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So long, Mighty U

Posted on October 10, 2025 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

Some 80 years ago today, one of the longest-serving yet oft-forgotten vessels in American maritime service was finally retired.

On 10 October 1945, the 190-foot Miami-class cruising cutter Unalga (WPG-53) was decommissioned, capping 33 years of unbroken service that began in 1912 with the old Revenue Cutter Service.

Serving with the Navy directly during the Great War, she went back to walking the beat and rejoined the Navy for WWII, first in conducting antisubmarine patrols under the auspices of the Commandant, 10th Naval District, then as a floating target ship for the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Training Center in Melville, Rhode Island.

Former crewman Merle L. Harbourt, in a 15 May 1992 letter to the USCG Historian’s Office, wrote about Unalga during the cutter’s second world war:

She never sank a submarine nor shot down a plane, but there is one old ship that I served in that should get some mention simply because she survived. The former Revenue Cutter Unalga, or ‘Mighty U’ as she was not too affectionately referred to by her crew, is a case study in unpreparedness.

As memory serves, the Unalga was commissioned in 1912 as a vessel of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service. I joined her in June of 1941 when she was home ported in San Juan, P.R. She was powered by a four-cylinder triple expansion reciprocating steam engine, which Lt. L. M. Thayer (later to be RADM Thayer), our engineering officer, was intent upon her maintenance since she was forever snapping piston rings.

Shortly before the outbreak of WWII, we painted her gray and limbered up our armament, one three-inch twenty-three caliber mount on the fore deck. We were tied up in San Juan, at the still-existing buoy depot, when December 7th became a day of infamy.

We served as Harbor Entrance Control Vessel for San Juan for a period and then were pressed into service to haul aviation gasoline from Puerto Rico (Ponce) to Charlotte Amalie, Virgin Islands, in 55-gallon drums stacked all over the main deck, to provide fuel for the Marine air station. The small tanker that had formerly provided that service was shelled and sunk by a sub earlier. Later, without the benefit of radar or sonar, we assisted in the escort of ships between Trinidad and Cuba, convoys that sometimes got away from us during darkness or heavy rains.

My humorous tales of life on that old ship are endless. Like the time when we thought we might be facing a German Q boat, or raider, and .30 caliber rifles were issued to a few crewmembers. And us with one snub-nose three-inch cannon! Or the time when, after sonar installation, we thought we had a sub contact, dropped a pattern of depth charges, and the main engine stopped. The vacuum had been lost. If we were in the vicinity of a sub, he probably thought we wouldn’t make it back to port anyway and didn’t waste a fish.”

She wasn’t quite finished, though.

Sold on 19 July 1946 for her value as floating scrap, she was renamed Ulua and then participated in the immigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine, past the British naval blockade.

Blockade-runner Ulua (former Unalga) tied up pier side at Marseille, France, December 1946

Warship Wednesday, October 1, 2025: Small Ship, Big Heroes

Posted on October 1, 2025 by laststandonzombieisland One comment

Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period, profiling 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

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi As Henk says: “Warship Coffee – no sugar, just a pinch of salt!”

Warship Wednesday, October 1, 2025: Small Ship, Big Heroes

Courtesy of the International Naval Research Organization, via the Naval Historical and Heritage Command. NH 87370

Above we see the gleaming S. M. Schiffes Zenta, the class leader of a trio of third-class protected cruisers in the Austro-Hungarian Navy, the Kuk Kriegsmarine, early in her career.

Some 125 years ago, she helped carve out a piece of China for Kaiser Franz Josef, then went on to make a heroic footnote in the history of naval warfare.

The Zentas

Our subject was the lead ship of the Zenta-class cruisers, which included the follow-on half sisters SMS Aspern and SMS Szigetvar. I say “half sisters” as all three ships in the class, while they were built successively by the Austrian Marinearsenal in Pola, were evolutionarily different. For instance, whereas Zenta’s displacement was 2,500 tons (full), Aspern ran 2,625 tons, and Szigetvar 2,562. Zenta was 10 feet shorter than her sisters and had a different rigging and mast arrangement, carrying a topmast on her fore as she was rigged for auxiliary sails.

Brassey’s plans for “Kreuzer A” or “Ersatz Grief,” which became Zenta. Note the sail rig and ram bow.

A more fleshed-out version.

Zenta was also the slowest of her class, capable of 19.5 knots on 7,200 shp, while her sisters could hit 20.8 knots, with the latter pair running 8,160 shp. They used eight coal-fed Yarrow boilers to feed two 4-cylinder VTE engines made by Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino, the Austrian navy’s chief machinery firm and maker of a dozen battleships for the dual monarchy.

Armament consisted of an eight-gun main battery of Skoda-made 4.7″ L/40 SC.96 guns (six in casemates, two open mounts on the main deck) backed up by a secondary anti-boat battery of 10 Hotchkiss/Skoda 47mm 33/44 3-pounders and a couple of Skoda M1893 8mm machine guns. As an anti-ship armament, they carried two above-water 17.7-inch torpedo tubes on the beam, using domestically produced Whitehead torpedoes.

SMS Zenta, Schiessübungen, 1903, with one of her 4.7″ L/40 Skodas in action. Note the “SMS Zenta” stencil on the life ring attached to the bridge wing.

47 mm S.F.K. L/44 gun. Image from Škoda Catalog ca. 1900 courtesy of András Hatala, via Navweaps.

Two of Zenta’s sailors pose by one of her Salvator-Dormus (Skoda) M1893 8mm machine guns. Designed by no less than Archduke Karl Salvator of Austria, they used a delayed blowback action and could fire about 180 rounds per minute from a top-mounted 20 or 30-round fixed magazine. These guns could be dismounted and, heavy at 65 pounds, could be married up to a stored landing carriage and shield for use ashore.

Armor was very thin, even for a light cruiser, ranging from 35mm at the casemates to 50mm over the conning tower.

It was estimated that the cost of these ships was £150,000 each.

Jane’s 1914 listing for the class.

Meet Zenta

All three ships of the class were named after famous battles in Austro-Hungary’s past. Our subject remembered the 1697 Battle of Zenta (Senta) with the Habsburg forces under Prince Eugene of Savoy, crushing an Ottoman force twice its size. The official state seal of Grand Sultan Mustafa II, humiliatingly captured along with over 9,000 Ottoman baggage carts full of supplies and bounty after the battle, can be viewed today in the Museum of Military History (Heeresgeschichtliches) in Vienna.

Depiction of the Battle of Senta 1697 by Jan van Huchtenburgh c. 1725.

Our ship was laid down at Pola on 8 August 1896 and launched into the Adriatic the following summer on 18 August 1897.

The future protected cruiser SMS Zenta during her launch (Stapellauf) at Pola.

Fitting out took nearly two further years, and she was commissioned on 15 May 1899. Her sisters joined her in 1900 and 1901, respectively.

Zenta. Courtesy of the International Naval Research Organization. NH 87372

Zenta. Courtesy of the International Naval Research Organization. NH 87371

Far Eastern Service

The Austrian fleet had dispatched units overseas to protect its interests during the Spanish-American War in 1898. For instance, the 6,000-ton armored cruiser SMS Kaiserin und Königin Maria Theresia was dispatched to Cuba and came close enough to American battle lines that she was almost engaged twice.

Kuk armored cruiser SMS KAISERIN und KÖNIGIN MARIA THERESIA sails past Morro Castle, Havana, 1898, by August Ramberg

With growing tensions in the Far East after the Japanese humiliation of the Manchu Chinese Dynasty in 1895 and the U.S. fighting for control of the former Spanish colony of the Philippines, the newly completed Zenta, under Fregattenkapitän (Commander) Eduard Thomann von Montalmar, was almost immediately dispatched to the Pacific after shakedowns.

Zenta in Hong Kong, taken by Friedrich Carl Peetz, Duke University Repository

By March 1900, Zenta had arrived at China station in the Yellow Sea. Pier side at Sasebo, Japan, on 30 May, von Montalmar received orders via the Austrian legation in Tokyo to return to China and provide a detachment of armed sailors to protect the threatened legation in Peking, which was being increasingly threatened by Boxers. After confirming the orders with the admiralty, she left on 31 May at close to maximum speed, arriving at the Taku Forts on the morning of 2 June.

SMS Zenta at the Taku Anchorage (Taku-Rhede) by Alex Kircher

As the Austrian charge d’ affaires in Peking, Arthur von Rosthorn, wanted to speak directly to the ship’s skipper personally, von Montalmar, four junior officers (two dressed in mufti so as not to surpass the number of “military” personnel allowed to travel into the interior by Chinese officials) and 25 armed sailors landed and went by train in company with a force of 51 German marines and sailors to Peking, arriving on 3 June. In addition to protecting the Austrian legation, a midshipman and eight sailors were loaned to protect the Belgian envoy, who had no guards of his own.

Austrian Marines (armed sailors), likely from Zenta, marching in Tientsin (Tianjin), after their arrival, 1900. National Archives, Kew NA03-08.

Well prepared, each of Zenta’s armed sailors carried a Steyr-Mannlicher bolt-action rifle and 500 rounds, along with eight days of “iron” rations. On 5 June, the rail line from Teinstein to Peking was cut, and soon the assembled 400~ members of the eight international forces would defend the legations from Boxers and Chinese soldiers during a 55-day siege (20 June 20 through 14 August) with von Montalmar killed by an enemy grenade on 8 July. Three of Zenta’s crew were also killed in action in the Quarter: Josef Dettan (on 25 June), Marcus Badurina-Peric (26 June), and Afred Tavagna (29 June).

One happy coincidence was that it was found that some of the Chinese troops used Mannlicher rifles of the same caliber, and their captured cartridges could easily be put to use. This also allowed the Austrian sailors to loan rifles to the ammunition-strapped Russian contingent, who had only marched to Peking with 60 cartridges in their pouches.

Supporting the so-called Seymour Expedition led by by British VADM Sir Edward Hobart Seymour, a lieutenant and two midshipmen from Zenta, along with 73 additional sailors (keep in mind Zenta only had a 300-man crew!) joined Seymour’s 2,127-strong force drawn from the assorted ships crowding under the Taku forts, with the idea to force the way to Peking via Tientsin and relieve the Legation Quarter.

Seymour’s expedition, 1900 Boxer rebellion

In the resulting land combat along the road and railways, one of Zenta’s sailors, Josef Deste, was killed in action on 22 June while storming the Great Hsi-Ku Arsenal eight miles northwest of Tientsin.

