Wangoni
 Wangoni
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The Wangoni was the first passenger ship to be built by the Woermann Line (WL) after the First World War. In September 1921 she started her first trip to South Africa in Hamburg. She was later deployed to West Africa. The German East Africa Line (DOAL) connected with the WL had two sister ships, Usaramo and Ussukuma .
The Wangoni sought at the start of World War II in September 1939 refuge in Vigo ( Spain ), from where they broke through to Germany, which failed five simultaneously started German ships in February 1940th She was then used by the Kriegsmarine as a residential ship. In the last few weeks before the end of the war in 1945, she was still used as a transport ship for the wounded.
In 1946 she was extradited to the Soviet Union , where she remained in service as a Chukotka until 1968 .
History of the Wangoni
The Woermann-Linie and the DOAL have been operated in personal union since 1917 and merged as the "German Africa Service" on May 20, 1922, even if the ships still carried different chimney brands and shipping company flags. The new construction program of the shipping companies assumed a resumption of pre-war services and provided for the procurement of four passenger ships of up to 9,000 GRT for the main lines (now known as South Africa Service), five of which were built for the two shipping companies by 1922 ( Usaramo , Ussukuma , Wangoni and the slightly larger Adolph Woermann and Usambara ). In 1922 there were two 5000 GRT passenger ships ( Wahehe , Wadai ) for the West African service. This new building program was commissioned soon after the peace agreement.
The order for the South Africa ships was placed with the Blohm & Voss shipyard , which built all the major structures for the German Africa Service until 1936. The first series consisted of three ships, which were immediately followed by the two larger ships mentioned, and two similar newbuildings ( Tanganyika , Njassa ) for the Hapag operating group . Two pairs of ships followed later ( Watussi / Ubena , Pretoria / Windhuk ), of which the Woermann Line and the DOAL each received a new building.
Named after an East African tribe, the Wangoni corresponded to its two previous sister ships for the DOAL. She was 127.6 m long and had a steam turbine with a gearbox of 3000 hp , which enabled the ship to reach a speed of 12 knots (kn) . The passenger facility offered space for 101 people in Class I, 61 in Class II and 102 in Class III. Class. After the keel was laid on 17 October 1920, the ship was launched on 22 March 1921 from the stack and was delivered on 8 September 1921, the Woermann Line.
The sister ships Usaramo and Ussukuma began their maiden voyages to Africa on March 17, 1921 and July 1921 in the colors of the DOAL.
The hull shape was a takeover of the pre-war Emir- class freighters of the DOAL, which the Bremer Vulkan had developed in 1911 and completed five cargo ships by 1917. Blohm & Voss had completed a ship by 1919 and delivered it to Great Britain immediately. In 1920 the cargo ship Urundi was launched, which for the first time had a geared turbine as a drive, like the following passenger ships.
Mission history
On September 15, 1921, the Wangoni began her maiden voyage across West Africa to South Africa. The planned traffic around Africa did not yet exist; the steamers from DOAL and WL ran either via South Africa to Lourenço Marques or through the Mediterranean and the Red Sea and then along the African east coast to there, to then turn and run back again.
In autumn 1928, the Wangoni and the Ussukuma were assigned to the passenger service to West Africa, which had been in operation again since 1922. The use of the 7800 GRT ships did not prove to be economical and they returned to the South African service. From July 1930, however, one of the ships to the European ports still called Freetown , Takoradi , Accra and Lagos every month before continuing the voyage to South Africa. The unbundling of the German shipping companies in 1934 led to the abandonment of the Africa services of North German Lloyd and Hapag. From 1934 the Wangoni and the Ussukuma were again only used to ports on the West African coast; Their range of passenger seats with 90 in 1st class and 160 in tourist class was considerably larger than that of the Wahehe- class ships that had previously been used , which were also used on a slightly different route. The Wangoni and her sister ship now ran from Hamburg via Antwerp , Boulogne and Southampton via Madeira , Tenerife , Las Palmas , Freetown, Takoradi, Accra, Lagos and Victoria to Douala . On the return journey Tenerife and Antwerp were left out. On December 29, 1937, most of the Wangoni passenger cabins burned down in Hamburg , but were immediately repaired.
When war broke out in 1939, the Wangoni called the Spanish Vigo and gave her passengers ashore. A number of German ships gathered there, including the smaller Wahehe of the West Africa service and the Usaramo of the DAL, which was used in the east coast service through the Mediterranean . In February 1940 the Germans tried to transfer six of the ships from Vigo home. On the night of February 9th to 10th, the Morea (1921 BRT), the Rostock (2542 BRT), the Arucas (3359 BRT), the Orizaba (4354 BRT), the Wahehe (4709 BRT) and the Wangoni left Vigo and tried to get to Norway through the North Atlantic . Five of the ships were lost:
- on February 11th, the Rostock was attacked by the French Aviso Elan ;
- on February 12, the Morea suffered the same fate from the British destroyer Hasty ;
- on February 21, the Wahehe was raised by British forces near the Faroe Islands ;
- On February 26, the Orizaba ran aground off the north Norwegian coast off Skjervoy near Hammerfest and was lost;
- on March 3, east of Iceland , the Arucas sank in heavy seas before the approaching cruiser HMS York ; there were eleven dead;
At this point in time, the Wangoni was the only one of the ships that had broken out of Vigo to reach Germany. After escaping an attack by the British submarine Triton off Kristiansand on February 28, she arrived in her home port of Hamburg via Kiel on March 1.
