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Warship Wednesday, April 9, 2025: First of a Long Line

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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

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, April 9, 2025: First of a Long Line

Naval History and Heritage Command photo NH 310

Above, we see the unique U.S. Revenue Cutter Windom circa 1900. She had already fought in one war under Navy orders, would go on to carry a “USS” during WWI, bust rum-runners, and chart a course for the modern Coast Guard.

Not bad for a 170-foot ship.

A New Era

In 1890, the Revenue Cutter Service– the forerunner of the USCG– was celebrating its centennial, having been authorized as part of the Treasury Department in 1790. Having fought during the Quasi War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Civil War, the USRCS had a long history of suiting up for combat when needed.

It was a busy force.

In 1890, the 36 assorted cutters of the service had cruised a total of 301,416 nautical miles, boarded and examined 26,962 vessels for revenue purposes, and assisted 123 distressed vessels, saving a value of $2,806,056 in ships and cargoes on the sea. They did everything that year from chasing down seal poachers in the Bering Sea to breaking up smuggling rings along the Florida Keys and arresting murderers on the high seas.

However, it was stuck in the 19th century while pointing towards the 20th and was obsolete. Most of the 36 cutters were small (under 100 foot) sloops, luggers, and tugs, capable of harbor and coastal patrols at best. The more blue water of the fleet were typically iron-hulled topsail steam schooners (USRC Gallatin, Hamilton, Boutwell, Dallas, Dexter, Rush, Corwin, and Forward) of about 140 feet in length. Two big steamers with auxiliary rigs, the 165-foot USRC Perry and the 198-foot USRC Bear, were dedicated to the far-off Alaska patrol. A couple of more modern twin-screwed steam cutters, the 145-foot USRC Morrill and the 190-foot USRC Galveston, were just coming online.

Armament in many cases was simply whatever could be scrounged from the Navy’ that was small enough to carry and service without lifts, typically 3-pounder 47mm or 6-pounder 57mm breechloading mounts, while smaller cutters usually just carried small arms. Speaking of which, trapdoor Springfield conversions and S&W cartridge revolvers were the norm. Some older cutters carried breechloading 3-inch Ordnance conversions of Civil War-era cannon.

USRC Corwin departing for Alaska in 1887. She was a 140-foot topsail schooner-rigged iron-hulled steamer that exemplified the cutter service in 1890. She carried a single 6-pounder.

As noted by the SECNAV at the time, Benjamin Franklin Tracy, “At present this large fleet of small vessels is constructed without any reference to the necessities of modern warfare.”

Pioneering a new age of steel cruising cutters for the service, capable of serving as a gunboat for the Navy in times of war, would be our USRC Windom.

Modern for her era, she was the first cutter constructed with a fully watertight hull, longitudinal and transverse bulkheads, and a triple expansion steam plant capable of 15 knots sustained speed.

She would carry a twin schooner auxiliary rig, at least at first

Designed to service Chesapeake Bay, Windom would displace 412 tons, have a length of 170 feet, eight inches overall, and an extreme beam of 27 feet. Her normal draught, carrying 50 tons of coal aboard, would be 6.5 fee,t while her hold was 13.5 deep.

Her twin inverted cylinder, direct-acting, triple-expansion steam engines (11 3-4, 16 1-2, and 26 1-2  cylinders with a 24-inch stroke) were designed by the Navy’s Bureau of Steam Engineering under orders of Commodore George Melville and were “regarded in engineering circles as more advanced in type than any in the Revenue Cutter Service. They drove twin cast-iron propellers and could generate 800 hp at 175 rpm. They drew steam via a single tubular double-ended horizontal 16×12 foot boiler.

Her battery was one installed 6-pounder RF Hotchkiss with weight and space for a 3-inch or 4-inch BL and a second 6-pounder as well. Small arms of a “modern type” would be provided for the 45-member crew.

Revenue Cutter Windom, Port Arthur, Texas

The design of Windom would lead the service to order five so-called Propeller class cutters, which were larger and faster (as well as costing about twice as much per hull) at 18 knots. These vessels, to the same overall concept but each slightly different in design, were built to carry a bow-mounted torpedo tube for 15-inch Bliss-Whitehead type torpedoes (although they appeared to have not been fitted with the weapons) and as many as four modern quick-firing 3-inch guns (though they typically used just two 6-pounder, 57mm popguns in peacetime).

These ships included:

–McCulloch, a barquentine-rigged, composite-hulled, 219-foot, 1,280-ton steamer ordered from William Cramp and Sons of Philadelphia for $196,000. She was the longest of the type as she was intended for Pacific service and so was designed with larger coal bunkers.

–Gresham, a brigantine-rigged 206-foot, 1,090-ton steel-hulled steamer built by the Globe Iron Works Company of Cleveland, OH for $147,800.

–Manning, a brigantine-rigged 205-foot, 1,150-ton steamer ordered from the Atlantic Works Company of East Boston, MA, for a cost of $159,951.

–Algonquin, brigantine-rigged 205.5-foot, 1,180-ton steel-hulled steamer ordered from the Globe Iron Works Company of Cleveland, OH for $193,000.

–Onondaga, brigantine-rigged 206-foot, 1,190-ton steel-hulled steamer ordered from the Globe Iron Works Company of Cleveland, OH for $193,800.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Meet Windom

Our subject, in frequent USRC/USCG practice, was named for a past secretary of the U.S. Treasury, in this case, William Windom. A long-term U.S. Congressman (1859-1869) and Senator (1870-1881, 81-83) from Minnesota, he served as the Treasury boss under James A. Garfield for nine months in 1881 and then again under Benjamin Harrison from 1889 through 1891, passing in office at age 63. He successfully helped defeat a push to transfer the Cutter Service to the Navy

The Honorable William Windom, of Minnesota, left, while in Congress compared to his official portrait as Secretary of the Treasury in the Garfield administration. NARA 165-A-3716 & LOC LC-DIG-cwpbh-03920

Honoring the late Mr. Windom, the Treasury Department carried his engraved portrait on the $2 U.S. Silver Certificate from 1891 to 1896, while the USRCS named its groundbreaking new cutter after him.

Ordered from the Iowa Iron Works, Dubuque, for $98,500, with delivery to be made down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico and then to Key West. The plates, frames, angle irons, and castings employed in the hull were furnished by the West Superior Steel Works of Wisconsin, while William Cramp built her engines.

Accepted by the Treasury Department on 11 May 1896, she was moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where she completed fitting out and was placed in commission on 30 June 1896.

Her initial skipper was Capt. Samuel Edmondson Maguire, a 54-year-old Marylander who had joined the Revenue Cutter Service in 1871 as a third lieutenant after carpetbagging in Louisiana during Reconstruction. Maguire had volunteered during the Civil War as a private in Company C of the 114th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, the famed Zouaves d ‘Afrique, and was wounded at Fredericksburg.

In October 1896, Windom was tasked with keeping guard over the notorious gun-running steamer Dauntless.

Impounded at sea by the cruiser USS Raleigh off Florida after a run to arm rebels fighting against the Spanish in Cuba, Windom guarded the filibuster mothership until the Collector of Customs released the libeled Dauntless, after paying a $200 fine for lying to off the coast with no lights, to resume her illicit activities. Windom joined the cutters, Boutwell and Colfax, through the end of the year in Florida waters, based on the St. John River, to run interference against other filibuster boats headed for Cuba, impounding the steamers Kate Spencer and Three Friends in November.

Besides filibuster-busting, Windom spent the first 17 months of her career in quiet operations on the Chesapeake and patrolling the fishing grounds between the Virginia capes and Cape Hatteras.

Then came…

War with Spain!

On 24 March 1898, with the drums of war beating with Spain, President McKinley ordered the cutters Gresham, Manning, Windom, Woodbury, Hamilton, Morrill, Hudson, Guthrie, and Calumet, “with their officers and crews, be placed under the direction of the Secretary of the Navy.” This was later augmented by the Corwin, Grant, Perry, McCulloch, and Rush in the Pacific, as well as the McLane, Onondaga, and Winona, with at least 20 cutters on Navy and Army (Coastal Artillery) orders during the short conflict.

As noted by the Secretary of the Treasury after the conflict from the USRCS’s thin volume on the war:

There were in cooperation with the Navy 13 revenue cutters, carrying 61 guns, 98 officers, and 562 enlisted men. Of these, 8 cutters (43 guns), 58 officers, and 339 men were in Admiral Sampson’s fleet and on the Havana blockade; 1 cutter (6 guns), 10 officers, and 95 men were in Admiral Dewey’s fleet at Manila, and 4 cutters (12 guns), 30 officers, and 128 men cooperated with the Navy on the Pacific coast.

In addition to services rendered by vessels with the naval forces, there were 7 others, carrying 10 guns, 33 officers, and 163 men, with the Army, engaged in patrolling and guarding mine fields in various harbors, from Boston to Mobile and New Orleans.

Two days after the transfer order from McKinley, Windom, at Hampton Roads at the time, received orders to report at Norfolk and was there on 25 April when Congress passed the resolution recognizing that a state of war existed between the United States and Spain. She was painted gray and fitted with a four-inch main gun and a second 6-pounder.

USRC Windom in drydock at the Norfolk Navy Yard, Portsmouth, Virginia, 9 April 1898. Photograph from the Bureau of Ships Collection in the U.S. National Archives. 19-N-19-21-12

Windom’s wardroom during the war, in addition to Maguire, included:

  • First Lieutenant F. G. F. Wadsworth, executive officer
  • Second Lieutenant Richard Owens Crisp, navigator
  • Second Lieutenant S. P. Edmunds
  • Third Lieutenant J. V. Wild
  • Chief Engineer C. F. Coffin
  • First Assistant Engineer C. W. Zastrow
  • Second Assistant Engineer Edwin W. Davis
  • Surgeon John C. Travis (March 29 to August 1, 1898)
  • Surgeon W. E. Handy (August 2 to August 29, 1898)

On 30 April, Windom departed Hampton Roads on her way to the blockade off Cuba, stopping at  Key West briefly before arriving off Cuba on 8 May.

Assigned to Commodore Howell’s 1st Squadron, she patrolled the southern coast of Cuba near Cienfuegos until the 13 May, cutting the two Cienfuegos cables. She also helped cover the withdrawal of the Navy small boat raid to the cable house ashore (the Battle at Punta de la Colorados), closing with a Spanish battery and plastering it with 4-inch fire, scattering assembled local infantry. She also reportedly destroyed the lighthouse there, which was being used as an observation post by the Spanish, with her 6-pounders.

In all, Windom’s battery fired 85 rounds that day.

Her efforts helped allow 51 of the 53 Sailors and Marines dispatched from the cruiser USS Marblehead and gunboat USS Nashville to return to their vessels alive, and the cutter afterward evacuated several of the more seriously wounded bluejackets to Key West.

From her official report of the incident:

Windom then, after a respite at Key West, assumed station off Havana on 28 May, holding the line through August, chasing four Spanish blockade runners in June.

Hostilities ended on 13 August, and Windom reverted to Treasury Department control four days later. Arriving at Norfolk, she soon transferred newly installed guns to the USRC Gresham, returning to her pre-war appearance by October.

Maguire, the former Pennsylvania Zouave, remained in the service until 1906, when he retired as a senior captain, closing out 35 years of service to the Treasury Department. He passed in Patchogue, New York, in 1916, aged 73.

Return to Peace

Following the end of the Spanish-American War, Windom was soon back on her normal beat along the Chesapeake, including patrolling the America’s Cup Races in 1903.

In 1906, she transferred to Galveston to replace the cutter of the same name.

January 27, 1908. Photograph of the canal in Port Arthur, Texas. People stand along the shore. Boats are pulled over to the shore. The Revenue Cutter Windom is in the background. Heritage House Museum Local Control No: hhm_01293.

Working the length of the Gulf of Mexico from Key West to Brownsville, she returned to Maryland in September 1911 for a refit that saw her placed in ordinary for six weeks.

Back in Galveston, she was the first vessel to transit the newly opened Houston Ship Channel on 10 November 1914. President Wilson fired a cannon via remote control to officially mark the channel as open for operations. A band played the National Anthem from a barge in the center of the Turning Basin while Sue Campbell, daughter of Houston Mayor Ben Campbell, sprinkled white roses into the water from Windom’s top deck and decreed, “I christen thee Port of Houston; hither the boats of all nations may come and receive hearty welcome.”

USRC Windom in the Houston Ship Channel

In January 1915, Windom again entered ordinary in Maryland for an extensive one-year rebuild that saw her coal-fired boilers replaced by more efficient Babcock & Wilcox oil-fired models and her bunkers converted. This mid-life service extension saw her emerge with a new name: the USRC Comanche, soon to be the USCGC Comanche.

Recommissioned on 8 January 1916, Windom/Comanche returned to the Gulf and was deemed the Krewe of Rex’s royal yacht for Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

Windom as USCGC Comanche

View of the royal yacht “Comanche” as it prepares to dock at the foot of Canal Street on the Monday before Mardi Gras 1916

War with Germany!

With the U.S. entry into the Great War, Comanche was transferred from the Coast Guard to the Navy on 6 April 1917. She soon picked up another large deck gun, this time a 3″/50 Mk II. Her crew was bumped from 49 to 76 to allow for more watch standers and gun crew.

Commissioned as USS Comanche on 11 April 1917, she performed patrol duties in the New Orleans area under the command of LT Robert Ferriday Spangenberg, USNRF, until the summer of 1919.

Comanche was stricken from the Navy List on 1 August 1919 and returned to the Treasury Department on 28 August 1919.

Twilight

Wearing her white scheme once again, Comanche continued her patrols of the Gulf for another seven months and then headed for Key West where she was decommissioned on 17 April 1920 for repairs.

USRC Windom Gulf of Mexico NARA 56-AR-049

Recommissioned in July 1920, the ship relieved the USCGC Tallapoosa at Mobile and rejoined the Gulf Division. There, she was active in the campaign against bootleggers bringing contraband liquor up from the Caribbean during Prohibition.

Comanche Commonwealth Lib 2002-013-002-029

Comanche Commonwealth Lib 2002-013-002-048

Arthur S. Graham – Ralph A. Dett – Albert T. Chase – Brady S. Lindsay with barrels of confiscated 195% liquor while serving on the U.S. Revenue Cutter Comanche off Texas, circa 1920. Digital Commonwealth 2002.013.002.039.

Serving successively at Mobile, Key West, and Galveston, she patrolled coastal waters constantly until June of 1930. During that period, she left the Gulf of Mexico only once, in 1923, for repairs at Baltimore and Norfolk.

In July 1927, while at sea 170 miles southeast of Galveston, she suffered a blaze in her fireroom that left her adrift and her radio room silent, the ship’s generators offline. Towed into port by a tug a week later, she was apparently never restored to her pre-blaze condition.

On 2 June 1930, she was detached from the Gulf Division and was ordered back to Arundel Cove for the final time.

She arrived at her destination on 1 July and was placed out of commission on the 31st. She was sold to Weiss Motor Lines of Baltimore on 13 November 1930 for a paltry $4,501.

While Weiss possibly kept her in service for a time longer, I cannot find her mentioned in Lloyds from the era. Odds are, with the downturn in the economy in the early 1930s leading to the Depression, and the aftermath of the 1927 fire never addressed, she was probably just scrapped.

Epilogue

Little remains of Winston/Comanche that I can find.

Some of her plans and papers are digitized in the National Archives.

The Coast Guard recycled the name “Comanche” for two subsequent cutters (served 1934-48 and 1959-1980) that we have profiled in the past.

Comanche seen on 26 November 1934, post-delivery but before commissioning in a rare period color photo. Note she does not have her Navy-owned main and secondary batteries fitted yet but does have her gleaming white hull, buff stack and masts, and black cap.

During WWII, a Maritime Commission Liberty ship (MC hull no. 516, 7194 GRT) was named SS William Windom. Entering service in early 1943, she dodged Scharnhorst on Arctic convoys, landed cargo at Normandy, and survived the war to be scrapped in 1964.

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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Warship Wednesday, March 12, 2025: Spymaster Farm

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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

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, March 12, 2025: Spymaster Farm

“Received from Office of Naval Intelligence,” U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, NH 64250

Above we see the beautiful new kleiner kreuzer SMS Dresden as she transits the Kiel Canal under the Levensau High Bridge in early 1908. Caught at sea in August 1914 in bad repair and already on her way back to Germany, she would end up being the last of the Kaiser’s cruisers at large on the high seas, sent to the bottom some 110 years ago this week.

The Dresden Class

The two Dresden-class light cruisers– our subject and the infamous SMS Emden— were ordered as part of the Kaiserliche Marine’s 1905-06 program to a modification of the earlier Königsberg class design and used the same hull form, armament, and armor plan but carried slightly different machinery. Some 388 feet long, they had a 44-foot beam and drew 18 feet of water under their hull.

Armament consisted of ten 4.1-inch SK L/40 naval guns— the standard weapon of almost all of Germany’s smaller cruisers and large colonial gunboats– in six single shielded pedestal mounts and four casemated, with 1,500 shells for these guns held in the magazine.

The German light cruiser SMS Dresden in a harbor. Note her forward 4.1-inch guns. IWM (Q 53072)

The secondary armament consisted of eight 2″/52 SK55 popguns with 4,000 rounds between them, backed up by a pair of submerged bow-mounted 17.7-inch torpedo tubes with space in the magazine for five fish. Landing party equipment included four Maxim machine guns and enough rifles, revolvers, and packs to outfit a company-sized force drawn from the 343-member crew. A light 6cm L/21 boat gun on a carriage along with 241 shells was also part of the ship’s bill.

