Heron (ship, 1909)

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The Reiher was a cargo ship built in 1909 , the second of this name by the German Argo shipping company . She was used by the Navy as a barrier breaker during World War II and sank in February 1945 after being hit by mines off the south coast of Norway .

Construction and technical data

The ship was built in 1909 by Bremer Vulkan in Vegesack with hull number 531 and delivered to the Argo shipping company in November 1909. It was 67.1 m long and 9.90 m wide, had a draft of 4.57 m and a side height of 4.83 m and was measured at 1,045 GRT . The machinery consisted of two boilers and a 3-cylinder triple expansion steam engine; she developed 1100 PSi and a speed of 11 knots over a wave . The bunker capacity was 98 tons of coal, the range 1300 nautical miles .

fate

Prewar years

The Reiher drove for the steam shipping company Argo AG in Bremen until 1922 , after it was taken over by the Roland-Linie in 1922 , and from January 1, 1923 for the steam shipping company Argo mbH, newly formed by the merger of the European traffic of Argo and Roland. In the following 13 years, with the ownership structure of her shipping company changing several times, she repeatedly changed the chimney colors and shipping company flag, but not the name. From January 1, 1926, the ship sailed under the flag of North German Lloyd (NDL), which had bought the Roland Group towards the end of 1925 and incorporated this new acquisition into the Hanseatische Dampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft AG. At the turn of 1932/33, the NDL founded its 100 percent subsidiary Argo Reederei AG by merging the Hanseatische Dampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft with the Reederei Aktien Gesellschaft from 1896 , which was then spun off from the NDL in 1934 and the majority passed into the private ownership of its previous director Richard Adler . In 1936 the shipping company became the Argo shipping company Richard Adler & Co., which continued to reside in Bremen.

In 1938 the old ship was renamed after all. A new building delivered by Howaldtswerke , the Reiher , was given the traditional name - the third ship of the shipping company - and the old Reiher was now called Flamingo .

Second World War

After the beginning of the Second World War , the Flamingo was requisitioned by the Navy , armed, put into service as an outpost boat with the designation V 109 on September 6, 1939 and assigned to the 1st outpost flotilla in Kiel on October 1, 1939 . V 109 was soon converted to a barrier breaker; As such, the ship was equipped with a VES system and armed with one 8.8 cm anti-aircraft gun , one 3.7 cm anti-aircraft gun and six 2 cm anti-aircraft guns. The 1st outpost flotilla was renamed the 3rd Sperrbrecherflotilla on October 1, 1940, and V 109 was renamed to Sperrbrecher 39 . The task of the flotilla was to clear and keep clear the exit routes of the German submarines through the Danish approaches to the Baltic Sea ( Little Belt , Great Belt and Öresund ).

On August 1, 1941, the ship was handed over to the Stavanger Harbor Protection Flotilla and renamed to Sperrbrecher 139 on September 1, 1941 . On October 1, 1943, the 52nd minesweeping flotilla was formed, which on October 1, 1944, was transformed into the 51st outpost flotilla in the 5th Coastal Security Association ( Bergen ) formed on May 23, 1944 by the division of the Norwegian West Coast Coastal Security Association. In the night from 17 to 18 February 1945 received Sperrbrecher 139 about a mile south-west of Lindesnes lighthouse at position 57 ° 58 '0 "  N , 7 ° 2' 0 '  O a a mine . The ship sank on February 18 during salvage work.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ 975 GRT is also occasionally cited; see The Ships List: North German Lloyd Company .
  2. ↑ The first heron of the Argo was a freighter of 896 GRT built in England in 1870 and bought by the NDL in 1897, which collided with an underwater wreck and sank in 1907.
  3. ↑ The fact that the ship, as shown on the website of the German Digital Library: Sperrbrecher 39 , was made available to the chief of the Sperrlotsenverband Ost as a guide boat on April 16, 1940 and was finally assigned to him on June 22, is a confusion with the heron from 1938.
  4. ↑ http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/km/vboote/vfl51-61.htm
  5. ↑ http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/km/vboote/vfl51-61.htm
  6. ↑ https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/2FZNQXPBZKH2NENWBUPRJYMSAOJFPG7V

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