Terje Viken
 The Terje Viken
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The British whaling mother ship Terje Viken was the first new whaling factory ship to be built in Germany. When it was completed in September 1936 by AG Weser in Bremen , it was the largest whaling ship in the world. For the new ship, nine new fishing boats were built in Germany at the same time according to British plans.
During the Second World War , the Terje Viken was sunk on March 7, 1941 by German submarines in the Atlantic.
Building history
The Terje Viken was ordered by the British Hector Whaling Co. of Norwegians Niels Bugge and Harald Krogh-Hansen in Germany. Bugge had moved the old Norwegian whaling company "Hektor" in 1932 in search of investors to Great Britain and converted it into the Hector Whaling Co., which operated the converted former White Star Liner Medic as the Hektoria whaling factory. The managers of the Hector concealed the actual client, the Unilever group , which had been one of the largest buyers of German ships since 1934, as this was the only way to make the profits made in the German Reich under the existing foreign exchange regulations. Another large investor was Svenska Handelsbanken , which also had significant frozen assets in the German Reich. With the new building in Germany, Unilever also wanted to free itself more from the dependence of the purely Norwegian whaling companies. As the largest processor of whale oil, the group regularly bought almost all of Norwegian production without being able to set prices. With the Southern Whaling, he had his own fishing fleet with two converted tankers ( Southern Empress , Southern Princess ) and had a strong influence on the companies of Johann Rasmussen and Torger Moe, which operate the new factory ships Sir James Clark Ross , as well as under the flag Panama's Vestfold and Vikingen operated.
Simultaneously with the Terje Viken at AG Weser , the Seebeck shipyard built nine whaling boats according to plans of the British shipyard Smith's Dock under the construction numbers 536 to 544 with the names Terje 1 to Terje 9 of 335 GRT.
Her sister ship Unitas , completed in 1937 for the German Unilever subsidiary, was slightly larger (21,847 GRT) because it had an additional protective deck.
Mission history
The new factory ship was the most modern and largest in the world when it was completed in 1936. Responsible for its operation and owner was United Whalers Ltd., newly founded on October 4, 1935, whose shares were largely owned by the parent company Hector until 1939 and which began its work with the licenses of two separate companies. In its first season from 1936 to 1937, Terje Viken produced more than expected with 17,384 tons of whale oil that was supplied to German Unilever companies. Until March 1940, the ship was used in three more Antarctic summers in the southern Arctic Ocean. It had been modernized again for the last fishing season and had additional facilities for more intensive processing of the whale bodies. Outside the whaling seasons, the ship was used as a tanker between the West Indies and Europe.
The end of the Terje Viken
On March 7, 1941, the Terje Viken was under Captain O. Borchgrevink on the way from Glasgow to Curacao within the convoy OB-293 southeast of Iceland when she was hit by two torpedoes at 05:05. Presumably they came from the German submarine U 47 under Günther Prien , whose whereabouts have not been clarified since this attack. At 05.50 a.m. U 70 shot a triple fan under Matz at the huge ship moving in ballast. But all three torpedoes missed their target. Shortly afterwards, U 99 under Otto Kretschmer met the Terje Viken on the port side and the crew left the ship. Later, some of the crew returned on board to save the ship. But it was too badly damaged and had to be abandoned.
At 18.55 am, the capsized Terje Viken in position 60 ° 0 '0 " N , 12 ° 50' 0" W . Two men died during the attack, the 105 survivors were picked up by the destroyer Hurricane under LtCdr HC Simms, RN, and brought back to Greenock . The capsized ship was finally sunk on March 14th by a British salvage tug by gunfire.
literature
- Joh. N. Tønnessen, Arne Odd Johnsen: The History of Modern Whaling , University of California Press (1982), ISBN 0-520-03973-4
- Jürgen Rohwer , Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronicle of the Naval War 1939-1945 , Manfred Pawlak VerlagsGmbH (Herrsching 1968), ISBN 3-88199-009-7
Web links
- Newspaper photo of Terje Viken after commissioning
- Website for Terje Viken
- Video of Terje Viken preparing for the 1938 fishing season
- Image of Terje Viken
- List of whale factory ships (norw.)
- The sinking of the Terje Viken on uboat.net
- Image of Terje 1
- Terje 1 website
- Terje 6 website
