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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

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Warship Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024: Danish E-Boat Days

Above we see a great Royal Danish Navy recruiting poster from 1951 by Aage Rasmussen. Reading roughly, “A healthy life. A future – become a naval officer,” it shows a well-dressed lieutenant in the Danish RN style uniform, complete with Marineglas 6×30 binos produced by Carl Zeiss.

You may find the planing torpedo boat– the hull number, P558, makes it Musvaagen— in the poster’s foreground familiar. We’ll get into that.

The Danish TB Saga

Denmark loved fast torpedo boats probably longer than any other naval force in history, fielding no less than 108 of them between 1879 and 2000.

As we have touched on with a past Warship Wednesday (“A Tough Little Wolf”) which focused on the Great War-era Søridderen and Tumleren classes, the country had 17 such TBs on hand going into 1914.

During WWI, the country managed to construct 10 further vessels of the 126-foot Springeren class, the last two of which were finished in 1919. This allowed the country, interbellum, to retire elderly boats left over from the late 19th Century.

By 1929, six big (195-foot) and well-armed Dragen/Glenten-class torpedo boats began entering service, which gave enough breathing room to the Danish admiralty to finally put the last of their pre-1914 TBs (the six members of the Søridderen and Tumleren classes) to pasture, and downgrade the Springeren-class to fast mine warfare vessels (capable of both laying and sweeping).

Then came WWII.

Denmark entered the conflict in 1939 the same way it had in the First World War, as a neutral. To enforce this neutrality on the sea, she had the aforementioned Dragen/Glenten TBs in her fleet– balancing several small gunboats, 10 fast minesweepers (the old Springeren-class TBs, sans torpedoes), four submarines, the training cruiser (artilleriskib) Niels Juel, and the old bathtub battleship (kystforsvarsskib) Peder Skram.

Ordered not to resist when the Germans blitzkrieged through the country in April 1940, and then largely disarmed, the Danish Navy was further humiliated by its government and ordered to “lease” their beautiful Dragen/Glentens to the occupier in February 1941. The Kriegsmarine used them as U-boat support ships and torpedo retrievers, numbered TFA1 through TFA6.

One, TFA3 (ex-Dragen) was lost to a mine, while the other five were in condemned condition by the end of the war.

Post-war, the Danish Navy, which had committed ritual scuttling in 1943 to escape German capture, only had a single torpedo boat left, Havkatten, a circa 1920 member of the Springeren class had been able to escape to Sweden and returned home in 1945 as the flagship of the Free Danish Brigade’s 133-member flotilla (Den Danske Flotille).

Officially rerated in the 1930s as a minesweeper, Havkatten only had a single 17.7-inch torpedo tube still mounted in her bow– but no torpedoes!

Besides Havkatten, the Danish flotilla at VE Day only contained three small 80-foot coastal mine boats (MS 1, MS 7, and MS29), each with a 12-man crew and armed with a 20mm cannon, nine even smaller coast guard launches with 5-man crews, and the 41-foot motor launch Fandango, with the latter types only armed with small caliber machine guns.

Schnellboote Solution!

Looking to get back into the TB business after WWII, the easiest way to pull this off was for the Danes to get reparations in the form of former Kriegsmarine Schnellboote, or E and S-boats in Allied parlance.

The Danes had the hulk of one, S116, on hand already in 1945.

As chronicled by Die Schnellboote Seite, beginning in early 1947, OMGUS, the U.S. occupation government in Germany, authorized the sale of 10 scratch-and-dent German E-boats collected at Bremerhaven for $80,000. With that also came whatever 21-inch torpedoes and parts could be scrounged.

Copenhagen kept reaching out concerning similar boats and obtained four more from U.S. stores in 1948, and another four from the British.

In 1951, the Danes picked up six E-boats from Norway, where they had been in coastal service.

Ultimately, the Danes would own no less than 22 former German E-boats and eventually get 18 of them working.

The first operational, appropriately dubbed Glenten (T51), formerly the Kriegsmarine’s S306, entered service in July 1947, and those that followed are typically known as the Glenten class in Denmark even though the boats came from several slightly different German classes. Meanwhile, in English-speaking sources, these are often broken down by former German sub-classes: Glenten/T51/S170, Gribben/T52/S38, and Havørnen/T53/S139.

See table:

