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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

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Warship Wednesday, May 21, 2025:  Mess with the Goat, You Get the Horns

Above, we see a trio of happy ratings (Besättningsmen) aboard the unique Flygplanskryssare (aircraft cruiser) HSwMS Gotland, likely in the late 1930s. One of the warship’s Bofors 6″/55 guns makes a cameo in the upper left corner. Behind the Swedish bluejackets are at least four Hawker Osprey S9 scout floatplanes with room on the rails to spare, showing that Gotland was no ordinary cruiser.

While Sweden often gets written off for its impact during WWII, the country, particularly this ship, made a key difference that made history some 84 years ago this week.

Meet Gotland

Our subject came about following the increased use of aircraft by the Swedish Navy in their summer maneuvers in 1925, which pointed to the dire need for a persistent seagoing aircraft carrier/tender of sorts.

From the 1926 report (mechanically translated):

The air forces assigned to an operating naval force now appear to be an indispensable, fully integrated part of the naval force, and numerous experiences from our fleet’s annually recurring exercises show that the air force’s participation in naval operations cannot be limited to sporadic engagements, but must be permanent and immediate.

As a stopgap, the old 3,600-ton coastal battleship Dristigheten was refitted as a seaplane carrier (flygmoderfaryget). With this conversion, she lost her big guns (two 210mm/44cal. Bofors M/1898s and six 152mm/44cal. Bofors M/98s) as well as her two torpedo tubes, trading them in for a few smaller caliber AAAs and the capability to handle as many as four floatplanes as well as tend small craft such as patrol boats and coastal gunboats. Her magazine space was largely converted to avgas bunkerage.

The Swedish Navy’s Marinens Flygväsende (MFV) at the time flew a host of early Friedrichshafen and Hansa models with Dristigheten lifting these reconnaissance seaplanes from her deck to take off on the water and retrieving them from the drink on their return. In her later years, she carried Heinkel HD 16/19s.

A more permanent fix would be preferable for two ships intended from the keel up to support aircraft. That’s where Gotland and her unrealized sister came in.

Gotland was designed to be a Swiss Army knife of sorts, carrying both a decent main battery, torpedo tubes, extensive aviation facilities meant to support a squadron of up to a dozen aircraft, as well as both minesweeping and minelaying gear. Her original plan was of a 5,600-ton, 460-foot hybrid aviation cruiser that included six 6-inch guns in three twin turrets, two forward and one rear, as well as two catapults and a rear hangar/aviation deck. It was also thought she would be able to run at up to 29 knots.

However, money being tight, the design was shortchanged, still with a six-gun main battery but with two of those carried in antiquated casemate mounts (this in the 1930s!). Also, she would not have a hangar, would only carry one catapult, and while able to carry 12 aircraft in theory, the government only allotted enough funds for six. She also shrank some 34 feet in length and lost a corresponding 340 tons in weight.

Correspondingly, using an upgraded form of the 24,000 shp machinery used by the Swedish 36-knot Ehrenskold-class destroyers (four oil-fired Penhoet boilers up from three Thornycroft boilers, in both cases supplying steam to two De Laval steam turbines), Gotland could make 27.5 knots on her 33,000 shp plant. Armor was just a slight smear over the machinery, turrets, and conning tower, generally just at or over 1 inch of steel.

Like most cruisers of her era, she also carried a decent torpedo battery consisting of two trainable triple M/34 533mm tubes on turnstiles.

She was also equipped with extensive minesweeping gear, including four large paravanes, stored on the deck forward of the superstructure.

When it came to her aviation operations, her aircraft were launched via an onboard catapult firing process (katapultskjutning) and recovered via crane. While her initial theory was that she would carry 12 aircraft in a hangar, this was deleted for cost reasons, and all storage and maintenance were done on an open deck, although a complicated canvas awning system could be installed if needed. It soon proved that she could only store five aircraft and use her catapult at the same time, which ironically made six aircraft the magic number anyway.

The aircraft of choice was a special version of the Hawker Osprey floatplane (the British Fleet Air Arm used 124 of the type), termed the Spaningsflygplan (reconnaissance aircraft) 9 in Swedish service. This made sense as the Swedes already had 42 Hawker Harts, which were essentially the same plane but without floats, used as light bombers. Sent to Stockholm in kits, they were outfitted with Swedish NOHAB (licensed-built Bristol Pegasus IM2) My VI 9-cylinder 600 hp engines rather than the standard 630 hp Rolls-Royce Kestrel.

Similarly, while British variants carried a synchronized forward-firing Vickers and a flexible Lewis gun for the observer, the S9 had a Swedish 8mm Flygplankulspruta ksp m/22Fh (Carl Gustaf made FN-licensed air-cooled M1919 Browning) fixed with 500 rounds while the back seater had a flex variant of the same gun, the ksp m/22R. Speed was about 140 knots while range was only about 400nm. In a pinch, 500 pounds of bombs could be carried underwing.

The aircraft could be shuttled around the handling deck via a rail system that interfaced with the floats.

