SM UC 57

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SM UC 57
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Hamnskar monument.jpg
Monument on Hamnskar Island
Type : UC II
Shipyard: Imperial Shipyard Gdansk
Build number: 39
Keel laying: March 14, 1916
Launch: September 7, 1916
Commissioning: January 22, 1917
Commanders:
Calls: 7 patrols
Sinkings:

1 sunk merchant ship

Whereabouts: Loss in November 1917, probably in the Gulf of Finland, cause unknown

SM UC 57 was a submarine of the Imperial Navy that went missing in November 1917 on the way back from a special mission for the intelligence service of the Admiralty ( naval intelligence service ) .

Technical specifications

Displacement: Surface 415 t , submerged 498 t or 594 t.

Length: 51.67 m.

Width: 5.22 m.

Draft: 3.61 m.

Drive : diesel engine / electric motor .

Power : 600/620 hp .

Speed : surfaced 11.6 kn , submerged 7.3 kn.

Oil supply: 56 t.

Dive time : 30-33 sec .

Armament : 1 10.5 cm gun , three torpedo tubes (2 in the bow, 1 in the stern), 18 mines in 6 shafts.

Crew : 27 men.

commitment

In November 1917, the boat carried out an intelligence service to Finland under Lieutenant Friedrich Wißmann , which was led by the intelligence service of the Admiralty's staff. For the bourgeois Finnish uprising movement ( Finnish Civil War ), weapons were delivered to Finland by sea on the initiative of the Politics Section of the Great General Staff . The steamer SMH Equity had already delivered a large load of weapons to Finnish waters under Lieutenant zur See Gustav Pezold in October . UC 57 transported four tons of explosives and eight Finnish fighters of the Royal Prussian Jäger Battalion 27 .

The boat left Danzig on November 12, 1917 and arrived in Finland on November 17. Since the start of the return trip on November 18, 1917, there has been no trace of the boat. The position 59 ° N 23 ° E was set as the assumed loss point; obviously this is the expiry point in Finland where it was last sighted. Presumably it got into a Russian mine lock . After 1918, exact details are currently unknown, the bodies of three crew members were washed up on the Estonian coast.

In 1934 the Finnish side erected a memorial for the boat and its crew on the island of Hamnskär , where the boat unloaded its cargo and put the hunters ashore.

literature

  • Johannes Öhquist: The lion banner. The Finnish people's rise to freedom , Berlin 1923, 2nd edition, ibid. 1942.
  • Gustav Pezold: The weapon ship. Secret weapons rides with SMH "Equity" for Finland's struggle for freedom in autumn 1917 , Hamburg 1943.
  • Ernst Freiherr von Gagern: The War in the Baltic Sea , Vol. 3: From the beginning of 1916 to the end of the war , Berlin 1964.
  • Erich Gröner : The German warships 1815-1945 , Vol. 3: U-Boats, auxiliary cruisers, mine ships, Netzleger, Sperrboote , Koblenz 1985, pp. 58-60.
  • Bodo Herzog: German U-Boats 1906–1966 . Erlangen: Karl Müller Verlag, 1993, p. 67 ISBN 3-86070-036-7 .

Web links