Unitas (ship, 1937)
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Abraham Larsen and Balaena in the harbor
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The Unitas was a German whaling factory ship . The ship built in 1937 by AG Weser in Bremen sailed under the German flag and was the world's largest whaling factory ship at the time. It carried out two fishing trips up to the beginning of the Second World War .
history
The ship survived the Second World War and was used as the Empire Victory under the British flag from 1945 to 1950 . In 1950 it was renamed Abraham Larsen and used with its home port in London by the Union Whaling Company in Durban . In 1957 the ship was sold to Japan and continued to be used as a whaling factory as the Nisshin Maru II until 1965 . It was not until 1987 that the ship last used as a fish processing factory was demolished.
Until the commissioning of the Dutch Willem Barendsz (26,830 GRT, 1955), the ship remained the largest whaling factory ship.
German whaling
From 1935 the construction of a German whaling fleet began . The first German whaling factory ship was the Jan Wellem , which was created by converting a combined ship that was no longer needed . The first new construction of a German whaling factory ship was commissioned by Walter Rau Lebensmittelwerke .
The largest processor of whale oil in Germany was the Unilever group, particularly with its margarine production. However, the British-Dutch group found it difficult to withdraw its profits from the German Reich because of the foreign exchange management. One way the group had found was to build new ships for its own account or for third parties. At the same time, the group was looking for a way to free itself from the dependency of the Norwegian whaling companies. So it came to the construction of the world's largest whaling factory ship Terje Viken (20,638 GRT) at AG Weser for the whaling company registered in Great Britain of Niels Bugge and Harald Krogh-Hansen, which acted on behalf of the Unilever Group.
The pressure of the German government to create its own whaling fleet as part of its self-sufficiency efforts led to the order of a sister ship by the Unilever company Van den Bergh Margarine -verkauf GmbH from DESCHIMAG , which is handled by their company AG Weser in Bremen has been. The ordered whaling mother ship Unitas came into service in September 1937 and was used by the newly founded Unitas-Deutsche Walfanggesellschaft mbH in Hamburg .
The tonnage of 21,845 gross register tons made the Unitas the world's largest factory ship before the Second World War. She was the mother ship of the company's own fleet. The Bremer Vulkan delivered the Unitas 2-8 fishing boats of 341 GRT under construction numbers 740 to 746 , which were slightly larger and faster than the Terje Viken fishing boats built in 1936 at the Seebeck shipyard . In order to be able to lift the fishing boats out of the water with the stern for repairs to the propellers and rudders , a 120-tonne lifting gear was available on the mother ship . In 1938 the fishing fleet received a reconnaissance boat with the 591 GRT Unitas 1 , like the one that the Norwegian Kosmos fleet had received for the first time in 1935 with the HJ Bull, which was roughly the same size . In addition, with the Brake (9925 GRT, 14,550 tdw, 12 kn) , the fishing fleet also had a modern tanker and supplier.
Before the Second World War, there were two fishing trips to Antarctica . In the first fishing season 1937/38 the crew of the expedition consisted of 420 men, of whom 197 were Norwegians. 1715 whales were killed and 120,000 barrels of whale oil and almost 3,000 tons of meat meal were produced from them. In the Antarctic, the Unitas had worked with her sister ship Terje Viken and had an advisor from the British Southern Whaling and Sealing Co. (Unilever's own whaling company) on board. The ship arrived in Hamburg on May 2, 1939, coming from its second fishing trip from the Antarctic . There was no third mission under the German flag.
War years
During the last years of the war, the Unitas was part of the security flotilla as a blocking watch ship and was last used in the Baltic Sea. It was in Gdynia when, on the night of December 18-19, 1944, No. 5 bomber group of the RAF Bomber Command flew an air raid on the port. 236 aircraft dropped 824 tons of bombs. At 8:50 p.m., an anti-aircraft alarm was given and at 8:55 p.m. an air raid alarm was given for the whole of Gdynia (then Gotenhafen ). Many ships were sunk. Docks and lifting pontoons were badly damaged. The Unitas itself received six bomb hits, but was repaired and could continue to be used.
In January 1945 the ship was also used to transport refugees . On April 5, 1945, the Unitas received an artillery hit from Gotenhafen, where the Red Army had already advanced.
Post-war use
In 1945 the Unitas was delivered to Great Britain and renamed Empire Victory . From 1948 to 1956 it was owned by the Union Whaling Company Ltd. in Durban, South Africa, and in 1950 it was named Abraham Larsen after the founder of the company, Abraham Emil Larsen (1880-1960), a Norwegian who emigrated to South Africa.
Nisshin Maru
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In 1957 the ship was sold to Japan, where it was used as a whaling factory ship by the Taiyo Gyogyo KK company as Nisshin Maru II until 1965 . This Japanese company is one of the largest deep-sea fishing companies in the world and has been involved in Japanese whaling since 1936 with the factory ships Nisshin Maru (16,764 GRT, 1936) and Nisshin Maru II (17,553 GRT, 1937). Both ships were lost in World War II. Japanese whaling was resumed as early as 1946 with a new Nisshin Maru I (11,803 GRT) ship. The first ship was converted into a tanker in 1950 and replaced in 1951 by a new building with a measurement of 16,811 GRT. In 1961 the company also acquired the Norwegian post-war building Kosmos III (18,047 GRT, 1947) and put it into operation as the Nisshin Maru III .
The only factory ship still processing whales is called the Nisshin Maru .
The former Unitas was converted into a floating fish processing factory in 1967. In 1987, the ship on Taiwan was scrapped .
literature
- Reinhart Schmelzkopf: The German Merchant Shipping 1919–1939 . Verlag Gerhard Stalling, Oldenburg, ISBN 3-7979-1847-X .
- Joh. N. Tønnessen, Arne Odd Johnsen: The History of Modern Whaling , University of California Press (1982), ISBN 0-520-03973-4
- Kurt Eisermann: You hunted the whale in Antarctica. Germany's participation in whaling in the 20th century . In: Men from Morgenstern , Heimatbund an Elbe and Weser estuary e. V. (Ed.): Niederdeutsches Heimatblatt . No. 799 . Nordsee-Zeitung GmbH, Bremerhaven July 2016, p. 2–3 ( digitized version [PDF; 2.4 MB ; accessed on July 27, 2019]).
Web links
- Website with photos under the name Abraham Larsen
- Website for the former Unitas I
- Website for the former Unitas IV
- Website for the former Unitas V
- Website for the former Unitas VIII
- List of whale boilers in the Norwegian WIKI
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Alfred Dudszus, Alfred Köpcke: The great book of ship types. Steam ships, motor ships, marine technology from the beginnings of machine-driven ships to the present day. transpress Pietsch, Berlin Stuttgart 1990, ISBN 3-344-00374-7 , p. 291.
- ↑ melt head, p. 208.