Wilhelm Bauer (ship, 1938)
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The Wilhelm Bauer was a submarine support ship of the German Navy during World War II . She was named after the pioneer of submarine construction Wilhelm Bauer and was the first of a total of eight planned ships of her class, of which only four were stacked and only three were completed, next to the type ship Wilhelm Bauer only the Waldemar Kophamel and the slightly larger Otto wishes . The three ships were the largest fleet tenders in the Navy.
Construction and technical data
The ship was at the 1937 Howaldtswerke Navy shipyard in Kiel placed on the stack, was there on 20 December 1938 by the stack and was put into service on 30 April 1940th It was 132.7 m long (126.2 m in the waterline ) and 16 m wide, had a draft of 4.97 m and displaced 5600 t . It was armed with four (from 1944 only two) 10.5-cm L / 45 flak , from 1944 one 4-cm flak Bofors , two 3.7-cm flak and four (from 1944 twelve) 2-cm flak. The crew numbered 289 men and the ship accommodated up to 423 submarine crews. Two propellers and four MAN - diesel engines with a total of 12,400 horsepower gave the ship a top speed of 20.5 knots . The range of action was 9,000 nautical miles at a cruising speed of 15 knots.
fate
The ship initially served with the technical training group for front submarines ("Agrufront") and from July 1940 on with the 27th U-Flotilla . In March 1945 the 25th U-Flotilla came into being . Soon afterwards, on April 8, 1945, it was sunk in Travemünde by hits from British aerial bombs . The wreck was lifted in 1950/51 and then broken up.
literature
- Erich Gröner , Dieter Jung, Martin Maass: The German warships 1815-1945, Volume 4: Auxiliary ships I: workshop ships, tenders and escort ships, tankers and suppliers. Bernard & Graefe, 1986, ISBN 978-3-7637-4803-7 .
- Siegfried Breyer: Special and special ships of the Kriegsmarine (I). Marine-Arsenal, Volume 30, Podzun-Pallas-Verlag, Eggolsheim-Bammersdorf, 1995, ISBN 3-7909-0523-2 .