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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday to look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday, June 12, 2024: Good ol’ Walrus Skull

Above we see the humble little inspektionsskibet (inspection ship) Ingolf of the Royal Danish Navy at anchor in Umanak (Uummannaq), Greenland in the summer of 1934, some 90 years ago.

She was a brawler for her type and task, and if you look closely at the front of her wheelhouse, you just may see her unofficial ship’s mascot, a walrus skull. 

Meet Ingolf

Ingolf was ordered in 1932 with inspiration drawn from the large inspection ship Hvidbjornen (1,050 t, 196 feet oal, 2x87mm, 1 aircraft, 14 knots, circa 1928).

Our subject’s name comes from the Old Norse name Ingólfr, meaning the wolf of the king Yngvi. The Dane had previously used the name several times, most recently for an iron-hulled sail-rigged steam schooner cruiser (skonnert-krydseren) that, commissioned in the 1870s, had spent the last two decades of her life as a training ship and polar exploration/survey vessel before retiring in 1926.

It was (and is) a popular boy’s name, including for use in the Danish royal family.

Constructed in Copenhagen at Orlogsværftet, the Danish naval shipyard, Ingolf was officially a fishery protection vessel intended for service off Greenland, Iceland (a Danish dependency until WWII) and the Faeroes Islands. However, she was a decent little gunboat by any measure.

With some 1,180 tons standard displacement, she ran 213 feet overall with a tubby (roughly 6:1 ratio) 35-foot beam and the capability of floating in just 16 feet of water. Powered by two Thornycroft boilers driving a VTE engine, she could make 16.5 knots on a single screw.

Her main battery consisted of a pair of 4.7-inch P.K. L45 M.32 mounts in shielded turrets fore and aft, a single 57mm L40 M.1885 gun, two 20mm/56 Madsen Rek. K. AAA guns, and two 8mm Madsen light machine guns.

The crew was just 66 men, of which a light platoon-sized landing/survey party could be spared for work ashore in her remote patrol area. The ship carried several whaleboats and survey ships for the task.

Amazing for her size, she was designed from the outset to carry an armed floatplane, which would be craned off and on for operations. More on this later.

Going well beyond Hvidbjornen, when compared to the five other Danish G-I-F fisheries protection/survey flotilla vessels that routinely sailed from Denmark to patrol those waters– Hejmdal (705 t, 175 feet oal, 2x75mm, 13 knot, circa 1935), Beskytteren (389 t, 143 feet oal, 1x57mm, 2x37mm, 11.8 knots, circa 1900), Hejmdal (817 t, 174 feet oal, 2x75mm, 12 kts, circa 1935), Islands Falk (730 t, 183 feet oal, 2x75mm, 2x47mm, 13 knots, circa 1907) and Freja (322 t, 124 feet oal, 2x75mm, 10 knots, circa 1938)– Ingolf was by far the largest, fastest, and strongest of the lot.

It was also intended to use her as a kadetskib, or school ship for naval cadets, a role her old schooner cruiser namesake had often filled.

Commissioned on 23 April 1934, he had an almost idyllic life, at least until 1939. 

Aircraft

Throughout her service, Ingolf and her smaller OPV companion, Hvidbjornen, would carry two types of light scout or torpedoflyet (torpedo-carrying) aircraft.

The first of these was the Heinkel H.E.8, of which the Danish Marinens Flyvevæsen bought (8) or built from kits (16) two dozen between 1928 and 1938. Classed by the Versailles-restricted Heinkel as two-seat “mail planes” they were easily modified to carry two Madsen light machine guns (one fixed forward-firing, one flexible) and eight hardpoints for small 28-pound bombs.

The second, and by far more formidable, floatplane used by the Danes from our subject was the Hawker Dantorp H.B. III, a type made specifically for the Danish Navy in 1933. Powered by an 850 hp Armstrong Siddeley Leopard IIIA air-cooled 14-cylinder twin-row radial engine– the most powerful radial engine in the world at the time– the three-place scout bomber carried a forward firing Vickers machine gun, a flexible Lewis gun for the gunner/radio operator, and up to 1,500 pounds of bombs or a single torpedo.

War!

Under the command of CDR Christian Vilhelm Evers (Søofficerskolen 1913) WWII began with Ingolf at the disposal of the Danish naval academy and would remain tasked with training cadets, along with her near sister, Hvidbjørnen.

With the socialist government neutering the Danish forces even before the relatively bloodless German invasion in April 1940.

Ingolf, like much of the Danish fleet, was unable to get off a shot before the government capitulated.

Of course, that didn’t stop extensive Free Danish forces from being formed overseas, most of the Danish merchant marine to sail for the Allies– over 5,000 Danish merchant sailors manned over 800,000 tons of shipping for the Allies, many never to be seen again– and the training ship Danmark, in the U.S. in 1940, to train over 5,000 Americans for while operating for the USCG. Two small Danish Navy fisheries patrol boats, Maagen and Ternen, were in Greenland and would serve the Allies.

While sidelined and fundamentally interned in their own country by the occupying German forces, Ingolf and Hvidbjørnen were one of the few vessels allowed to cruise inside Denmark’s territorial waters as they were still allowed to train cadets. Of course, this was done with empty magazines and near-empty bunkers. 

Thus, they were afloat in the Storebælt (Great Belt)– strait between the islands of Zealand and Funen on 29 August 1943 when the Danish Admiralty flashed orders at 0408 to scuttle or make for Sweden. The Germans had begun their Operation Safari to disarm and disband the remnants of the Danish military. However, before they could reach Swedish waters, they were intercepted by the German minesweeper M 413 and torpedo boat T 18. 

CDR Evers and his crew tried to sink Ingolf by opening the sea valves and wreck her equipment but were stopped before the job was complete by the Germans who, according to reports, boarded and took hostages from among the cadets.

Meanwhile, Hvidbjørnen was more successful and was wrecked.

Limping to nearby Korsor, the Danish crews were interned and the proud Ingolf seized.

When the internment sites were closed in October 1943 the enlisted men were paroled although some officers remained in custody or were deported to Germany. Most of those let go subsequently took to a range of resistance activities.

The Germans renamed Ingolf as Sleipnir, then she was used as a flottentender from January 1943 and later bombed in the last months of the war during Allied air raids in Kiel. Leaking, she was towed out to Heikendorf on the east side of the Kieler Fjord, where she sank.

She was later scrapped post-war.

Epilogue

CDR Evers, who commanded Ingolf from 1934-36 and 1939-43, retired from the Navy in August 1945, sat on the board of several Danish utility companies into the 1960s, and passed in 1967, aged 80. He was buried with full military honors at Holsteinborg cemetery

Post-war, the Royal Danish Navy would recycle the name for a second Inspektionsskibet Ingolfs (F350) which was in commission from 1962 to 1991. A 1,700-ton Hvidbjørnen class OPV armed with depth charges and a 76mm cannon, the little 239-foot vessel had both a hangar and flight deck for, first, a French Alouette III, and later a British Westland Lynx helicopter.

Notably, members of the old crew from the circa 1934 Inspektionsskibet Ingolfs visited the new ship with the same moniker in April 1984, posing with the vessel’s embarked Lynx militærhelikopter, S.181.

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Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

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