While Zenta had detachments fighting for their lives in Peking and on the roads outside of Tientsin, she coughed up even more men for service ashore in storming the Taku Forts, where 40 modern guns threatened the growing Western flotilla should the Chinese navy enter the fray.

A detachment of 21 Austrian sailors, under Midshipman Stenner and joined by a young 20-year-old Midshipman 2cl Georg von Trapp, joined a larger German force under Capt. Pohl to seize the Northwest Taku fort on the morning of 17 June. The force also wound up capturing the South Fort, where the Austrian flag was raised.

Erstürmung von taku by Fritz Neumann, Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection

Erstürmung der Takuforts durch österr kuk Austrian SMS Zenta

While the two other landing parties from Zenta had suffered deaths, the Taku Fort group survived its battle without a loss.

The Zenta men of the failed Seymour Expedition and the Taku group then assembled a 55-man platoon to join the 14,000-strong Russian/Japanese-led relief force that ultimately lifted the Peking Siege in August. They carried with them the ship’s two Skoda machine guns.

Skoda M1893 machine guns on carriage and limber. Zenta’s crew used two of these in their work ashore during the taking of the Taku forts. This image, from a circa 1902 U.S. Army report, may actually be of our cruiser’s guns seen in China.

A week after the siege was broken, a 160-strong force from the Austrian cruisers SMS Aspern and Kaiserin und Königin Maria Theresia, arrived in Peking on 20 August, relieving the Zenta men, who returned to the coast to rejoin their ship. In late July 1901, she departed Chefu (Zhifu) to the sounds of the Radetzky march being played.

She finally arrived back in Pola on 1 October 1901 and was awarded a silk flag of honor for her Chinese actions.

Von Trapp, promoted to a Midshipman 1c, received the Silberne Tapferkeitsmedaille II. Klasse and the War Medal before he was commissioned as a Fregattenleutnant (frigate lieutenant, equivalent to sub-lieutenant) in May 1903. He soon transferred into the budding Austrian submarine corps.

The late von Montalmar was regarded as a hero back home.

Zenta in her dark grey livery. Photographed at Pola on 1 October 1901 upon her return from East Asia. Courtesy of the International Naval Research Organization. NH 87366

Zenta in her dark grey livery. Photographed at Pola on 1 October 1901 upon her return from East Asia. Courtesy of the International Naval Research Organization. NH 87367

Zenta in her dark grey livery. Courtesy of the International Naval Research Organization. NH 87368

Salad Days

After a refit, Zenta spent the next 12 years in a series of fleet maneuvers, yard periods, and flag-waiving cruises, including a 12-month trip along the coasts of Africa and South America in 1902-03.

Austro-Hungarian light cruiser SMS Zenta in November 1902 off Zanzibar

SMS Zenta Aquatortaufe, 1903 crossing equator shellback ceremony

By 1905, she was relegated increasingly to a role as a torpedo boat flotilla leader, receiving a wireless set for that purpose. She also joined a series of international naval demonstrations in the Mediterranean as the region descended into a swirling series of wars in North Africa and the Balkans.

Zenta, with her laundry aloft. Courtesy of the International Naval Research Organization. NH 87369

A (Short) Great War service

Under the command of Fregattenkapitän Paul Pachner, when August 1914 came, Zenta was the leader of six Austrian torpedo boats tasked with blockading the rocky Montenegrin coast, in particular the Montenegrin port of Antivari (now Bar). In support were Zenta’s sister Szigetvar, the old 5,000-ton coast-defense ship SMS Monarch, the equally old 1,500-ton torpedo cruiser SMS Panther, and three destroyers.

On the morning of 16 August, just over two weeks into the war, a combined Anglo-French squadron of two 25,000-ton Courbet class dreadnoughts, each packing a dozen 12-inch guns, joined by 10 smaller pre-dreadnoughts, seven cruisers, and more than 20 destroyers, swooped down on Zenta, cruising alongside the humble Austrian destroyer Ulan.

While Pachner, whose trapped ship was outgunned by almost any of the British or French ships in the squadron save for the destroyer, cleared his decks for action and turned into the fray– ordering her companion Ulan to flee northward and alert the rest of the Austrian fleet.

It was over in less than 20 minutes, with Courbet smothering the attacking Austrian cruiser with 12-inch shells, sending her to the bottom some four miles off the coast of Castellastua, reportedly with her flags still flying. At least 173 of her crew perished, while none of Zenta’s shells were observed to land within 400 yards of the closest French ship. However, the French did have three of their guns burst during the exchange, leaving a sour taste in the mouths of the French Admiralty.

As noted by French VADM Amedee Bienaime

The destruction of this small cruiser of 2,500 tons, which stood unprotected for twenty minutes under the scattered fire of our entire fleet, cost 500 large-caliber shells and the loss of two 24-centimeter and one 19-centimeter guns. The same result could have been achieved by a single armored cruiser in five minutes, with a few well-aimed shots. I must say that, compared with the efforts made to achieve it, this result is not at all satisfactory.

After about six hours of swimming, 139 battered and waterlogged survivors reached the Sveta Neđelja reef just off the Montenegro coast and were rounded up that afternoon by local troops sent in by boat. Austrian propaganda at the time claimed that they were initially pushed back into the water with bayonet charges by the Montenegrins and drowned.

Celebrity status

The battle was celebrated in Austria during the war, with a number of heroic portrayals circulated widely in periodicals and postcards.

Arthur Thiele, Zenta

Der Heldenkampf der Zenta J Huemesser 10CB2B93

Der Heldenkampf der Zenta Ulan J Huemesser Sammlung 39240_2 1-2

Painting showing SMS Zenta and SMS Ulan in action on 16 August 1914, by Harry Heusser via Illustrirte Zeitung 1915, wiki

Wien Museum Online Sammlung 39742_3

“Im Heizraum der Zenta vor dem Untergang.” (in the boiler room of the ‘Zenta’ before the sinking). By Harry Heusser, Kriegspostkarte, 1915. Wien Museum

Zenta postcard Arthur Thiele

Zenta and Ulan by Ákos Bánfalvy

Wien Museum Online Sammlung 39755_8 1-2

There was even a popular song, “The Bold Heroes of the Zenta” (Die kuhnen helden der Zenta), by Greiffenstein and Bunnieitner, Vienna, that was circulated.

The phrase “Pflichtgetreu bis in den Tod” means “Faithful to duty until death,”

The rough translation:

The waves in the blue sea, roaring and cheering…

The wondrous brave heroes of the “Zenta”!

A small cross marks the “Zenta” now, but look in the future…

The brave heroes of the “Zenta.”

The French fleet came into sight, but no one’s face turned pale,

The brave heroes of the “Zenta.”

They landed the anchors so fresh and bold,

That it seemed and hailed hostile…

The brave heroes of the “Zenta.”

The Frenchman then stood up in horror:

“Such brave heroes we have never seen!”

Those were the men of the “Zenta.”

But one thing was certain: That is the end;

The cruiser thundered in defiance,

But never the men of the “Zenta.”

They sank down deep from the flood,

Their banner still shines in the sun’s glow;

The men of the “Zenta” cheer.

We sing and cheer in God’s name:

To the Emperor, to the Reich a thunderous

The brave heroes of the “Zenta.” Hurrah!”

Lock up

At the same time, our lost cruiser and her crew were celebrated in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; her surviving 139 marooned officers and men were cooling their heels in a Montenegrin prison camp in Podgorica.

When that Balkan country was overrun by the Central Powers in January 1916, knocking it out of the war, the Zenta men were liberated.

Officers of the small cruiser SMS Zenta with two KuK flight officers after their release from the Montenegrin prisoner of war. (HM Hadtörténeti Intézet és Múzeum)

“Der Kommandant S. M. Schiffes Zenta nach Befreiung aus montenegrinischer Gefangenschaft” (The Commander of S. M. Ship “Zenta” after liberation from Montenegrin captivity) 1922 Pola postcard. Wien Museum

“Stab S. M. S. Zenta nach Befreiung aus montenegrinischer Gefangenschaft.” (Staff of S. M. S. Zenta after liberation from Montenegrin captivity) 1922 Pola postcard. Wien Museum

The 139 survivors returned to their old homeport of Pola aboard the 250-ton T-class torpedo boat, SMS 81T, one of Zenta’s old flotilla mates.

Austrian Torpedo Boat SMS 81T photographed returning to Pola with the freed crew of the sunken cruiser Zenta. In the background is a Battleship of the Habsburg class. NH 87683

Epilogue

Zenta’s survivors went back out to the Austrian fleet.

Pachner was never trusted by the Austrian Kriegsmarine with another seagoing command despite his “hero” status. He finished the war as a rear admiral manning a desk. After the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy, he went into merchant service and sailed on Yugoslav, Spanish, and Egyptian vessels, among others.

He moved back to his native Maribor (then in Yugoslavia) in poverty and died there in 1937, aged 66. His grave is simply marked “Fremder Seemann” (foreign sailor).

After the war, a group of her 1914 survivors returned to Montenegro in 1923 and paid for a chapel to be built on top of a cliff near the shore in the Bay of Kotor, to commemorate their escape.

Von Trapp, of course, became the most celebrated Austrian U-boat “ace” in history and is immortalized in The Sound of Music.

Zenta was discovered off the coast of Montenegro in 1996. The largest artificial reef in that country’s waters, she rests on a mud bottom at 240 feet, making her a destination for deep divers in touch with their decompression tables.

A pair of ornately decorated Chinese-made bronze cannon, with bores of 13.7 cm and 12.5 cm, respectively, dating to the Qing Dynasty, were captured during the Boxer Rebellion by the Austrian naval detachment (including von Trapp and the men of the Zenta) during the taking of the Taku Forts.

Looted from the Pei tang fortress, they were transported back to Europe as trophies and are currently on display at the HM Hadtörteneti Intezet es Muzeum in Budapest.

They were recently refurbished and given new mounts.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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War Pigeons on the Marne

Posted on August 29, 2025 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

110 years ago this week. 31 August 1915, along the Marne.

A French Brillié Schneider P3 model bus has been converted into a mobile pigeon coop (pigeonnier mobile) for the Army

Réf. : SPA 29 M 467. Albert Moreau/ECPAD/Défense

Pigeonnier militaire aménagé dans un bus Berliet à impériale

The French military’s use of pigeons for communication dates back to the War of 1870, after the Prussians besieged Paris, and citizens volunteered 300 of their birds.

