Stord (ship)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stord
HNoMS Stord 1943 IWM A 020865.jpg
Ship data
flag NorwayNorway (service and war flag) Norway
other ship names

HMS Success (G26)

Ship type destroyer
class S to W class
Shipyard J. Samuel White
Cowes
Order January 9, 1941
Keel laying February 25, 1942
Launch April 3, 1943
Commissioning September 6, 1943
Whereabouts Canceled in Belgium in 1959
Ship dimensions and crew
length
110.6 m ( Lüa )
103.5 m ( Lpp )
width 10.9 m
Draft Max. 4.4 m
displacement 1,710   ts standard;
2,350 ts maximum
Machine system
machine 2 Admiralty three drum boilers
2 Parsons - geared turbines
Machine
performance 		40,000 PS (29,420 kW)
Top
speed 		36.75 kn (68 km / h)
propeller 2
Armament

The Norwegian Stord was a destroyer of the British S-Class . The ship was part of the January 1941 fifth order for destroyers of the war type for the Royal Navy from the War Emergency Program. The destroyer ran as HMS Success be the first of the two to the shipyard J. Samuel White in Cowes contracts awarded on April 3, 1943 from the stack . The destroyer, which was still in the equipment, was taken over on loan from the Norwegian Navy in Exile and put into service on September 6, 1943 under the name Stord as the fifth destroyer of the S-class.

The Stord excelled end of December 1943 in the Battle of the North Cape from which the sinking of the German battleship Scharnhorst led. The Stord was bought by Norway after the end of the war and was then the flagship of the Norwegian Navy until more destroyers were delivered. The ship was then used by the Norwegian Naval War School as a training ship for officer candidates. In 1959 it was canceled in Belgium .

Construction and technical data

The Stord was an S-class destroyer and displaced 1710 ts as standard and 2530 ts fully loaded. The ship was 362 ft 9 in long and 35 ft 8 in wide and had a draft of up to 14.5 ft . It was driven by two Parson gear-turbine sets, each driving a screw shaft. The total drive power of 40,000 HPw was generated with the steam from two Admiralty boilers and gave the ship a top speed of over 36 knots . At full load, the Stord could carry up to 615 ts of fuel, with which she could cover up to 4675 nm at a cruising speed of 20 kn. Their crew normally consisted of 170 men.

The destroyer was armed with four 4.7-inch (120 mm) / L45-Mark XII guns , which became real multi-purpose weapons thanks to the new suspension. A Bofors 40 mm twin gun in a carriage of the Hazemeyer type developed in the Netherlands and four automatic twin cannons of the 20 mm Oerlikon type were available to repel air attacks . In addition, the destroyer was armed with two 21-inch quadruple torpedo tubes and usually had 70  depth charges on board, which were deployed via two drainage rails and four launchers.

The ship was awarded in January 1941 in the fifth order of destroyers for the Royal Navy as part of the War Emergency Program as the first order to J. Samuel White in Cowes . The construction of the ship began in February 1942 three months before the sister ship Swift , which was also to be built by White . On April 3, 1943, it was launched as Success . When it was put into service on August 26, 1943 as the fifth S-class ship, it was taken over by the Norwegian Navy as a Stord . Since the destroyers of this type were built at different speeds by the shipyards involved, four ships of the structurally identical T-class and two of the subsequent U-class and one of the V-class, which were also largely identical, were already in service when the Stord was commissioned .

The destroyer was named after the southwestern Norwegian island of Stord and was the first naval destroyer of the Norwegian Navy. A significant part of its first crew, including the first commander Skule Storheill came from the April 14, 1943 in the English Channel sunken destroyer escort Eskdale of type III of the Hunt class . By the end of the war, the Norwegian Navy received another S-class destroyer, the Svenner , also named after a Norwegian island , which came on March 1, 1944 as the eighth ship to the 23rd Flotilla. This destroyer was lost after a short period of service on the first day of the invasion of Normandy .

Mission history

During the final tests by the shipyard in August 1943, the Norwegian Navy took over the destroyer on August 26 and renamed it Stord . The ship carried out further tests and then the acceptance runs and was taken into service with the 23rd (British) Destroyer Flotilla at Home Fleet on September 3rd , which consisted of the S-class destroyers, of which the Scorpion on September 11th. May 1943 was the first to enter the service of the Royal Navy. The retraction of the ship and crew continued in Scapa Flow .

When the convoy RA 54A started as the first return convoy of the beginning Northern Sea escort season in the Kolafjord on November 2, 1943 , the Stord formed the security of the remote security group provided by the Home Fleet with the battleship Anson , the carrier Formidable, with two British, two American and one Canadian destroyer and the cruiser Jamaica until the group disbanded on November 8th. 14 days later, the Stord then formed the cover group of the convoy JW 54B together with Saumarez , Hardy , Savage , Scorpion , Scourge , Venus and Vigilant and accompanied the convoy to Arkhangelsk . On December 3, the eight almost new destroyers of the S- and V-Class began their march back to the Home Fleet.

