Ivan Vladimirovich Kudishin Liners at war. "Lusitania", "Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse", "Queen Elizabeth" and others. Ivan Kudishin - Liners at war. "Lusitania", "Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse", "Queen Elizabeth" and other Kaiser wilhelm der Grosse steam boilers

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SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse(“Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse” German - Emperor Wilhelm the Great) was a German transatlantic liner owned by the shipping company North German Lloyd. Named after the first Emperor of the German Empire, Wilhelm. The ship became famous for being the first German ship to win the Atlantic Blue Riband.

Career

Construction, launching, first voyage

Further career

Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse became the first liner to have a commercial wireless telegraphy system installed when the company Marconi equipped the ship in February 1900.

The ship was also the first four-tube liner. It is the four chimneys that will become a sign of the prestige and safety of the ships. But unlike later four-pipe liners, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse had only two boiler shafts, which bifurcated at the top. This is the reason for the placement of pipes at unequal intervals. Although, like many other four-pipe liners, it did not need as many pipes. Two would be enough.

The ship escaped a massive fire at the North German Lloyd's pier in Hoboken, New Jersey, in June 1900, which seriously damaged her linemates Main, Bremen and Saale. 161 crew members died on those ships.

World War I

Service

In August 1914, the ship was requisitioned by the Kaiser's Navy and converted into an auxiliary cruiser. SMS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, intended for raids on merchant ships in the Atlantic. It was equipped with six 4-inch guns and two 37 mm guns. After missing two passenger ships because they were carrying many women and children, he sank two cargo ships and was sunk himself on August 26, 1914.

Death

The auxiliary cruiser was taken by surprise while bunkering with coal off the coast of the then spanish colony Rio de Oro (now Western Sahara) in western Africa, by the old British cruiser Highflyer ( HMS Highflyer), armed with 6-inch guns. "Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse" tried to fire back, but soon ran out of ammunition. The crew abandoned the ship and sank it in shallow water. British sources at this time insisted that the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse sank due to damage caused by the cruiser. Whatever the reason, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was the first commercial raider lost during the First World War. The liner lay on its starboard side above the water until 1952, when it was dismantled for metal.

Gallery

Kaiser Wilhelm liner port 1897.jpg

"Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse" in port in 1897.

KWDG smoking room.jpg

First Class Smoking Room (postcard ca. 1890−1905)

Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse fight painting 1914.jpg

Battle of Rio de Oro (picture)

Kaiser Wilhelm Der Grosse"s Wreck.jpg

The wreck of the Kaiser Wilhelm aground (1914)

see also

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Notes

An excerpt characterizing the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse (liner)