The program reached its zenith during the Great War, with upwards of 30,000 pigeons used by the French alone.

Proving especially adept at avoiding “the Boche” during the country’s German occupation in WWII, the Resistance used another 16,500 SOE-supplied birds— which had been parachuted in as part of Operation Columbia! As the birds had been bred in England, once released by French underground cells, they quickly winged their way back home across the Channel to their coops, carrying brief but vital intel.

The French only officially ended their pigeon program in 1961 after the Algerian War.

However, since 2014, the 8th Signal Regiment (8e Régiment de Transmissions, 8e RT) has maintained a small in-house pigeon breeding program as a hedge on potential electromagnetic attacks that could disrupt other communication methods.

“La relève de nos pigeons voyageurs est assurée!”

Schlieffen, adjacent

Posted on August 18, 2025 by laststandonzombieisland One comment

Lt. Gen. Friedrich Von Boettcher, the new German military attaché to Washington, is seen reviewing the horse soldiers of the 14th U.S. Cavalry during his visit to the World’s Fair, Chicago, in August 1933. These troops were stationed at Camp John Whistler in the Fair Grounds.

Signal Corps photo 111-SC-99762. National Archives Identifier 329583324.

A former artillery officer in the Royal Saxon Army (Königlich Sächsische Armee), during the Great War, Von Boetticher transferred to the German General Staff and ended the war as a major, with two Iron Crosses and the Hohenzollern Ritterkreuz. A buddy of Von Seeckt, he served on numerous disarmament commissions and was the German military plenipotentiary to the League of Nations during the Weimar era, then as head of the German Army’s Artillery School at Jüterbog, before being transferred to D.C. in April 1933.

He remained in Washington as something of a terribly ineffective attaché until he and the remainder of the German legation were shown the door in early 1942– leaving his adult children in America. Arriving back in Germany, he served a series of quiet roles on the OKW, earning a Kriegsverdienstkreuz and a Ritterkreuz during WWII. Captured in 1945, he cooled his heels in a POW camp in Luxembourg in Bad Mondorf in the former Palace Hotel with many other high-ranking German military officers for two years, then retired.

Meanwhile, his son Friedrich joined the U.S. Army in 1944, went to Japan with the Occupation forces, and became a U.S. citizen in 1946. His youngest daughter, Hildegard, later married the British officer Captain Horace Marsden, and the couple emigrated to Canada in 1951. Ironically, his New York-born grandson, from his physician daughter Adelheid, became a U.S. Army doctor who served as a physician in a prisoner of war camp in Vietnam.

Post-war, Herr Von Boetticher rekindled relations with assorted American officers and worked on compiling historical resources. Assigned to the U.S. Army’s Military Foreign Studies Program until 1952, he undertook lecture tours to the States.

Von Boetticher was a noted author who wrote at least seven volumes of military history and theory. He was also a super fan of the late, great Prussian Field Marshal Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, besides penning three books on the man, going so far as to marry the man’s second granddaughter, Anna Josepha von Hanke, 25 years his junior, in 1953.

General der Artillerie von Boetticher died on 28 September 1967 in Bielefeld-Schildesche, aged 85.

Warship Wednesday, August 13, 2025: A Long-Lived Tyne Built Ship

Posted on August 13, 2025 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a 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, August 13, 2025: A Long-Lived Tyne Built Ship

Photo: Naval History and Heritage Command NH 58988

Above, we see the fine Armstrong-built Asama-class armored cruiser Tokiwa of the Imperial Japanese Navy photographed in 1899 with a bone in her teeth.

Amazingly, this indomitable warship would serve nearly a half-century and be lost during her fifth war for the emperor, some 80 years ago this week.

The Asamas

The late 19th/early century Imperial Japanese Navy was very European in construction. Ten out of ten battlewagons carrying the Rising Sun flag against the Russians in 1904 were built in the yards of Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Vickers in Britain.

Of the Emperor’s armored cruisers, Izumo and her sister Iwate came from Armstrong, Yakumo hailed from the German yard of AG Vulcan, Kasuga and Nisshin from Ansaldo in Genoa, and Azuma from Ateliers et Chantiers de la Loire in France. Ordered in 1897 alongside these six cruisers were another pair based on an improved design of the Chilean O’Higgins.

The Chilean armored cruiser O’Higgins was built in 1896-98 at Armstrong to the design of Sir Philip Watts for £700,000. The 8,500-ton 412-foot long three-piper could make 21.6 knots on a 30-boiler (16,250 ihp) plant and carried four 8″/40s and 10 6″/40s. She had a Harvey nickel steel armor belt that ranged from 5 to 7 inches, while her conning tower was protected with 8. She remained in Chilean service until 1933.

Sir Philip tweaked the one-off O’Higgins design to add more armor protection (2,100 tons all told) and horsepower to carry it all. Instead of a belt that maxed out at seven inches and the eight-inch CT, this new design rocked as much as 14 inches. It also used extensive compartmentalization with 163 watertight compartments, 32 of which were in the double bottom. This added 1,200 tons to the displacement and stretched the hull to 442 feet. The powerplant dropped the forest of 30 boilers seen on the Chilean ship for a dozen larger single-side cylindrical boilers and upped the ihp to 18,000 to keep the same (or better) speed.

Paid for out of a Chinese indemnity given to Japan as part of the spoils of the 1895 war, these two ships would be named Asama and Tokiwa, after traditional regions in the Empire.

The weaponry would also be stepped up a bit from O’Higgins.

While the Chilean ship carried four EOC 8″/40 Pattern T guns in single mounts, the new Asamas would carry two pairs of improved EOC 8″/45 Pattern U (41st Year Type in Japanese service) guns, the same type which would go on to be carried by the rest of Japan’s armored cruisers as well as the post Russo-Japanese War domestically built Ibuki-class armored cruisers. These were protected by six inches of armor over their gun houses and were serviced by electric hoists from the magazines.

Asama photographed during a visit to an American port between the wars. Note her 8″/45 forward turret. 80-G-188753

Asama photographed during a visit to an American port between the wars. Note her 8″/45 stern turret. 80-G-188754

The secondaries on the Asamas were also beefed up, from the 10 6″/40 QF EOCs on O’Higgins in five-inch turrets and casemates to 14 guns with 10 in casemates and four in single shielded mounts. Tertiary anti-boat armament included a dozen 3″/40 Armstrongs and seven 47/30 2.5-pounder Hotchkiss (Yamauchi) guns. Torpedo batteries included a 450mm tube in the bow and four on the beam. Likewise, two of her steam punts could be equipped with spar torpedoes.

The Asama class, 1914 Janes listing.

Meet Tokiwa

Laid down on 6 January 1898 at Elswick as Yard No. 662/armored cruiser No. 4 (her sister Asama was No. 661), Tokiwa took to the water on 6 July 1898 and was commissioned on 19 May 1899. She made a mean 23 knots on her speed trials.

Tokiwa conducting full power trials, Spring 1899, North Sea off Sunderland

On 19 May 1899, with Captain (later Admiral) Dewa Shigeto in command, Tokiwa left Britain for Yokosuka, completing the 11,000nm voyage in a handy 57 days– a heck of a shakedown cruise.

IJN Tokiwa Navy and Army Illustrated Feb. 10 1900

War (with China)!

Rated as a first-class cruiser, Tokiwa was dispatched on 19 June 1900 to join the Eight-Nation Alliance naval forces in Chinese waters during the Boxer Rebellion. While arriving around the time of the assault against the Taku Forts, she was not used in the assault there, standing by offshore with a dozen other large, allied vessels as smaller gunboats closed in for the work.

However, landing forces from the Japanese ships sent 329 armed sailors ashore to help storm and garrison the forts.

While 54 Japanese marines were dispatched as part of Admiral Seymour’s overland relief expedition to Peking, I can’t say whether any of those came from Tokiwa.

Admiral Seymour’s expedition: Japanese troops on the march by H. M. Koekkoch

Tokiwa returned to Kure on 20 August.

War (with Russia)!

Clustered with the armored cruisers Izumo, Iwate, Azuma, Yakumo, and Asama, along with the dispatch boat Chihaya, Tokiwa formed the 2nd Squadron under VADM Kamimura in 1903. This force proved a key left hook to the right cross of Togo’s 1st Squadron during the war against the Tsar.

Captain Shigetaro Yoshimatsu became Tokiwa’s eighth skipper on 19 January 1904. A professional officer who graduated from the Naval Academy in 1880, he had studied in France and England and fought as a gunnery officer on the second-class cruiser Yoshino during the 1894 war with China. He had been XO on Tokiwa’s sister Asama when she took part in the 1902 Spithead naval review celebrating the coronation of King Edward VII.

Tokiwa. Copied from “War Vessels of Japan,” circa 1905. NH 74381

Three Meiji-era armored cruisers at work. Iwate (left), Tokiwa (center), and Yakumo (right), from the 2nd Fleet during the late Russo-Japanese War. Of note, the 9,500-ton Yakumo was the only large German-built warship in the Japanese Navy, delivered in 1900 by AG Vulcan Stettin. Both Iwate and Tokiwa were built at Armstrong on the Tyne.

Offshore for the initial torpedo boat attack on the sleeping Russian anchorage at Port Arthur on 8 February 1904, she managed a few 8-inch shells lofted when the Russians sortied out the following morning, and thus began the blockade and later siege of that fortress city that would prove the hub on which the conflict revolved.

IJN Tokiwa in 1904

It was off that port that Tokiwa almost captured the Russian destroyer Steregushchiy in March and participated in rebuffing Marakov’s 13 April sortie that ended in his death upon the sinking of his flagship via mines.

Japanese destroyer IJN Sazanami, attempting to tow a sinking Steregushchiy, was lost in action against two Japanese cruisers, while Reshitel‘nyi managed to escape. In the fight, Reshitel‘nyi lost one killed and 16 injured– a third of her crew. William Lionel Wylie painting.

The Russian battleship Petropavlovsk sinks as Adm. Makarov stands bravely on deck. Tokiwa witnessed the scene. Japanese woodblock print

Relieved from the Port Arthur blockade in the summer 1904 to chase down a raiding trio of Russian armored cruisers (Rossia, Gromoboi, and Rurik) out of Vladivostok, Tokiwa, along with the armored cruisers Iwate, Izumo, and Azuma and protected cruisers Takachiho and Naniwa, finally clashed with the Russian cruisers off Ulsan on the early morning of 14 August. With the Russians outnumbered six hulls to three, the six-hour swirling artillery duel turned brutal, and Rurik was sunk, taking some 200 of her crew with her, while the severely damaged Rossia and Gromoboi managed to limp away.

