State Secretary Solf

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Secretary of State Solf was a freight and passenger steamship that operates in the South Pacific German trade and plantation society . In 1917 the ship was taken over by the US Navy .

Construction and technical data

The ship was ordered in 1913 by the Deutsche Handels- und Plantagengesellschaft (DHPG) from the Stocks & Kolbe shipyard in Kiel in order to maintain regular mail traffic between their properties on the South Sea islands. The decision was made to use a wooden structure, as the mussel growth, which considerably impaired the speed of a ship, was particularly strong on iron ships in the South Seas; the hull was covered with copper below the waterline against the mussel growth. A wooden hull also had the advantage that the loose keel could break off if it hit a coral reef before the hull itself was leaked . Finally, it was also important that the interior of a wooden ship heats up less than that of an iron ship in a tropical climate.

The keel was laid in the spring of 1913, and on December 15, 1913, the ship named State Secretary Solf was launched . It was named after the former governor of the German colony German Samoa and now State Secretary of the Reich Colonial Office , Wilhelm Solf . The ship, with two masts and a chimney, was 43.5 m long (39.2 m in the waterline) and 7.78 m wide, had a side height of 3.70 m above the lower edge of the Sponung and a maximum draft of 3, 50 m and displaced 581.5 tons . The ship was measured with 304 gross tons . The load capacity was 220 tons (including bunker coal and water).

fate

Beginning in March 1914 was the Secretary of State Solf with target Apia , Samoa on their station location, from Kiel. She made the 16,000 nautical miles long journey without incident and proved to be particularly seaworthy even in bad weather. On June 6, 1914, the ship arrived in its new home port Apia.

After only a few months of service in the South Seas, the First World War broke out in Europe and it was foreseeable that troops from the British Dominions of Australia or New Zealand would soon occupy the German colonies in the South Pacific. The colonial administration in Apia therefore had all its important documents and money loaded onto State Secretary Solf and sent the ship to Pago Pago on Tutuila in neighboring and neutral American Samoa . The Secretary of State Solf met on August 6, 1914 just two days after the British declaration of war against the German Reich , in Pago Pago and there American US by the authorities was interned . Six days later, the NDL freighter Alsace also arrived in Pago Pago, which had left Sydney shortly before the British declaration of war and was now also interned. Both ships were there under the German flag until April 1917.

On April 6, 1917, the USA declared war on the German Reich and the two ships interned in Pago Pago were confiscated as enemy property. The 42 men in their crews were shipped to Hawaii on April 18th . The Alsace , whose crew had made the machinery unusable, was towed to Pearl Harbor by the coal freighter USS Ajax in May and, after being repaired, put into service under the American flag.

The Secretary of State Solf was repaired in the Pago Pago Naval Station, armed with two three-pounder cannons and put into service on June 9, 1917 with a crew of 22 men under the command of Lieutenant William T. Mallison of the US Navy . In the first half of September, the ship made an extensive voyage to New Britain and Bougainville to repatriate residents of the Solomon Islands . During the repairs made after his return, the condition of the ship, after almost three years as a semi-trailer , turned out to be quite unsatisfactory. The ship was renamed Samoa on September 17th and was then mostly in Pago Pago, interrupted only by occasional short trips to Apia or the Manu'a islands .

The Samoa was taken out of service on June 30, 1920, advertised for sale on July 12, sold to the Samoan Shipping and Trading Co. on Tutuila on November 23, 1920, and delivered to its new owner on December 7. Her further fate is unknown.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ The New Zealand Expeditionary Force, consisting of the battle cruiser HMAS Australia , the light cruisers HMAS Melbourne and HMAS Sydney , the French armored cruiser Montcalm , the New Zealand light cruisers HMNZS Psyche , HMSNZ Philomel and HMNZS Pyramus and the two freighters Moeraki and Monowai of Union Steam Ship Company , arrived in Apia on August 29th and occupied the German colony without a fight.
  2. ↑ The Onset of "The War" in German New Guinea , edited by John Kevin Doyle (report prepared by the ranking postal official in the German colonies in the Pacific, Post Secretary Carl Weller of Rabaul, German New Guinea, in mid-1915 after he was repatriated to Germany.)
  3. ↑ http://www.schudak.de/timelines/samoa1898-1951.html
  4. ↑ Four cannons are mentioned elsewhere ( Ruby Gwin: Walter Irwin's Diary: World War I Pharmacist Mate. Trafford Publishing, 2012, ISBN 978-1-4669-5228-7 (e-book), p. 67 )
  5. ↑ a b http://www.historycentral.com/navy/Steamer/samoaI.html
  6. ↑ In another place June 16 is mentioned as the day of commissioning. http://www.schudak.de/timelines/samoa1898-1951.html

Web links

literature