When it came to armor, they carried a 3.1-inch belt of Krupp nickel steel along with 3.9 inches of protection over their conning towers and engines and about an inch over the deck. Meanwhile, the gun shields on the 4.1″/40s were two inches thick. Damage control was built into the design with 14 watertight compartments and a double-hulled bottom.

Dresden class cruiser diagrams Janes 1914

When it came to engineering, both used 12 coal-fired Schulz-Thornycroft marine boilers with Dresden using four Parson’s steam turbines generating 15,000shp while Emden had two reciprocating VTE engines that produced a less powerful 13,500shp. Likewise, Dresden carried more coal bunkerage (860 tons) while Emden could only stow 790 under normal conditions. Speed was virtually the same (23.5 Emden, 24 Dresden) as was cruising range with Emden having a longer (3,760nm) endurance at 12 knots while Dresden could only steam 3,600 but at 14 knots. Äpfel zu Organen.

Meet Dresden

While sister Emden was constructed at KW in Danzig, Dresden was laid down at the same time as Yard No. 195 (Ersatz Comet as she was originally to be named to replace the 19th-century sloop of that name) at Blohm & Voss, Hamburg. Launched on 5 October 1907 with Lord Mayor of Dresden, Otto Beutler, as a sponsor, she was commissioned on 14 November 1908, beating Emden to the fleet by eight months.

Outfitting Dresden class cruiser in Stettin

Meeting some early disaster, while on her shakedown on 28 November, Dresden was involved in a collision with the two-masted Swedish sailing ship Cacilie, sinking the Swede and sending the cruiser back to Hamburg for six months of repair, which was followed by a turbine explosion on follow-up trails.

Dresden at Wilhelmshaven in 1909. Farenholt Collection NH 65782

Finally emerging ready to serve, Dresden set sail under Kapitän zur See Eduard Varrentrapp in a three-ship task force along with the 6,500-ton training cruisers Victoria Louise and Hertha, bound for New York, where they would join the 3,700-ton Ostamerikanischen station cruiser (stationskreuzer) Bremen. Of note on Bremen during this period was a young ensign, one multilingual Wilhelm Canaris, who at the time was planning to spend his career in torpedo boats.

Peacetime ship of intrigue

The four German ships, Dresden included, arrived in New York in late September 1909 to attend the international naval review as part of the 300th Hudson-Fulton Exhibition. The force, under the command of the white-bearded and well-mustached 65-year-old Grossadmiral Hans von Koester– the first German naval officer to hold the rank– would take in the sites and become one of the more celebrated contingents, with thousands of ethnic Teutons and recent emigres from the region in NYC at the time.

Dresden was extensively photographed in the fortnight she spent on the Hudson.

German cruiser SMS Dresden. Picture taken between 24.September and 9.October 1909 during the Hudson Fulton fleet parade in New York. Note protected cruisers Victoria Louise and Hertha, other units of the German Squadron, in the background. Bain News Service collection, LOC 04281.

Dresden during Hudson-Fulton. H. C. White Co. image. LC-DIG-stereo-1s43331

Dresden during Hudson Fulton with her glad rags flying. Detroit Publishing postcard. LOC LC-D4-22624

Dresden during Hudson Fulton. Detroit Publishing postcard. LC-D4-39223

Photographed before World War I, probably at New York. NH 43303

Returning to Germany, Dresden suffered another collision, this time with the light cruiser Konigsberg, and spent some time in the training division in the Baltic.

She was beautiful in all respects, as shown off in period postcards.

She was then along with the cruiser Strassburg, dispatched to join the Mittelmeer-division in the Med between April and September 1913 under the command of FKpt Fritz Ludecke, where she kept tabs on the Balkans as the region descended first into war with the Ottomans and then among themselves, giving birth to the new nation of Albania.

SMS Dresden at Swinemunde

In December 1913, with Ludecke swapped out for FKpt Erich Kohler so that Ludecke could take command of the new light cruiser SMS Karlsruhe, Dresden skipped a much-needed overhaul to hold down the Ostamerikanischen station for six months as Bremen returned home after spending nearly 10 years in the Americas. The plan would be that Karlsruhe, her shakedown finished, would arrive in the summer of 1914 to tap Dresden out and take over the station. Joining Dresden for this deployment, fresh off a year in the Baltic on torpedo boat duties, was a now Lt. Canaris, who had proven very capable when on the old Bremen of making and utilizing local contents across Latin America.

Bremen, fresh from evacuating 1,200 European civilians during the Mexican revolution along with the HAPAG steamers Kronprinzessin Cecilie and Bolivia, was relieved on 21 January 1914 and returned home to Germany, via Port-au-Prince, on 13 February, leaving the station in Dresden’s hands.

With Germany backing Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta, Dresden got involved with the local affairs at a ground level. Besides continuing to evacuate nearly 2,000 American and European non-combatants to HAPAG liners alongside British and U.S. warships during the occupation of Veracruz, the cruiser sent a detachment of armed sailors to guard the German embassy in Mexico City and helped the HAPAG steamer SS Ypiranga escape U.S. custody in April 1918, the latter filled with 30 train car loads of German-made Mauser rifles and cartridges bound for Huerta in violation of the American weapons embargo on the dictator. The German-flagged steamer SS Bavaria likewise arrived with another load of guns in May.

Canaris’ contacts and agents in the region, cultivated during his time on Bremen, often proved invaluable. The young officer had a reputation as a “fixer.”

Vera Cruz, Mexico, warships off Fort San Juan de Ulua near the time of the U.S. landing in April 1914. The three ships in the foreground from left to right are the German cruiser Dresden, the Mexican gunboat Nicolas Bravo, and the Spanish cruiser Carlos V. The ship behind the bow of Carlos V may be the Mexican Zaragoza as Bravo’s sister Morales was probably in the Pacific at this time. NH 42501

However, no matter how many guns the Germans sent, they arrived too late to help Huerta turn the tide against the Constitutionalists of Carranza, Obregon, and Villa in the north and the Zapatistas in the south. “El Chacal,” with his Federal Army soundly defeated at the Battle of Zacatecas in July 1914, resigned his office. His ride out of the country? Dresden, with Canaris as the general’s interpreter and handler, took him into exile as far as Kingston, Jamaica along with his vice president, Aureliano Blanquet, and their families.

The deposed dictator would later work with German naval spymaster Kapt. Franz von Rintelen during WWI on a series of anti-American and anti-Mexican for that matter initiatives until he passed under sketchy circumstances in Fort Bliss, Texas, with Von Rintelen writing after the war that, perhaps, Huerta was poisoned.

This brings us to…

War!

The fresh and brand-new Karlsruhe, finally complete and deployed to American waters on her maiden cruise, rendezvoused with the well-worn and homebound Dresden at Port-au-Prince, Haiti on 26 July 1914. The ships respective skippers changed places with Kohler, who was intimately aware of the current situation in the theatre, cross-decked from Dresden to Karlsruhe to take command of the new cruiser while Ludecke, who handled the vessel’s commissioning and shakedown, took up residence in his old cabin on Dresden for what he expected to be a ride back home. Likewise, Dresden transferred ordnance, spare parts, and even part of her small arms locker to Karlsruhe as the latter would need them more.

About that.

With the two cruisers departing Haiti on the evening of 26 July, they intercepted a radio message stating that diplomatic relations between Austria-Hungary and Serbia had been broken off and war in Europe was imminent. Karlsruhe made for Havana to top off her provisions and coal bunkers, then, instead of roaming West into the Caribbean, sortied East towards the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Ludecke in Dresden, heading back to Germany with not enough coal to make it there without stopping to refill her bunkers, was ordered to turn around and engage in independent cruiser warfare (Handelskrieg: commerce raiding) in the event of war– a suicide mission for a ship in Dresden’s condition some 4,800 miles away from home and in waters teaming with British warships.

Topping off at St. Thomas in the Danish Virgin Islands on 31 July, Dresden made ready for war and sailed south in radio silence.

By 3 August war was at hand and Dresden turned wolf. Pairing up with the HAPAG steamer Corrientes out of Pernambuco which was placed at her disposal, the cruiser began stopping passing merchant ships off the coast of Brazil to inspect their papers. Encountering four British vessels, she let two go (SS Drumcliffe and SS Hostilius) on parole after deeming their cargo to be neutral and sank two whose cargo was considered contraband: SS Hyades (3,352 tons) on 14 August and SS Holmwood (4,223 tons) on 26 August.

A fictional depiction of SMS Dresden firing at Mauretania. Zeichnung von Paul Teschinsky, August 1914. Illustrierte Zeitung, 1915

Headed further into the South Atlantic, Dresden was joined by the HAPAG steamers Prussia, Baden, Persia, and Santa Isabel. The Admiralty then dispatched orders for her to proceed into the Pacific with her train to link up with the Bremen-class light cruiser SMS Leipzig which, after an eight-year tour in Chinese waters as part of VADM Maximilian von Spee’s East Asian Squadron (Ostasiengeschwaders zusammentreffen), had been dispatched to relieve the light cruiser SMS Nürnberg on the west coast of Mexico, where the latter had been protecting German residents during the revolution. Picking up coal and provisions at San Francisco in August just after the outbreak of the war, Leipzig melted into the Southeast Pacific, lurking between Baja and the Galapagos Islands, where she, like Dresden, soon picked up a train of coal-carrying German steamers (Anubis, Abyssinia, Amasis, and Karnak of the DDG Kosmos line).

After a stopover to effect repairs before rounding Cape Horn, Dresden transitioned to the Pacific.

Panic ripped through the Western seaboard of Canada as Dresden and Leipzig were believed in the area (they never got within 1,000 miles), with the Canadian government rushing the newly-formed Cobourg Heavy Battery from Quebec and its two new 60-pounder 5-inch BL guns for a transcontinental rail trip to establish an emergency coastal battery (at Point Grey– now the University of British Columbia) to protect Vancouver. Likewise, the Condor-class sloop HMCS Shearwater landed two QF 4-inch naval guns for positioning in Stanley Park, named for Lord Frederick Stanley, Governor General of Canada in 1888. The RCN’s largest warship, the old Apollo-class protected cruiser HMCS Rainbow, missed Leipzig by only a day at San Francisco in mid-August.

Following an invitation from the British Ambassador in Tokyo, the 9,500-ton Japanese armored cruiser Izumo was dispatched to Esquimalt as reinforcement. The Japanese cruiser Asama, battlecruisers Kurama and Tsukuba, and the patchwork battlewagon Hizen (former Russian Retvizan) later joined her in what the IJN referred to as the American Expeditionary Force (Amerika ensei-gun) under RADM Keizaburo Moriyama. A separate Japanese task force built around the battleship Satsuma and cruisers Hirado and Yahagi sailed as the Special Southern Expeditionary Force (Tokubetsu nanken shitai) to search the Philippines, Palau Islands, and East Indies area and after Coronel moved towards the South-Central Pacific with the battlecruiser Ibuki. Had Spee crashed into either of these forces, it would have no doubt been one of the most interesting naval clashes in history.

Linking up with Leipzig off the west coast of Chile on 3 October, the two cruisers and their train of makeshift supply tenders on 12 October joined Von Spee’s primary force– the big, armored cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the light cruiser Nürnberg— at Easter Island. The admiral’s squadron had been on the run from their homeport at Japanese-besieged Tsingtao since August and had stopped along the way to plaster French Tahiti (wasting 80 irreplaceable shells to level Papeete) and sweep the Marquesas Islands on the ever-present search for coal.

Besides her guns, Dresden’s very handy fixer, Canaris, was able to provide the admiral with intel, garnered via his carefully cultivated contacts around the continent. He was one of the first to pass the reports of a British cruiser force approaching from the Horn.

From 26–28 October the squadron coaled in Cumberland Bay of the volcanic and sparsely populated Isla Más a Tierra (Robinson Crusoe Island)– it’s as remote as it sounds, situated some 350 west of Chile– and made ready. There, the auxiliary cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich, which had been raiding in Australian waters with little luck, arrived and took over reasonability for the collier train.

By 1 November, Von Spee’s force would mix it up in the lopsided sea battle of Coronel against British RADM Craddock’s 4th Cruiser Squadron. While recounting the whole engagement is beyond the scope of this blog post, suffice it to say that Dresden, unscathed, accounted well for herself, landing a reported five hits on the Town-class light cruiser HMS Glasgow and one on the armed merchant cruiser Otranto. However, she expended 102 shells she could not recover from magazines that were already depleted.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, on the evening of 4 November in deep water east of Trinidad, Karlsruhe mysteriously met her end at the hands of an explosion that has yet to be explained. She sank in just 27 minutes, taking two-thirds of her crew to the bottom with her. Until then, she had a successful raiding career, taking 17 prizes.

The same week, in the Indian Ocean, on 9 November, Dresden’s sister, SMS Emden, was defeated in a battle with the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney near the Cocos Islands, having collected 23 prizes. The number of German cruisers on the high seas was shrinking rapidly.

Back in the Pacific, Von Spee’s squadron sailed triumphantly into Valparaiso to coal and replenish, unafraid of the Royal Navy for a change.

German Vice Admiral Graf Maximilian von Spee’s cruiser squadron, leaving Valparaiso, Chile, on November 3, 1914, following the Battle of Coronel. U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph NH 59638

Dresden in Valparaiso, Chile, November 1914. Blickrichtung Backbord Richtung Bug

Dresden in Valparaiso, Chile, November, 1914

After replenishing at Valparaiso with the rest of the victorious squadron, Dresden was released to patrol the area and sank the British steamer North Wales (3,691 tons) on 16 November.

Crossing back into the Pacific, Von Spee anchored his force at remote Picton Island on 6 December and called a council of his skippers. Leaving Prinz Eitel Friedrich and the collier train hidden along the south coast of Argentina, he wanted to take his cruisers and raid the British coaling station at Port Stanley in the Falklands. His captains for the most part disagreed with only Capt. Schonberg of the Nürnberg sided with Von Spee and urged to break up the squadron to proceed on independent raiding sorties ending in either internment or a trip back home. The loss of Emden was sobering.

Von Spee, being the boss, went his way and on 8 December crashed headlong into British VADM Doveton Sturdee’s waiting force of two hulking battlecruisers (HMS Invincible and Inflexible along with the cruisers HMS Cornwall, Kent, Carnarvon, Glasgow, and Bristol; and the old battlewagon HMS Canopus.

It was over by late afternoon, with Strudee’s flotilla of bruisers chasing down Von Spee’s smaller cruisers and pounding them one by one beneath the sub-polar waves of the South Atlantic.

A German light cruiser in action, Dresden’s profile, probably at the Battle of the Falkland Islands, 8 December 1914, by William Lionel Wyllie, RMG PV3152

The Splashes of Canopus’s Guns- Scharnhorst and Dresden at the Battle of the Falkland Islands, 8 December 1914, about 13.30, William Lionel Wyllie, RMG PV1022

light cruiser Dresden at the Battle of the Falklands painting by Alexander Kircher

Of Von Spee’s cruisers off the Falklands that day, only the turbine-powered Dresden, with Ludecke pushing his stokers and boilers to the point of breaking– somehow hitting a record 26 knots on cranky engines– managed to gain a few miles on her pursuers and, with darkness falling, slip into the nameless fjords and inlets of Tierra del Fuego

Von Spee and four of his cruisers found themselves in the embrace of Poseidon that day along with 2,200 German sailors– including both of the admiral’s sons.

Sinking of the Scharnhorst painted by Admiral Thomas Jacques Somerscales currently on display at the Royal Museums Greenwich

Endgame

For a time, the world thought Dresden was dead, lost with the rest of Von Spee’s squadron.

However, she was still very much alive. She had suffered no damage in the clash. With the help of one of Canaris’ contacts, the German-Chilean mariner and harbor pilot Albert Pagels, Dresden was able to hide in the Punta Arena region, with Pagels guiding the cruiser into scarcely charted Quintupeu Fjord for safekeeping.

“SMS Dresden of the shores of Chile, 1914”

Eventually, the word got out and the British, along with the rest of the world that could do basic cruiser math, knew Dresden was still at large, a fleet in being if nothing else. Canaris provided constant reports on British fleet movements, and she was able to relocate a few times during this period, keeping one step ahead of the Royal Navy.

On 18 January 1915, Dresden was able to take on 1,600 tons of coal– twice her normal load– from the NDL freighter Sierra Cordoba. Ludecke nursed a plan to strike out across the remote Southern Pacific, skirting Antarctica until rising north to raid the Solomon Islands and, coaling at the Dutch East Indies, head into the Indian Ocean.

On 27 February, she sank the British barque Conway Castle (1,694 tons), her last prize, bringing her total to 12,927 tons of Allied merchant shipping.

German surface raiders– both actual cruisers and hilfkreuzers– captured or sunk an amazing 623,406 tons of Allied shipping in the Great War.

Nearly bumping into the cruiser HMS Kent at 11,000 yards on 8 March, Dresden lit all boilers and cranked almost 25 knots against Kent’s 22 to keep over the horizon successfully. However, this five-hour chase drained her bunkers dry– down to her last 80 tons– and a promised replenishment shipment on the NDL steamer Gotha, coming out of Montevideo with 3,000 tons of coal and spare parts for Dresden’s turbines, was likely not coming. It was clear the time came to end the race.

Ludecke ordered his ship to the closest neutral port, Robinson Crusoe Island, and made ready to intern Dresden under the safety of Chilean supervision, anchoring 500 yards offshore. Informing the Admiralty by coded wireless message of his status, he received “Seine Majestät der Kaiser stellt Ihnen frei, aufzulegen” (“His Majesty the Emperor gives you the freedom to hang up”) in reply.

