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The German destroyer Erich Giese was just like many other vessels sunk in the naval battles around Narvik in 1940. During the second naval battle for Narvik on the 13th of April 1940, British destroyers attacked the vessels which laid at anchor in Narvik harbor, but were themselves attacked by several German destroyers during the attack. Erich Giese tried to slip put from the harbor, but was spotted and quickly put under a ferocious fire from the British warships which consisted of the destroyers Bedouin, Hardy, Punjabi, Cossack and the battleship Warspite. Erich Giese managed to put a torpedo hit on one of the British destroyers, but was herself heavily hit by grenades from Bedouin and Warspite during the attack and caught fire after 21 hits. At 1330 the commandant Gerhard Schaar ordered the crew to abandon the sinking destroyer. Of the crew on 315 men, 83 crew members followed the destroyer down in the deep. The wreck of Erich Giese can be located just outside the marina on Ankenes near 250 meters from land on a depth of sixty to seventy meters. At present it its not allowed to dive on this wreck...
The destroyers of the "Zerstörer 1934A" class were the first four destroyers build in Germany after World War I. Based on the same design principals as the torpedo boats, those ships showed some serious problems after completion, which was partly caused by the fast naval construction programs after 1933. They were very bad seagoing ships, like most other German vessels they took over a high amount of water during heavy seas, making their forward artillery unusable. Further they showed a structural weakness since the hull started to bend in heavy seas and were burdened with heavy vibrations produced by the engines. Their high pressure turbine engines caused many problems during operations, which were limited by the short range of those ships. The idea was to equip the ships with the newly designed high pressure turbines because this system seemed to have several advantages about normal turbine systems - at least on the paper. Test installations on land were very promising, but when installed on board on the destroyers, the engines rooms got very crowded making maintenance very difficult. Like all other German destroyers, they were all equipped for mine laying which was intensively used during the first months of the war. Most ships of this class did not survive the second year of the war, two of them were even sunk by own bombers, but in their few operational months, they did some successful mining operations near the British coast. Z 12 Erich Giese (1939)
Part of the 6st destroyer
division at the outbreak of the war, operating in the Baltic Sea near
Danzig and later Decorations;
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began his
naval career in October 1937. He served on the destroyer |
Edited 29.06.2007 |