Tokiwa landed some blows against Rossia and was slightly damaged by return fire, with three of her crew injured.

Rossia at Vladivostok after the Battle off Ulsan in August 1904. She suffered nearly 200 casualties from 28 hits delivered by the Japanese squadron, with a few of these coming from Tokiwa. Knocked out of the war for two months, her raiding career was capped.

Then, following the collapse of Port Arthur, came the Valkyrie ride of VADM Rozhestvensky’s 2nd Pacific (1st Baltic) Squadron through the straits of Tsushima. Tokiwa was there.

Battle of Tsushima. May 27, 1905, North of Oki Island. Following the 1st Squadron under the flag of Togo on Mikasa, a photograph was taken from the 2nd Squadron flagship Izumo, showing Azuma, Tokiwa, Yakumo, Asama, and Iwate turning to port at 15 knots.

During the battle, Tokiwa and her squadron engaged the Russians several times, most notably in the destruction of the 14,000-ton Peresvet-class battleship Oslyabya.

Death of the battleship Oslyabya in the Battle of Tsushima. (by Vasily Katrushenko)

When the smoke cleared, Tokiwa had suffered eight hits, mostly from smaller caliber shells, resulting in 15 casualties.

Post-war, she was a darling of the fleet, being chosen to escort Crown Prince Yoshihito (later Emperor Taisho) on his tour of Yamaguchi and Tokushima Prefectures in 1908.

IJN Tokiwa postcard 1908

The same year, she participated in the 1908 Kobe Fleet Review.

The 1908 Kobe Fleet Review (November 18th). From the left of the image: battleships Katori and Kashima, armored cruisers Izumo, Iwate, and Tokiwa, protected cruisers Soya (ex-Russian Varyag), Kasagi, and Chitose; from the right of the image: battleships Mikasa, Fuji, Asahi, Sagami (ex-Russian Peresvet), and Shikishima. A fleet review of the grand maneuvers attended by 48 warships, 52 destroyers, and 11 torpedo boats.

In 1910, both Asama and Tokiwa had their well-worn set of British boilers replaced with 16 more efficient 16 Miyabara boilers as part of a general mid-life refit.

War (with the Kaiser)!

When the Great War kicked off, British-allied Japan soon got involved in the rush to capture (and keep) Germany’s overseas colonies. As part of this, on 18 August 1914, she was assigned to the 4th Squadron along with Iwate and Yakumo, part of VADM Sadakichi Kato’s 2nd Fleet, detailed to blockade and seize the German treaty port of Tsingtao, an operation that began on the 27th of that month and stretched into early November.

A Japanese lithograph, showing the Japanese fighting German troops during the conquest of the German colony Tsingtao (today Qingdao) in China between 13 September and 7 November 1914. Via National Archives.

She was then dispatched to scour the West Pacific– along with other allied assets– in the attempt to run down Graf Spee’s East Asiatic Squadron. Once Spee was sent to the bottom along with most of his squadron in December and the last of his cruisers (SMS Dresden and the Hilfkruezer Prinz Eitel Friederich) were accounted for the following March 1915, the pressure eased and our aging cruiser was allowed to spend the rest of the war in a series of more pedestrian tasks, including a series of Grand Maneuvers.

Battleships Mikasa, Hizen, Shikishima, armored cruisers Izumo, Tokiwa, Azuma, and Nisshin during the Taisho 4 Grand Maneuvers in the Hyuga Nada Sea on October 25, 1915

Tokiwa photographed sometime after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 and 1920.Courtesy of Mr. Tom Stribling, 1986. NH 101759

NH 58987

NH 58681

Note the “mum” on her bow as she is clustered near U.S. Naval vessels. NH 58679

IJN Tokiwa, French postcard

She became active in a series of globetrotting training cruises, carrying naval academy cadets. This included the 44th class cadet training cruise to the U.S. with Yakumo from 5 April to 17 August 1917. A second cadet training cruise for the 46th class with Azuma from 1 March to 26 July 1919 jogged south to Australia. Azuma and Tokiwa teamed up for a third cruise with the 47th class that roamed to the Mediterranean from 24 November 1919-20 May 1920.

Montage, Practice Squadron with cruisers Tokiwa and Yakumo, 1917, during the cadet training cruise to the U.S. R.A. Iwamura. NH 111677

Ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Katori, Izumo, Iwate, Tokiwa, Asama, 1919, with HIH Crown Prince Hirohito aboard Katori off Korea. San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive.

Treaty rebuild

By 1921, both Asama and her sister Tokiwa, too slow for fleet operations, were reclassified as coast defense vessels. At the same time, many of Japan’s old armored cruisers were disarmed as part of the Naval Limitation Treaties, and their weapons were reduced.

The 8″/45s removed from Tokiwa and her fellow armored cruisers in the 1920s were recycled for use as coastal artillery, including two twin turrets at Tokyo Bay, four single guns mounted at Tarawa, and another four at Wake Island.

Between 30 September 1922 and 31 March 1923, Tokiwa was converted to a cruiser minelayer. In this, she landed her rear 8″/45 turret, her torpedo tubes, six of her 6″/40s, and all her obsolete 3-inch and 2.5-pounders. She then picked up accommodation for 300 mines on deck tracks for over stern sowing. A similar conversion was done to the old armored cruiser Aso (ex-Russian Bayan).

It was in this mine role that, on 1 August 1927, while training with mines in Saeki Bay, Kyushu, after returning from overseas service in China during the Shandong Intervention, Tokiwa suffered from an explosion that left 35 dead and another 65 injured. Through a combination of magazine flooding and assistance from nearby vessels, a complete disaster was avoided, and she was quickly repaired and returned to service.

The incident led to the redesign of the No. 5 Kai-1 mine to install safety features and a further redesign of several classes of new Japanese light and heavy cruisers to better handle damage.

October 1928, Kure. View from the stern of the battleship Nagato shows the Fuso directly ahead, with the mast and funnel of the Tokiwa, then a mine layer, visible in the background. To the left, the cruiser Nagara is moored in the foreground, with the Furutaka behind it

War (with China, again)!

Once repaired, Tokiwa spent most of the next decade in Chinese waters and frequently landed her sailors and marines for strongarmed use ashore, especially after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.

Cruiser Tokiwa Rikusentai 2nd Co Cmd Plat in front of the Japanese Middle School (their HQ) on Range Rd, Shanghai, February 11th, 1932, photo by Austin Adachi

CM Tokiwa. View taken at Shanghai, China, 1932, by G.J. Freret, Jr., probably from USS Houston (CA-30). NH 51896

Cruiser minelayer Tokiwa. Passing USS Houston (CA-30), at Shanghai, China, on the Whangpoo River. Photographed by G.J. Freret, Jr., in February 1932. Note the ship’s boat being hoisted aboard by crane. NH 51877

She returned home in 1937 to have her 16 Miyabara boilers, which had been installed in 1910, replaced by 8 Kampon boilers, reducing her speed to 16 knots. During this refit, she hung up the pretext of being a cruiser, and remaining 8″/40s and 6″/40s were removed. This allowed for her mine storage to be bumped to 500 “eggs”, and she had a couple of 40mm and 10 twin 25mm AAA guns installed. Likewise, by this time, her sister Asama had been converted into a training ship.

Tokiwa was on hand in Yokohama Bay with 98 other IJN ships in October 1940 for the largest (and last) grand fleet review in Japanese history.

Battleship Yamashiro and the Type 97 flying boat Yamashiro firing the Imperial salute at the 2,600th Anniversary Fleet Review are the heavy cruiser Suzuya, the armored cruiser Tokiwa, and the seaplane tender Chiyoda.

War (with the Allies)!

On 29 November 1941, Tokiwa sailed from Truk as part of Operation “GI,” the invasion of the British Gilbert Islands, which began on 8 December (Japan time).

The following January, Tokiwa was part of Operation “R,” -the Invasions of Rabaul, New Britain, and Kavieng.

She felt her first Allied sting in a carrier raid at Kwajalein in February from USS Enterprise. Damaged in four near misses from 500-pound bombs, she suffered eight killed and 15 wounded. This sent her to Sasebo for three months of repairs.

Dispatched to respond to the Marine Raiders’ sweep of Makin Island in August 1942, she managed to pull quieter duty for (most of) the rest of the war, narrowly avoiding torpedoes from USS Salmon (SS-182) in 1943 on her way back to the Home Islands. There, she led a minelaying squadron (the 18th Sentai) that sowed over 6,000 mines.

Striking a mine off the Hesaki lighthouse in the Kanmon Strait in April 1945, Tokiwa put into Sasebo again for repairs and added another 10 25mm guns, giving her a final fit of 30 of these weapons (some reports state 37). She also had depth charge racks and throwers installed along with a Type 3 sonar and was fitted with primitive (2-shiki 2-go and 3-shiki 1-go) radars.

After laying minefields in her old 1905 stomping grounds in the Tsushima Strait, she was ironically damaged by a B-29-sown aerial mine on 3 June 1945 off Maizuru harbor. The damage was slight, and she left Maizuru after makeshift repairs for Ominato. In all, between 24 January 1944 and 30 June 1945, she laid 17 series of anti-submarine minefields in Japanese waters.

Five elderly (and mostly disarmed) Russo-Japanese war era cruisers were still afloat in Japanese home waters in the last days of the war: the everlasting sisters Asama and Tokiwa, along with Yakumo, Izumo, and Iwate. All were pummeled by American and British carrier-borne aircraft strikes in late July and early August 1945, with three of the five damaged so extensively they bottomed out in shallow water.

Japanese cruiser Iwate seen sunk off Kure in October 1945. She had been sunk by air attacks on 24 July. Photo by USS Siboney (CVE-112). 80-G-351365

It was at Ominato that Tokiwa was caught by aircraft from USS Essex and Randolph on the afternoon of 9 August. She suffered at least four direct bomb hits and at least that many near misses, crippling the ship and killing or wounding half of her crew. Towed to shallow water off Cape Ashizaki, she was beached, and her crew attempted repairs.

With the end of hostilities, her crew was relieved on 20 September, and she was removed from the Naval List on 30 November.

All these battered old bruisers were unceremoniously scrapped shortly after the war, and only one, Tsushima veteran Yakumo, ever sailed again under her own power– as an unarmed repatriation transport to bring 9,000 Japanese troops home from KMT-occupied Formosa in 1946.