On December 13, the Stord with the sister ships Saumarez , Scorpion and Savage was assigned to a newly formed remote security group with the battleship Duke of York and the cruiser Jamaica for the convoys JW 55A and JW 55B to northern Russia and the countercurrent RA 55A . On the 18th, the British battleship and its companions left the Kola Fjord again and then ran to Akureyri (Iceland) for oiling . Only on the 26th did the association return to the sea area in order to be able to intervene in the naval battle off the North Cape .

Sea battle off the North Cape

On Christmas Day, a German combat group under Rear Admiral Erich Bey with the battleship Scharnhorst and the 4th Destroyer Flotilla under Captain Johannesson with the five destroyers Z 29 , Z 30 , Z 33 , Z 34 and Z 38 set sail for the Intercept convoy JW 55B . During the search for the convoy there was a skirmish between the British cruiser cover group with Belfast , Norfolk and Sheffield under Vice Admiral Robert Burnett and the Scharnhorst , in which two hits by the Norfolk u. a. put the radar of the German battleship out of action. At a second meeting with the British cruiser group, the Norfolk was hit. However, Bey believed that he had a battleship in front of him, so began the retreat at high speed and released his destroyers. The allied long-range cover group approaching from the west tried to relocate the Scharnhorst back to the northern Norwegian fjords . A chase broke out in which the Duke of York and Jamaica scored a few hits. However, the Scharnhorst was once again able to escape the range of the British ships. The S-class destroyers then sent ahead found the Scharnhorst and launched a pincer attack. During the torpedo attack by Scorpion and Stord , the battleship received a torpedo hit and came through its evasive maneuvers in the range of Savage and Saumarez , who scored three more torpedo hits that stopped the Scharnhorst . She continued to fire, but was sunk by the far superior British units on the evening of December 26, 1943. Only 36 men of the 1972 crew could be rescued from the North Sea by the British destroyers.

The Stord reached the Kola Fjord with the Duke of York and further destruction on December 27, and on December 31 with the Jamaica and the undamaged sister ships and the Opportune Scapa Flow.

The Stord then accompanied other northern sea convoys , so from January 21, 1944 JW 56A and JW 56B as part of the escort group of nine destroyers and three corvettes, of which the Hardy was lost. The Stord was attacked by U 957 without success . This was followed by convoy RA 56 from February 6 to 9, followed by convoy JW 58 from March 29 to April 4 and by convoy RA 58 from April 7 to 13 .

In May the ship was assigned to the support forces for the invasion of Normandy . The Stord was to fire at targets in Ouistreham with the sister ship Scorpion . At the beginning of June 1944 she and her sister ships led the heavy units of the Royal Navy from the Clyde to the Solent intended for the bombardment and stood in front of the Sword landing section early in the morning with two battleships, a monitor, five cruisers and over ten destroyers German torpedo boats T 28 , Jaguar and Möwe of the 5th Torpedo Boat Flotilla under Korvettenkapitän Heinrich Hoffmann was attacked. The Germans, surprised by the size of the British support groups, fired a volley of torpedoes and then quickly withdrew. They only scored one hit, which sank Stord's Norwegian sister ship Svenner .

The Stord initially provided artillery support to the troops that had landed. Only after a few days was it supposed to secure the sea area against German attackers. On the night of June 8, she left her firing position with Saumarez , Virago and Isis in order to intercept German speedboats that had attacked a convoy with landing craft in vain . On the night of the 11th, four speedboats managed to outmaneuver the destroyer patrol with the Stord , Scorpion , Scourge and Kelvin and to sink three small freighters south of the Isle of Wight . The destroyers pursued the S-boats without success as far as Boulogne . On the night of June 13, the Stord and the Scorpion discovered the torpedo boats T 28 and Möwe , attacking from Le Havre , which retreated from the superior destroyers. On the night of June 24th, the Germans evacuated Cherbourg and the Stord attacked the Germans relatively unsuccessfully with the destroyer Venus and MTBs . In July, went Stord then repairs to the Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth , to then be routed back to Scapa Flow to the Home Fleet.

On August 15, 1944, it belonged to the part of the Home Fleet that was supposed to lead parallel to the convoy JW 59 to advance with carrier aircraft against the battleship Tirpitz lying in the Kåfjord . The four attacks (247 sorties) from the 20th to the 29th from the aircraft carriers were costly and resulted in only two insignificant hits.