German Number	German class, builder	Entered Service	Seized By	Norwegian Name	Danish Name	Entered Danish Service	Danish Number
S15	S14 Lürssen	27 February 1937	USN	N/A	(Cannibalized)	(1947)	T46
S115	S109 Schlichting	30 May 1942	UK	N/A	(Cannibalized)	(1947)
S116	S109 Schlichting	4 July 1942	Denmark	N/A	(Cannibalized)	(1945)
S122	S26 Schlichting	21 February 1943	UK	N/A	(Cannibalized)	(1947)
S306	S151 Lürssen	Incomplete	USN	N/A	Glenten	07/31/1947	P551 (T51)
S107	S26 Schlichting	6 July 1941	USN	N/A	Gribben	04/15/1948	P552 (T52)
S216	S151 Lürssen	27 December 1944	USN	N/A	Havoarnen	11/19/1948	P553 (T53)
S133	S26 Schlichting	31 December 1943	USN	N/A	Hærfuglen	03/21/1949	P554 (T54)
S206	S151 Lürssen	31 August 1944	USN	N/A	Hoegen	03/28/1949	P555 (T55)
S127	S26 Schlichting	10 July 1943	USN	N/A	Isfuglen	07/08/1949	P556 (T56)
S305	S301 Lürssen	29 March 1945	USN	N/A	Jagtfalken	07/08/1949	P557 (T57)
S79	S26 Lürssen	27 June 1942	Norway	N/A	Musvaagen	07/15/1950	P558 (T58)
S196	S171 Lürssen	3 July 1944	UK	N/A	Raagen	11/01/1949	P559 (T59)
S97	S26 Lürssen	25 March 1943	USN	N/A	Ravnen	01/10/1953	P560 (T60)
S207	S171 Lürssen	19 September 1944	UK	N/A	Skaden	10/07/1950	P561 (T61)
S64	S26 Lürssen	2 November 1941	USN	Lyn (1947)	Stormfuglen	10/08/1953	P562
S303	S301 Lürssen	24 February 1945	USN	E2, Brann	Taarnfalken	05/12/1952	P563
S85	S26 Lürssen	7 December 1942	USN	Storm	Tranen	11/03/1955	P564
S302	S301 Lürssen	12 February 1945	USN	E1, Blink	Falken	02/07/1953	P565
S117	S109 Schlichting	8 August 1942	USN	B97, Tross	Hejren	01/05/1956	P566
S195	S171 Lürssen	10 July 1944	USN	E3, Kjekk	Lommen	04/21/1955	P567
S68	S26 Lürssen	1 July 1942	USN	N/A	Viben	11/03/1955	P568 (T62)

By late 1954, the fleet reached its zenith, with 15 former German E-boats in active service, a full decade after WWII ended.

As acquired by the Danes, most of these boats had two 21-inch forward torpedo tubes- the first time the Danish Navy went with such large fish– with two torps loaded and room for a reload, giving them the capability to carry four torps. War-surplus German G7 straight runners were used.

Deck-mounted armament at first typically consisted of anywhere from two to five 20mm/65 Flak C30/C38s. The guns were classified as the Mk M/39 LvSa in Danish service. The boats also had some capability to run a few mines and/or depth charges on stern racks.

With all the E-boats running 114 feet in length on similar hulls, the force was all powered by a trio of Daimler-Benz diesels, albeit in three different variants across the classes. Even the slower models could still touch 38 knots at a full clip, at least for the length of a couple of attack runs, while the zestier of the herd could log 45. Their range was typically 700 miles, more than enough to cover the narrow Kattegat and Skagerrak straits. 

By 1951, with NATO standardization, the Danish E-boats started landing their German-made flak guns in favor of, first, a single 40mm/60 Mk M/36 Bofors aft, and then by late 1955 an improved new Swedish-made 40mm/70 Bofors SAK 315 single (M/48 LvSa in Danish service) as well a U.S. supplied 20 mm/70 Mark 7 Oerlikon (Mk M/42 LvSa) forward.

Likewise, they received a small surface search radar and NATO pennant numbers, transitioning from the Danish T series (e.g. T54) to the NATO P series (e.g. P554).

In Danish service, these craft typically had 22 member crews including two officers, two petty officers, and 18 ratings.

In Danish service, boats were originally in a grey/green livery but the country did experiment with a flash white scheme as well.

Our subjects were augmented in service by 10 brand-new Danish-built Flyvefisken and Falken-class vessels, which were constructed at Copenhagen based on a scaled-up 118-foot version of the German design they had been working with since 1945.

The first to be decommissioned by the Danes, Hærfuglen (ex-S133), Isfuglen (ex-S127), and Musvaagen (ex-S79) were all early boats with smaller diesels and were pulled from service in November 1954. Speed was everything with these boats, after all.

By 1960, the Danes still had 11 left in service. Via the 1960-61 Janes:

However, all things fast eventually run out of time, and by September 1965, the last, Viben (ex-S68), was withdrawn, capping some 20 years of E-boat fun under the Dannebrog.

Epilogue

None of the Danish-operated E-boats survive. 

Supplemented by the newer Flyvefisken and Falken-class near-sisters, they were replaced by a half-dozen of the Soloven (British Vosper Brave-Ferocity type). Short boats at just 98 feet, they carried four torpedo tubes and could reach a paint-peeling 50 knots.

Finally, in 1974 the Danish Navy introduced their penultimate torpedo boat, the 10 ships of the Willemoes class. Sleek 139-footers running on Rolls-Royce Proteus gas turbines, they could make 40 knots and carry a combination of Harpoon AShW missiles, up to six torpedo tubes for modern wire-guided torpedoes, and a 76mm OTO Melera.

The Willemoes would remain in service until 2000.

The end of an era.

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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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