Last Cruise of Dresden, via Canaris, by Heinz Hohne

On 9 March, Ludecke reported to the local governor at Robinson Crusoe of his intentions, who simply shrugged– he had no police or soldiers to take the cruiser into custody on an island with 45 inhabitants– and said he would send a letter by sail coaster to the mainland for orders how to proceed. In the meantime, Ludecke ordered Dresden’s guns elevated and pointed harmlessly at the island’s dormant volcano, with her steam punt tied to her stern ready to pull her around to face an incoming threat in extremis. With coal so low, shore parties were landed to retrieve wood to burn in the boilers for heat and auxiliary power.

While the Chilean navy three days later dispatched the protected cruisers Esmeralda and Ministro Zenteno to accept Dresden’s passage into internment, it was the British who found her first.

On the foggy morning of 14 March 1915, with many of the German cruiser’s complement ashore, a squadron made up of the cruisers HMS Kent and Glasgow along with the auxiliary cruiser Orama, appeared on the horizon– bird-dogged there by a decrypted wireless signal. Any question of the battle’s outcome was a foregone conclusion. The three British man-o-wars carried a total of 34 6- and 4-inch guns against Dresden’s 10. Nonetheless, as her pinnacle turned Dresden’s scarcely manned battery seaward, her fate was sealed.

SMS Dresden at Juan Fernandez Island, 14 March 1915. The white flag of surrender is flying from the foremast. IWM Q 46021

Capt. John Luce, Glasgow’s skipper, opened fire on Dresden at 3,000 yards despite the fact both ships were inside Chilean territorial waters. He had orders to destroy the German and, having faced off with her unsuccessfully at Coronel and the Falklands, took them seriously. Four minutes into the battle, with Dresden firing all of three rounds, she raised the white flag and struck her colors. Canaris motored out in the pinnacle for parley while Ludecke ordered her scuttled via a mix of open sea valves and torpedo warheads in her magazine.

Within a half hour of Glasgow’s first shot, Dresden capsized to port at 1115 and sank in 230 feet of water. Seven members of her crew were killed, three outright and four from wounds. Another 14 were seriously injured. The British suffered no casualties.

German cruiser Dresden surrendered and on fire after engagement with Royal Navy cruisers at the Battle of Mas a Teierra, March 14, 1915. Library of Congress Lot 9609-20

Sinking off the coast of Chile, 1915. NH 528

Sinking of Dresden, British postcard

Epilogue

Strongly worded notes of protest flew between London, Santiago, and Berlin over the sinking and violation of neutrality.

Most of Dresden’s crew survived the ship’s final battle.

As they were on Chilean territory, they were not picked up by the British as PWs and instead were, awkwardly, interned. After waiting five days on Robinson Caruso Island as guests of the local governor, existing on a cargo of 1,000 lobsters, they were picked up by the tardy Esmeralda and Ministro Zenteno then were deposited on Quinquirina Island, adjacent to Coronel.

The crew from German cruiser Dresden Aboard Chilean Cruiser Esmeralda, German war newspaper, May 1915

Settling into an easy life, funded by the German embassy in Santiago, the men kept chickens and cows, and tended neat gardens. The city of Dresden took up a public subscription for gifts sent to the crew for the Christmas of 1915. Two men died while in exile, one in 1916, and the other in 1917.

Allowed flexible leave periods, many men simply released themselves from their gilded cage, aided by the German naval attaché, KKpt August Moller. Kplts Kurt Nieden and Friedrich Burchardi, along with ObltzS Kurt Hartwig were among the first to leave, the latter arriving in Germany just three months after Dresden’s sinking and, switching to submarine duty, earned a Blue Max as the skipper of SM U-32, sending 44 enemy ships to the bottom including the battleship HMS Cornwallis.

Canaris followed suit. Traveling under a Chilean passport arranged by Moller, “Senior Reed Rosas” arrived in Europe on a Dutch steamer in October 1915, including a stopover at Plymouth. Within a few months, Canaris would be reassigned from the surface fleet to Directorate N, naval intelligence, and, still traveling as Rosas, would proceed to Spain to set up a spy network before joining the U-boat arm himself.

Canaris was a good surface sailor and a better submariner but proved most suited to the role of spymaster, running the Abwehr from 1935-45. Turning against his boss in the end, he perished just before the war was over at the hands of his own countrymen.

Another officer, Lt. Lothar Witzke, his leg broken in the sinking of Dresden, escaped Chilean confinement in early 1916 and, proceeding to California, joined German intelligence and was named as part of the munitions explosions at Black Tom Island in New York Harbor in 1916 and Mare Island in 1917. Subsequently arrested by U.S Army counterintelligence, he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was not conducted due to the Armistice, and ordered released by President Coolidge in 1923. He was welcomed with an Iron Cross when he returned home. He later, without a shock here, worked for the Abwehr.

The largest group of Dresden sailors to leave Chile, six officers and 45 men led by Lt. Karl Richarz, escaped an old three-master barque, Tinto (137 feet, launched in 1852). They arrived some four months and 12,000 miles later in Germany via Iceland and Norway. This feat was accomplished despite inadequate charts and condemned sails, with a stop (and release) by the British armored cruiser HMS Minotaur as a cherry on top. One of the officers aboard, a young ensign Friedrich Wilhelm Fleischer, would go on to become a vice admiral during WWII only to end that war in a British PW camp. Jack Higgins would borrow the story for the basis of “Storm Warning” albeit changing the date to 1944.

As for Ludecke, Dresden’s final skipper, he remained in exile, reportedly untethered after the loss of his proud ship. He did not return to Germany until the end of 1919. Retained by the Reichsmarine briefly until March 1920, he was the operations officer for the fleet’s sole remaining cruiser squadron’ until he retired at the rank of rear admiral. He passed in 1931, aged 58, having only written briefly of his wartime experience, a chapter in a forgotten 1920s German text.

Ludecke served 30 years in the German Navy. He is seen to the left of Von Spee during the council of the admiral’s skippers at Picton Island on 6 December 1914.

Of Dresden’s other skippers, her Hudson-Fulton commander, Varrentrapp, went on to command the battleships SMS Schleswig Holstein and Konig Albert during WWI, ending the conflict as a rear admiral in charge of the defenses of Wilhelmshaven. He was discharged in 1919 and passed in 1928, aged 60. Erich Köhler, who Lüdecke relieved in July 1914, perished at age 41 aboard Karlsruhe when the ship went down.

One other Dresden crewmember deserves mention. Immediately after the sinking. A rating on Glasgow noticed a pig swimming in the water and succeeded in rescuing him. The crew named said swine “Able Seapig Tirpitz” and he served as their mascot for a year before being transferred for shoreside duty at the Whale Island Gunnery School at Portsmouth.

Late in the war, he was auctioned off for charity but his “trotters” were turned into a carving set delivered to Glasgow while the head was mounted.

Both relics made their way to the Imperial War Museum, where the head is now on display, as Catalog No. EPH 9032 in the First World War Galleries. IWM Q 47559 IWM (Q 20554)

It seemed that almost all of the German cruisers that Dresden sailed with died in battle, the ship something of an albatross for the Kaiserliche Marine.

Besides Karlsruhe, Dresden’s own sister Emden, and the other four cruisers of Von Spee’s squadron, Konigsberg, who she literally bumped into in 1910, would scuttle up the Rufiji River in Africa in July 1915, her crew eventually captured by the British in 1917. Likewise, the old Bremen was sunk in the Baltic by a mine in December 1915. Strassburg, who she patrolled the Balkans with back in 1913, would be sunk at least twice in WWII.

The Japanese only disbanded the Amerika ensei-gun patrol force in May 1915, after Asama was recovered from being grounded off Baja in shallow water. The secondary Tokubetsu nanken shitai had been ordered back to Japan in January 1915 following Von Spee’s death off the Falklands. It was the beginning of the Combined Fleet’s experimentation with squadron operations outside of home waters. It would not be the last.

As for Dresden herself, as Robinson Crusoe gets little traffic, her hull is still there, as are 6-inch shells from Glasgow— the latter embedded in the cliffs behind her final anchorage. Dresden was illegally salvaged several times, likely by “treasure” hunters. Legal expeditions in 1965 and 2006 recovered numerous relics including her binnacle, flags, and her 340-pound ship’s bell. After display in Chile, the latter was sent “home” to a place of honor at the Militärhistorische Museum der Bundeswehr (MHM) in Dresden, unveiled in 2008 on the ship’s 100th birthday.

Schiffsglocke des Kleinen Kreuzers SMS Dresden, Leihgabe der Republik Chile, Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr, Dresden, via Wiki commons

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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Warship Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2024: Inadvertent Records

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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, Aug. 28, 2024: Inadvertent Records

Above we see a great action shot of the late Victorian-era Hermes class protected cruiser HMS Highflyer living up to her name while fighting the Atlantic, circa 1905.

Although a dated design by the time of the Great War, Highflyer still made short work of a faster and larger German auxiliary cruiser some 110 years ago this week.

The Hermes Class

The Admiralty, starting in 1889, began to order several successive batches of “second-class” protected cruisers: rakish steel-hulled steamers capable of 20 or so knots (fast for their age) and, while girded with an internal curved steel armored deck protecting their vital machinery spaces, weren’t meant primarily for fleet-on-fleet action but instead tasked with the role of overseas patrol and protection.

With an armament of 6 and 4.7-inch QF guns and a few torpedo tubes, as well as the ability to land 100 or so Tars armed as light infantry for work ashore, these vessels were seen as capable of keeping the peace against either local rebellions or foreign interlopers short of a battleship during times of peace. In times of war– something not seen against a European power by the Royal Navy since the Crimea– such warships could both capture enemy shipping, using the very gentlemanly “cruiser prize rules” and protect the crown’s own merchantmen from the enemy’s own raiders.

In the short period between just 1889 and 1898, the Royal Navy ordered 38 of these cruisers: 21 Apollo-class (3,600t, 19.75kts, 2×6″, 8×4.7″, 4x 14″ TT), 8 Astraea-class (4,360t, 19.5kts, 2×6″, 8×4.7″, 1x 18″ TT), and 9 Eclipse-class (5,600t, 18.5kts, 5×6″, 6×4.7″, 3x 18″ TT).

Following in the wake of this hectic building spree, the Admiralty ordered a further five vessels in the Estimates of 1896-1901, laid down in five different yards. Repeats of the Eclipse class with a few tweaks, the Hermes (or Highflyer) class were roughly the same size, a little faster, and carried a more homogenous armament of 11 6″/40 (15.2 cm) QF Mark I guns instead of the mixed 6-inch/4.7-inch batteries.

These were arranged in single open mounts, one forward, two aft, and eight arranged in broadside. Armored with a 3-inch thick steel front shield, these mounts were capable of lobbing a 100-pound HE shell to 10,000 yards at a rate of fire of 5-to-7 rounds per minute depending on crew training.

Two 6″/40 (15.2 cm) guns on the aft quarterdeck aft of HMS Hermes.

The 373-foot Hermes/Highflyer class, second-rate protected cruiser HMS Hyacinth pictured c1902. This three-color peacetime livery shows off her waist broadside 6-inchers well.

For countering torpedo boats, these new cruisers would carry nine 3″/40 12pdr 12cwt QF Mk Is and a half-dozen 47mm/40 3pdr Hotchkiss Mk I guns. Their torpedo battery consisted of two 18-inch tubes below the waterline on the beam. Two Maxim machine guns and an 800-pound QF 12-pounder 8 cwt landing gun on a carriage were also carried for the ship’s ashore force.

Carrying 500 tons of Harvey armor, this ranged from 6 inches on the CT to 5 inches over the engine hatches with a 3-inch deck.

Powered by 18 Bellville boilers which drove a pair of 4-cylinder VTEs on two screws, the designed speed was 20 knots with a planned endurance, on 1,100 tons (max load) of good coal, of 3,300nm at 18 knots. On builder’s trials, over an eight-hour course at full power, most beat the 20-knot guideline while, when driving at 30 hours on 3/4 power, still ranged from 17.34 to 19.4 knots. Not bad for the 1900s.

Published builder’s speed trials for 1899, with three of our class, Hermes, Highflyer, and Hyacinth, listed in the middle:

With a 21-foot draft (more when carrying a double load of coal), these cruisers carried a flotilla of small boats including two 36-foot sail pinnaces, a 32-foot steam cutter, a 30-foot gig, and several smaller gigs and whalers as ship-to-shore connectors.

Listed in journals as having a 450-man ship’s company, this size was often larger during peacetime overseas sailing– especially when an RM platoon was embarked– and drastically reduced while in ordinary.

The class consisted of five cruisers: the first flight Hermes, Highflyer, and Hyacinth, then the follow-on modified (with heavier boilers) Challenger and Encounter.

Jane’s 1914 listing for the class.

Meet Highflyer

Our subject is the fourth Royal Navy vessel named Highflyer, a tradition that began with the (brief) capture and reuse of the 5-gun American privateer of that name in 1813 by the HMS Poictiers. The second was a small 2-gun tender while the third was a well-traveled 21-gun wooden-hulled screw frigate that served in the Crimean War and the Second Opium War with time out to bombard the Arab fort at Al Zorah.

Ordered alongside class leader Hermes (Yard No. 401) at Fairfield, Govan, Highflyer was Yard No. 402 and was laid down on 7 June 1897. Launched on 4 June 1898, she was completed on 7 December 1899– the last RN cruiser commissioned in the 19th Century.

Peacetime career

Dispatched to serve as the flagship of RADM Day Bosanquet’s East Indies Station, Highflyer set out in February 1900 for Trincomalee, Ceylon. There she remained for over three years, cruising around the region as directed, and served the same mission for the next East Indies Station commander, RADM Charles Carter Drury.

HMS Highflyer NH 60585

Next came a stint as flag for the North America and West Indies Station, again under RADM Bosanquet until 1908 when she was rotated back to England for drydocking and refit.

HMS Highflyer IWM (Q 42674)

Again deploying overseas, she left for East Indies Station in early 1911 to relieve her sister Hyacinth, and carried the flag of RADM Edmond Slade until April 1913.

Relieved by HMS Swiftsure, Highflyer was sent back to England to join the 3rd Fleet, detailed as a training ship for the new Special Entry Cadet scheme which took lads 17½ to 18½ years of age and gave them up to 18 months of training before sending them to the fleet. Such training meant hours and hours of holystoning decks, chipping and painting bulkheads, polishing brightwork, and drills, drills, drills.

HMS Highflyer IWM (Q 75385)

Her “lucky 13th” skipper, Capt. Henry Tritton Buller, assumed command on 1 July 1913.

Her complement was nearly doubled during this period, as noted by this log entry while at Chatam in late 1913.

Officers: 32
Seamen: 164
Boys: 24
Marines: 50
Engine-room establishment: 134
Other non-executive ratings: 466

She undertook a three-month Med training cruise in the Spring of 1914, roaming to Malta from Devonport with stops at Villefranche, Tangier, Naples, Algiers, and Gibraltar.

War!

With Europe under tension of war, on 13 July 1914 at 0100, Highflyer logged a note to mobilize for fleet service and began receiving Marines and ratings from the Devonport depots and hospital. Three days later, she weighed anchor for Spithead via Bournemouth, leading the Astraea-class protected cruiser HMS Charybdis and class leader HMS Eclipse out to sea.

Putting in at Portsmouth, she soon took on ammunition and coal. With Sarajevo on fire from Austrian shells and the Kaiser sending his troops into Belgium, on 3 August, Highflyer’s complement– augmented by fresh reservists arriving every day– began fuzing lyddite shells and arranging torpedoes.

With the news of war declared against Germany flashed at 23:23 on 4 August, Highflyer made ready to prepare for battle and sortied out into the Channel with the Arrogant-class cruiser HMS Vindictive.

On the morning of the second day of Britain’s war, Highflyer spotted the 13,000-ton Koninklijke Hollandsche Lloyd liner SS Tubantia and promptly stopped her for inspection. Returning from Buenos Aires with £500,000 in gold destined for German banks, the liner’s steerage berths held 150 German military reservists returning home from South America and a cargo of Argentine grain likewise destined for the Vaterland.

With such a floating violation of neutrality, Highflyer’s prize crew directed the liner to Plymouth with the cruiser closely escorting. Once there on 6 August, Royal Marines escorted the German reservists off while the gold was confiscated– along with her German-bound mail which included bundles of rubber and wool– and taken ashore.

Tubantia, relieved of contraband, was later released and allowed to resume her voyage.

Putting back to sea to patrol the Bay of Biscay for German blockade runners, Highflyer sailed to Gibraltar and, with orders for Cape Verde, it was off the Spanish Northwest African enclave of Río de Oro
that she spotted a familiar ship on the morning of 26 August.

The Norddeutscher Lloyd liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, at 24,000 tons and 649 feet overall, was the largest ship in the world when she put to sea in 1897.

Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse circa 1897 card by A. Loeffler, Tompkinsville, N.Y. LC-USZ62-69220

Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse circa 1897 card by A. Loeffler, Tompkinsville, N.Y. LC-USZ62-69219

Capable of carrying as many as 1,500 passengers, the liner’s Baroque revival decor, overseen by Johann Poppe, can be seen in this view of her smoking cabin, North German Lloyd pamphlet c. 1905. LC-DIG-ppmsca-02202

Size comparison by the Gray Lithograph company for the lines North German Lines of the ocean liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse with the Trinity Church, the St. Paul Building in New York, the Washington Monument, and the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC. Library of Congress LC-DIG-ppmsca-50050

One of the fastest ships in the world as well, she twice captured the Blue Riband, sustaining a 22.3 knot Atlantic crossing in 1898.

