Viper (ship)
.jpg) The identical adder
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The Viper was the second ship of the Wespe class , a class of eleven armored cannon boats of the Imperial Navy , which was designed for the defense of the German North and Baltic Sea coasts.
Construction and service time
The Viper was like her sister ships and from the Bremen shipyard AG Weser built. Work on the ship began in May 1875. Contrary to the original plan, it was given armor from British production, as the Dillinger Hütte commissioned with the production was not yet able to guarantee the required quality of the armor plates. The new building was launched on September 21, 1876.
After the completion of the ship, it was not until August 20, 1885 that the Viper was put into service for the first time. Together with her sister ships Wespe , Mücke and Salamander , she took part in a fortress exercise in Wilhelmshaven led by the corvette SMS Stein . She was then assigned to the Reserve Division of the North Sea. With this association, which also included salamanders , camaeleons and wasps , further exercises were carried out from May 11 to June 9, 1886 and from August 15 to September 14, 1887. In addition, the ships took part in the autumn maneuvers of the fleet in 1887 and 1888.
In the meantime assigned to the II. Reserve Division of the North Sea, the Viper was activated for exercises and autumn maneuvers in August and September, the last time in 1891.
Whereabouts
After its last service from August 4 to September 22, 1891, the Viper was not reactivated and remained in the reserve until it was deleted from the list of warships on June 28, 1909. As a result, it was converted into a crane ship with 100 t lifting power. It was used, among other things, in the salvage of the ship of the line Rheinland, which ran aground near Lagskär in 1918, to dismantle the armor plates and guns.
The Viper was used from 1924 at the Wilhelmshaven naval shipyard and was to work as an armored landing vehicle for the Seelöwe company , the planned landing in Great Britain, in 1940 . The ship survived the Second World War and was then used by the diving company Gebr. Beckedorf, Hamburg, to salvage war wrecks. In 1953, the former Dutch ironclad Gelderland , which was sunk in Kotka in 1944 and converted by the Navy into an anti-aircraft ship, was lifted by Viper . With the takeover of the bankrupt salvage company Taucher Beckedorf by Harms Bergung in 1955, the ship changed ownership and remained in use until around 1970.
Commanders
| August 20 to September 14, 1885 | unknown |
| May 11th to June 9th, 1886 | Lieutenant Fuchs |
| August 16 to September 14, 1887 | unknown |
| August 15 to September 15, 1888 | Lieutenant Paleske |
| August 13 to September 11, 1889 | Lieutenant Truppel |
| August 13 to September 20, 1890 | Lieutenant Weyer |
| August 4 to September 22, 1891 | Captain Karl Dick |
literature
- Gröner, Erich / Dieter Jung / Martin Maass: The German warships 1815-1945 . tape 1 : Armored ships, ships of the line, battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, gunboats . Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-7637-4800-8 , p. 164 f .
- Hildebrand, Hans H. / Albert Röhr / Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships . Biographies - a mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present . tape 8 : Ship biographies from Undine to Zieten . Mundus Verlag, Ratingen, S. 48 .
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