Tag Archives: SNMG2

A Decent Looking CSG by any measure

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How about this great PHOTEX featuring the 30,000-ton F-35-equipped Italian Navy aircraft carrier ITS Cavour (CVH 550), her companion strike group, and the multi-national squadron of Standing NATO Maritime Group Two (SNMG2), sailing together during Exercise Mare Aperto (Italian for “Open Sea”) ’26 in the Western Mediterranean.

The Freedom-class littoral combat ship off Cavour’s port side is actually TCG Burgazada (F-513), an Ada-class ASW corvette of the Turkish Navy, which is almost a dead ringer for the LCS but with some decent sub-busting gear.

Note the collection includes 13 escorts and three replenishment ships. At least six are FREMM class frigates (Italian Bergamini class, French Aquitaine class) with their very distinctive tall silhouettes are visible.

The exercise runs until 24 October in the waters around Sardinia, with the Cavour group at its core.

For those curious, SNMG2 is under the command of Greek Commodore Georgios Kypriotis on his flagship, the Elli (Kortenaer) class HS Kountouriotis (F462), with the Spanish Bazan-class frigate ESPS Blas de Lezo (F103), Italian FREMM (Bergamini)-class ITS Federico Martinengo (F596), Turkish corvette TCG Burgazada (F513), and Spanish AOE ESPS Patiño (A14).

Bofors/Breda 40s still at work

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NATO Maritime Group Two (SNMG2) and Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group Two (SNMCMG2) recently poked around in the Black Sea, operating with the Bulgarian and Ukrainian navies, which no doubt gave the Russians a bit of heartburn.

SNMG2, under Spanish RADM Aguirre (no Klaus Kinski jokes, please) included three frigates, one each from Spain, Romania, and Turkey– the latter two being Black Sea countries.

Meanwhile, SNMCMG2, under CDR Katsouras of the Greek Navy, consisted of three minesweepers, one each from Italy, Spain, and Turkey, with Katsouras commanding the group from his flagship HS Aliakmon (A470).

Built during the 1960s at Bremer-Vulcan in then-West Germany as the 3,700-ton Type 701 Lüneburg-class trossschiff (TS= supply ship) Saarburg (A1415), Aliakmon served with the Bundesmarine in the Baltic and the North Sea, acting as a mothership to minesweepers and patrol boats, until 1994 when she was sold to the Greeks to began her second career.

The image of the Greek support vessel from NATO this month showed something interesting:

How about that beautiful Breda Type 106 Twin 40 mm/L70s? 

These guns were 1950s Italian updates to the venerable old twin Bofors designs and use a 32-round ready mag, topped off by 4-shell clips, much like the WWII models. This specific style of gun was just used by the Germans, primarily on their Hamburg-class destroyers and Lüneburg-class tenders.

Their continued use by the Greeks now means they are almost the last twin Bofors-style 40mms still afloat as the Canadians retired theirs, used on the Kingston-class OPVs, in 2014.

A few coast guards, such as in Iceland, still run 40mm Bofors for warning shots or to destroy derelicts at sea, and a couple mounts are in the Philipines on old PCEs– which are rapidly being retired– but that’s about it.

Aliakmon carries two twin Bredas as well as two twin Rheinmental 20mm guns, all of them optically-guided and manually-operated.