai, as an increased need for shallow ships was suspected. The German Reich chartered the Woochow in the summer of 1900 and used the boat as a troop transport between Tanggu and Tientsin . On March 3, 1901, the head of the East Asia Squadron , Vice Admiral Felix von Bendemann , finally suggested that the Reichsmarineamt buy the boat and its equipment for the gunboat. Von Bendemann received telegraphic approval of this proposal eight days later. The Woochow was bought on the same day and brought to Tsingtau for renovation .
On March 19, 1901, the boat was officially put into service with the crew of the Taku torpedo boat under repair . The renaming to Forward probably took place at the same time . The main task of the boat was to secure German economic interests as well as to represent the German Empire along the Yangtze . As part of this activity, the Vorwärts lay before Shanghai from April 18 to May 10 and arrived in Hankau at the end of May . In October the boat sailed on Lake Pojang and then wintered in Shanghai. In July 1902 the Han Jiang was navigated, the Vorwärts spent the winter in Ichang .
In 1903, the Dongting Lake and the Hsiang-kiang were on the gunboat's visit list. After a stay in Shanghai from September 25th to November 12th, the Vorwärts started again in Itschang as winter quarters. During their stay there, the commander and some of the crew members investigated the possibility of navigating and setting up a steamship line on board a houseboat upstream to Hsü-Tschou . Itschang was left again in early April 1904. Two months later, the Vorwärts met with the new river gunboat Vaterland off Kiu-kiang , which from then on was also used on the Yangtze. In the following year the Vorwärts visited Tschangscha for the first time . From October 2nd to mid-November 1905, the boat stayed in Tsingtau, where a basic repair was carried out.
The Vorwärts was also used on the Yangtze in the following years . After trips in the area from Hankau to Nanking , the operation had to be interrupted from September to November 1907 because the boat was in Shanghai for repairs. There, on March 31, 1910, the active use of the Vorwärts finally ended . The gunboat was replaced by the SMS Otter and decommissioned.
Whereabouts
The Vorwärts was deleted from the list of warships on June 18, 1910. The following year a Chinese company bought the boat for 50,000 marks . It was subsequently used again as a river steamer. His whereabouts are unknown.
Commanders
| March 19, 1901 to November 1902 | First lieutenant to the Sea of Weise |
| November 1902 to December 1904 | First Lieutenant Sharp |
| December 1904 to July 1906 | First lieutenant at sea / captain lieutenant von Zerboni di Sposetti |
| July 1906 June 1907 | Oberleutnant zur See / Kapitänleutnant Fischer |
| June 1907 to June 1909 | Oberleutnant zur See / Kapitänleutnant Riechers |
| June 1909 to March 31, 1910 | Oberleutnant zur See / Kapitänleutnant Kautter |
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. 171 .
- Hildebrand, Hans H. / Albert Röhr / Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships . Biographies - a mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present . tape 8 : Ship biographies from Undine to Zieten . Mundus Verlag, Ratingen, S. 54 f .