Several tens of thousands of people lay dead in different positions and uniforms in the fields and meadows that belonged to the Davydovs and state-owned peasants, in those fields and meadows in which for hundreds of years the peasants of the villages of Borodin, Gorki, Shevardin and Semyonovsky had simultaneously harvested crops and grazed livestock. At the dressing stations, about a tithe of space, the grass and soil were soaked in blood. Crowds of wounded and unwounded different teams people with frightened faces, on the one hand, wandered back to Mozhaisk, on the other hand, back to Valuev. Other crowds, exhausted and hungry, led by their leaders, moved forward. Still others stood still and continued to shoot.
Over the entire field, previously so cheerfully beautiful, with its sparkles of bayonets and smoke in the morning sun, there now stood a haze of dampness and smoke and smelled of the strange acidity of saltpeter and blood. Clouds gathered and rain began to fall on the dead, on the wounded, on the frightened, and on the exhausted, and on the doubting people. It was as if he was saying: “Enough, enough, people. Stop it... Come to your senses. What are you doing?"
Exhausted, without food and without rest, the people of both sides began to equally doubt whether they should still exterminate each other, and hesitation was noticeable on all faces, and in every soul the question arose equally: “Why, for whom should I kill and be killed? Kill whoever you want, do whatever you want, but I don’t want any more!” By evening this thought had equally matured in everyone’s soul. At any moment all these people could be horrified by what they were doing, drop everything and run anywhere.
But although by the end of the battle people felt the full horror of their action, although they would have been glad to stop, some incomprehensible, mysterious force still continued to guide them, and, sweating, covered in gunpowder and blood, left one by three, the artillerymen, although and stumbling and gasping from fatigue, they brought charges, loaded, aimed, applied wicks; and the cannonballs flew just as quickly and cruelly from both sides and flattened the human body, and that terrible thing continued to happen, which is done not by the will of people, but by the will of the one who leads people and worlds.
Anyone who looked at the upset behinds of the Russian army would say that the French only have to make one more small effort, and the Russian army will disappear; and anyone who looked at the backs of the French would say that the Russians only have to make one more small effort, and the French will perish. But neither the French nor the Russians made this effort, and the flames of the battle slowly burned out.
The Russians did not make this effort because they were not the ones who attacked the French. At the beginning of the battle, they only stood on the road to Moscow, blocking it, and in the same way they continued to stand at the end of the battle, as they stood at the beginning of it. But even if the goal of the Russians was to shoot down the French, they could not make this last effort, because all the Russian troops were defeated, there was not a single part of the troops that was not injured in the battle, and the Russians, remaining in their places , lost half of their army.
The French, with the memory of all the previous victories of fifteen years, with the confidence of Napoleon's invincibility, with the consciousness that they had captured part of the battlefield, that they had lost only one-quarter of their men and that they still had twenty thousand intact guards, it was easy to make this effort. The French, who attacked the Russian army in order to knock it out of position, had to make this effort, because as long as the Russians, just like before the battle, blocked the road to Moscow, the French goal was not achieved and all their efforts and the losses were wasted. But the French did not make this effort. Some historians say that Napoleon should have given his old guard intact in order for the battle to be won. Talking about what would have happened if Napoleon had given his guard is the same as talking about what would have happened if spring had turned into autumn. This couldn't happen. Napoleon did not give his guards, because he did not want it, but this could not be done. All the generals, officers, and soldiers of the French army knew that this could not be done, because the fallen spirit of the army did not allow it.
Napoleon was not the only one who experienced that dream-like feeling that the terrible swing of his arm was falling powerlessly, but all the generals, all the soldiers of the French army who participated and did not participate, after all the experiences of previous battles (where, after ten times less effort, the enemy fled), experienced the same feeling of horror before that enemy who, having lost half the army, stood as menacingly at the end as at the beginning of the battle. The moral strength of the French attacking army was exhausted. Not the victory that is determined by the pieces of material picked up on sticks called banners, and by the space on which the troops stood and are standing, but a moral victory, one that convinces the enemy of the moral superiority of his enemy and of his own powerlessness, was won by the Russians under Borodin. The French invasion, like an enraged beast that received a mortal wound in its run, felt its death; but it could not stop, just as the twice weaker Russian army could not help but deviate. After this push, the French army could still reach Moscow; but there, without new efforts on the part of the Russian army, it had to die, bleeding from the fatal wound inflicted at Borodino. The direct consequence of the Battle of Borodino was the causeless flight of Napoleon from Moscow, the return along the old Smolensk road, the death of the five hundred thousandth invasion and the death of Napoleonic France, which for the first time at Borodino was laid down by the hand of the strongest enemy in spirit.

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Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse(German: SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse - Emperor William the Great listen)) is a German transatlantic liner owned by the shipping company North German Lloyd. The lead ship of the "Kaiser" type, consisting of 4 sister ships - in addition to the "Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse" also "Kronprinz Wilhelm", "Kaiser Wilhelm II" and "Kronprinzin Caecilia". Named after the first Emperor of the German Empire, Wilhelm. The ship became famous for being the first German ship to win the Atlantic Blue Riband.

She set off on her maiden voyage on 19 September that year, from Bremerhaven to New York. In November 1897, she set a speed record for crossing the North Atlantic, going from west to east, and four months later the liner intercepted the Blue Riband of the Atlantic in a westerly direction, taking it from the British Cunard Line liner Lucania. He held the record until the HAPAG liner Deutschland broke it in July 1900. east direction and westward in September 1903. The fact that German ships took away this famous prize ultimately prompted Great Britain to build its fast duo, the Lusitania and Mauretania.

Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse became the first liner to have a commercial wireless telegraphy system installed when the company Marconi equipped the ship in February 1900.

The ship was also the first four-tube liner. It is the four chimneys that will become a sign of the prestige and safety of the ships. But unlike later four-pipe liners, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse had only two boiler shafts, which bifurcated at the top. This is the reason for the placement of pipes at unequal intervals. Although, like many other four-pipe liners, it did not need as many pipes. Two would be enough.

