Widnes (ship)

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Widnes
HMS Aberdare - sister ship of the Widnes
HMS Aberdare - sister ship of the Widnes
Ship data
flag United KingdomUnited Kingdom (Naval War Flag) United Kingdom of the German Empire
German EmpireGerman Empire (Reichskriegsflagge) 
other ship names

Withernsea
12 V 4
UJ 2109

Ship type Minesweeper
class Hunt class
Shipyard Napier & Miller , Old Kilpatrick / Glasgow
Launch June 28, 1918
Whereabouts Sunk October 18, 1943
Ship dimensions and crew
length
70.40 m ( Lüa )
width 8.70 m
Draft Max. 2.20 m
displacement 710 t standard / 930 t maximum
 
crew 74 men (Royal Navy)
60–70 men (Kriegsmarine)
Machine system
machine 2 × 4-cylinder triple expansion machines
Machine
performance 		2,200 PS (1,618 kW)
Top
speed 		16 kn (30 km / h)
propeller 2
Armament

Royal Navy:

  • 1 × 102 mm gun
  • 1 × 76 mm gun
  • 2 × 7.7 mm machine guns

Navy:

  • 2 × 88 mm guns
  • 2 × 37 mm anti-aircraft guns
  • 6 × 20 mm flak

The Widnes was a British minesweeper of Hunt class in the First World War . 1918 been launched and made even a short time in service, it was 1939 by the Royal Navy reactivated after 20 years in the reserve fleet. In May 1941, the German Air Force damaged the ship off Crete so badly that it was abandoned. The Navy salvaged and reactivated the ship as the 12 V 4 and later as the UJ 2109 until British destroyers sank it in the Aegean Sea in October 1943 .

Construction and technical data

The Widnes belonged to the second series of the Hunt class of the First World War, the Aberdare class, built from 1916 to 1919 . The Widnes was commissioned in mid-1917 and stacked as the Withernsea at Napier & Miller in Old Kilpatrick, Glasgow , under hull number 219 . Before it was launched on June 28, 1918, the ship, baptized after the coastal town of Withernsea, was renamed after the inland town of Widnes in order to avoid misunderstandings in the communication between the town and ship names. The delivery to the Royal Navy took place on September 17, 1918.

Her length was 70.40 meters, she was 8.70 meters wide and had a draft of 2.20 meters. The displacement was 710 tons standard (930 tons maximum). The drive consisted of two 4-cylinder triple expansion machines with two boilers, which achieved 2200 hp and worked on two screws . With that she reached a top speed of 16 knots.

In the Royal Navy, it was armed with a 4.0-inch gun (equivalent to 102 mm) at the bow, a 3.0-inch gun (equivalent to 76.2 mm) and two machine guns of 7.7 mm caliber at the stern . The crew was 74 officers and men.

history

Royal Navy

Even before commissioning in 1918 Lieutenant RNR Thomas V. Birkett took over on August 28 in command of the Widnes he to laying kept the ship. The ship was still in the final phase of the First World War and was on November 11, 1918 in the Adriatic Sea . It stayed there until November 1919, when it was relocated to the reserve in Malta on November 28, 1919 with the 2nd minesweeping flotilla . It remained in Malta until 1935, then moved with the flotilla to Singapore and remained there in the reserve until the beginning of the Second World War.

In view of the imminent danger of war, the Widnes was brought back into active service from August 1939 like many ships of the Royal Navy from the reserve. As of October, Lt. Cdr. William Maurice Passmore, then Lt. Cdr. Robert Bruce Chandler. This kept the command until the sinking in May 1941. The ship moved from January 1, 1940 with sometimes longer stops in Colombo and Aden in the Mediterranean and reached Alexandria on April 22, 1941. There it joined the 2nd minesweeping flotilla.

From Egypt , the Widnes was assigned to the British naval forces off Crete . After the withdrawal of British troops from Greece, she ensured that the British naval base in Souda Bay was kept open . Even before the German air landing on Crete on May 20, 1941, the Merkur company , the Widnes was slightly damaged in a German air raid by close hits and machine gun fire. When the German air landing began two days later, it was so badly damaged in another air raid that the commander had to beach it in Souda Bay. The Royal Navy declared it a total loss.

German Navy

The Navy lifted the damaged ship on August 30, 1941 and repaired it in Piraeus - probably in the Skaramanga naval shipyard, where a naval equipment and repair facility had been set up. The armament now consisted of two 88 mm submarine cannons, two 37 mm and six 20 mm anti-aircraft guns . There were also three depth charges . The crew strength was 60-70 officers and men.

The ship was assigned to the 12th Coast Guard Flotilla, which was set up in Piraeus in July 1941, and was given the identification 12 V 4 . The area of ​​operation of the flotilla was the western Aegean; security tasks were in the foreground there. In November 1941 the ship led the German steamer Ithaka to Souda together with 11 V1 , the former Greek minesweeper of Palaskas . The Ithaka was sunk by the British submarine HMS Proteus on November 10, southwest of the island of Milos .

After the 21st submarine fighter flotilla was set up in December 1941, the 12 V 4 was integrated into this flotilla and the marking was changed to UJ 2109 . However, different dates are given for the change of flotilla or the renaming: these range from January 3, 1942, through February 1, 1942 to January 16, 1943 as the date of commissioning as UJ 2109 . No further events are mentioned in the literature until October 1943.

