Saar (ship, 1934)
 Submarine escort ship Saar 1936 with U 10 , U 11 , U 8 and U 9
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The Flottentender Saar was the first submarine escort ship of the Reichsmarine or Kriegsmarine .
Construction and technical data
The ship was on 19 September 1933 the Friedrich Krupp Germania shipyard in Kiel set to stack and expired on 5 April 1934 from the stack . It entered service on October 1, 1934, and completed its test drives on November 26, 1934.
It was 100.5 m long (waterline 99.8 m), 13.55 m wide and had a draft of 4.63 m. The water displacement was 2,710 tons (standard) or 3,250 tons (fully equipped). Two Krupp 8-cylinder diesel engines gave the Saar a top speed of 18.3 knots . The crew consisted of 232 men. The ship was originally armed with three 10.5 cm C / 24 cannons and two 2 cm anti-aircraft guns. In 1944 the three 10.5 cm guns were replaced by newer C / 32 models and the anti-aircraft armament was increased to two 3.7 cm single mounts and twelve 2 cm C / 38 anti-aircraft guns in three quad mounts.
Navy
After completing the test drives and brief use as a target ship, the Saar was assigned to the anti-submarine defense school in Kiel-Wik , where the first submarine officers were trained since October 1933. In 1935 she came to the U-Flotilla Weddigen ( 1st U-Flotilla ) in Kiel , commanded by Frigate Captain Karl Dönitz , as a submarine escort . On October 6, 1937, she was assigned to the U-Flotilla Saltzwedel ( 2nd U-Flotilla ) in Wilhelmshaven . From July 1940 the ship was assigned to the 21st , 25th , 26th and 27th U-Flotillas in Pillau and Gotenhafen as escort ship. Towards the end of the war it was used as a residential ship for the FdU Ost .
French Navy
At the end of the war in Bremen in 1945 the ship was spoiled by the USA, which in 1947 passed it on to France as a German reparation payment . The ship was brought to Cherbourg by a German hull crew , where it was overhauled and put into service in the French Navy on January 17, 1948 under the name Gustave Zédé (identification: A 641) . The anti-aircraft artillery now consisted of two 40-mm Bofors guns and three 20-mm quadruples. After the first test drives, it was further modified until February 4th in Cherbourg, then until April 10th in Brest and then until May 8th 1948 in Lorient . The ship docked for the first time on May 13, 1949 in its new home port of Toulon , where it belonged to the "Groupe d'Action Sous-Marine (GASM)", the submarine command.
Until December 15, 1970, the ship, affectionately called " Tatave ", was active in the Mediterranean squadron as a submarine tender. Always accompanying submarines, it took part in a number of large maneuvers and training trips, was involved in the Suez crisis in 1956 , brought relief supplies to Agadir after the severe earthquake in 1960 , and took part in the French evacuation of Bizerta in 1961 . Conversions were made in 1951 in Marseille (mast, armament, electronics), 1955 in Toulon (armament, electronics) and 1958/59 in Sidi Abdallah / Menzel Bourguiba (bridge, electronics).
The End
On February 15, 1971, the Gustave Zédé was transferred to the fleet reserve, and on June 29, 1971, the hull was given the identification Q 481. From 1972 to February 1976 she was a target ship for Exocet - anti-ship missiles MM38 of naval aviation uses.
On February 26, 1976, the vessel was finally by a torpedo of the submarine Doris in position 42 ° 30 ' N , 5 ° 24' O sunk. The wreck lies today at a depth of 2149 m.
literature
- Breyer, Siegfried: Special and special ships of the Kriegsmarine (I), Marine-Arsenal Volume 30, Podzun-Pallas-Verlag, Eggolsheim-Bammersdorf 1995. ISBN 3-7909-0523-2
- Hildebrand, Hans / Albert Röhr / Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships. A mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present day. Biographies, Volume 9. Mundus Verlag 1990.
Web links
- Gustave Zédé (French) , with a detailed construction drawing