Asama (Japanese training ship, ex-CA) at Kure, circa October 1945. She was scrapped along with her sister and the rest of Japan’s legacy armored cruisers by 1947. Collection of Captain D.L. Madeira, 1978. NH 86279

Epilogue

Today, there are few remains of Tokiwa despite her nearly 50 years (okay, 46 years, 11 months, 17 days) of service.

She is remembered in a variety of scale models

Between 3 October 1898 and 20 September 1945, she had 52 skippers. At least seven of these became admirals.

These included her Russo-Japanese War skipper, Capt. Shigetaro Yoshimatsu, who went on to become a full admiral and the sixth commander of the Combined Fleet (Rengo Kantaishireichokan) in November 1915, a post he held through October 1917.

Shigetaro Yoshimatsu, seen as the skipper of Tokiwa in 1904 and then as Admiral of the Navy in 1915. He passed in 1935, at age 75, having spent 37 of those years in uniform.

Another was Naoma Taniguchi, who, after serving as Tokiwa’s skipper in 1916-17, rose to become a full admiral and commander of the Combined Fleet, then Chief of the Naval General Staff in the early 1930s. Head of one of the IJN’s more rational factions, he was instrumental in the ratification of the Treaty of London and later refused to send ships to respond to the Manchurian Incident. For this, he and his deputy officers were forced into retirement in 1933, leaving more hawkish officers in charge. He passed soon after.

Then there was the Viscount Ogasawara, who translated Mahan into Japanese in 1899, served as Togo’s aide, and wrote several popular works on the Russo-Japanese war at sea, one of which was turned into a movie in 1930. Ogasawara later served as the director of the school that educated then Crown Prince Hirohito and, moving to the retired list in 1921 as a vice admiral, became a naval advisor to the throne through November 1945.

VADM Viscount Naganari Ogasawara was Togo’s aide and Hirohito’s teacher and advisor, taking a break between the two to command Tokiwa in 1912. He passed in 1958, aged 90, having spent 56 years in service. He was one of the last surviving Tsushima vets.

In 1989, the Japanese government recycled the name of the old cruiser for a new Towada-class replenishment ship (AOE-423). The Hitachi SC built vessel almost immediately clocked in on one of modern Japan’s first overseas naval deployments– Desert Shield/Storm, now some 35 years in the rearview. The oiler delivered non-combatant material to Saudi Arabia as part of Japan’s contribution to the coalition effort and has been a familiar consort to allied vessels underway in the WestPac in the past few decades.

A starboard bow view of the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force fleet support ship Tokiwa (AOE-423) as she pulls away from the destroyer USS Decatur (DDG 73) (not shown) after an underway replenishment 15 March 2006. CTR3 Ryan C. Finkle, USN, Photo 330-CFD-DN-SD-06-16313 via NARA

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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Swashbuckling Baltic Baron of Boxer Fame

Posted on August 1, 2025 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

Some 125 years ago this month, this guy was the biggest hero in Russia, having recently picked up not only the St. George Cross but also five foreign orders “in recognition of exemplary bravery and selflessness.’

I give you 37-year-old Lieutenant Baron Ferdinand (Vladimirovich) Arthur Lionel Gotthard von Rahden, of the Tsar’s Navy, who commanded the Russian naval infantry unit drawn from the crews of the battleships Navarin and Sisoy the Great during the defense of the Peking Legation Quarter during its 55-day siege in the Boxer Rebellion.

Hailing from a family of hereditary Baltic barons (he inherited the title from his late father, Vladimir, the former vice-governor of Estonia, in 1881), Ferdinand graduated from the Naval Cadet Corps in 1886 and from 1889 onward held down spots on Russian warships drifting further and further East. From the Black Sea Fleet to the Caspian Flotilla and the cruiser Admiral Kornilov in the Indian Ocean. By 1891, he was a navigator on the cruiser Vladimir Monomakh in Vladivostok. By the time of the Boxer Rebellion, he was head of the 01 Division on Navarin and was selected to lead the 71-member company to Peking.

Of the 445 foreign soldiers, sailors, and Marines holding the Legation wall, the Russians had the third-largest force, just behind the only slightly larger British (79 Marines) and the French (75 sailors) contingents.

Russian sailors on a barricade before the Peking Legation Boxer Uprising, Niva magazine, No. 43, 1900

During the siege of Pekin, Baron von Rahden received several wounds, including a contusion of the cranial bone, but, importantly, his force captured four guns from the besieging Boxers, which were of great use to the defenders.

“Peking, China. 1900. A Russian officer, Baron Randen [sic], and four armed soldiers behind a barricade, probably at the Russian Legation, during the Boxer Rebellion.” Note he appears armed with a Steyr M.95, which may have been borrowed from Austrian Marines in the Legation, while his men have Mosin M.91s (AWM A05909)

Baron von Rahden, as portrayed in 55 Days at Peking, albeit in a much nicer costume, complete with sword belt sash, than the uniform he actually wore

After the Boxer Rebellion, Von Rahden, promoted to Captain (2nd rank), rode a wave of good assignments, including XO of the gunboat Koreets and command of the destroyer Ryany, which operated out of Vladivostok during the Russo-Japanese War. A scouting mission with his greyhound along the Korean peninsula during the conflict earned him an Order of St. Stanislav and a promotion to Captain (1st rank).

Then came a position as port captain of Vladivostok, followed by what would be the pinnacle of his naval career, that of skipper of the cruiser Askold in 1910.

Russian cruiser Askold in Vladivostok

At that point, Von Rahden’s star burned out.

Dismissed from his post on embezzlement charges, the Vladivostok Naval Court handed down a sentence of 3.5 years in the brig and the removal of all ranks, orders, and privileges. After serving 22 months, the Tsar commuted his sentence in light of his past record, and he was dismissed from the Navy, ending his 26 years in the fleet with a squish.

When Russia marched to war again in 1914, Von Rahden repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, applied to return to service.

It was only after the twin seismic military disasters of 1914 and 1915 that, on Valentine’s Day 1916, Von Rahden was appointed from ignoble retirement to become a colonel and second in command of the 205th (Shemakha) Infantry Regiment, then part of the 52nd Division on the mud of the Austrian front. In January 1917, he was made commander of the 82nd Infantry (Dagestan) Regiment, on the Romanian front. In April 1917, he was awarded the Order of St. Vladimir, 3rd degree with swords, one of the last issuances of that decoration.

Von Rahden, somewhat redeemed, was the 85th’s final colonel, and on 23 November 1917, he was promoted to major general, setting him up for command of a division. It was a position he held only briefly, being cashiered at the end of the year, following directives from the new Bolshevik military commissars who were eager to separate from the service any nobles still in uniform.

Returning home to Estonia in 1918, Von Raden soon fell in with the German-allied Baltic Landeswehr, a proto-Freikorps-style force led by his fellow Couronian and Livonian nobility. Leading a company in that force, he fought with the Landeswehr against the Reds at Windau, Tukkum, and Mitau.

Once Riga was captured, with the Landeswehr being strongly disfavored by the recently arrived British and French military missions to the Baltic, he and his company moved over to General Yudenich’s White Russian Northwestern Army during what had become the full-blown Russian Civil War.

Leading the battalion-sized 17th Libau Regiment of the 5th Division during Yudenich’s failed push on Petrograd, Baron Von Rahden, formerly of the Tsar’s Navy, was killed in action in the village of Russkoye Koporye on 25 October 1919, aged 56 hard years.

Polish Pociag Pancerny Proclivity

Posted on July 31, 2025 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

The Polish military in the first half of the 20th Century cultivated a rich armored train (Pociag Pancerny) tradition that started in early 1918 with Polish units formerly serving in the Russian Army and newly independent.

This early train, Związek Broni (Arms Association), was created at the Bobruisk (Babrujsk) fortress using captured Russian rolling stock and armed with a combination of Pulitov 76.2mm M1902 field guns and Maxim machine guns. At the same time, a flatcar carried a damaged Austin armored car.

Zwiazek-Broni’s Austen armored car flatcar

Polish armored train near Arkhangelsk – 1918 during the Russian civil war. Note the Polish national eagles on their helmets. Signal Corps image via NARA

With 90 armored locomotives constructed by the Poles, this was later expanded to over 40 named war trains in the 1919-21 period of combat against the Reds, Balts, and Ukrainians in the East and German Freikorps types in the West.

During the Third Silesian Uprising, Polish insurgents used no less than 16 armored trains, such as “Kabicz,” seen here, against the German irregulars. The train consists of a T37 armored steam locomotive and two 2-axle iron coal wagons. NAC PIC_1-H-446-2

Once the wars were over, the better trains were retained and, eventually, modernized.

Just in case.

Polish armored train (Pociąg pancerny) Danuta in July 1935. Note the flatcar with motorcycles. NAC PIC_107-738-67

Polish armored train, 1939

By September 1939, the Poles had at least a baker’s dozen war trains in their arsenal, each typically supported by a dedicated supply train that included sleeping and coal cars, repair workshops, and flatbeds carrying light tanks. The allowance for a full crew of an armored train (with its support train) in 1939 consisted of 8 officers, 59 non-commissioned officers, and 124 riflemen, with most cross-trained in repair and maintenance tasks.

The Polish armored train PP 11 Danuta from 1939. From the left: artillery wagon, infantry assault wagon, armored Ti3 steam locomotive, artillery wagon. The train carried two 100mm wz. 1914/19 howitzers and 75mm wz.1902/26 field guns mounted on rotating turrets as their primary armament, while secondary armament was composed of nine 7.92 mm wz. 08 machine guns. She fought against the Germans for two weeks until trapped and scuttled by her crew.

Then, in Britain…

With this tradition behind them, it was logical for the Free Poles evacuated to Britain from France and elsewhere post-Dunkirk to man some armored trains. After all, there was a cadre of men among them familiar with their operation.

Starting in July 1940, troops of the 1st Polish Corps soon manned a series of 12 armored trains, organized into four dedicated battalions. The idea was that these trains could race up and down the coastline and form a mobile reserve in the event of German amphibious landings, or shuttle inland to tackle paratrooper insertions.

Produced in the Derby Carriage and Wagon Works and by the LNER works at Stratford in London, the trains were dubbed A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, J, K, L, and M. While these varied in length, construction, and armament, they were usually much shorter than the type the Poles had operated 1918-1939, typically of just 4-5 cars with an engine in the middle.

A few images exist in the IWM with good detail.