The ship was taken over by the Navy and moved to Gotenhafen as a barge in June 1940 and to Swinoujscie in September 1941 . In March and April 1945 it was used as a transport ship for the wounded to evacuate the wounded from East Prussia. At the end of the war the ship was in Rendsburg .
After being overhauled in Hamburg, the ship was handed over to the Soviet Union on March 19, 1946. As the "Tschukotka" (Чукотка) the ship remained in service with the Soviet merchant navy until 1967. As a stationary training ship, it is said to have existed in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky until 2007 .
Sister ships
| Surname | Construction no. | GRT | Launched in service |
further fate |
| Usaramo | No. 387 | 7758 | October 2, 1920 March 11, 1921 |
On July 31, 1936, the first "special steamer" from Hamburg to Cádiz , to bring weapons, ammunition and other equipment, had "volunteers" on board who had recently been formally released from the Wehrmacht to fight alongside Franco ( Start of the Condor Legion ), traveling home in the North Atlantic in 1939, calling at Vigo (boiler damage), chartered by the Gestapo to deport Jews to China from spring 1939 , transferred to Bordeaux in autumn 1940 , accommodation ship, passed through Royan on December 10, 1940 Air raid sunk, lifted and repaired, sunk in Gironde as a block ship on August 25, 1944 , lifted and scrapped after the war |
| Ussukuma | No. 389 | 7765 | December 20, 1920 July 9, 1921 |
1939 in Lourenco Marques, attempted breakthrough to Brazil via Mozambique, arrived in Bahía Blanca , Argentina on October 13, 1939 ; set sail for Montevideo on December 4 , arrested by British cruiser Ajax ; to avoid being captured, even sunk |
Individual evidence
- ↑ Schmelzkopf: Handelsschiffahrt , p. 48
- ↑ Schmelzkopf: Handelsschiffahrt , p. 46
- ↑ a b Kludas: The ships of the German Africa Lines 1880-1945 , p. 82.
- ↑ Kludas: Afrikalinien , p. 68ff.
- ^ Kludas: Africa Lines , p. 70
- ↑ Kludas: Passenger Shipping, Vol. IV, p. 135
- ↑ Timetable West Africa 1st half 1937 with Holland West Africa Line
- ↑ Kludas: Passenger Shipping, Vol. V, p. 98
- ↑ a b Rohwer: Seekrieg , p. 31
- ^ History of Rostock 1922-1969
- ↑ Sunk as block ship Empire Seaman ex Morea / DLL near the Orkneys in 1940
- ↑ Sunk as Empire Citizen ex Wahehe / DAL on February 3, 1941 in the North Atlantic
- ↑ Loss of Orizaba / Hapag
- ^ Fall of the Arucas / NDL
- ↑ Rothe: Passenger Ships 1919-1985 , pp. 51, 86
- ^ The World's Merchant Fleets, 1939: The Particulars And Wartime Fates, p. 480
- ↑ Kludas: Liners , Bd.V, p 156
- ↑ http://juedische-emigration.geschichtswerkstatt-goettingen.de/fallbeispiele/katz.html Deportation of the Göttingen couple Katz
- ^ Kludas, Afrika-Linien, p. 81
Web links
- Page on the history of the shipping companies Deutsche Afrika-Linien, John T. Essberger, u. a. as well as the trading house C. Woermann under construction
literature
- Arnold Kludas : The ships of the German Africa Lines 1880 to 1945 . Verlag Gerhard Stalling, 1975, ISBN 3-7979-1867-4 .
- Arnold Kludas: The History of German Passenger Shipping Volume IV Destruction and Rebirth 1914 to 1930 , Writings of the German Shipping Museum, Volume 21
- Arnold Kludas: The History of German Passenger Shipping Vol. V An era comes to an end from 1930 to 1990 , writings of the German Maritime Museum, volume 22
- Claus Rothe: German ocean passenger ships 1919 to 1985 . Steiger Verlag, Moers 1987, ISBN 3-921564-97-2 .
- Hans Georg Prager: Blohm & Voss Koehler Verlagsgesellschaft, Herford 1977, ISBN 3-78220-127-2 .
- Jürgen Rohwer , Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronicle of the Naval War 1939-1945 , Manfred Pawlak VerlagsGmbH (Herrsching 1968), ISBN 3-88199-0097
- Reinhart Schmelzkopf: Die deutsche Handelsschiffahrt 1919–1939 , Verlag Gerhard Stalling, Oldenburg, ISBN 3-7979-1847-X