Speedboat escort

A speedboat escort ship is a supply and support ship specially designed to support a flotilla of speedboats .

Conception

The ship type emerged in the 1920s and 1930s parallel to the development of speedboats and motor torpedo boats . Equipped accordingly, the escort ships, also called tenders in other navies, served the flotillas as command ships, the boat crews as accommodation and the boats as fuel, torpedo, mine, ammunition, fresh water, food and spare parts depot. Medical care for the boat crews and minor repairs to the boats themselves could also be carried out. This enabled the speedboats to operate in areas that did not have sufficient base infrastructure on land.

Reich and Kriegsmarine

In the German Reichsmarine , from 1927 onwards, they made do with the correspondingly converted old tender Nordsee , a converted steamship for island service to Heligoland, which, however, was not an ideal solution due to its age and low speed and was not built for this purpose. The ship was replaced in 1934 by the newly built Tsingtau , which in many respects was similar to the submarine support ship Saar, which was built around the same time . In January 1939 the Tanga was added as a second ship. In 1938 the Navy ordered two more, but considerably larger and faster, S-boat escort ships, the Adolf Lüderitz and her sister ship Carl Peters . Four more ships planned and commissioned from Werft AG Neptun in Rostock were no longer built.

In the course of the western campaign, the Wehrmacht captured two Belgian cargo ships in May 1940 , which were converted into S-boat escort ships by 1943 - the Herrmann von Wißmann and the Gustav Nachtigal . It was put into service in December 1943 and May 1944. From September 1941, the Estonia , a former combined ship of the Norwegian Hurtigruten , which had been captured in the Baltic Sea , was used as an auxiliary speedboat escort. In May 1944 the former Danish ferry and passenger ship Hammershus was put into service as an auxiliary speedboat escort ship Buea .

Two of these nine ships were lost due to the war: on June 15, 1944, the Gustav Nachtigal was sunk by an air torpedo west of Borkum , and on May 10, 1945, the Carl Peters sank in the Geltinger Bay after running into a mine . Five of the ships were confiscated by the Allies after the war. Some of them were used again in the German mine clearance service before they were handed over as spoils of war to various victorious powers: the Adolf Lüderitz to the Soviet Union , the Hermann von Wißmann to the Royal Navy , then to Belgium, the North Sea to the USA, the Tanga to Denmark and the Tsingtau to the Royal Navy. The Buea was returned to Denmark, served as a ferry again from 1947, was converted by the Danish Navy into a Hendrik Gerner submarine tender in 1963 and broken up in 1976. The Estonia was was then operated at war in such poor condition that it was in 1952 a new owner took, but after rebuilding until well into the 1990s.

Speedboat escorts of the Kriegsmarine

The following ships were put into service as speedboat escorts or auxiliary speedboat escorts for the Navy:

Web links

literature

Erich Gröner: The ships of the German navy and their whereabouts 1939-1945. JF Lehmanns, Munich, 1976, ISBN 3-469-00297-5 .

Hans-H. Hildebrand, Albert Röhr, Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships. A mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present day. Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, Hamburg, ISBN 978-3836497435 .

Volkmar Kühn: Speedboats in use 1939–45. 3. Edition. Motorbuchverlag, Stuttgart, 1997. ISBN 3-8794-3450-6 .

Siegfried Breyer: Special and special ships of the Kriegsmarine (I), Marine-Arsenal Volume 30, Podzun-Pallas-Verlag, Eggolsheim-Bammersdorf, 1995, ISBN 3-7909-0523-2 .