Troops pictured manning an armored train on a line at North Berwick in Scotland, 4 February 1941. The train was armed with a QF 6-pounder 6 cwt Hotchkiss gun recycled from a Great War-era Mk IV “Male” tank, two Boys anti-tank rifles, and six Bren machine guns. Photo by Walter Thomas Lockeyear IWM H 7033

Official caption: “Polish troops are manning an armored train in Scotland. They are used for patrolling lines along the coast, reinforcing any threatened point, and dealing with tank attacks where the railway offers the best means of reaching them. Each of two engines with one 6-pounder, six Brens, and 2 AT rifles. A speed of 50 mph, range of 30 miles without refueling.” Photo by Walter Thomas Lockeyear IWM H 7034

As noted by one publication,

Armoured train K, powered by a single locomotive, No 7573, was armed with two 6-pounder guns, as well as six Bren machine guns, two Vickers machine guns, four Thompson sub-machine guns (Tommy guns) and numerous rifles carried by the crew. Initially, the train carried some 14,000 rounds of ammunition, which was later increased to some 38,000 rounds of varying calibers.

Polish Armored Train K

By 1942, with the chance of invasion of the British Isles slipping away and the Poles better used in North Africa, they left their trains behind for Home Guard use and pulled stumps for warmer, and more German-rich, climes.

As detailed by Brian Osborne’s The People’s Army:

In their Home Guard role, the trains were each initially armed with two Hotchkiss 6-pounder cannon, a Vickers machine-gun, and four Bren guns. They were manned by 16 Home Guardsmen under a captain, with a lieutenant as weapons training officer, two signalers, and a train crew of four. In addition, there was a mobile base consisting of a passenger coach and brake van to provide crew transport and catering. This came under the charge of the second in command, along with a company sergeant major, a train crew of three, and a fighting crew of six deploying two Bren guns and a Boys anti-tank rifle – an armorer and a further three men, making a total in the mobile base of 14. Thus, each armored train had a total complement of 38 officers and men. The mobile base would be detached from the train when going into action.

However, after the war, the Poles continued to use armored trains into 1952 when the Dywizjon Artylerii Kolejowej (Railway Artillery Division) was finally disbanded and its inherited German and Soviet trains placed in reserve, capping a winding 34-year run.

Polish Dywizjon Artylerii Kolejowej armored train, in the late 1940s, a recycled Wermacht Panzerzug with French M1890 194mm naval guns

Nottingham, found

Posted on July 22, 2025 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

The 5,400-ton Town-class cruiser HMS Nottingham was the Royal Navy’s only remaining lost cruiser from the Great War era, whose wreck was previously undocumented.

Was.

Lost to three torpedoes from U-52 (Kptlt. Hans Walther, Pour le Mérite) on 19 August 1916 during a missed connection between the RN’s Grand Fleet and the Kaiserliche Marine’s High Seas Fleet, HMS Nottingham had an extensive service record.

She served in most of the key fleet actions, including the battles of Heligoland Bight (1914), Dogger Bank (1915) and Jutland (1916) where, at the latter, Nottingham was heavily engaged, alongside her fellow light cruisers of the 2nd Squadron, HMS Birmingham, Southampton and Dublin, in a major close-quarters battle with the cruisers of Germany’s 4th Scouting Group –SMS Stettin, München, Frauenlob, Stuttgart and Hamburg. On 20 June 1915, she even missed two torpedoes from U-6.

In April 2025, ProjectXplore divers Dan McMullen, Leo Fielding, and Dom Willis, supported by skipper Iain Easingwood of MarineQuest, loaded the dive charter MV Jacob George with a C-MAX CM2 side scan sonar and 300m or armored towing cable and documented the wreck they believed to be Nottingham on the bottom at 262 feet, 60 miles off the coast of Scotland.

Earlier this month, 10 divers from the UK, Germany, and Spain gathered, and outfitted with JJ-CCR rebreathers on trimix/O2 fills, dove the wreck, clearly documenting “Nottingham” on her stern, as well as her four distinctive funnels, which are intact, as well as gun arrangement, and other facets that solidified the discovery.

And thus we remember:

Warship Wednesday, July 16, 2025: Flat Iron Warrior

Posted on July 16, 2025 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

Warship Wednesday, July 16, 2025: Flat Iron Warrior

Above we see the Norwegian Gor-class gunboat-turned-minelayer KNM Tyr, all 102 feet long with a 4.7″/40 EOC gun forward and mines stowed aft. Downright ancient when the Germans came in 1940, she nonetheless proved a serious thorn in their side.

Norwegian Rendels

Starting in the 1870s, the Norwegians embarked on a program of modern warship construction, including steam engines and iron/steel hulls. Constructed locally at Carl JohansVærns Værft, Horten, they ordered eight 2nd class gunboats (Kanonbåt 2. kl) running between 250 and 420 tons, three first class gunboats of between 720 and 1,280 tons, a 1,045-ton steam corvette, an armed 350-ton minelaying “crane vessel” (Kranfartøy), and 14 assorted (45 ton-to-107 ton) 2nd class torpedo boats by 1902. Meanwhile, four 4,000-ton coastal battleships (Panserskibe) with 8.2-inch guns and up to 8 inches of armor would be ordered from Armstrong in the 1890s.

The eight 2nd class gunboats were all of the “flat iron” or Rendel type, a common format introduced by Armstrong in 1867 and built under contract for or copied by over a dozen fleets around the globe, including Norway’s neighbors Denmark and Sweden. Short and stubby, typically about 100 feet long with a 30-foot beam, they were flat-bottomed and drew a fathom or less, even under a full load. This hull form and their anemic compound steam engines only allowed for a speed in the 8-10 knot region, leaving these as defensive vessels ideal for guarding strongpoints and key harbors.

Armament was typically a single large (8-to-15-inch!) gun that could be lowered and elevated inside a shielded battery but not traversed, with the gunboat coming about to aim the horizonal.

The Norwegian Rendels included KNM Vale and Uller (1874, 1876, 250t); Nor, Brage, and Vidar (1897-1882, 270t); Gor and Tyr (1884, 1887, 289-294t); and Æger (1893, 420t). The first five carried a single Armstrong 26.67 cm (10.5-inch) RML forward and two 1-pounder Hotchkiss guns amidships.

Kanonbåt 2 kl Brage’s crew with her Armstrong 26,7cm RML.

Æger toted a more modern 8.3-inch Armstrong breechloader and three small (one 10-pdr and two 4-pdrs).

Æger. This 109-foot 420-tonner was the pinnacle of Rendel development. A one-off design, she was decommissioned in 1932 and her name recycled for a new Sleipner-class destroyer. NSM.000460

Gor and Tyr each carried a single breechloading Krupp 26 cm (10.2 inch) L/30 gun (606-pound shell, 192-pound charge, m/v 1805 ft/secs), the same model gun used on the 3,700-ton Japanese Armstrong-built protected cruisers Naniwa and Takachiho, backed up, like most of the other Norwegian Rendels, by two 1-pounder Hotchkiss guns.

Kanonbåt 2. kl. Gor (b. 1884, Karljohansvern Verft, Horten), note the large Krupp gun forward. NSM.000459

Japanese officers of the protected cruiser Naniwa posing near one of her 26 cm (10.2″) Krupp guns, 1885

Meet Tyr

Constructed as Yard No. 67 at Horten, Tyr was named for the one-handed Norse god of war who sacrificed his other hand to trap the wolf Fenrir. Laid down in 1884, she launched on 16 March 1887 and, fitting out rapidly, joined the Norwegian fleet shortly after.

Norwegian gunboat KNM Tyr from 1887

After 1900, with the looming formal separation from Sweden on the horizon and the prospect of a possible fight on their hands, the Norwegians upped their torpedo boat numbers rapidly to nearly 30 boats as their four new bathtub battleships arrived on hand from Britain. With that, the Rendels transitioned to more static support roles around this time, such as minefield tenders at strategic coastal fortifications and depot ships.

Around this time, most landed their obsolete main gun in exchange for something more contemporary, with most picking up a trainable QF 4.7″/40 Elswick 20-pounder behind a shield. This allowed the removal of their armored bow bulwark. Gor and Tyr also picked up a high-angle 76mm mount, while some of the older boats received a 47mm mount.

Gor as minelegger with mines aft.

After Norway got into the submarine business in 1909 with the small (128-foot, kerosine-engined) German-built KNM Kobben, Tyr became her tender until 1914.

K/B 2 kl Tyr as tender with Norwegian submarine Kobben alongside. MMU.944062

Tyr plan 1913, slick-decked as tender.

With the mine warfare lessons reverberating around the globe after the Russo-Japanese War, it became obvious how easy these broad-beamed shallow-draft craft could be converted to minelayers. This typically meant installing twin port and starboard rail tracks on deck running about 65 feet to the stern for easy planting either via boom over rail drop. On the Gor and Tyr, this allowed for as many as 55 mines stowed on deck.

Tyr as mine planter with her 4″/40 forward and two 37mm 1-pounders on her amidships bridge deck. Model in the Horten Marinemuseet.

Same model, note the mine arrangement. The model omits her 6-pounder 76mm gun.

mines on converted Norwegian 2c gunboat, pre-1940

Same as above

1929 Jane’s abbreviated listing of seven of the old Rendel gunboats, including Tyr. Note that Gor is still listed with her old 10-inch Armstrong. The larger Aegir was listed separately and was disposed of in 1932.

War!

September 1939 brought an uneasy time to Scandinavia. The remaining seven Norwegian Rendals, all by this time working as minelayers, bided their time and clocked in on the country’s Nøytralitetsvakt (Neutrality Watch).

Tyr was placed under the command of Orlogskaptein (LCDR) Johan Friederich Andreas Thaulow “Fritz” Ulstrup and stationed at the outer ring Lerøy Fortress overlooking the narrow Lerøyosen south of Bergen. Ulstrup, 43, was a career naval officer who was minted in the Great War and, having studied in France from 1922 to 1924, was serving as an instructor at the Naval Academy in Bergen when the war started.

Ulstrup, who doubled as fortress commander at Lerøy, also had a flotilla of five small armed auxiliary guard boats– Haus (135grt), Lindaas (138grt), Alversund (178grt), Manger (153grt), and Oygar (128grt)– and an old (circa 1898) torpedo boat, Storm, under his control. However, the fort itself, slated in 1939 to receive a 120mm gun battery with four old L/40 French-built Schneider weapons from the decommissioned border forts of Vardasen and Gullbekkasen pointing toward Sweden, instead only had a couple of 65mm Cockerill guns and searchlights.