By July 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse caught orders to chop over to the Kaiserliche Marine and, while at Bremerhaven, quickly converted to become an auxiliary cruiser (hilfskreuzer) under the command of Fregattenkapitän Max Reymann. While she had been designed to carry as many as eight 5.9-inch and four 4.7-inch guns as well as up to 14 Spandau machine guns, only four old 4.1-inchers were on hand for the conversion.

Ordered to sea on 4 August to take a route northeast of Iceland, Reymann took his barely converted cruiser to sea, with orders to make for the South Atlantic. He promptly sank three British ships, taking 126 of their crew aboard. Several other ships were stopped but the enemy passenger problem was getting out of hand so Reymann simply disabled their wireless and allowed them to proceed.

KWdG’s brief raiding record:

7 August: trawler Tubal Cain (227 GRT), sunk.
15 August: passenger ship Galician (6,757 GRT), allowed to proceed.
15 August: passenger ship Arlanza (15,044 GRT), allowed to proceed.
16 August: frozen meat freight Kaipara (7,392 GRT) and Nyanga (3,066 GRT), sunk.
16 August: coal steamer Arucas, captured for use as an escort ship with a prize crew.

Needing a breather from the Royal Navy dragnet looking for him, Reymann put into Río de Oro for a couple of days on 17 August to take coal from Arucas and two German ships (Magdeburg and Bethania) sheltering there.

Reymann never got to finish his cruise before Highflyer appeared on the horizon on the 26th in what was, technically, a breach of neutrality.

A series of signals were exchanged between the two ships:

Highflyer: “Surrender.”

Highflyer: “I demand your surrender.”

KWdG: “German warships will not surrender. I request you to respect Spanish neutrality.”

Highflyer: “This is the second time you have been coaling in this harbor, I demand that you surrender; if not, I will open fire on you immediately.”

KWdG: “This is the first time I’m coaling here, and besides, this is a Spanish matter.”

Highflyer: “Surrender immediately.”

KWdG: “I have nothing more to say to you.”

Putting ashore his prisoners and non-combatant complement, Reymann figured the end was near, and, sailing out, Highflyer soon opened up at 1515, with the German replying.

Although KWdG was faster, Highflyer had an excellent position and continued to exchange fire with her larger guns at ranges past 7,500 yards while the artillery duel between the two lasted until 1615 when the German ship ceased fire and, smoking, withdrew behind some sand hills.

Reymann, low on ammunition and with two men dead and zero chance of escaping, smashed his wireless, scuttled his ship (she had rolled on her side by 1710), and put his crew ashore via lifeboats.

The shipless Fregattenkapitän and his men landed on a Saharan beach five miles from the Spanish fort at Villa Cisneros (Al-Dakhla) where they were interred.

Buller, ever the gentleman, attempted to send his own medical teams to help the crew of the German cruiser but recalled them once he determined they were not needed. Highflyer suffered one killed– RJ Lobb, Leading Carpenter’s Crew, ON M.2882– and 10 wounded during the engagement. A prize court would later grant Highflyer’s crew £2,680 for the sinking.

The battle made Highflyer famous, and newspapers around the globe celebrated the fight. 

Assuming the flag of the Cape Verde station by October, Highflyer remained on a sharp lookout for German raiders and runners for the next two years without the same sort of brilliant luck she had in the first three weeks of the war. She spent much of this time combing the seas off West Africa, often haunting Sierra Leone and St. Vincent.

By 1917, she was engaged in cross-Atlantic convoy escorts from Halifax to Plymouth as part of the North American Squadron.

May 1917,”S.S. Durham Castle with [S.S.] Ayrshire and HMS Highflyer ahead.” Exterior view from the deck of the SS Durham Castle looking fore at two ships ahead. Lt. Irvine of the RAMC, having just graduated in medicine, was shipping out on the SS Durham Castle to the campaign in German East Africa. The image is from an album chronicling the wartime experiences of Archibald Clive Irvine (1893-1974) in East Africa. During this time he would meet Dr John W Arthur which in turn would lead to his missionary work at Chogoria in Kenya. Acc.12016/1 (reference number), International Mission Photography Archive, ca.1860-ca.1960 (collection), National Library of Scotland (subcollection), NLS DOD ID: 97047298 (file).

It was while at Halifax on 6 December that Highflyer had a ringside seat for the great Halifax explosion when a collision between the relief ship SS Imo and the munitions ship SS Mont Blanc sent the latter sky-high in the world’s largest pre-atomic explosion, killing over 1,900.

With the Mont Blanc ablaze and abandoned by its crew, six volunteers from Highflyer rowed almost a mile across the harbor to the ship to offer assistance. All perished but one when the Mont Blanc’s cargo exploded when the whaler was only 300 feet away.

The survivor, Second Class Able Seaman William Becker, J5841, was propelled 1,600 yards across the harbor by the explosion. Becker swam through the icy water to safety and lived until 1969. He earned an Albert Medal and was entered in the Guinness Book as the “Farthest-Flying Human Projectile (Involuntary).”

From Highflyer’s deck log:

8:40 am: Port watch of stokers landed for route march.
8:45 am: Collision between IMO (Belgian relief ship) and S.S. MONT BLANC (French) .
8:48 am: Fire broke out on MONT BLANC.
8:55 am: Commander Triggs and Lieutenant Ruffles proceeded in whaler to investigate.
9:08 am: Mont Blanc exploded (cargo, ammunition previously unknown) causing large wave and setting Richmond on fire. Damage was done to HIGHFLYER and to most of its boats. The skiff was sent to find the whaler’s crew and picked up Murphy AB who was unconscious and later died. Becker AB was found on the shore, having swum there. No trace of the remainder of the whaler’s crew was found. HIGHFLYER received wounded from other ships, made temporary repairs and cleared debris. The ship had to be unmoored at one point because of the danger from its proximity to the PICTON and the fires. The watch of stokers which had been landed administered first aid on shore.
Casualties
Killed
Jones, Robert DCS 270699 ERA 1st class
Kelly, Francis DK 21331 Sto. 1st class
Rogers, Edn. Benjamin DK 33240 Sto. 1st class
Murphy, Joseph DJ 2308 Able Seaman, [who was picked up in the water] (whaler’s crew)
Missing (Whaler’s crew)
Triggs, Tom Kenneth Commander
Ruffles, James Rayward Lieutenant RNR
Rushen, Claude Eggleton LS DCS 234241
Fowling, James Able Seaman DCS 22261
Prewer, Samuel David Able Seaman DCS 236276
Wounded: 2
Slightly Wounded 25
Minor Injuries 20
Several Officers with facial injuries and injured tympanic membranes who carried on with their duties.
From other ships:
2 Pte. of Composite Regiment
2 of crew of Tug HILFORD (one, Perrin, Charles died later)
5 from S.S. PICTON
6 from S.S. IMO
3 others injured
55 other survivors, several with minor injuries were accommodated on board

Halifax explosion, with HMS Highflyer shown in the channel, via the Halifax Naval Museum

Repaired at Devonport, Highflyer was sent to Bermuda to serve as a guard and station ship for the first half of 1918 then returned to convoy work, escorting Yanks to Europe. She was off Glasgow on one such run when the Armistice was announced on 11 November.

Late-war she apparently had a dazzle scheme drawn up by British Vorticist (the very English modernist movement that grew out of Cubism) artist Edward Wadsworth who supervised the camouflaging of over 2,000 ships during the Great War.

HMS Highflyer, 1917 dazzle camo, Edward Wadsworth Art.IWM DAZ 37

Following a post-war refit at Devonport, Highflyer was sent once more to assume the role of flagship for the East Indies Station. Hoisting the flag of RADM Hugh H. D. Tothill, she held down the station from July 1919 to January 1921.

Paid off, she was sold for scrap at Bombay on 10 June 1921, at the time, she was the last Victorian-era cruiser in RN service.

Epilogue

The RN has not reissued the name “Highflyer” to another vessel.

However, in a salute to her extensive service on the East Indies Station– which was both her first and last posting– the “stone frigate” of the Royal Navy shore establishment in Trincomalee was named HMS Highflyer from 1943 until 1958 when the dockyard, wireless station, hospital, and headquarters facility was taken over by the Royal Ceylon Navy. I believe the old cruiser’s bell was located there during WWII but I can’t discern if/where it still exists. 

Our cruiser is remembered in maritime art.

HMS Highflyer by Alma Claude Burlton Cull 1880-1931

As well as in Delandres vignettes from the period.  

Of her sisters and half-sisters, Hermes was converted to a seaplane carrier in 1913, and sunk on 31 October 1914 by SM U 27.

HMS Hermes, sank after being struck by a torpedo from U-27 on October 31, 1914

Hyacinth spent her Great War career off Africa and assisted in the blockade of the German cruiser SMS Konigsberg there. She was decommissioned in 1919.

HMS Hyacinth listed to increase the range of her 6-inch guns, firing on German positions north of Lukuledi River, Lindi, German East Africa, 11th June 1917.

Near-sisters Challenger and Encounter, the latter in Australian service, spent the Great War off Africa and in the Pacific. While Challenger was broken up in 1920, Encounter would endure as a disarmed depot ship for the Royal Australian Navy throughout the 1920s until she was scuttled in 1932.

Modified Hermes class Challenger class protected cruiser HMAS Encounter IWM (Q 75381)

As for Highflyer’s hard-charging early war skipper, who captured Tubantia and sank Kaiser Wilhelm der Große, Admiral Sir Henry Tritton Buller, G.C.V.O., C.B., went on to command three different battleships and HM yachts before moving to the retired list in 1931. He passed in 1960, aged 86.

Meanwhile, KWdG’s skipper, Max Reymann, released himself from Spanish custody and managed to make it as far as Switzerland before the war ended. The bulk of his crew, some 350 men, were not as lucky and, catching a ride to the U.S. aboard the Spanish steamer Bethania, were intercepted in the Caribbean by the British armored cruiser HMS Essex and spent the rest of their war in a POW camp in Jamacia. Reymann returned to service, was appointed president of the Marinefriedenskommission (Naval Peace Commission) with the post-war Reichsmarine, and retired as a vice admiral in 1923. He passed in 1948, aged 76. He is remembered on the Ehrenrangliste der Kaiserlich Deutschen Marine (list of honorable men of the Imperial German Navy.)

Kaiser Wilhelm der Große, partially salvaged, is still in Rio de Oro, now in Moroccan waters. What is left of her wreck was located in shallow waters in 2013 and can be dived, with the proper permission.

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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Warship Wednesday (On a Thursday) April 18, 2024: Return for the Taxpayer

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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

Warship Wednesday (On a Thursday) April 18, 2024: Return for the Taxpayer

U.S. Navy photograph 80-G-289893, now in the collections of the National Archives.

Above we see the leader of her class of dreadnoughts, USS New York (Battleship No. 34), photographed clad in Measure 31a/8B camo, off Norfolk on 14 November 1944. Note rows of shielded 20mm Orelikons manning her rails, a stern quad 40mm Bofors, and large SG and SK radars on her foremast. 

Still echoing the fine lines of a Great War battlewagon– during which she served with the British Grand Fleet– New York had already done hard work in WWII off North Africa and in riding shotgun on convoys in case Kriegsmarine surface raiders appeared and is shown above just as she was preparing to leave for more fighting in the Pacific, in all steaming some 123,867 miles from 7 December 1941 to her homeward bound journey back to the East Coast from Pearl Harbor.

Commissioned on Tax Day some 110 years ago this week– 15 April 1914– for $14 million, the taxpayers got a great return for their investment.

Empire State and Lone Star

By 1911, the U.S. had ordered eight dreadnoughts in successively larger sizes in four different pairs ranging from the two-ship South Carolina class (16,000 tons, 8×12 inch guns, 18.5 knots, 12-inch armor belt), to the two-ship Delaware class (20,000 tons, 10×12 inch guns, 21 knots, 11-inch belt), the two ship Florida class (21,000 tons, 10×12 inch guns, 21 knots, 11 inch belt) and finally the two Wyoming class ships (26,000 tons, 12×12 inch guns, 20 knots, 11-inch belt).

With the lessons learned from these, the next pair, New York, and sistership USS Texas (BB-35),

Postcard showing ship information of the New York class battleships, which included USS New York (BB 34) and USS Texas (BB 35). PR-06-CN-454-C6-F6-31

The ship’s main battery would be 10 of the new 14″/45 Mark 1 guns, arranged in five two-gun turrets. It could fire a 1,400-pound Mark 8 AP shell to 22,000 yards. At point blank (6,000 yards) range, the Mark 8 was thought capable of penetrating 17.2 inches of side armor plate.

USS New York (BB-34) in her original configuration as seen from a kite balloon about 1300 feet above the ship, which was making 17 knots, giving a great overhead look at her armament. NH 45149

The secondary battery would be 21 5″/51s arranged one “stinger” aft, in casemates, and on deck. By tradition, one of these was manned by her Marine Detachment.

USS New York (Battleship #34), Marine Detachment loading the 5″/51 Gun, during World War I.

The class was also built, as most battleships of the era, with surface attack torpedo tubes for some reason. They had four 21-inch tubes installed- one on each side of the bow and one on each side of the stern– with co-located magazines able to carry a total of a dozen 1,500-pound Bliss-Leavitt Mark 3 torpedoes, rated to carry their 200-pound warhead to some 4,000 yards at 26 knots.

Almost as an afterthought, two 1-pounder 37mm guns were fitted, one atop each lattice mast, for AAA/counter-kite work. 

Jane’s Fighting Ship’s entry for the class, circa 1914.

Meet New York

Our subject is the fifth U.S. Navy ship to carry the moniker of the 11th State of the Union, with previous name carriers including a Revolutionary War gundalow, a 36-gun frigate burned by the Brits in 1814, a 74-gun ship-of-the-line that languished on the ways for 40 years, a screw sloop that shared a similar fate, and an armored cruiser who saw combat in the Spanish American War then was renamed (first Saratoga, then Rochester) to free up the name for new battlewagon.

“Bombardment of Matanzas” by the armored cruiser USS New York, the protected cruiser USS Cincinnati and monitor USS Puritan, April 27, 1898, by Henry Reuterdahl NH 71838-KN

The latter armored cruiser even gave up her 670-pound circa 1893 Meneely Bell Co. of Watervliet, NY, bell, which was rededicated and presented to the new New York in 1914.

Appropriately, while Texas was built at Newport News, our subject was ordered from the New York Navy Yard. The future USS New York was laid down (ironically now) on 11 September 1911 and launched on 30 October 1912, sponsored by Miss Elsie Calder, daughter of Congressman William M. Calder of Brooklyn.

She was commissioned on 15 April 1914 with her first skipper being Capt. Thomas Slidell Rodgers (USNA 1878), a veteran of the Spanish-American War.

USS New York (BB-34) the National Ensign is raised at the battleship’s stern during her commissioning ceremonies, on 15 April 1914, at the New York Navy Yard, Brooklyn, N.Y. with a view of the same event from a different angle showing her stern 5″/51 gun mount and sistership USS Texas (BB-35) in background, fitting out with scaffolding around her main mast. NH 83711 and NH 82137.

How about this for a dreadnought shot? USS New York (BB-34) loading stores at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on April 24, 1914. Note the brown hoist 15-ton locomotive crane at left and horse-drawn vehicles, including one from the Busch Bottling Co. George G. Bain Collection. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Shortly after bringing her into commission, Rodgers took on funds for the fleet and an oversized detachment of Marines and took New York south to the Gulf of Mexico, where the brand-new battleship served as the flagship for RADM Frank Friday Fletcher’s squadron blockading Veracruz, Mexico, a role she continued to hold through most of the summer.

USS New York (BB-34) underway at high speed, 29 May 1915. Photograph from the Bureau of Ships Collection in the U.S. National Archives. 19-N-13046

After the crisis abated, New York would sail for Hampton Roads and assume the mantle of flagship, First Division, Atlantic Fleet, which she would hold until March 1915. She would then spend the next two years in an annual cycle of winter gunnery and tactical training in Caribbean waters and summer cruising off the East Coast.

USS New York (BB-34). In Hampton Roads, Virginia, 10 December 1916. Note the rangefingers atop Turrets No. 2. and No. 4. NH 45138.

War!

When the Great War finally reached the long-slumbering American giant in April 1917, New York and her sisters began a feverish workup period to get war-ready. For what, it turned out, was to be tapped to augment the British fleet. As the newest U.S. battleships were oil burners, and New York– at the time, the flagship of Division Six, Atlantic Fleet– and her older sisters and cousins could still be fed on good Welsh coal, the call went through.

As detailed by DANFS:

The Navy Department, on 12 November 1917, selected the coal-burners New York, Florida (Battleship No. 30), Wyoming, and Delaware (Battleship No. 28) to form Battleship Division Nine as reinforcement for the British Grand Fleet. The battleships were to be commanded by Rear Adm. Hugh Rodman. The next day the flag for Division Six, Battleship Force was transferred from New York to Utah (Battleship No. 31) and the flag for the Commander of Division Nine, Battleship Force was broken in New York. The battleship arrived at Tompkinsville on 15 November and the next day, she shifted to the New York Navy Yard to be fitted out for distant service. She remained at the yard until the 22nd, when she departed for Lynnhaven Roads, Va., arriving on the 23rd.