After the armistice between Italy and the Allies on September 8, 1943, the British intended to conquer the Italian Aegean Islands in the Dodecanese campaign . The German units used to recapture Kos (“Eisbär”) started on October 1st from various ports in Crete and initially drove in three separate escorts towards Kos. The convoy from Heraklion consisted of the transporters Citta di Savona as well as F 336 and F 338 , escorted by UJ 2109 . A day later, the three escorts met on the island of Naxos , drove together to Kos and disembarked the German troops.

A good two weeks later, UJ 2109, together with UJ 2110 (ex Greek auxiliary miner Korgialenios ) and the clearing boat R 211, escorted the Italian transporter Trapani and the German steamer Kari (ex French Ste. Colette ) on a supply transport from Piraeus to Kos. On October 16, the Kari was sunk by the British submarine Torbay and the Trapani was damaged. On the night of October 17, the British destroyer Hursley and the Greek Miaoulis sank the Trapani and set fire to UJ 2109 and F 338 in Akti Bay on Kalymnos . The next night, the British destroyers Penn and Jervis finally destroyed the submarine hunter.

literature

  • Donald A. Bertke, Gordon Smith, Don Kindell / Naval-history.net: World War II Sea War - Volume 1: The Nazis strike first , Bertke Publications, Dayton / Ohio 2011, ISBN 978-0-578-02941-2 .
  • Donald A. Bertke, Gordon Smith, Don Kindell / Naval-history.net: World War II Sea War - Volume 2: France falls, Britain stand alone , Bertke Publications, Dayton / Ohio 2011, ISBN 978-1-937470-00- 5 .
  • Donald A. Bertke, Gordon Smith, Don Kindell / Naval-history.net: World War II Sea War - Volume 3: The Royal Navy Is bloodied in the Mediterranean , Bertke Publications, Dayton / Ohio 2012, ISBN 978-1-937470- 01-2 .
  • Erich Gröner: The German warships 1815-1945, Vol. 8/2: Outpost boats, auxiliary minesweepers, coastal protection associations (Part 2), small combat associations, dinghies , Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Bonn 1993, ISBN 3-7637-4807-5 .
  • Peter Schenk: Battle for the Aegean. The Navy in Greek Waters 1941-1945 , Verlag Mittler, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-8132-0699-8 .
  • Peter C., Smith: War in the Aegean: The Campaign for the Eastern Mediterranean in World War II (Stackpole Military History Series) , Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg 2008, ISBN 978-0-8117-3519-3 .
  • Ken Welch / Albert Welch: A Sailor at war 1939–1945 , e-book, Kindle Edition 2013.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.clydesite.co.uk/clydebuilt/WW2-ships/WIDNES_219.html , http://forums.clydemaritime.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=11520 , http: //www.navypedia .org / ships / germany / ger_esc_uj2109.htm
  2. ↑ cf. http://www.naval-history.net/xDKWW2-3908-01RNships.htm , http://uboat.net/allies/warships/ship/6525.html , http://forums.clydemaritime.co.uk/ viewtopic.php? t = 11520
  3. ↑ http://forums.clydemaritime.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=11520 , http://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?14145 , http://www.naval-history.net/WW1NavyBritishShips -Dittmar3.htm # W
  4. ↑ http://www.dreadnoughtproject.org/tfs/index.php/HMS_Widnes_(1918) quotes the "Navy List" from March 1919
  5. ↑ World War 1 Dispositions of Royal Navy ships. Accessed May 1, 2019 .
  6. ^ Locations of Royal Navy Ships. Pink Lists, World War 1. Retrieved May 1, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Bertke, Volume 1, p. 50, http://forums.clydemaritime.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=11520 , http://www.dreadnoughtproject.org/tfs/index.php/HMS_Widnes_(1918) , http://www.naval-history.net/xGW-RNOrganisation1919-39.htm
  8. ↑ http://uboat.net/allies/warships/ship/6525.htm , http://www.gravelroots.net/storemid6/73_obe.html
  9. ↑ Bertke, Volume 2, p. 211, Bertke, Volume 3, p. 207, Welch, http://www.naval-history.net/xDKWW2-3909-04RN.htm , www.naval-history.net/xDKWW2 -4006-15RNOverseas-Dominion.htm, www.naval-history.net/xDKWW2-4101-26RNOverseas-Dominion.htm, www.naval-history.net/xDKWW2-4104-31APR02.htm
  10. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from August 23, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ↑ Bertke, Volume 3, p. 505, Gröner, p. 397, http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/41-05.htm , archive link ( Memento from 23 August 2011 in the Internet Archive ), cf. . also http://www.gravelroots.net/storemid6/73_obe.html
  12. ↑ Gröner, p. 397
  13. ↑ Schenk, p. 32, http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/km/mittelmeer/suedost/ksf.htm ,
  14. ↑ http://www.historisches-marinearchiv.de/projekte/verluste_griechenland/ausgabe.php?rubrik=%&where_value=529
  15. ↑ http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/km/ujaeger/uj21-23.htm#21
  16. ↑ Schenk, p. 40
  17. ↑ cf. http://www.forum-marinearchiv.de/smf/index.php?topic=21539.10;wap2
  18. ↑ Gröner, p. 397
  19. ↑ Schenk, p. 65, Smith, p. 94, cf. also http://www.forum-marinearchiv.de/smf/index.php?topic=4205.0
  20. ↑ Gröner, p. 397, Schenk, p. 75, http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/43-10.htm , cf. also http://www.historisches-marinearchiv.de/projekte/verluste_griechenland/ausgabe.php?where_value=531&lang=1&rubrik=%