Laid down at Lindholmen, Göteborg/Götaverken, in 1930, our subject launched on 14 September 1933, christened by Crown Prince Gustav Adolf (later King Gustav VI). She was only the second Swedish warship to carry the name, with the first being a circa 1682 50-gun ship of the line that fought at Rügen in 1715.

After fitting out and trials, she was commissioned on 14 December 1934.

Her wartime assignment was to lead the modern destroyers of the Kustflottans, or Coastal Fleet, a job well suited as her draft was 18 feet at maximum load but could go as shallow as 15 when light. She would drill with these forces each summer.

Meanwhile, during peacetime, she was an envoy for the country and a training tool for its fleet, deploying on an annual winter cruise between December and April, to warmer climes down south while the rest of the Swedish Navy was locked into the Baltic by ice.

Equipped with four generators (two diesel and two running off the steam turbines), Gotland had a saltwater evaporator and extensive reefers to allow for overseas cruises. Her endurance at 12 knots was well over 4,000nm.

She completed seven winter cruises before WWII halted such operations.

War!

When Germany invaded Poland and France and Britain soon joined in what became WWII in September 1939, Gotland was undergoing an overhaul between her summer maneuvers and a planned winter overseas cruise. Rushed to completion, she made ready for war and joined the Kustflottan instead.

It was while serving on Swedish neutrality patrol (neutralitetsvakten) that, just after noon on 20 May 1941, Gotland’s aircraft spotted the new German battlewagon KMS Bismarck and her consort the cruiser Prinz Eugen and a destroyer screen in the Kattegat between Sweden and Norway. Closing to within visual distance an hour later, Gotland shadowed the Teutonic force for two hours and transmitted a report to naval headquarters, stating: “Two large ships, three destroyers, five escort vessels, and 10–12 aircraft passed Marstrand, course 205/20′.”

This report soon made its way to one Captain Henry Mangles Denham, RN, the British naval attaché in Stockholm, who duly transmitted the information to the Admiralty, and thus kicked off the great Hunt for Bismarck. Denham, a gentleman of the first sort who saw service on the battlewagon HMS Agamemnon as a midshipman of 16 in the Dardanelles in the Great War, had been seconded to Naval Intelligence in 1940 and, as you can see, was soon able to establish very good relations with the Swedish secret service. Just a week later, Bismarck was sunk– as was HMS Hood in the process.

The intelligence tip was the highlight of Gotland’s wartime service.

By the winter of 1943-44, it was decided that Gotland would be better suited to continue service as an anti-aircraft cruiser (Luftvärnskryssare) due to the fact that her aircraft were considered obsolete and anything heavier, such as the Saab 17 dive bomber, would need a more advanced catapult as they weighed over 9,000 pounds, over twice as much as the S9 Osprey Hawker.

Removed was all the aviation gear. She then packed on the Bofors AAA guns to include eight 40mm/56 K/60 M32s (6 of them in advanced power-controlled gyrostabilized mounts) and four (2×2) 20mm/63 K/66 M40s.

Cold War, and another rebuild

In 1946, Sweden flirted with the idea of a more full-fledged light aircraft carrier/cruiser (hangarkryssare) with a hangar and a flight deck. Running some 8,100 tons (full), the 465-foot craft would be able to carry 20 Vampires backed up by a gun armament of eight 120mm guns in four turrets, 16 40mm guns in eight twin mounts, and 26 20mm guns.

This never came to pass, and, in the meantime, with the Swedes building two new cruisers, Gotland was relegated to use as the command ship of the Swedish naval academy (Sjostridsskolan) during the summer and returned to her traditional long winter voyages, completing 10 additional cruises after the war.

Over the winter of 1953-54, she was overhauled and rebuilt for the second time in her career. The refit included radar (a British-supplied Type 293 short-range aerial-search) and triple racks (raketstall) for 103mm Bofors illumination rockets on each side of the 6″/55 gun houses. She also finally lost her casemate guns.

With the new cruisers added to the fleet and the Swedish Navy strapped for cash and manpower to keep three such vessels active, Gotland, even though she was just overhauled, was laid up in material reserve (materielberedadstand) as the winter of 1956 approached.

On 1 July 1960, she was marked for disposal and sold for scrap two years later.

Epilogue

She is well remembered in her home country. While she was in commission, she carried an extensive art collection and accumulated a series of goodwill relics from overseas port calls during her 17 winter training cruises. These, along with a tremendous number of logs and informal cruise books and ship’s papers, are retained by the Swedish Marinmuseum.

The Marinmuseum also has a wooden 26-inch scale model (Fartygsmodell) of Gotland in her flight cruiser arrangement that was constructed by Arne Åkermark at Europafilm in the 1940s.

They also have a larger 34-inch model made in the 1960s.

The third HSwMS Gotland is the class leader (A19) of a series of advanced AIP diesel-electric subs that joined the fleet in 1996.

As for Captain Henry Mangles Denham, RN, the British naval attaché who passed along Gotland’s report on Bismarck leading to the “release of the hounds,” he remained at his post in Stockholm until 1947, when he retired, capping 32 years of service to the crown. His cloak-and-dagger work in Scandinavia earned him one of the very few CMGs (Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George) given to naval officers and was also decorated by numerous Allied governments.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

 

***

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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