At 3:00 p.m. on 25 November 1917, Battleship Division Nine sailed from Lynnhaven Roads with Manley (Destroyer No. 74) in escort. While Manley was to join the convoy escort and patrol forces based at Base No. 6, Queenstown [Cobh], Ireland, Division Nine was bound for the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet anchorage at Scapa Flow, Orkney Islands, Scotland, to serve under the command of Adm. Sir David Beatty, RN. The weather on the voyage was bad from the start, but worsened during the night of 30 November-1 December. Delaware and Florida lost contact with New York and Wyoming. New York took on over 250 tons of water in her chain locker and forward compartments and only the efforts of bailing lines for three days prevented the ship from foundering. Division Nine eventually re-consolidated at 7:00 a.m. on 7 December at Cape Wrath and continued on to Scapa Flow. With a hearty welcome from the crews of the ships of the Grand Fleet, the ships anchored at noon.

“Arrival of the American Fleet at Scapa Flow, 7 December 1917” Oil on canvas by Bernard F. Gribble, depicting the U.S. Navy’s Battleship Division Nine being greeted by British Admiral David Beatty and the crew of HMS Queen Elizabeth. Ships of the American column are (from front) USS New York (BB-34), USS Wyoming (BB-32), USS Florida (BB-30) and USS Delaware (BB-28). U.S. Navy Art Collection, Washington, D.C. NH 58841-KN

Under British command, Battleship Division Nine was re-designated as the Sixth Battle Squadron of the Grand Fleet.

USS New York (BB-34) in British waters, 1918. NH 45144

USS New York (BB-34) camouflaged with a false bow, in 1917-18, while serving in British waters. Note another American battlewagon in the background left. NH 45142

The Squadron sailed extensively on both workups with the British and convoy missions, with New York’s gun crews counting at least one encounter with a German U-boat.

When the Germans finally sortied out in strength, it was to surrender.

New York, with VADM William Snowden Sims and RADM Hugh Rodman aboard, assumed her position in column with the entirety of the Grand Fleet in the Firth of Forth on 21 November 1918, to accept the surrender of the High Seas Fleet.

Surrender of German High Seas Fleet, as seen from USS New York, 21 November 1918. Oil on canvas by Bernard F. Gribble, 1920. NH 58842-KN

Battleships of the Sixth Battle Squadron The squadron is shown anchored in a column in the left half of the photograph, at Brest, France, on 13 December 1918. NH 109382.

While seconded to the Royal Navy, New York played host repeatedly to visiting royals in British waters. This included Admiral Price Hirohito (yes, the future Emperor, on his only visit to an American warship), King George V, the young Prince of Wales (future King Edward VIII) King Albert of Belgium, the 8th Duke and Dutchess of Athol, and Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn.

She would also escort Wilson to France for the Versailles conferences.

USS New York (Battleship #34) escorted President Wilson to France in 1918. Note the AAA guns on platforms between the stacks. Naval History and Heritage Command, NH 48144

She was welcomed back home to New York City (where else) just in time for Christmas 1918.

USS New York (BB-34) off New York City for the Victory review on 27 December 1918. NH 45145

Soon after, a commemorative bronze tablet was installed on her quarterdeck.

NH 114261

Celebrating New York’s Great War service, her image, shown steaming from west to east, was used on the reverse of the $2 Federal Reserve Bank Note, of which $136,232,000 worth of bills were printed between 1918 and 1922.

Interbellum and reconstruction

After just a few months stateside, New York was ordered to transfer to the Pacific Fleet, stationed out of San Francisco, which would be her home

USS New York (BB-34) in the east chamber, Pedro Miguel lock, during the passage of the Pacific fleet through the Panama Canal, 26 July 1919. NH 75721

USS New York (BB 34), aerial view of the battleship as she transits the Panama Canal. Photograph released July 1919. Note the details of her masts and secondary armament. 80-G-461375.

USS New York (BB-34) entering Vancouver Harbor, B.C., on 5 August 1921. NH 89557

Sisters are back together again! USS New York (BB-34) and USS Texas (BB-35) Drydocked at the Norfolk Navy Yard, Virginia, during the mid-1920s. NH 45153

USS New York, in the foreground, followed by sister Texas (BB-35), and Wyoming (BB-32), proceeding at full speed across the Pacific firing their guns during annual battle maneuvers. Courtesy of the San Francisco Maritime Museum NH 69006

By August 1926, she was sent to Norfolk Navy Yard for an extensive 13-month modernization.

This reconstruction gutted the old coal-fired engineering suite, replacing 14 original Babcock boilers with 6 more efficient oil-fired boilers, which of course required her bunkerage to change from one medium to the other. This resulted in her two stacks becoming one single stack. Her beam stretched 10 feet with the addition of torpedo blisters on her sides. Meanwhile, her lattice masts were ditched, and replaced by enclosed pagoda-style houses on shorter tripod masts, which dropped her overall height (from keel) from 199 feet to 186 feet.

USS New York BB-34 in drydock during refit at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Portsmouth, Virginia. 10 April 1927.

When it came to armament, her four torpedo tubes were removed as was most of her secondary battery (culling it from 21 5″/51s to just 6 guns, all above decks). Her 14″/45s were upgraded with their chamber volumes enlarged to allow larger charges to give an increased muzzle velocity, switching from Mark 1/2/3 guns to Mark 8/9/10 standard. For AAA work, she picked up eight 3″/50 DP guns arrayed four to a side. She also picked up the capability to carry, launch, recover, and maintain as many as four observation planes.

When she rejoined the fleet in September 1927, her mother would not have recognized her.

USS New York anchored in Hampton Roads on October 17, 1929. Note the single stack and rearranged masts, now with houses. NH 64509

Jane’s Fighting Ship’s entry for the class, circa 1931.

USS New York (BB 34), port bow, while anchored, February 12, 1930. Photographed by U.S. Naval Air Station, Coco Solo, Canal Zone. 80-CF-14-2043-1

She was a favorite of the fleet, a showboat, and was often at the head of formations during this period.

USS New York (BB-34) leads USS Nevada (BB-36) and USS Oklahoma (BB-37) during maneuvers, in 1932. The carrier USS Langley (CV-1) is partially visible in the distance. NH 48138

USS New York (BB-34) leading the formation for fleet review in New York on 31 May 1934. Note how wide she is post torpedo blisters. This added 3,000 tons to her displacement and gave her and Texas a tendency to roll in heavy seas. NH 712

USS New York (BB-34) At fleet review in New York, 31 May 1934. Note the assortment of Curtiss floatplanes on her catapult. NH 638

New York attended the Coronation ceremonial naval review at Spithead in 1937 for King George VI, continuing her long link to the British royals.

Battleship USS New York, Spithead Coronation Fleet Review, May 20th, 1937. IWM

More improvements would come. In 1937, she picked up two quad 5-ton 1.1-inch/75 caliber “Chicago Piano” AAA guns– thought state of the art at the time and were just entering service.

1.1 AA gun, the Chicago Piano

In December 1938, New York became the first American warship to carry a working surface search radar set. The experimental Brewster 200 megacycle XAF set, designed by the Naval Research Laboratory, ran just 15 kW of energy but its giant 17 sq. ft. rotating “flying bedspring” duplexer antenna proved capable of tracking an aircraft out to 100 nm and a ship at 15. By 1940, the XAF was modified to become the more well-known RCA-made CXAM, and the rest is history.

USS New York (BB-34). View of the ship’s forward superstructure, with the antenna of the XAF radar atop her pilot house, circa late 1938 or early 1939. Note the battleship’s foremast, with its gunfire control facilities; her armored conning tower; and the rangefinder atop her Number Two gun turret. NH 77350

She was going to need it.

Battleships of the New York-class, USS New York and USS Texas, in New York City during the New York World’s Fair, 3 May 1939.

War (again)

After the grueling Neutrality Patrol following the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, New York spent the beginning of the war escorting convoys between the U.S. and Iceland, which the Americans had occupied.

Occupation of Iceland, July 1941. Seen from the Quarterdeck of USS New York (BB-34), Atlantic Fleet Ships steam out of Reykjavik Harbor, Iceland at the time of the initial U.S. occupation in early July 1941. The next ship astern is USS Arkansas (BB-33), followed by USS Brooklyn (CL-40) and USS Nashville (CL-43). Note 3″/50 gun on alert at left, and quick-release life ring at right. 80-G-K-5919

Her AAA suite would balloon throughout the conflict to 10 quad 40mm Bofors mounts (40 guns) and another 46 20mm Oerlikons. She also saw her crew almost double, from her designed 1,069-man watch bill to one that grew to over 1,700 by 1944.

Early in the war, her Curtiss SOC Seagulls were replaced by iconic OS2U Kingfishers, which had a longer range and greater payload. She would put them to effective use.

Three Vought OS2U scout planes take off in Casco Bay, Maine, on 3 May 1943. Photographed from USS New York (BB-34) floatplanes seaplanes

USS New York (BB 34), placing 3rd OS2U on the catapult. Photographed May 1943. 80-G-82708

Once the U.S. got into the war post-Pearl Harbor, New York was one of the few battleships left in the Atlantic. She was assigned to escort two further convoys to Iceland (16 Feb- 18 March 1942, and 30 April- 10 May 1942) as well as two to Scotland (in June and August 1942), alternating with Atlantic patrol duty looking out for the Bismarck– with both New York and Texas coming very close to the German boogeyman and her consort, Prinz Eugene. 

By November 1942, New York was tapped to help provide coverage to the Torch Landings in North Africa. There, off Safi, she fired 60 of her big 14-inch shells– the first time in anger– supporting the U.S. Army’s 47th Infantry Regiment ashore. During the campaign, she was straddled by French coastal artillery and, at Fedala, narrowly avoided German torpedoes.

Battleship USS New York (BB-34) Norfolk Naval Yard 11 August 1942 escort carrier USS Charger (ACV-30) just before leaving for Torch landings

USS New York (BB-34) off North Africa on 10 November 1942, just after the Battle of Casablanca. 80-G-31582

Once Torch was wrapped up, New York was used for two subsequent convoy runs (December 1942 and March-April 1943) between the U.S. and North Africa.

Across her six convoys (two each to Iceland, Scotland, and Casablanca), none of the ships under her watchful eye were lost or damaged by enemy action.

What a magnificent photo! USS New York (BB-34) pitching into heavy seas while en route from Casablanca on convoy escort duty, in March 1943. The view looks forward from her foremast. Note her twin 14″/45 gun turrets and water flowing over the main deck. 80-G-65893

USS New York (BB-34) in Casablanca Harbor, 1943. Photo from the LIFE Magazine archives, taken by J.R. Eyerman. Note that her radar and antennas have been airbrushed out

In March 1943, the Sultan of Morocco visited her.

Then came more than a year stateside, used for training.

She would serve as a floating Main Battery (14″/45, which was still used by sister Texas as well as Nevada and Pennsylvania while California, Tennessee, Idaho, and New Mexico had only slightly different 14″/50s) and Destroyer Escort Gunnery (3″/50, 40mm Bofors, 1.1/75 Chicago Piano, and 20mm Oerlikon) School from June 1943 to July 1944, steaming circles in Chesapeake Bay, and then, in the late summer of 1944, would be used for a trio of midshipmen training cruises to the Caribbean.

USS New York (BB-34) off the U.S. east coast, circa 1943, while a gunnery training ship. The only slightly older USS Wyoming would spend her entire WWII career in the Chesapeake on this duty. 80-G-411691

During this quiet period, New York trained approximately 750 officers and 11,000 recruits of the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and allied forces as well as 1,800 Annapolis midshipmen.

Missing the landings in Italy and France, it was decided to shift the old girl to the Pacific in preparation for the last amphibious operations in the drive to the Japanese home islands. Leaving New York in November 1944– the lead photo of this post– she would arrive at San Pedro, California via ‘The Ditch” by 6 December.

USS New York (BB-34) photographed in 1944-45, while painted in camouflage Measure 31A, Design 8b. Note her extensive radar suite and annetaa array– which by this time of the war included SG, SK, and FC (Mk 3) radars as well as two Mk 19 radars– has not been airbrushed out. NH 63525

En route to Iwo Jima, she had an engineering casualty, with a blade on her port screw dropping that limited her maximum speed to just 13 knots and cramped her ability to maneuver. Nonetheless, New York still arrived in time for the pre-invasion bombardment of Iwo on 16 February and closed to within 1,500 yards of the invasion beaches to deliver rounds on target. She fired 1,037 14-inch shells in the campaign in addition to another 5,300 smaller caliber rounds (not counting AAA fire).

USS New York (BB-34) bombarding Japanese defenses on Iwo Jima, on 16 February 1945. She has just fired the left-hand 14″/45 gun of the Number Four turret. The view looks aft, on the starboard side. 80-G-308952

Able to get her busted screw repaired at Manus once the Iwo Jima landings ended, New York was in the gunline off Okinawa in late March, again in time to get in on the pre-invasion bombardment, providing NGFS to the U.S. Tenth Army and the Marine III Amphibious Corps throughout the month-long campaign, firing more than 4,000 14-inch shells alone.

Her aviation unit while off Okinawa was also amazingly active, with her three Kingfishers not only correcting fire from New York and 11 other ships on the gunline to support the Devils and Joes ashore, but they also fired 30,000 rounds of .30-06 in strafing runs on exposed Japanese targets– an unsung mission for Navy floatplanes.

Her closest brush with the Divine Wind came on 14 April 1945 off Okinawa when a Japanese plane came in amidships and crashed into a Kingfisher on the catapult. Incredibly, the Old Lady shrugged off the impact with only superficial damage– the bulk of the Japanese aircraft continued to come to rest in the ocean some 50 yards off New York’s starboard side–
and the ship listed just two personnel with minor casualties.

The Kingfisher damaged after being clipped by a kamikaze on 17 April 1945. The aircraft was later craned off ashore. NH 66187

Once the Okinawa operations stabilized, New York retired to Pearl to swap out her well-used 14″/45s for new ones in preparation for the upcoming invasion of Japan proper, Operation Olympic. She was there when VJ Day came, and those new guns weren’t needed.

She held to a quote attributed to Admiral Mahan, that, “Historically, good men on old ships are better than poor men on new ships,” with the words written on a sign on her quarterdeck.

Despite her extensive campaigning– from the Torch landings and screening convoys to bringing the pain in Iwo Jima and Okinawa– New York only earned three battle stars for her WWII service.

She made two fast trips shuttling personnel between the West Coast and Hawaii, then set sail for New York City on 29 September to celebrate Navy Day there along the “surrender ship” USS Missouri (BB-63) and the famed carrier USS Enterprise (CV-6).

USS New York (BB-34) arrives at New York from the Pacific, circa 19 October 1945. She was featured in Navy Day celebrations there later in the month. 80-G-K-6553

Same as above, 80-G-K-6554

Of the 13 old battlewagons on the Navy List going into WWII, New York was one of only three that was never seriously damaged or sunk, despite the French coastal artillery, German torpedoes, and Japanese suicide planes.

During her career, she boasted that she had schooled the most flag officers– future commodores and admirals– than any other ship, a figure that stood at more than 60 by 1945. One thing is for sure is the fact that, of her 26 skippers, at least 10 went on to wear admiral’s stars.

Atomic Ending

Post-war, the Navy had three entire classes of ultra-modern fast battleships giving them eight of the best such ships in the world (Washington, North Carolina, South Dakota, Indiana, Massachusetts, Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri, and Wisconsin) as well as eight legacy dreadnoughts that had undergone extensive modernization/rebuilds post Pearl Harbor (the 16″/45 carrying Colorado, Maryland, and West Virginia along with the 14″/50-armed California, Tennessee, Idaho, and New Mexico). Besides these 15 battlewagons, arguably the toughest battle line ever to put to sea, the Navy also had two more Iowas under construction (Kentucky and Illinois) and a trio of 27,000-ton Alaska-class battle cruisers (classified as “Large Cruisers” by the Navy).

This meant the service, which crashed into WWII with a dire battleship shortage, ended with a massive surplus.

As such, the older battleships that had not undergone as drastic a wartime modernization as the Pearl Harbor ships– USS Mississippi, USS Pennsylvania, USS Nevada, USS Arkansas, USS Wyoming, USS Texas, and our New York— were quickly nominated for either disposal or limited use as experimental ships or targets and rapidly left the Naval List.

The eldest, Wyoming, was decommissioned in August 1947 and sold for scrap by that October, preceded by her sister, Arkansas, which was sunk on 25 July 1946 as part of the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll.

This left New York as the oldest American battleship still afloat. She would not hold this title for long.

Like Arkansas, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, she had been used in the Crossroads tests.

USS New York BB-34 before Test Able during Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll – 1946. Note the Curtiss SC Seahawk floatplanes on deck and skyward-pointing 3″/50s. Most of her 20mm and 40mm mounts appear to have been deleted. LIFE Bob Landry

New York was just off the old Japanese battleship Nagato (to the right of the “X’) for the Able airdrop test.

And was the closest surviving battleship to the underwater “Baker” shot.

USS Achomawi (ATF-140) Spraying USS New York with Salt Water Post Baker. 374-ANT-18-CR-2416-010

Somehow enduring both bombs, New York, Nevada, and Pennsylvania were towed to Kwajalein for decontamination (where Pennsylvania was later scuttled), then to Pearl Harbor and studied by radiological experts there for the next 15 months.

In the meantime, on 29 August 1946, the empty New York was quietly decommissioned.