On the early morning of 9 April 1940, just after midnight, two cruisers appeared off Bergen and flashed that they were the RN’s HMS Cairo and Calcutta, when in fact they were the German Kriegmarine’s light cruiser sisters Koln and Konigsberg, each with nine 15 cm SK C/25 (5.9-inch) guns, as the Gruppe 3 invasion force under RADM Hubert Schmundt. The cruisers were followed by 600 troops of the Wehrmacht’s 69th Infantry Division on the 1,800-ton gunnery training ship (Artillerieschulschiff) Bremse with four 12.8 cm SK C/34s, the torpedo boats Wolf and Leopard, and the E-boat tender Carl Peters shepherding S19, S21, S22, S23, S24, and naval trawlers Schiff 9 and Schiff 18.

Tyr, loaded with live and armed mines picked up at Laksevåg, was at the ocean-front fishing village of Klokkarvik, directly in the path of the Germans.

Klokkarvik harbor during the neutrality watch in 1939/40. In the picture, you can see a mine-armed KNM Tyr at anchor with a Draug-class destroyer at the quay. Note the Royal Norwegian Navy’s Hover M.F.11 floatplane in the foreground. (Source: Naval Museum Horten)

When the Germans began to creep into the fjord and with word of other sets of foreign warships in the Oslofjord, Ulstrup, who had been arguing with Bergan’s overall commander, RADM Carsten Tank-Nielsen all day on the 8th to be able to sow his mines, finally obtained clearance at 0030 for Tyr to hurriedly drop eight mines between Sotra and Lerøy, closing Lerøyosen. However, the 10-14-hour time-delay safety features on the magnetic contacts of the mines meant they were still dormant when the German cruisers passed harmlessly over them. Storm, meanwhile, fired a torpedo at Carl Peters at 0220 but missed.

Ulstrup closed to shore so he could place a quick phone call to Tank-Nielsen to apprise him of the situation, then returned to his minelayer to beat feet toward Bjørnefjord, playing a cat and mouse game with German E-boats and reportedly landing a hit from her 4.7-inch gun on one, receiving several 20mm hits from the Schnellbooten in exchange.

Further up the fjord, batteries at the now-alerted Norwegian inner ring Forts Kvarven (3 x 210mm St. Chamond M.98s) and Sandviken (3 x 240mm St. Chamond L/13s) opened up on the passing Germans at 0358 and soon landed hits on both Konigsberg and Bremse in the darkness of pre-dawn, leaving the former adrift with flooded boiler rooms. While Tyr, Ulstrup, and company managed to withdraw further into the fjords– laying another 16 mines in the Vatlestraumen approaches north of Bergen– Bergen itself fell to the German seaborne force just hours later.

However, the crippled Konigsberg would be hammered by a strike of RNAS Sea Skuas out of Orkney once the sun came up and caught five 500-pound bombs, sinking her in the harbor on 10 April.

Meanwhile, Tyr’s mines near Vatlestraumen sank the packed German HSDG freighter Sao Paulo (4977grt) on the evening of the 9th, sending her to the bottom in 260 feet of water.

The 361-foot Hamburg-Südamerikanische Dampschiffahrts-Gesellschaft steamer Sao Paulo was lost to one of Tyr’s mines.

In trying to sweep the mines, the German naval auxiliary Schiff 9 (trawler Koblenz, 437grt), and the auxiliary patrol boat Vp.105 (trawler Cremon, 268grt), along with two launches from Carl Peters, were lost on the 11th. Some sources also credit the German steamer Johann Wessels (4601grt), damaged on 5 May, and the German-controlled Danish steamer Gerda (1151grt), sunk on 8 May, as falling to Tyr’s eggs.

Withdrawing down the 114-mile-long Hardangerfjord, Ulstrup was appointed the commander of this new sector on 17 April and, moving ashore to Uskedal, left Tyr to her XO, the 47-year-old Fenrik (ensign) Karl Sandnes. Ulstrup, stripping the 37mm guns from Tyr and two 65mm guns from auxiliary gunboats, mounted them on flatbed trucks as improvised mobile artillery.

A 1937 Chevy flatbed with a 65mm L35 Hotchkiss under Ulstrup’s dirt sailors, April 1940

The next two days saw a series of skirmishes around Uskedal, in which Tyr closed to shore to use her 4.7-inch gun against German positions in improvised NGFS, coming close enough to get riddled by German 8mm rifle fire in return.

A naval clash on the 20th involving the advancing Germans in the Hardangerfjord saw Tyr, under the command of Sandnes, shell the German auxiliary Schiff 18, which beached at Uskedal to avoid sinking. The same battle saw the Norwegian Trygg-class torpedo boat Stegg sunk by Schiff 221 while the Norwegian armed auxiliary Smart was sunk by Bremse. The German minesweeper M.1 went on to capture five Norwegian-flagged steamers that were hiding in the fjord.

With Ulstrup and his force ashore getting ready to displace inland under fire, and Tyr trapped in the fjord, Sandnes brought his command to the shallows and, attempting to camouflage her, hid the breechblock for her 4.7 and evacuated the old minelayer. By forced march, they made it to Matre, some 14 miles on the other side of the mountain, and soon rejoined Allied lines.

Meanwhile, Tyr was soon discovered by the Germans, who towed her back to Bergen and, along with her fellow Rendel gunboat-turned-minelayer cousin, Uller, were soon pressed into service with the Kriegsmarine.

On 30 April, Tyr and Uller left occupied Bergen with German crews on a mission to mine the entrance to Sognefjord, barring it to British ships. This service would be short-lived as a Royal Norwegian Navy Heinkel He 115 seaplane spotted the pair, now under new management, and bombed Uller seriously enough to have her crew beach on a reef and evacuate on Tyr. Uller later lifted off the reef and sank near Gulen, becoming a popular dive spot.

As for Tyr, she saw no further direct combat, although the Germans likely continued to use her in some form of coastal service for the rest of the war.

Post-war

Tyr was still afloat in 1945 when the Germans were run out, and was subsequently sold on the commercial market. Her old hull still in good shape, she was converted to an economical diesel plant and sailed for a time as a heavy lift steamship.

By 1951, she had been converted to the car ferry Bjorn West, a task she fulfilled for three decades. Further converted for service in a salmon farming operation.

Found in poor condition ten years ago, she recently passed to a consortium of Vestfold county municipality, the KNM Narvik Foundation in Horten, and the Bredalsholmen Shipyard and Preservation Centre, who, with Tyr safely in drydock in Kristiansand, plan on restoring her to her 1940 condition. At this point, she is believed to be the last Rendel-type gunboat.

They plan to make her sailable, which isn’t that far-fetched.

Epilogue

The Norwegian Navy has recycled our gunboat/minelayer’s name at least twice.

The first was an Auk-class minesweeper, ex-USS Sustain (AM-119), which was transferred in 1959 and served as KNM Tyr (N47). Three Auk-class sisters transferred with her (ex-USS Strive, Triumph, and Seer) were named Gor, Brage, and Uller, in a nod to the old Rendel boats that saw WWII service.

Ex-USS Sustain (AM-119) as KNM Tyr (N47). Commissioned 9 November 1942, she earned eight battle stars for her World War II service from North Africa to France to Okinawa, helping to sink at least one U-boat in the process. She served the Norwegians from 1959 to 1984.

The third KNM Tyr in Norwegian service, N50, was bought commercially in 1995 and spent two decades mapping and filming dozens of historic wrecks in the country’s waters with her ROVs, including Scharnhorst and HMS Hunter (H35).

The intrepid LCDR Ulstrup continued to resist the Germans after leaving Tyr in April 1940. He crafted a makeshift shoreside torpedo battery, the only torpedo available being salvaged from the wreck of an old torpedo boat, and managed to caravan mines from a storage facility in Sogn to Ulvik to surprise the occupation forces. Once the Allies pulled out in mid-June, he was left to his own devices with a resistance group that became known, logically, as the Ulstrup Organisasjon.

With the heat getting too close for comfort, Ulstrup and a dozen other patriots crowded on the sailing trawler MK Måken (M 366 B) on 19 September 1940 and set out from Alesund for the Shetlands, arriving at Baltasound 11 days later. Welcomed as a hero in London, he was soon in command of the old four-piper HMS Mansfield (G76) (former USS Evans, DD-78), which in April 1941 carried commandos for a raid on Oksfjord, Norway, where the herring oil factory was destroyed.

“HNMS Mansfield, Norwegian Town-class destroyer. She is an ex-U.S. destroyer (USS Evans) and is manned entirely by the Norwegian Navy.” Circa 1941. Note her Norwegian flag. Photo by Harold William John Tomlin, IWM A2725

Once Mansfield was passed on to the Canadians in March 1942 after the Norwegians rode shotgun on 17 Atlantic, Ulstrup, promoted to Kommandørkaptein, was given command of the 11th Department in the Ministry of Defense in London, then subsequently placed in command of the Norwegian forces in Iceland, where he spent the rest of the war.

Returning to Norway with a War Cross with Swords, Ulstrup was promoted to rear admiral in August 1952. After escorting Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie on his tour of Norwegian naval bases, including the Horten shipyards in November 1954, he was made a Grand Officer of the Order of the Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II, rounding out his international awards.

Kontradmiral Johan Fredrik Andreas Thaulow Ulstrup, retired, passed in 1956, age 60, having wrapped up a 41-year career.

Tyr’s best-known “kill” of the war, the HSDG steamer Sao Paulo, packed with German military vehicles and stores that never made it to shore, is a favorite of wreck divers.

Meanwhile, in Klokkarvik, a memorial, complete with a mine and a seagull, was dedicated in 2021.

As noted in the town:

The seagull that takes off from the mine is a symbol of optimism. We should be aware of what war brings, but be most concerned with how we can secure peace. We should learn from history, – because it tends to repeat itself. The seagull draws our attention to the sea, the source of everything, our future.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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Goodbye, horses

Posted on July 10, 2025 by laststandonzombieisland One comment

No, not the Q Lazzarus song made infamous by Ted Levine, we are talking about the Army’s latest initiative to divest itself of equines, something it has been doing in slow motion since 1917 despite a few half-hearted returns.

It could be argued that 1916 was the height of the U.S. Army’s post-Civil War (when the Union Army fielded 6 regular army and 266 volunteer cavalry regiments as well as 170 unattached squadrons) horse cavalry. At the time, during Pershing’s Punitive Expedition into Northern Mexico to chase Villa, the Army had 17 regiments of regulars– with the 16th and 17th Cavalry Regiments only organized in Texas in July 1916.

