Versailles (ship, 1919)

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The Versailles was a French canal ferry that ran the Dieppe - Newhaven line from 1921 to 1940 and was then used as a mine ship in front of the German Navy .

French Channel Ferry

The ship was in 1914 for the French state railway Chemins de Fer de l'Etat at the shipyard Forges et Chantiers de la Méditerranée in Le Havre on laid keel , but the building was after the outbreak of World War I interrupted and resumed only 1919th The ship was 95.0 m long and 11.0 m wide, had a 3.2 m draft and was measured at 1903 GRT . Its four boilers and two steam turbines developed 15,000 hp and gave a top speed of 17 knots . The Versailles was delivered in July 1921 and then served the English Channel route between Dieppe in Normandy and Newhaven in southern England, which was jointly operated by the Chemins de Fer de l'Etat and the English London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (LBSC).

French troop carrier

On May 20, 1940, after the German attack on Belgium and the Netherlands , the Versailles was commandeered by the French Navy to transport troops to the French 7th Army (General Giraud ) in the Netherlands and Belgium . Then she was used in the last days of May and early June in Operation Dynamo , the evacuation of the Allied troops trapped around Dunkirk .

German mine ship

After the occupation of France in June 1940, the ship fell into German hands. It was equipped by the navy as a mine ship to lay flanking mine barriers on both sides of the German invasion routes during the planned invasion of Great Britain ( Operation Sea Lion ) . It could carry up to 111 mines and was armed with two 20 mm anti-aircraft guns. After the plan to invade England had been abandoned, the Versailles was relocated to the Baltic Sea in February 1941 and assigned to the East Mining Ship Group. During the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Versailles and the mine ships Prussia , Grille and Skagerrak laid mine blocks in the eastern Baltic Sea to prevent Soviet forces from penetrating the central Baltic Sea.

However, the ship turned out to be unsuitable due to excessive vibration of its keel plates and was laid up in Wesermünde in mid-July 1941 and finally decommissioned on January 24, 1942. At the end of the war, after the Allied bombing of the port, the ship was in such poor condition that it was scrapped as early as 1945.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/km/fds.htm
  2. ↑ http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/41-06.htm
  3. ^ German Minelayer Ulm: Interrogation of Survivors. Nov. 1942 (p. 16) ( Memento from July 3, 2012 in the Internet Archive )

Web links

literature

  • Karl von Kutzleben, Wilhelm Schroeder, Jochen Brennecke : Mine ships 1939–1945. The mysterious missions of the “midnight squadron”. Köhler, Herford 1974, ISBN 3-7822-0098-5 .