USS New York (BB-34) entering Pearl Harbor after being towed from Kwajalein, on 14 March 1947. Note Floating drydock (ABSD) sections in the background. 80-G-371904

The experts satisfied they had garnered everything they needed to know from the mildly radioactive old battleship, it was decided to tow her out and allow the fleet a proper SINKEX in the deep sea off Oahu. It took them all day to send the leviathan to the bottom. Similarly, Nevada was towed out for the same fate a few weeks later.

ex-USS New York (BB-34) is towed from Pearl Harbor to be sunk as a target, on 6 July 1948. USS Conserver (ARS-39), at left, is the main towing ship, assisted by two harbor tugs on New York’s port side. 80-G-498120

ex-USS New York (BB-34) was sunk as a target off Hawaii on 8 July 1948. 80-G-498140

Same as above, 80-G-498138

Same as above, 80-G-455669

ex-USS New York (BB-34) capsizes while being used as a target off Hawaii on 8 July 1948. 80-G-498141-A

Epilogue

While New York currently rests some 15,000 feet down, she has lots of relics ashore.

Her Chelsea chronometer, removed by a member of her crew before the Bikini tests, is now in the NHHC’s collection. As noted by the donor:

“By the time I left the ship, it was full of goats, rabbits, guinea pigs, and assorted other small animals that were to be on the ship at the time of the explosion. They were expected to survive as the New York was considerably more than a mile from the explosion. As I left the ship, I decided that I would save the clock we had in our quarters and put it in my bag. The New York survived the explosion- as was intended- as did all the animals- to the delight of the traditional navy. However, within one month all of the animals were dead.”

Her XAF-1 radar, the first installed on a U.S. Navy warship, has been in the collection of the National Museum of the U.S. Navy since the 1960s.

XAF Radar Antenna, 1960s. Being delivered to the Washington Navy Yard for display. Note the U.S. Navy tug alongside a small thin barge carrying the radar antenna. The tug appears to be USS Wahtah (YTB-140). This radar was the first shipboard radar to be installed onboard a U.S. Navy ship, USS New York (BB-34). NMUSN-1019.

Meanwhile, the antenna, which was delivered to the Washington Navy Yard by boat and is currently on display in the National Electronics Museum, Linthicum, Maryland after being displayed outdoors until the late 1980s.

The National Archives has her plans, deck logs, and war history preserved.

Her amazing 229-page WWII cruise book, from which many of the above images are obtained, is digitized online via the Bangor Public Library. It contains the best epitaph to the “Old Lady of the Fleet”:

Her sister Texas, of course, was preserved just after the war and is currently undergoing a dry dock availability to keep her in use as a museum ship for generations to come.

Out of the water! USS Texas at Gulf Copper 31 Aug 2022 Photo by Sam Rossiello Battleship Texas Foundation. Note the paravane skeg at the foot of the bow, her 1920s torpedo bulge love handles, and the stabilizer skeg on the latter.

Since BB-34 slipped beneath the waves in 1948, the Navy has since recycled her name twice, kind of.

USS New York City (SSN-696), an early Flight I Los Angeles-class hunter-killer, was commissioned in 1979 and retired (early) in 1997.

The seventh USS New York (LPD-21), a San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock built at Ingalls and commissioned in November 2009, is the current holder of the name. At 684 feet overall, she is larger and faster (“in excess of 22 knots”) than our battleship although she hits the scales at a paltry 25,000 tons– including 7.5 tons of steel salvaged from the World Trade Center.

 

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.

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

They are one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I am a member, so should you be!

Warship Wednesday, April 10, 2024: Mongolia by way of Massachusetts

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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

Warship Wednesday, April 10, 2024: Mongolia by way of Massachusetts

Photo by Geo. H. Russell. Library of Congress, Box PAN US Military-Army No.92 (E size). Control number 2007664426

Above we see, 105 years ago today (10 April 1919), the well-armed troopship USS Mongolia (ID 1615) arriving at Boston with the returning hometown boys of the 26th “Yankee” Division aboard.

Don’t let her passenger liner appearance fool you, she was a fighter and had the honor of the first surface engagement between U.S. Naval personnel and sailors of the Kaiserliche Marine.

The Beautiful Twins of the Pacific Mail Steamship Co.

Founded in 1848 originally to service the Panama Route across the isthmus during the California Gold Rush, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company had flown its red, white, and blue house flag from more than 60 passenger steamers before the 19th Century was out.

While the majority of these were smallish (2,000-3,000 ton) coastwise vessels, by the late 1890s the company had ordered four progressively larger liners– SS China (10,200 tons), SS Nile (11,000 tons), SS Korea (18,000 tons), and SS Siberia (18,500 tons)– to build its reputation and expand its reach across the Pacific, kicking off its Trans-Pacific service.

By 1901, it moved to pick up two new liners– SS Mongolia and SS Manchuria— that would be its crown jewels.

The sister ships, ordered from the nascent New York Shipbuilding Co in Camden, were huge for their era at 615 feet oal with a registered gross tonnage of 13,363 tons. They could carry 1,712 passengers in four different classes, with speeds sustained at 16 knots, intended for cruises from San Francisco to ports in China and Japan, with a midway stop in Hawaii. The service was later extended to Hong Kong and Manila.

At the time, they were the largest passenger vessels constructed in America, with class leader Mongolia delivered in February 1904. 

“Speed and Comfort” Pacific Mail Steamship Co. poster with artwork by Fred Pansing, showing Mongolia and citing the names of her fellow Trans-Pacific line vessels. LOC LC-DIG-ppmsca-58680

S.S. Mongolia at Manila, Philippine Islands, in 1913. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. NH 45962

By August 1915, with a downturn in Pacific sailings, both Mongolia and sister Manchuria, along with the smaller Korea and Siberia, were sold to the Baltimore-based Atlantic Transport Line and soon began working from the East Coast.

As a war was going on in the Atlantic (ATL had already lost several of its ships to government requisition and U-boats), Mongolia made nine wartime crossings while the U.S. was neutral, carrying munitions and foodstuffs to a hungry England.

In this role, she had “American S. S. Mongolia” painted in large white letters along the sides of her hull flanked by American flags.

S.S. Mongolia, painted with neutrality markings, circa 1915-1917. 165-WW-274A-004

War!

On March 13, 1917– still three weeks away from the U.S. declaration of war– Secretary of the Navy Josephus “Cup of Joe” Daniels issued regs governing the conduct of armed American merchant vessels, on which Navy personnel designated as Armed Guards manned the guns. The Bureau of Ordnance would follow up on the directive and issue guidance to the fleet for the removal of 20 5-inch/51-caliber, 20 6-inch/40-caliber, 4 5-inch/50-caliber, and 26 3-inch/50-caliber guns from storage and warships in reserve for use on merchantmen.

Talk about armed neutrality!

The first to be armed would be the passenger liners Manchuria, Mongolia, and St. Louis, along with the steamships New York, Philadelphia, Kroonland, Aztec, and St. Paul.

Just two days after the SECNAV’s orders, the New York Navy Yard completed the installation of deck guns aboard Manchuria, St. Louis, Aztec, and New York, and on the 16th of March, Manchuria— outfitted with two 4-inch guns forward, one 6-inch gun aft, two 1-pounders, and two Lewis guns– left NYC to become the first American armed merchantman to sail for the European war zone.

Mongolia would receive three 6″/40 Mark 4s, two forward and one over her stern, and later add two additional mounts, giving her a total of five of these large guns– the rough equivalent of a light cruiser. Her initial Armed Guard, consisting of one officer (Massachusetts-born LT Bruce Richardson Ware, Jr., USNA ’07) and 22 enlisted (a size that would later double), likewise carried sidearms and had a locker of rifles and a pair of Lewis guns at their disposal as well.

S.S. Mongolia. One of the ship’s forward six-inch guns, taken while Mongolia was at sea in April 1917. These guns were manned by Armed Guard crews supplied by the U.S. Navy. NH 41973

Mongolia, 1917. Note 6″/40 on stern. 165-WW-335D-021

Mongolia would make history on the early morning of 19 April– the Anniversary of the Battle of Lexington– when, at 0522, the Armed Guard aboard her engaged and drove off a U-boat with their stern 6-inch gun—No. 263, nicknamed “Teddy Roosevelt”—while some 7 miles southeast of Beachy Head in the English Channel. She fired on the submarine, wrecking the periscope and conning tower, and forced it to submerge. These are considered the first shots by the U.S. Navy against Germany in the Atlantic.

S.S. Mongolia. Two officers on board the ship soon after her 19 April 1917 action with a German submarine. They are identified in the original photo captions as Lieutenant Charles F. (or Bruce R.) Ware, USN, and First Officer Waldo E. Wollaston (or Mollaston). Note the right-hand officer’s high boots, communications gear, and .45 caliber M1911 pistol; binoculars worn by both; and non-U.S. Navy insignia on the left-hand officer’s cap. NH 52704

USS Mongolia. The ship’s after six-inch gun, with several shells, circa 1918. This gun was nicknamed Teddy, after former President Theodore Roosevelt. The original image is printed on postcard (AZO) stock. Donation of Dr. Mark Kulikowski, 2009. NH 106599

S.S. Mongolia. The ship’s after six-inch gun and its crew, April 1917. The two officers at right are identified, in the original photo caption, as Lieutenant Ware and Captain Emory Rice of the U.S. Naval Reserve Force. Note shells on deck, painted with letters: T-E-X-A-S and T-E-D-D-Y. NH 781

The news was electric and widely reported on both sides of the Atlantic, eventually passing into the post-war record.

The engagement was the subject of an art piece by Joseph Christian Leyendecker, used widely in reference to the Mongolia vs U-boat fight, with the gunners, in Leyendecker fashion, shirtless.

As noted by press accounts of interviews given by the ship’s skipper, Capt. Emery Rice:

“It was twenty-two after five o’clock in the morning of the 19th that we sighted the submarine. The officer commanding the gunners was with me on the bridge where, in fact, we had been the most time throughout the voyage.” Captain Rice continues, “There was a haze over the sea at the time. We had just taken a sounding for we were getting near shallow water, and we were looking at the lead when the first mate cried: “My God, there’s a submarine off the port bow!”

“The submarine was close to us, too close in fact for her purpose, and the boat was submerging again in order to maneuver into a better position for torpedoing was where we sighted her.” Rice continues “We saw the periscope go down and the swirl of the water. I quickly ordered the man at the wheel to put her to starboard and we swung the nose of the ship toward the spot where the submarine had been.”

“We were going at full speed ahead and two minutes after we first sighted the U-boat it emerged again about 1,000 yards off. Its intention probably had been to catch us broadside, but when it appeared he had the stern gun trained full on it. The gun crew commander, Lieutenant Ware gave the command “1,000 yards, Scale 50” and the big gun boomed. Gunner’s Mate James A. Goodwin was on the gun at the time, and he actually fired the shell that hit the U-boat. We saw the periscope shatter and tumble end over end across the water and the submarine disappeared. I can’t speak too highly of the cool manner in which the lieutenant handled his crew of gunners. It was a fine exhibition of the efficiency of American Naval men.” The whole encounter lasted only about two minutes. Lt. Ware gave the order to fire, and Gunner’s mate Goodwin pulled the lanyard firing the first shot, which missed. Reloading quickly, the gun crew fired again, and this time they were right on target hitting the conning tower of the U-boat. This shell exploded and hit the area of the conning tower. Quickly in a foamy froth of bubbles, the German slipped beneath the sea. America had just inflicted its first blood at sea against Germany, and it was over as quickly as it had started.

Captain Rice continues, “I assure you we did not stop after the incident, but steamed away at full speed, for it was not improbable that there was another submarine about. The one I got undoubtedly had been lying on the bottom at the spot waiting for the ship and came up when it heard our propellers. I immediately sent a wireless stating that a submarine had been seen.” Rice ended his statement with this “That’s about all the story except this. The gunners had named the guns on board the Mongolia and the one which got the submarine was called “Teddy” after Theodore Roosevelt; so Teddy fired the first gun of the war after all.” Captain Rice stated that Teddy Roosevelt was from Allison, Massachusetts, and that the encounter with the submarine occurred on the date when Massachusetts was celebrating the anniversary of the Battle of Lexington.

Ware’s version was less verbose:

We were just leaving New York Harbor when word reached us that Congress had declared war. On the way over we had daily gun practice and some ill luck with our 6-inch fixed ammunition. By the time we reached the submarine zone, our two bow guns had damaged bores and were not firing true. It was at dawn on the morning of the 19th of April, the anniversary of the Battle of Lexington, that we sighted the U-boat coming at us off the bow. Realizing that our forward guns were unreliable, we swung the Mongolia hard to starboard. The submarine, delighted to see us offering a broadside target for its torpedo, also swung around, coming into the range of our port guns. Our first shot caught the sub square on the conning tower beneath the periscope. There was a splash and when the water cleared away, there was no more submarine.

Post-war analysis doesn’t show a U-boat lost in these waters at the time Mongolia reported the incident, but it is posed by some that the boat involved may have been S.M. UB 40, an extremely successful member of the Flandern Flotilla, which reported taking gunfire in the same area without significant damage around this time.

Both Ware and Rice (who was sheep-dipped as a USNRF officer) were soon issued the Navy Cross.

While widely celebrated, the Armed Guards of Mongolia received what was possibly more press coverage due to an accident that occurred on a later voyage the following month.

On 20 May 1918, while just a few hours out of New York, while conducting target practice with the famed Teddy, an accident occurred that left a group of Red Cross nurses crossing over to France, who were observing the crew at work, with two dead and a third injured.

As noted by the SECNAV’s office at the time:

When about 100 miles to sea, in accordance with the usual procedure, guns were fired to test mounts, ammunition, and to practice the navy crew in their use. The guns were of the 6-inch caliber for which the shell and powder are loaded separately into the gun. The powder charge is contained in a brass case and there held in place by a pasteboard wad, distance pieces, and a brass mouth cup that fits closely, thus making a moisture-tight joint in order that the powder may always give the velocity and pressure intended. When the gun is fired this brass cup is propelled some distance, sometimes whole and sometimes in pieces, but always in front of the gun. Several nurses who were watching the firing were sitting on the promenade deck some 175 feet abaft and 10 feet above the gun. On the third shot the brass mouth cup struck the water peculiarly, boomeranged directly back to the ship, struck the stanchion near where the nurses were sitting and broke. Its pieces instantly killed Mrs. Edith Ayres and Miss Helen Burnett Wood, of Chicago

“Miss Helen B. Wood, the Chicago Red Cross nurse who was instantly killed in a gun accident while the gun crew of the armed American liner Mongolia was at target practice at sea,” followed by an ARC photo of Miss Edith Ayres. Signal Corps 165-WW-55B-84 via NARA/LOC LC-A6195- 4962

For what it is worth, later Congressional hearings into the incident charged that the fuzes involved were of “inferior workmanship” and that the Navy had not inspected them before accepting them from the Raleigh Iron Works, which was in the midst of rushed war work. In the hearings, the makers of the fuzes rebutted the charge, and the whole thing was written off as a terrible, but freak, accident.

Mongolia and her guard, then under one LT Philip Seymour, would, on 1 June 1917, engage another U-boat in a surface action. As noted in Seymour’s Navy Cross citation, the “enemy submarine fired a torpedo at that vessel, which, through quick maneuvering, missed the ship. Four shots were fired at the periscope when the submarine disappeared.”

On 9 April 1918, SECNAV Daniels announced that seven Army-run War Department transports and store ships—Finland (ID-4543), Pastores (ID-4540/AF-16), Tenadores, Henry R. Mallory (ID-1280), Lenape (ID-2700), Mongolia (ID-1615), and Manchuria (ID-1633)—were to be taken over by the Navy.

This led USS Mongolia to be commissioned in the Navy on 8 May 1918, with CDR E. McDowell in command. She went on to make 13 cross-Atlantic voyages from the U.S. to France, transporting over 33,000 troops, before decommissioning on 11 September 1919 for return to her owner. Likewise, her sistership Manchuria had bested that number, carrying 39,000 troops in 13 round trips to Europe (nine of them after the Armistice).

World War I Troop Transport Convoy at Sea, 1918. The most distant ship, in the left center, is the USS Mongolia (ID # 1615). The nearer ship, misidentified on the original print as USS Mercury (ID # 3012), is USS Madawaska (ID # 3011). Note the small destroyer ahead of the forward ship. Photographed by V.J.M. Donation of Charles R. Haberlein Jr., 2008. NH 106288

USS Mongolia (ID # 1615) at the New York Navy Yard, 28 June 1918, after being painted in pattern camouflage. NH 50252

USS Mongolia (ID # 1651) In port, while painted in dazzle camouflage, circa 1918. Donation of Dr. Mark Kulikowski, 2008. NH 105722

Nurses of Mobile Hospital #39, onboard Mongolia. A.T.S. Base Section #1. St. Nazaire Jan. 20. 1919 111-SC-46348

Homeward-bound troops taking their afternoon walk. St. Nazaire, Jan. 20 1919 111-SC-46349

USS Mongolia. Brest, 1919 111-SC-158226_001

102nd Artillery 26th Division loading on the Mongolia. Brest 3.31.19 111-SC-158223_001

103rd Artillery, 26th Division loading on the S. S. Mongolia. Brest, Finistere, France 3.31.19 111-SC-158225_001

LC-DIG-ggbain-23572

With troops aboard. Note her 6″/40. LC-DIG-ggbain-28781

Officers and men of Mongolia

Camouflaged U.S. Navy transport in harbor with barge and a passenger ferry alongside, circa 1918 or very early 1919. This ship is probably the USS Mongolia (ID # 1615). Donation of Charles R. Haberlein Jr., 2009. NH 106646

Returning to Trade

Post Versailles, Mongolia and Manchuria were operated by the rebooted New York‑Hamburg steamship line, making regular trips to Weimar-era Germany.

SS Mongolia at the St. Pauli Landing Stage, Hamburg, Germany, while in commercial service after World War I. Donation of Captain Stephen S. Roberts, USNR (Retired), 2008. NH 105919

Re-acquired by the Panama Pacific Lines in 1925, within a few years she was under the flag of the Dollar Steam Ship Lines, then in 1938, under the ownership of the American President Lines, was renamed SS President Fillmore.

