Sailing of the pocket battleship Graf Spee and others

All,

I remember reading about the sailing of the Graf Spee for the open ocean two weeks before the commencement of hostilities.

Does anyone know if any other German ships (warships and merchant raiders) sailed before the start of hostilities/

Thanks

 

Ooops, Sorry moderators.

Can this thread be moved to the proper location?

Thanks

 

Deustchland and her supply ship Westerwald sailed at about the same time, and about 26 U-boats were deployed to the open ocean. Conversion of merchant ships into raiders only began after the war started.

 

thanks for the help.

 

I wonder if Germany also recalled the merchant navy to home ports.
Were there other other "support ships" , besides Altmark and Westerwald ?

 

I don't know what efforts they made to warn merchant ships but quite a few were caught overseas. For one thing, Hitler had hoped that war with Britain and France could be avoided, or resolved after his conquest of Poland. Clay Blair, Hitler's U-Boat War cites 137 "prizes" or "requisitioned" vessels added to the British shipping pool - these are separate from Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, etc. ships. Incidentally the "neutral" US Navy often shadowed German merchant ships trying to slip home and reported their positions to the British.

Altmark and Westerwald are the only supply ships mentioned sailing in August 1939, but eventually there were many of them, for example about seven were deployed in the Atlantic at the time of the Bismarck sortie. They were particularly important for raider and U-boat oeprations in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Conversely British efforts to hunt down supply ships, aided by Ultra, progressively constrained those operations.

German blockade runners to/from the Far East remained active into 1944, until the French ports were cut off by the Allied land advance.

 

I've set in the estuary before, waiting for that soup to clear.

I was in the Baltic one time, we had to return a German exchange officer to one of their Hamburg class destroyers. The fog was so thick, we had the ship on radar 75 yards away and couldn't see it, not even a darker spot in the fog.

 

CARRONADE HI!-One name I rarely see in a combat context in W.W.2 naval warfare is the Kriegsmarine battleship ''LUTZOW''
The Scharnhorst and Guienesau dash up the Channel from Brest succesfuly in 1942; Bismarck sinks ''Hood'' AND IS SUNK HERSELF in 1941; Scharnhorst is sunk in 1943 following Graf Spee who forcibly scuttled hrself in December 1939 on the River Plate but ''LUTZOW?-DID IT DO ANYTHING IN W.W. 2 except look menacing?
Or did ''LUTZOW'' END UP IGNOMINIOUSLY like ''PRINZ EUGEN''? I.E. A post-war nuclear test target in the Pacific?

 

Obviously, I'm not Carronade, but here goes anyway. Hope you don't mind....Lutzow, nee Deutchland, survived until almost the end of the war. About a month or so before the end of the war she was sunk by RAF bombers, after which she was still used as a gun battery against Soviet forces. She was active throughout her life, damaged several times and repaired (including one time by Republican bombers in the Spanish Civil War). However, she didn't do much damage or have a dramatic ending such as Bismark or Graf Spee so little has been written about her. Most of her shots fired were probably in the Baltic against Soviet forces.

 

Hi, Duns!

As harolds said, Deutschland/Lutzow did not accomplish much until late in the war when she was active against the Soviet advance. She was at sea at the outbreak of war but only sank or captured a few ships before slipping home. In Norway she was hit by 28cm (Krupp!) shells at the same time Blucher was sunk, then torpedoed by a British submarine on her way home. She was going to participate in the attack on convoy PQ-17 but ran aground in Norway. She did take part in the unsuccessful attack on a British convoy in the Barents Sea December 31, 1942; she, Hipper, and six destroyers were held off by the convoy escort and run off by two 6" cruisers, an embarassment which led to Hitler's order to scrap the surface fleet and Raeder's resignation. Bit of a hard luck ship?

 

Thanks Harolds-hope the snow isn't too bad in Wyoming just now! for your info.Also Carronade, both of you have fully answered my question-Mind you some British battleships like HMS Rodney'' didn't grab the headlines like ''Warspite'' and others did in W.W.2 either.

 

Truth is a lot of warshps never got to fire their guns at an enemy ship, BTW the third Deutchland, Admiral Scheer, while a lot less known than Graf Spee, had a pretty spectacular cruise.

 

There's definitely snow here and it's COLD! A friend's vehicle thermometer regisistered -22 degrees near here. Oh, by the way, that was in FARENHEIT degrees.