U.S. 5th Cav in Mexico, 1916

Add to this “practically all the serviceable cavalry” from the mobilized National Guard that included three cavalry regiments, 13 separate squadrons, and 22 separate cavalry troops, a force that required the immediate purchase on the open market of 1,861 cavalry horses by quartermasters to take to the field as most units were called up with less than half their stables full.

One Guard cavalry unit had no horses on call-up day except one privately owned mount, and in another that had 92 state-owned horses, only 23 passed inspection by a U.S. Cavalry remount officer.

“Making cavalry horses out of outlaws!”

While nearly 2 million Doughboys went “Over There” in the Great War, few were horse soldiers (just the 6th and 15th Cavalry Regiments arrived in France in March 1918, and were later sent to the trenches dismounted).

Instead, cavalry units were either repurposed into supply trains and artillery units or left to watch the border; the latter regiments organized into the short-lived 15th Cavalry Division.

At the same time, the Army went all-in on mechanization and established its first dedicated tank units.

The great cavalry farce of the 1920s-1930s

By the 1920s, the walk away from horses continued, and three regiments of regulars (15th, 16th, and 17th) were disbanded, as the regular cavalry increasingly became motorized (the 1st and 13th U.S. Cavalry were the first to hand in their horses, starting in 1932). In the Philippines, the 26th Cavalry regiment (Philippine Scouts), made up generally of Filipinos and Filipino-Americans, with a few seconded Regular Army officers and NCOs, was established in 1922 using horses and equipment left behind when the segreated 9th Cavalry shipped back home.

The interwar role of horse cavalry was increasingly transferred to the National Guard and Army Reserve.

However, it was a force largely just on paper, allowing much smaller “regiments” than those typically seen in an infantry format to exist (1,090 officers and men vs 3,500 by 1918 TOE, numbers even smaller by later standards).

Florida National Guard summer camp officer with 1902 pattern sword fooling on horseback, Jacksonville, 1930 time frame.

This saw the creation out of whole cloth of 20 NG horse cav regiments between 1921 and 1927: the 101st and 121st Cavalry Regiments in New York, 102nd Cavalry in New Jersey, the 103rd and 104th Cavalry in Pennsylvania, 105th Cavalry (Wisconsin), 106th Cavalry (Illinois), 107th Cavalry (Ohio), 108th Cavary (Georgia), 109th Cavalry (Tennessee), the 110th Cavalry in Massachusetts, the 112th and 124th Cavalry Regiments in Texas, 113th Cavalry (Iowa), 114th Cavalry (Kansas), 115th Cavalry (Wyoming), 116th Cavalry (Idaho), 117th (Colorado/New Mexico, never fully formed), 122nd (Connecticut and Rhode Island), and 123rd (Kentucky).

In 1927, each cavalry regiment at the time, when fully staffed and ready for service, included four lettered 123-man troops led by captains, organized into two numbered 248-man squadrons led by a major, plus a regimental headquarters, machinegun, medical, and service troops for 39 officers and 710 men including ferriers and veteranirians. Add to this 810 horses, 64 mules, three cars, three 1 1/2 ton trucks, a motorcycle (with side car), 38 assorted wagons, 10 M1917 water cooled MGs, 24 M1918 machine rifles (BARs), 501 M1903 Springfield rifles (with bayonets), 724 M1911 pistols, 16 M1903 medical bolos, and, of course, 425 Patton-style M1913 cavalry sabers.

These optimistically formed four NG Cavalry divisions, the 21st, 22nd, 23rd, and 24th.

At the division level, there was a 103-man light tank company with 18 M1917 (Renault FT) tanks and 7 truck-pulled 37mm guns as well as an 89-man armored car company with 12 M1/M2 armored Scout cars, and a 520-man battalion of 12 horse-drawn 75mm field guns (in three batteries) and seven AAA MGs. While authorized, few divisions actually had these exotic bits of kit other than the Regular Army’s 1st and 2nd Cavalry Divisions, which each housed four active Cavalry regiments.

The 3rd Cavalry Division was openly just a “paper” division with its support units in the Reserve and never in its 19-year interwar history drilled as a unit.

`Troop A, 1st Squadron, 108th Cavalry Regiment, Georgia National Guard at Fort Oglethorpe, Ga. in 1930

It should be noted, however, that the TOE for each NG cavalry troop in peacetime would be just 65 officers and men (against the fully-manned wartime authorization of 123) but had only 32 horses, enough for training, yet still requiring a massive influx of trained horse flesh in wartime, followed by a good 6 months to a year of unit training before they could be deployed.

Further, these regiments were slowly reformatted as hybrid horse-mechanized units, with elements of both, with horse (and trooper) numbers dropping while traditional items like the saber were abandoned after 1934.

Wyoming National Guard’s 115th Cavalry Regiment in its final format, circa 1940, with jeeps, motorcycles, and trucks augmenting the regimental band and horse soldiers.

At the same time, the Army Reserve amazingly had 24 horse cavalry regiments, numbered 301st through 324th, in six divisions (!) numbered the 61st through 66th. With somehow even fewer horses on hand than the NG units, these regiments typically had to borrow NG horses, those from CMMG or ROTC units, or trek to the U.S. 3rd Cavalry’s stables at Fort Myers in the summer to train.

Meanwhile, the 2nd Cavalry Regiment pitched in to train Great Plains Army Reservists at Fort Riley, Kansas. The 14th Cav maintained a Cavalry riding school at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, specifically to train Midwestern Army Reservists, where, in 1936, their 2nd Squadron taught future president Ronald Reagan how to ride horses, by the numbers.

Reagan’s military service began with the U.S. Army Reserve via at-home Army Extension courses in 1935. He was a private in the Iowa-based 322nd Cavalry Regiment before being commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Officers Reserve Corps. He was later assigned to the 323rd Cavalry Regiment in California and in 1942 requested a transfer to the USAAF, where he helped produce 400 training films in the 1st Motion Picture Unit.

While it was estimated that the Army would need over 200,000 horses immediately in wartime if all 44 Guard and Reserve horse cav regiments and their 10 divisional organizations were fully-fleshed out, the service typically only procured between 1,500 and 2,500 new horses every year in the 1930s, including use for both active and reserve cavalry and artillery, and at the end of the 1941 fiscal year the remount depots only had 28,000 horses on hand.

By the fall of 1940, with the Guard federalized, of the existing 19 NG cavalry regiments, 7 were reorganized into mechanized regiments, 6 were converted to field artillery, and 4 to coastal artillery.

Only two, the Texas 112th and 124th, were given a reprieve as horse cavalry and would be brigaded together as the 56th Cavalry Brigade, which survived until March 1944 when they put their horses to pasture and became the 56th Cavalry Reconnaissance Troop, Mechanized, bound for the CBI theatre.

The regular Army’s 3rd Cavalry Regiment led its horses away in February 1942, and the 1st Cavalry Division was de-horsed by May 1943, followed by the 2d Cavalry Division ten months later.

Likewise, the massive Army Reserve “cavalry” force saw its 24 regiments melt away by 1942 when they were hollowed out by having their assigned personnel called to active duty and reassigned to Regular Army and federalized National Guard units. The empty unit shells were typically reclassified into Signal Aircraft Warning (radar) battalions and Tank Destroyer battalions (notably the 62nd, 63rd, 65th, 66th, 70th, 71st, and 75th), then rebuilt with new personnel.

Most of the “U.S” branded horses were “loaned” to the USCG, who took 3,900 for WWII beach patrol work, while over 7,000 went overseas as military aid to allies.

The Constabulary

While there was a short resurgence of small horse-mounted recon detachments formed in divisions in 1944-45, notably with the 10th Mountain, who experienced possibly the final U.S. Army mounted cavalry charge, the 35,000-strong U.S. Constabulary force in occupied Germany from 1946-52 included much use of horses.

Organized into 10 regiments, the circa 1946 TOE of each allowed for a horse platoon with 30 horses to patrol difficult terrain.

Even afterward, the Army’s Berlin Garrison was authorized 56 horses for the use of the force there as late as 1958.

“One of the famous Constabulary regiment horse patrols”

Short-lived resurgence

The Army’s last dedicated pack horse unit, the 35th QM Pack Co., was deactivated at Fort Carson, Colorado, in the spring of 1957.

Since then, the Army has continued whittling down its horse inventory with a short reprieve post 9/11 such as in the famous use of local ponies by the 5th SFG’s ODA 595 when it operated with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and the fleeting Special Operations Forces Horsemanship Course at Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center in California.

Man don’t those white horses glow at night! Green Berets from 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne) ride horses to travel through rough terrain during a site reconnaissance training exercise on March 1, 2016 in Nevada. (U.S. Army photo by 3rd SFG (A) Combat Camera)

Plus, there was a steady resurgence post-Vietnam of ceremonial horse detachments on posts with a history going back to the Old West days.

The 11th ACR’s “Black Horse” Detachment at Fort Irwin

About that.

The Army last week announced that it was “streamlining its Military Working Equid program to align more resources with warfighting capability and readiness. MWEs include horses, mules, and donkeys owned by the Department of Defense and housed on Army installations.”

This means that, of its current seven horse detachments– often staffed by volunteers on collateral duty– just two will remain.

Starting in July 2025, the Army will sunset ownership, operation, and materiel support of MWE programs at Fort Irwin, California; Fort Huachuca, Arizona; Fort Riley, Kansas; Fort Sill, Oklahoma; and Fort Hood, Texas.

However, MWE programs will continue with The Old Guard Caisson units at the Military District of Washington and at Joint Base San Antonio, Texas.

“This initiative will save the Army $2 million annually and will allow the funds and Soldiers dedicated to MWE programs to be redirected to readiness and warfighting priorities.

An estimated 141 current Army horses will be moved out to new homes.

“Installation commanders will have one year to transfer, facilitate adoption, or donate the MWEs to vetted owners according to federal law. The Army Surgeon General’s MWE Task Force, comprised of equine veterinarian experts, will provide oversight to ensure the MWEs go to appropriate owners.”

Of note, the Caisson Platoon just resumed limited operations at Arlington last month.

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Category Archives: World War One

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Warship Wednesday, August 13, 2025: A Long-Lived Tyne Built Ship

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Warship Wednesday, July 16, 2025: Flat Iron Warrior

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The great cavalry farce of the 1920s-1930s

The Constabulary

Short-lived resurgence

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