Mongolia in Gaillard Cut March 17, 1926 185-G-1094

During the first days of WWII, she was sold to Wallam & Co. on 2 February 1940 and would sail for Cia Transatlantica Centroamericana under the Panamanian flag named (wait for it) SS Panamanian, and would carry commercial cargo through the conflict, managing to avoid further U-boat activity.

After suffering a fire at Freemantle’s North Quay while carrying a 10,000-ton cargo of flour in January 1945, she was scrapped at Shanghai in 1946.

As for her sister Manchuria, she had a similar interbellum history but, as the American-flagged President Line’s SS President Johnson, was requisitioned by the War Shipping Administration in 1941 and carried troops throughout the Pacific during WWII. 

Sold post-war to a Panamanian firm, she continued sailing as SS Santa Cruz, typically carrying European war refugees to South America, and was scrapped in 1952.

Epilogue

Mongolia’s naval plans are in the National Archives, as are her USS and USAT deck logs.

One of her 6″40s, No. 155, is preserved at Gosport Park, in Portsmouth, Virginia.

Speaking of Mongolia’s Armed Guard, Ware, its Navy Cross-wearing commander, went on to become an instructor at the Naval Academy then, after passing through the Naval War College program and later the Army War College, would become the XO of the transport USS Gold Star in the 1920s and then filled the same billet on the dreadnought USS West Virginia— during which the battlewagon was first in gunnery in the fleet. He also published extensively.

Retiring from the Navy as a captain in 1935, he passed in San Diego and is buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery.

Mongolia is well remembered in the period of maritime art and postcards. 

S.S. Mongolia artwork, printed on a postal card issued by the Jewish Welfare Board to Soldiers and Sailors of the U.S. Army & Navy, during World War I. NH 45961

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.

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International.

They are one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO, has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships, you should belong.

I am a member, so should you be!

Warship Wednesday, April 3, 2024: The Bathtub of Sampson, Schley, and Sims

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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

Warship Wednesday, April 3, 2024: The Bathtub of Sampson, Schley, and Sims

Naval Historical and Heritage Command Photo NH 85726

Above we see the “Propeller-class” brigantine-rigged cruising cutter Manning of the newly-formed U.S. Coast Guard as she steams in European service with the U.S. Navy during the Great War, circa 1917-18. Note her dazzle camouflage, rows of depth charges over her stern, and four 4″/50 cal open mounts, fore and aft, made all the more out of place due to her antiquated plow bow and downright stubby 205-foot overall length.

You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but Manning was in her second war and still had a lot of life left.

Turn of the Century Cutters

The Propeller class was emblematic of the Revenue Cutter Service– the forerunner of the USCG– at the cusp of the 20th Century. The USRCS decided in the 1890s to build five near-sisterships that would be classified in peacetime as cutters but would be capable modern naval auxiliary gunboats.

These vessels, to the same overall concept but each slightly different in design, were built to carry a bow-mounted torpedo tube for 15-inch Bliss-Whitehead type torpedoes (although they appeared to have not been fitted with the weapons) and as many as four modern quick-firing 3-inch guns (though they typically used just two 6-pounder, 57mm popguns in peacetime). They would be the first modern cutters equipped with electric generators, triple-expansion steam engines (with auxiliary sail rigs), steel (well, mostly steel) hulls with a navy-style plow bow, and able to cut the very fast (for the time) speed of 18-ish knots.

All were built 1896-98 at three different yards to speed up delivery.

These ships included:

–McCulloch, a barquentine-rigged, composite-hulled, 219-foot, 1,280-ton steamer ordered from William Cramp and Sons of Philadelphia for $196,000. She was the longest of the type as she was intended for Pacific service and so was designed with larger coal bunkers.

–Gresham, a brigantine-rigged 206-foot, 1,090-ton steel-hulled steamer built by the Globe Iron Works Company of Cleveland, OH for $147,800.

–Manning, a brigantine-rigged 205-foot, 1,150-ton steamer ordered from the Atlantic Works Company of East Boston, MA, for a cost of $159,951.

–Algonquin, brigantine-rigged 205.5-foot, 1,180-ton steel-hulled steamer ordered from the Globe Iron Works Company of Cleveland, OH for $193,000.

–Onondaga, brigantine-rigged 206-foot, 1,190-ton steel-hulled steamer ordered from the Globe Iron Works Company of Cleveland, OH for $193,800.

Meet Manning

As the USRSC (and the USCG until 1967) was part of the Treasury Department, our vessel was the only one named in honor of Grover Cleveland’s Treasury secretary, Daniel Manning, although she only carried the last name and not the full name while in service. Accepted by the Service, Manning was commissioned on 8 January 1898, and she would soon “see the elephant.”

War with Spain!

Unlike the coming World Wars where the entire Service would be placed under the control of the Navy, only those vessels deemed modern enough to hold their own in a fight were seconded to the larger sea-going branch for the conflict with the Empire of Spain.

On 24 March 1898, President McKinley instructed his T-Sec to place nine cutters– ours included– “under the direction of the Secretary of the Navy, and cooperate with the Navy, until further orders. This was five weeks after the mysterious and controversial sinking of the USS Maine in Havanna harbor and a full month before Congress declared war on Spain, a fateful vote tallied on 25 April.

In all, the RCS would place 13 revenue cutters– carrying 61 guns and crewed by 98 officers and 562 enlisted— under Navy control during the conflict. This would include four (Grant, Corwin, Perry, and Rush) used to patrol the Pacific coastline and one (Manning’s sister McCulloch) to Commodore Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron for the push on Manila.

This left the Manning, under the command of Captain Fred M. Munger, Morrill, Hamilton, Windom, Woodbury, Hudson, Calumet, and McLane, to join the North Atlantic Squadron under RADM William Thomas Sampson (USNA 1861).

Meanwhile, another seven smaller cutters (Dallas, Dexter, Winona, Smith, Galveston, Guthrie, and Penrose), with a total of 10 guns between them and crewed by 33 officers and 163 men, were placed under Army orders patrolling coastwise minefields off protected harbors from Boston to New Orleans.

Manning was up-armed with three 4-inch guns (2 forward, one aft) with a mix of 250 AP and Common shells. She was also given steel gun shields for her 6-pounders for which she took on 1,500 AP shells, and was fitted with a Maxim-Nordenfeldt 1-pounder 37mm “pom pom” with another 2,200 rounds for that eclectic gun.

A Maxim-Nordenfelt 37mm 1-pounder autocannon fitted on the yacht USS Vixen in 1898. Manning was fitted with one of these for her SpanAm War service. Basically a super-sized Maxim machine gun, it had a very respectable 300 rpm rate of fire, as long as the shells held out. LC-DIG-det-4a14810

Manning would head south to Key West, and eventually be folded into Commodore Winfield Scott Schley’s 2nd Squadron.

His little gunboat was listed by the Navy as having engaged in combat on 12 and 13 May at Cabanas and Mariel, Cuba, and 18 July at Naguerro. Munger noted some 71 rounds of 4-inch and 148 rounds of 6 pdr. ammunition expended in the earlier of the three.

May 12, 1898, USS Manning in engaged off Cabanas, Cuba By Lieut. G. L. Carden, R.C.S. This is the only known photo of a Revenue Cutter in action during the Spanish-American War.

Munger filed three detailed reports with the T-Sec’s office, detailing the cutter’s actions in the war, including a total of some 600 rounds fired across several more engagements than what the Navy detailed.

Returned from Navy service to the RCS on 17 August 1898, Manning put into Norfolk to remove the bulk of her wartime armament and settled into her “salad days.”

Interbellum

USRC Manning. Photograph by Hart, taken off New York City circa 1898-99. Note that she still has at least one 4-inch gun forward and her steel shields over her 6-pounders. NH 46627

On 2 January 1900, Manning was ordered to report to San Francisco via the Straits of Magellan for duties with the Bering Sea Patrol, where she would perform the hard work in the remote region for 13 of the next 16 summers, with occasional pivots to warmer climes in Hawaii.

As with other cutters sent to Alaska, this ranged from policing fishing and sealing grounds, responding to natural disasters, conducting hydrographic surveys, responding to wrecks and distress, and generally serving as the sole federal institution for hundreds of miles in many cases– a job that spanned from carrying supplies and medicine to isolated coastal villages to serving as constabulary force ashore, and even holding court with an embarked judge from time to time. Her Public Health Service physician was often the only medical professional to call at many of these areas with any regularity.

Boiler room of the USS Manning with four crew members, Washington State, between 1898 and 1906

the crew of the Revenue Cutter Manning while on a Bering Sea Patrol 1901 210604-G-G0000-1004

the crew of the Revenue Cutter Manning while on a Bering Sea Patrol 1910 210604-G-G0000-1005

the crew of the Revenue Cutter Manning while on a Bering Sea Patrol 1910 210604-G-G0000-1006

U.S. Revenue Cutter Manning, Unalaska, Aug. 1908. A great view of her torpedo tube. LOC LC-USZ62-130291

Equipped sometime during this period with a 2-KW DeForest spark transmitter/receiver, Mannng could also serve as a floating wireless station while her original coal-fired suite was replaced with oil-fired boilers during a refit at Mare Island Naval Shipyard.

At Sea – “USRC Manning’s race boat crew (1902-1904) which used the Corwin’s Gig. Left to right: Seaman ‘Frenchie’ Martinesen, Master-at-Arms Stranberg (Coxswain), Seaman Andreas Rynberg, Magnus Jensen, and Franze Rynberg.”

Japanese schooners caught poaching near the Pribilof Islands, Bering Sea, Alaska, 1907. “On verso of image: Schr. Nitto Maru is in the foreground. Schr. Kaiwo Tokiyo in the center. Both poachers on Pribloff Islands, Behring Sea, now under the guard of Rev. Cutter McCulloch at Unalaska. Manning is on the right. 63 Japanese in both crews.” John N. Cobb Photograph Collection, University of Washington UW14289. At the time, Capt. Fred Munger, Manning’s old SpanAm War skipper, was head of the Bearing Sea Fleet. 

Manning, 1912. Note this is before her refit that changed her to oil and reduced her masts, ditching her auxiliary sail rig. Note her torpedo tube, still with a hatch. 

In June 1912, while docked at Kodiak Island, Manning’s crew noted the rumbling and ash in the distance that was the historic eruption of Novarupta/Katmai— the largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century. She would spend the next several days harboring refugees from the surrounding communities– as many as 414 onboard the small gunboat at any one time– and, as every well was full of ash, run her then rare desalination plant to make fresh water.

Crew and deck of the US Revenue Cutter Manning covered in ash from June 6, 1912. Via Anchorage Museum

U.S. Revenue Service cutter Manning, crowded with Kodiak residents seeking safety during the 1912 eruption of Novarupta, which resulted in about a foot of ashfall on Kodiak over nearly three days. The photograph was published in Griggs, 1922, and was taken by J.F. Hahn, U.S.R.S.

While many of her crew became sick from the ash of Navarupta, and she had fought both malaria and the Spanish off Cuba for nearly four months during the war, Manning had been a lucky ship when it came to deaths. This streak ended on 10 October 1914 when she lost four crewmen and a Public Health Service physician after one of her small boats swamped in heavy surf off Sarichef, Unimak.

Then came trouble in Europe.

Great War

While in Astoria, Oregon on 26 January 1917, Manning received orders to report, via the Panama Canal, to the Coast Guard Depot at Curtis Bay, Maryland to prepare for possible Naval service.

Soon after she arrived there, on 6 April 1917, the day Congress declared war on Imperial Germany, U.S. Navy’s radio centers transmitted “Plan One, Acknowledge” to all Coast Guard cutters, units, and bases, the code words initiating the service’s transfer from the Treasury Department to the Navy and placing it on an immediate wartime footing. Manning became part of the Navy once again.

It was decided to use the little gunboat as part of the scrappy Squadron 2, Division 6 of the Atlantic Fleet Patrol Forces, and sent overseas to report to VADM(T) William Sowden Sims. Based at Gibraltar, this force consisted of six Coast Guard cutters (Tampa, Algonquin, Seneca, Manning, Ossipee, and Yamacraw). On a list compiled for the British Admiralty, the USCG cutters were described as “good sea boats, good crews, much better than old gunboats.”

With Royal Navy communications personnel aboard, they would escort convoys between Gibraltar and the British Isles and conduct antisubmarine patrols in the Mediterranean against very active German U-boats there.

For her role, Manning and her sister cutters headed to Gibraltar were given a dazzle camouflage scheme. She and sister Algonquin would be armed with four 4-inch guns with 1,500 shells stored in two magazines fore and aft, two racks capable of carrying 16 300-pound depth charges, and four 30.06 Colt “potato digger” machine guns. A small arms locker would be filled with a pair of .30-06 Lewis guns, 18 .45 caliber Colt pistols, and 15 Springfield rifles.

USCG Cutter Manning in her Great War dazzle 170807-G-0Y189-009

USCGC Manning in dry dock. Note the canvased deck guns. 170807-G-0Y189-010

Although Manning’s Gibraltar service is not well documented, the risk was no joke as fellow Squadron 2 cutter Tampa, after completing a convoy run from Gibraltar to England, was torpedoed by UB-91, killing all 131 (111 USCG, 16 RN and 4 USN) personnel aboard.

Returning to USCG service

Reverting back to the Treasury Department on 28 August 1919, Manning would remain on the East Coast, spending the next 11 years operating out of Norfolk with her traditional white hull. During this period, she would participate in the reestablished International Ice Patrol, and take part in the “Rum War” against bootleggers, and other traditional USCG taskings.

U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Manning At Norfolk, Virginia, 30 December 1920. Note her armament has been landed but her torpedo tube remains although the hatch has been removed and the tube plated over. Panoramic photograph, taken by Crosby, Boston, Massachusetts. Donation of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard Museum, 1970. NH 105313

Manning would be involved in the landmark human smuggling case of the schooner Sunbeam in December 1919 and race to the scene of the sinking British liner SS Vestris off the Virginia Capes in November 1928.

Manning, Norfolk, 1920s. Note the lattice masts of the battleship to the right and the tall gantry works of what looks to be a Proteus class collier to the right

Manning late in her career. Note her RF DF equipment. Also, her torpedo tube has been removed altogether. 

Manning Underway 1927

Past her prime and slated to be replaced by a new and much more modern 250-foot Lake class cutter, Manning was decommissioned at Norfolk on 22 May 1930. The following December, she was sold to one Charles L. Jording of Baltimore for just $2,200.02.

As for her classmates: Cleveland-built sisters Algonquin and Onondaga had been sold in 1930 and 1924 respectively and disposed of. Gresham, sold by the Coast Guard in 1935 for scrap was required by the service in WWII for coastal patrol, then became part of the Israeli Navy before disappearing again in the 1950s and was last semi-reliably seen in the Chesapeake Bay area as late as 1980. McCulloch was lost in 1917 northwest of Point Conception, California when she collided with the Pacific Steamship Company’s steamer Governor (5,474 tons) in dense fog and endures as a reef.

Epilogue

Some of her logs are digitized and online. Few other relics of the old girl exist, which is a shame.

While the Coast Guard has not commissioned a second USCGC Manning, it did, in 2020, commission a painting by Michael Daley, MBE, GAvA, of the old girl steaming out of Gibraltar at the head of a convoy during the Great War with another cutter on the horizon.

Artist Michael Daley, MBE, GAvA. CGC MANNING escorting a convoy out of Gibraltar during World War I. 210610-G-G0000-101

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.

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

Legion calling…

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70 years ago today: 5 Septembre 1953 – Indochine Française. Radioman 1er bataillon du 3e Régiment Etranger d’Infanterie (1/3e REI).

Photo by Pierre Ferrari/ECPAD/Défense TONK 53-84 R3

Note the M1 Thompson submachine gun in the center of the photo and a MAS 36 on the ground to the left. Also, drink in the Mle. 47/49 bush caps– “Le Chapeau de Brousse“– and a “canne du poilus,” a staple of French soldiers going back to 1914. 

Formed 11 November 1915 to serve in the Great War from the shattered remnants of other Foreign Legion units, the 3e REI earned its kepis under the command of the famed Lt. Col. Paul-Frédéric Rollet, “the father of the Legion” at the siege of de Belly-en-Santerr, the Somme, Verdun, and in piercing the Hindenburg Line. Following inter-war service in Africa and combat against the Germans in 1940 and 1943-45, the regiment embarked for Indochina in 1946 and served through Dien Bien Phu, losing 3,837 Legionnaires in Southeast Asia. Notably, its Indochina-era march, “Anne-Marie du 3e REI” has its lyrics in German, a clear reference to the old “Devil’s Guard” days when much of the Legion were former Wermacht and even Waffen SS troopers.

Following combat in Algeria, the regiment moved to Madagascar in 1962 when that country became independent and then, in 1973, back to the jungles when it shifted garrison to Kourou in French Guiana where it still exists today as a battalion-sized light infantry force guarding France’s space center and operating the French Army jungle warfare school.

The more things change…

Warship Wednesday, June 28, 2023: The Tsar’s Jutland Veteran

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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

Warship Wednesday, June 28, 2023: The Tsar’s Jutland Veteran

Archivio Centrale dello Stato

Above we see the Italian light cruiser Bari moored at Patras in Axis-occupied Greece in May 1941. Note her laundry out to dry, her 5.9-inch guns trained to starboard, and her crew assembled on the bow with the band playing. A ship with a strange history, a wandering tale, she was lost some 80 years ago today.