During the convoy operation RA 62 , the Stord belonged to the security association around the Implacable in December 1944 , which attacked German shipping traffic on the Norwegian coast with its aircraft. In the first week of January 1945, the destroyer belonged to the cover formation of convoy JW 63 , which reached the Kolafjord undetected by the Germans.

In February and March 1945 the Stord was overhauled again. From April 16, it belonged to the security of the convoy JW 66 and from April 29 of the following return convoy RA 66 , in which it came to the last convoy battle of the Second World War.

The Broadway (ex USS Hunt )

The Stord , which arrived back in Great Britain in early May 1945, ran from Rosyth to Tromsø on May 13, 1945 with Sector Commander Northern Norway , the Norwegian Rear Admiral Edvard Christian Danielsen , and the formerly American HMS Broadway . In front of the Westfjord, the two destroyers met the German Arctic submarines on May 16 on the march to Trondheim and handed them over to the Canadian 9th Escort Group with five frigates, which had withdrawn from the JW 67 convoy . On the evening of May 16, the two destroyers were the first Allied ships to reach Tromsø. The Stord brought on 25./26. another Norwegian weather station on Bear Island .

From June 5 to 7, 1945, the Stord belonged to the heavy cruisers Norfolk and Devonshire and the British destroyers Onslow and Orwell to the association that brought the Norwegian King Haakon VII back to Oslo after exactly five years in exile .

Under British command, the destroyer made a number of trips as part of the repatriation of Allied soldiers and the control of German units.

Post-war deployment

In August 1945 the Stord was placed under the command of the Norwegian Navy . Until 1948 the king made several trips in Norway with the Stord ; he visited Bergen on the Stord in August 1945 and the Lofoten in summer 1946 .

The destroyer was officially acquired in 1946 and renamed KNM Stord on October 30, 1946 .

The Stord was not modernized and remained in service with the Norwegian Navy until the late 1950s. From 1950 the ship received the NATO identification D 300 . She was then used as a cadet training ship for the Norwegian Naval War School. In 1959 the Stord was canceled in Belgium.

The name plate of the destroyer and a model of the ship are exhibited in the town hall in Stord . A torpedo set from the Stord is exhibited in the Norwegian Naval Museum in Horten .

Renewed use of the name

The ORP Bielik ex KNM Svenner

From 1967, the Norwegian Navy again had a KNM Stord with a Kobben-class submarine . The class 207 boats built by the Nordseewerke in Emden were the first submarine exports in Germany. The submarine Stord entered service in the Norwegian Navy on February 14, 1967 as the 14th boat of its class. The boat, which was decommissioned in Norway in 1987, came to Poland in 2002 as ORP Sokół as the first of four boats.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lenton, p. 174
  2. ↑ English, pp. 62f.
  3. ^ Rohwer: Sea War , December 12–31, 1943 Arctic Ocean: JW 55B reached Soviet ports without losses
  4. ↑ 26 were saved by Scorpion , 6 by Matchless , 4 ??.
  5. ↑ Rohwer, 26/12/1943 North Sea
  6. ↑ Rohwer, 12.1.- 2.1.1944 North Sea
  7. ↑ Rohwer, 06/06/1944 channel Allied invasion ( "Decision Day") in Normandy.
  8. ↑ 6.– 13.6.1944 Canal / North Sea Attack attempts by German surface ships against the invasion fleet.
  9. ↑ Rohwer, June 16–29, 1944 Kanal.
  10. ↑ Rohwer, 15.8.- 9.6.1944 North Sea.
  11. ↑ Rohwer, 7.- 12/14/1944 Norway.
  12. ↑ Rohwer, 1st 08/01/1945 North Sea.
  13. ↑ Rohwer, April 16-25, 1945 North Sea.
  14. ↑ Rohwer, April 29–2, 1945, North Sea.
  15. ↑ KNM = Kongelig Norsk Marine was introduced in 1946 as the Norwegian prefix for the ships of the Norwegian Navy

Web links

literature

  • Roger Chesneau (Ed.): Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships 1922-1946 , Conway Maritime Press (Greenwich, 1980), ISBN 0-85177-146-7
  • John English: Obdurate to Daring: British Fleet Destroyers 1941-45 , World Ship Society (Windsor, 2001), ISBN 978-0-9560769-0-8
  • Henry Trevor Lenton: British & Empire Warships of the Second World War , Naval Institute Press (Annapolis, 1998), ISBN 1-55750-048-7
  • Alan Raven / John Roberts: War Built Destroyers O to Z , Bivouac Books (London, 1978), ISBN 0-85680-010-4
  • Jürgen Rohwer , Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronicle of the Naval War 1939-1945 , Manfred Pawlak VerlagsGmbH (Herrsching 1968), ISBN 3-88199-0097
  • MJ Whitley: Destroyers of World War 2 , Naval Institute Press (Annapolis, 1988), ISBN 0-87021-326-1