Uhenfels (ship, 1931)
 The Uhenfels in Freetown in 1939
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The second Uhenfels of the Deutsche Dampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft Hansa (DDG "Hansa"), put into service in 1931, was the last of a series of four cargo ships for heavy goods transport of the shipping company, which were completed between 1929 and 1931 at Werft AG Weser .
In 1939, after the outbreak of war, Uhenfels , who was on her way home, tried to reach home from the Indian Ocean around the Cape of Good Hope and through the Atlantic . On November 5, 1939, aircraft of the HMS Ark Royal spotted the ship off Freetown . A British destroyer prevented the ship from sinking.
The angry Uhenfels was used from 1940 as an Empire Ability under the British flag. On June 27, 1941 she was torpedoed from a convoy by the German submarine U 69 and sank to 23 ° 50 ′ 0 ″ N , 21 ° 11 ′ 0 ″ W .
History of the ship
The second Uhenfels was given the name of a Rheinfels class cargo ship built by AG Weser , which was in service with the DDG "Hansa" from 1907 to 1918. It was named after the castle and estate Uhenfels in Seeburg near Urach , which was built in 1899 by the banker Georg Gabriel Warburg (1871–1923) of the Hamburg banking family .
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The first Uhenfels (5577 GRT, 8670 tdw), which was taken over in April 1907, was the first cargo ship built by AG Weser for the company's East India service after the two small steamers Soneck and Stahleck of 834 GRT for the North Sea and Baltic Sea 1883. The first Uhenfels was launched in 1914 in Tanjung , the main port of Batavia in the Dutch East Indies , and was transferred from the German Empire to the Dutch government in October 1918 as compensation for war losses suffered. As a Bandoeng , the ship began service for Rotterdamschen Lloyd in 1919 . At the beginning of 1931 the Bandoeng was shut down and sold for demolition at the end of the year.
The second Uhenfels is the 30th new building of the AG Weser, now part of Deschimag, for DDG “Hansa”. It was part of the second order for two more ships in the newly developed heavy lift freighters in the Lichtenfels class . The shipyard built two more ships under construction numbers 885 and 886, which, like the first two ships, were characterized by the consistent use of the Maier shape and their heavy lift gear . The shape gave the ships a very characteristic appearance, especially at the bow. The loading gear consisted of a 120 t, 30 t and 15 t boom and 18 × 5 t booms. The new ship had. like the sister ships, a length of 160.45 m over all and 149 m between the perpendiculars. The width was 18.94 m and the draft 7.77 m. The Uhenfels was measured with 7503 GRT and 4502 NRT and had a load capacity of 10,340 tdw. Driven by a 3-cylinder triple expansion machine from the shipyard with a Bauer-Wach steam turbine of 5,100 PSi, which acted on a propeller, the ship could reach a speed of 13.7 kn.
The Uhenfels, which was delivered on March 12, 1931, was the last new ship to be built for the DDG "Hansa" until the Ehrenfels was commissioned in 1936 until it was procured according to the Third Reich's four-year plan .
Calls
The main area of application of the new Uhenfels and its sister ships was the transport of rolling stock for railways to the Middle East. The heavy lift boom enabled the independent loading and unloading of locomotives on tracks at the pier without additional port facilities. Despite the global economic crisis, the newbuildings were a success and established the reputation of DDG "Hansa" as a heavy lift shipping company.
In 1936 the Uhenfels was used as a transporter for supplies for the Condor Legion to Spain. In 1939 the Uhenfels set sail from Bandar Shapur with the launch "DDG HANSA VII" on deck to Bombay at the end of July and left Bombay on August 25, 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, to return to Germany. She tried to reach her homeland via the Portuguese colony of Mozambique .
Fate of war
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Since the ship did not have sufficient coal supply, it ran on September 10th Lourenco Marques . It was not possible to get coal there. Finally, the bunkers from Hapag's Dortmund (5138 BRT, 1926) in the port were filled and it was not until October 13, 1939 that the Uhenfels succeeded in its third attempt to leave the port of the Portuguese colony unhindered. The ship passed the southern tip of Africa and the South Atlantic without being noticed . She had £ 250,000 worth of opium and cotton and hides on board.
The Allied search groups for the armored ship Admiral Graf Spee , operating in the South Atlantic, ultimately became the Uhenfels' undoing. On November 5, 1939, two aircraft belonging to the British carrier HMS Ark Royal discovered the German ship about 230 nautical miles from Freetown. The British destroyer Hereward was sent to inspect the ship. He found the Uhenfels and immediately dispatched a prize squad that was able to prevent the sinking initiated by the crew. The destroyer brought the ship to Freetown the following day. 61 men were captured. The Uhenfels had very little food on board.
Operations under the British flag
The Uhenfels arrived in Gibraltar on March 18, 1940 and went into dock for an inspection. With a load of corn, palm kernels and other food from the West Indies, she then went to London, where she was the first captured German ship to sail on April 5th.
In April 1940, the German ship was renamed Empire Ability and used by the Ministry of War Transport (MoWT). The ship was then managed by the Elder Dempster Lines . On October 23, 1940, the Empire Ability received a bomb hit during an Air Force attack on Gare Loch , an arm of the Firth of Clyde in Scotland , in which ships were being prepared for a new convoy.
The Empire Ability was torpedoed and sunk in the early morning hours of June 27, 1941 southwest of the Canary Islands from the convoy SL-78 by the German submarine U 69 on its third attempt on the convoy. The submarine had previously sunk the steamship River Lugar (5423 BRT, built in 1937), which sank within seconds. Only six survivors could be saved. The Empire Ability , hit at 2:37 p.m., caught fire and sank after 21 minutes. The ship's cargo included 7,725 tons of sugar and 238 tons of rum. Only two men were killed. 107 men, including 17 members of the military and 27 civilian passengers, were picked up by the America (10,218 GRT, 1930) and later transferred to the corvette HMS Burdock . The corvette brought the castaways to Milford Haven .
After the losses of the sister ships Freienfels and Geierfels on December 19, 1940 off Livorno and the Lichtenfels on April 4, 1941 in Massaua , all ships of the class were now war losses.
Individual evidence
- ^ History of the Warburg family in Seeburg
- ↑ Schmelzkopf: Die deutsche Handelsschiffahrt 1919–1939 , p. 118
- ↑ melt head, p. 192
- ^ Rohwer: Seekrieg , p. 21
- ↑ Sinking the Empire Ability
Web links
- The Uhenfels on ddghansa with links to the sister ships
- The first Uhenfels
- Sinking the Empire Ability
- Entry of the Empire Ability on the memorial to the British Merchant Navy on Tower Hill
literature
- Hans Georg Prager: DDG Hansa - from liner services to special shipping . Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, Herford 1976, ISBN 3-7822-0105-1 .
- Jürgen Rohwer , Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronicle of the naval war 1939-1945 . Manfred Pawlak VerlagsGmbH, Herrsching 1968, ISBN 3-88199-0097 .
- Reinhardt Schmelzkopf: German merchant shipping 1919–1939 . Verlag Gerhard Stalling, Oldenburg, ISBN 3 7979 1847 X .