The Muravyov-Amurskiy class

No fleet in military history was in desperate need of a refresh as the Imperial Russian Navy in the 1910s. Having lost 17 battleships (depending on how you classify them), 13 cruisers, 30 Destroyers, and a host of auxiliaries to the Japanese in 1904-1905, the Russians were left with virtually no modern combat ships except those bottled up in the Black Sea by the Ottomans. Also, with lessons learned from the naval clashes, it was clear the way of the future was dreadnoughts, bigger destroyers, and fast cruisers.

To fix this, the Russian Admiralty soon embarked on a plan to build eight very modern 25,000-ton Gangut, Imperatritsa Mariya, and Imperator Nikolai I-class battleships augmented by a quartet of massive 32,000-ton Borodino-class battlecruisers. With the age of the lumbering armored cruiser over, the Russians went with a planned eight-pack of fast new protected cruisers of the Svetlana and Admiral Nakhimov classes (7,000 tons, 30 knots, 15 5.1-inch guns, 2 x torpedo tubes, up to 3 inches of armor) as companions for the new battle wagons.

And, with Russia all but writing off its larger Pacific endeavors, eschewing rebuilding its former battle fleet there in favor of a much more modest “Siberian Military Flotilla” based out of often ice-bound Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk, the Tsar’s admirals deemed that just two light scouting cruisers were needed for overseas use in the Far East, typically to wave the flag, so to speak.

That’s where the Muravyov-Amurskiy class came in.

The two cruisers, at 4,500 tons displacement and 426 feet overall length, were generally just reduced versions of the Svetlana/Admiral Nakhimov classes being built in Russian yards already.

Planned to be armed with eight 5.1-inch guns and four torpedo tubes, they were turbine powered and expected to be fast– able to touch 35 knots at standard weight for short periods although published speeds were listed as 27.5 knots.

Mine rails over the stern allowed for up to 120 such devices to be quickly sown– a Russian specialty.

Their armor was thin, never topping three inches, and spotty with just a protective deck above machinery spaces, a protected conning tower, and 50mm gun shields.

Muravyov-Amursky class in 1914 Janes.

It should be noted the Russian cruisers feel very much like a follow-on to the experimental “cruiser corvette” SMS Gefion (4,275 t, 362 ft oal, 10 x 4-inch guns, 1-inch armor) that Schichau built at Danzig in the mid-1890s for overseas service. 
 

SMS Gefion, commissioned in 1895, would serve briefly in East Asia before she was laid up in 1901. After service as an accommodation hulk through the Great War, she was converted to use as a freighter, Adolf Sommerfeld, in 1920, only to be broken up a few years later.

The two new vessels were to be named after historic 19th Century Russian figures who had expanded the country’s reach towards the Pacific: General Count Nikolay Nikolayevich Muravyov-Amursky, a statesman who proposed abolishing serfdom; and Admiral Gennady Ivanovich Nevelskoy, a noted polar explorer.

General Muravyov-Amursky and Adm. Nevelskoy.

They were ordered in the summer of 1913 from F. Schichau’s Schiffswerft in Danzig, as yard numbers 893 and 894.

The choice to have a German firm build the new cruiser class wasn’t too unusual for the Tsarist fleet as the Russian cruiser Novik and four Kit-class destroyers was built at Schichau in the 1900s while Krupp delivered the early midget submarine Forel at about the same time. The Russian protected cruiser Askold, one of the most successful of her type, was built at Kiel by Germaniawerft while the cruiser Bogatyr was ordered from AG Vulcan’s Stettin shipyards, also in Germany.

Besides German orders and construction at domestic yards along both the Baltic and the Black Sea, the Russians also ordered warships and submarines from France, Britain, Denmark, and the U.S.– they needed the tonnage.

The planned future Muravyov-Amursky at Schichau-Werke, Danzig, on the occasion of her launch, 29 March 1914 (Old Style), 11 April (N.S.).

Ironically, this was at the same period that Russia’s primary military ally was France, whose principal threat was from Germany. However, most Russian Stavka strategists and statesmen of the era assumed that they would be far more likely to fight the Ottomans or Austrians– perhaps even the Swedes– long before the Germans.

Then came August 1914 and relations between Germany and Russia kind of took a turn.

Kreuzer Pillau

When Germany declared war on Imperial Russia, Muravyov-Amursky had been launched just four months prior and was fitting out with an expected delivery in the summer of 1915. Sistership Admiral Nevelskoy was still on the ways with her hull nearly complete. With the Kaiserliche Marine hungry for tonnage, they seized the two unfinished Russian cruisers and rushed them to completion.

Muravyov-Amursky was renamed after the East Prussian town of Pillau, and Nevelskoy after the West Prussian port city of Elbing. Muravyov-Amursky/Pillau was completed in December 1914 and Nevelskoy/Elbing was delivered the following September.

To keep them more in line with the rest of the German battleline, they were fitted with slightly larger (and better) 15 cm/45 (5.9″) SK L/45 guns, the same type used as secondary armament on German battleships and battlecruisers as well as later on most of their cruisers built during the Great War.

Pillau as seen during her German career. Courtesy of Master Sergeant Donald L.R. Shake, USAF, 1981. NHHC Catalog #: NH 92715

SMS Elbing of the Pillau class, circa 1915-16

SMS Pillau shortly after entering service, 1915

Pillau had her baptism of fire in the Battle of the Gulf of Riga in August 1915– ironically against the Russians– while Elbing took part in the bombardment of Yarmouth in April 1916. Both were assigned to the High Seas Fleet’s 2nd Scouting Group (II. Aufklärungsgruppe), commanded by Contre-Admiral Bödicker, and took a key role in the Battle of Jutland.

While Jutland is such a huge undertaking that I won’t even attempt to showcase it all in this post as I would never have the scope to do it properly, Elbing scored the first hit in the battle, landing a 5.9-inch shell against HMS Galatea from an impressive distance of about 13.000 m at 14.35 on 31 May. In the subsequent night action, she was accidentally rammed by the German dreadnought SMS Posen and had to be abandoned, with some of her crew saved by the destroyer S 53 and others landed on the Danish coast by a passing Dutch trawler.

As for Pillau, she was hit by a single large-caliber shell– a 12-incher from the battlecruiser HMS Inflexible— that left her damaged but still in the fight while she is credited with landing hits of her own on the cruiser HMS Chester. In all, Pillau had fired no less than 113 5.9-inch shells and launched a torpedo in the epic sea clash while suffering just four men killed and 23 wounded from her hit from Inflexible.

Her chart house blown to memories and half of her boilers out of action but still afloat, Pillau then served as the seeing eye dog for the severely damaged battlecruiser SMS Seydlitz— hit 21 times by heavy-caliber shells, twice by secondary battery shells, and once by a torpedo– on a slow limp back to Wilhelmshaven with the dreadnought’s bow nearly completely submerged.

German battlecruiser SMS Seydlitz, low in the water after Jutland. The image was likely taken from Pillau, who led her back to Wilhelmshaven from the battle

SMS Seydlitz after the Battle of Jutland, 1916. Amazingly, she only suffered 150 casualties during all that damage and would return to service by November– just six months later. Colorized photo by Atsushi Yamashita/Monochrome Specter http://blog.livedoor.jp/irootoko_jr/

Then, her work done, Pillau had to lick her wounds.

SMS Pillau in Wilhelmshaven showing heavy damage to her bridge, caused by a 12-in shell hit from the battlecruiser HMS Inflexible.

She only suffered 27 casualties at Jutland while her sister, Elbing, was lost.

The entry wound, so to speak

Repaired, Pillau took part in the Second Battle of Heligoland Bight on 17 November 1917 as well as other more minor operations before the end game in October 1918 in which her crewed mutinied and raised the red flag rather than head out in a last “ride of the Valkyries” suicide attack on the British Home Seas Fleet.

SMS Pillau passing astern of a ship of the line, winter 1917

SMS Pillau on patrol in Helgoland Bay, 1918 note AAA gun forward

Incrociatore Bari

Retained at Wilhelmshaven as part of the rump Provisional Realm Navy (Vorläufige Reichsmarine) under the aged VADM Adolf von Trotha while 74 ships of the High Seas Fleet surrendered to the British in November 1918 to comply with the Armistice, Pillau was saved from the later grand scuttling of that interned force seven months later at Scapa Flow.

The victorious allies, robbed of the choicest cuts of the German fleet, in turn, demanded Pillau be turned over for reparations along with a further nine surviving battleships, 15 cruisers, 59 destroyers, and 50 torpedo boats. Pillau was therefore steamed to Cherbourg and decommissioned by the Germans in June 1920.

It was decided that Pillau was to go to the Italians as a war prize, with the Regia Marina renaming her after the Adriatic port city of Bari in Italy’s Puglia region. The Italians also were to receive the surrendered German light cruisers SMS Graudenz and SMS Stassburg, the destroyer flotilla leader V.116, and the destroyers B.97 and S.63. Italy would further inherit a host of former Austrian vessels including the battleships Tegtthof, Zrinyi, and Radetzky; the cruisers Helgoland and Saida; and 15 destroyers.

The future light cruiser Bari seen in rough shape, with the provisional denomination “U” painted on her bow, right after being ceded to Italy, Taranto, 5 May 1921.

Embarrassingly, just after she entered service with the Italians, Bari ran aground at Terrasini and was stuck there for a week before being refloated.

Aerial photos of Bari stranded at Terrasini, 28 August 1925.

Still, she went on to have a useful and somewhat happy peacetime service with the Italian fleet.

L’incrociatore leggero Bari late 1920s a

L’incrociatore leggero Bari late 1920s

L’incrociatore leggero Bari late 1920s, seen from the port side.

Bari, fotografiado en Venecia en el año 1931

Italian cruiser Bari, in Venice in the early 1930s. Colorized by Postales Navales

Cruiser Bari (ex SMS Pillau ) in floating dock, 1930s

Italian light cruiser Bari (formerly the German SMS Pillau) moored at the pier in 1933

Italian Light Cruiser RM Bari pictured at Taranto c1929 

Bari would be extensively rebuilt in the early 1930s, including a new all-oil-fired engineering suite that almost doubled her range but dropped her top speed to 24 knots. This reconstruction included several topside changes to appearance as well as the addition of a few 13.2mm machine guns for AAA work.

Bari crosses the navigable canal of Taranto after the second round of modification works, circa 1933-40. Compare this to the postcard image shown above taken at the same angle and place that shows her mid-1920s appearance

Bari in the 1931 Janes Fighting Ships

She took part in the Ethiopian war in 1935 and would remain in the Red Sea as part of the Italian East African Naval Command well into May 1938. She then returned home for further modernization at Taranto in which her torpedo tubes were removed and a trio of Breda 20mm/65cal Mod. 1935 twin machine guns were installed and two twin 13.2/76 mm Breda Mod. 31s.

Bari, as covered by the U.S. Navy’s ONI 202, June 1943.

When Italy joined WWII, Bari was soon sent to join the invasion of Greece where she conducted minelaying and coastal bombing missions in the Adriatic and the Aegean. She served as the flagship of ADM Vittorio Tur’s Special Naval Force (Forza Navale Speciale, FNS), an amphibious group that was used to occupy the Ionian Islands including Corfu, Kefalonia, Santa Maura, Ithaca, and Zakynthos. She would also participate in naval gunfire bombardment operations on the coast of Montenegro and Greece against partisans and guerrillas.

Bari in Patras in occupied Greece, as the flagship of the Forza Navale Speciale, May 1941

Another shot from the same above.

Bari moored in Patras, around 18 June 1941, with the ensign of Ammiraglio Comandante Alberto Marenco di Moriondo aboard.

ADM Tur and the FNS, with Bari still as his flag, would go on to occupy the French island of Corsica in November 1942 during the implementation of Case Anton, the German-Italian occupation of Vichy France after the Allied Torch landings in North Africa.

Bari anchored at the breakwater of the harbor of Bastia, Corsica, on 11 November 1942, as the flagship of the Forza Navale Speciale that was then occupying the island after Operation Torch.

The cruiser in Bastia on November 11, 1942, during the Italian landings. Note the steel-helmeted blackshirt troops in the foreground

In January 1943, with the FNS disbanded and ADM Tur assigned to desk jobs, Bari retired to Livorno where she was to be fitted as a sort of floating anti-aircraft battery, her armament updated to include a mix of two dozen assorted 90mm, 37mm, and 20mm AAA guns.

This conversion was never completed.

On 28 June 1943, she was pummeled by B-17s of the 12th Air Force and sank in the industrial canal at Livorno, deemed a total loss.

From 10 June 1940 to the sinking, the Bari had conducted 47 war missions and steamed 6,800 nautical miles.

After the Italian armistice, the Germans attempted to salvage the cruiser for further use but in the end wound up scuttling it once more in 1944. Post-war, she was stricken from the Italian naval list in 1947 and raised for scrapping the following year.

Epilogue

Very few remnants of these cruisers endure.

A painting by German maritime artist Otto Poetzsch was turned into a series of widely circulated Deutsches Reich postcards, used to depict both Pillau and Elbing.

Elbing‘s wreck has been extensively surveyed and studied over the years and is generally considered to be in good shape after spending a century on the bottom of the Baltic. Besides her guns, she has china and glassware scattered around the hull.

The Russian scale model firm Combrig makes a 1/700 scale kit of Pillau.

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.

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships, you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

Great War Echos along the Copacabana

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When the U.S. entered what was then termed the Great War and is now better known as World War I, the country’s Army went from an oversized border defense force to one capable of taking on the Kaiser. In April 1917, when Congress at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson declared war against Imperial Germany, the U.S. had a standing Army of just 127,500. By the end of the war the following November, this grew to a force of well over 4 million.

All those troops needed weapons, and they needed them fast.

Just as the M1917 “American Enfield” .30-06 manufactured by Remington, Eddystone, and Winchester augmented the standard M1903 Springfield rifle, the Army turned to Colt and Smith & Wesson to produce a revolver capable of firing the same .45 ACP rimless ammo that the standard M1911 Government used. For Colt, that meant a variant of its M1909 New Service chambered in .45 ACP. For Smith, this meant revamping the Hand Ejector 2nd Model from .44 Special or .455 Webley to the shorter .45 ACP.

While only something like 15,000 S&W 1st Model Hand Ejector revolvers – known as the Triple Lock because its cylinder locked up with the frame in three places – were made between 1908 and 1915, the simplified 2nd Model (which deleted the third lockup point) saw a bit more success. This was because the British government had ordered almost 70,000 modified guns chambered in their standard .455 Webley for use in the Great War before America joined the conflict. A quick redesign to allow the 2nd Model to run .45 ACP, and Smith soon had their M1917 revolver in production for the U.S. Army.

Over 160,000 S&W M1917s were delivered before the end of the war, and they were often standard issue for specialist soldiers such as dispatch riders, military police, and machine gunners, while the M1911 automatic was more traditionally issued to officers. (Photos: National Archives)

While over 160,000 were constructed for the U.S. Army, and they served through not only the Great War but also through WWII– making it the first truly popular S&W N-frame on the American market– the Brazilians really loved the big .45 ACP. Ordered as the Modelo 1937, the Exército Brasileiro took possession of 25,000 commercial grade M1917s before WWII, carried them to war in Italy, they bought another 12,000 in 1946– taking all Smith had in stock or could make.

The Brazilians liked the revolver so much that, while the 25,000-strong Brazilian Expeditionary Force that fought in Italy with the Allies in WWII was largely equipped with American small arms, its officers often carried their Modelo 1937s to war. (Photos: National Archives/Exército Brasileiro)

Brazil only fully replaced the Modelo 1937 in the late 1980s with Beretta/Taurus-made Model 92 9mm semi-autos, keeping them in service for some 50 years.

This Model 1917 is from Smith’s second batch sent to Brazil in 1946, as it has a serial number outside the original run, the commercial round bottom U-notch rear sighting notch, and the standard Modelo 1937 national crest. It wears a CAI ST AL VT (Century Arms International St Albans, VT) import mark on the bottom of the barrel, and was likely from the batch of 14,000 surplus guns brought in from Brazil in 1989-1990. (Photo: Chris Eger/Guns.com)

Speaking of keeping dated small arms in use, the Brazilians still run Great War-era bolt guns behind the scenes.

As a bit of a backgrounder, the Brazilians loved them some Mauser rifles. They started with the M1904 Mauser-Vergueiro rifle then went all-in with the Model 1908 rifle, similar to the Gew.98 with a 29-inch barrel. After WWI, in the 1930s Brazil bought the unlicenced Czech 08/34, a K98k clone with a 22-inch barrel chambered in 7mm as well as genuine Oberndorf-built M1935s.

Supplemented by a homegrown variant of the FAL made by the Itajubá-based IMBEL after 1964 and more recently by the IMBEL IA2 in 5.56, Brazil’s Mausers linger on as the homogenized “Mosquefal” M968, converted to 7.62 NATO, used in both training and parades.

Just 95 Pfennigs per Week– and all the Bombs you can Catch!

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This great image shows a Kratzchen-wearing German Lanser in a set of exceptionally well-prepared trenches during the Great War, triumphantly holding some sort of unexploded ordnance as the rest of his company– probably wisely– stands a few paces to the side.

Imperial War Museum image Q 88134, likely a German image captured post-war and archives

Scrolled on the dugout behind the circa 1917 EOD guy is “Rent 95 pfennigs per week” while the ordnance has been variously attributed as a French Mortier (crapouillot) de 58 T N°1 bis while the IWM calls it “an unexploded aircraft bomb which had just been dropped.” As there seems to be a stack of soft evergreen boughs close at hand, perhaps they shielded its fall. 

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