The ship escaped a massive fire at the North German Lloyd's pier in Hoboken, New Jersey, in June 1900, which seriously damaged her linemates Main, Bremen and Saale. 161 crew members died on those ships.

In August 1914, the ship was requisitioned by the Kaiser's Navy and converted into

Ivan Vladimirovich Kudishin

Liners at war. "Lusitania", "Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse", "Queen Elizabeth" and others

© Kudishin I.V., 2017

© Yauza Publishing House LLC, 2017

© Eksmo Publishing House LLC, 2017

Almost every naval historian has comprehensive information about all capital warships of the past century, but if the conversation turns to passenger or cruise ships, then other than the name, the owner company and sometimes some fragmentary information about the participation of a particular vessel in hostilities, it is very difficult to obtain any information. The exception is Titanic, about which, thanks to the efforts of filmmakers, everything or almost everything is known. It’s no wonder that the active life of this unfortunate ship was reduced to four days. This was the shortest career of the liner in the history of passenger steam shipping. And if you ask yourself what is interesting about the peaceful service of a ship serving a regular route, then the answer is quite simple. This is, first of all, routine, monotonous work, common to everyone. vehicles– from a truck or rail car to an air or ocean liner, only occasionally, by chance, interrupted by some striking biographical fact.

But in the event of a military conflict, passenger ships began to live a completely different life. They were converted into raiders, troop transports, floating hospitals, after which the beauties created for purely peaceful transportation - passenger ships began to perform functions unusual for themselves with varying degrees of success. Some succeeded in this, adding military awards to peaceful titles and glory, while others found not glory, but death. But in any case, the military adventures of passenger ships in the twentieth century are a little-revealed and very interesting topic. This book attempts to fill the information “vacuum” that has formed in this area of ​​naval history by providing details of the biographies of some of the passenger ships that gained fame and notoriety during the wars of the twentieth century.

"The Crowned Family" goes to war

Surely military glory was not at all part of the plans of the management of the famous German shipping company North German Lloyd, when in 1900 it ordered a new four-pipe fast liner from the Vulcan shipyard in Stettin (the current Polish city of Szczecin). In accordance with the loyal traditions of the company, the new ship, even before laying, was named “Crown Prince Wilhelm” - in honor of one of the representatives of the royal house of Hohenzollern that ruled in Germany. The new transatlantic liner was supposed to strengthen the prestige of Germany on the European-American line, which was won with blood by the first-born - the speedboat of the North German Lloyd, the steamship Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse built in 1897, which took away the most prestigious prize "Blue Ribbon of the Atlantic" from the British. In addition, the construction of the Kronprinz was intended to put to shame Lloyd's rivals in Germany - the transatlantic company Hamburg-America Line, whose four-pipe Deutschland speedboat took the Blue Riband from "Big Willie", as the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was dubbed » his many fans. Despite the fact that the economic data of the Deutschland were kept secret, it was no secret to anyone that the new “ribbon carrier,” built with the help of huge government subsidies, was too gluttonous to make a profit, but it was a bearer of national German prestige on the Atlantic.

In order not to fall into the same mistake as its Hamburg competitors, the North German Lloyd company used two relatively economical quadruple expansion steam engines with a total power of about 36,000 hp on its new liner. s., operating on two screws. Steam for the machines was supplied by 12 single-furnace and 4 double-furnace boilers located in four boiler rooms. Each of them had an individual chimney. Naturally, boiler fireboxes required a large number of coal - when running for maximum speed(23 knots) Kronprinz Wilhelm consumed about 500 tons of fuel per day. For comparison, however, the competing liner Deutschland had a daily coal consumption of up to 1,200 tons. The main designer of the steamship was the famous shipbuilder Robert Zimmerman, who had extensive experience in designing passenger ships, the author of the “Big Willie” project.

The only surviving transatlantic liner, the Queen Mary.

"Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse" in New York before the war

In its architecture, “Kronprinz Wilhelm” generally repeated its older brother, “Big Willy” - it had the same low silhouette, a straight knife-shaped stem, a cruising stern with an overhang, an elongated superstructure from the forecastle to the very stern overhang and four pipes combined into two closely spaced pairs. Moreover, in addition to installing more modern machines, the liner had a displacement of 600 tons (14,908 tons) compared to “Big Willie” and was 3.05 m longer (202.1 m).

Despite its similar size and displacement, the Kronprinz Wilhelm was a quite cost-effective and capacious ship compared to the Big Willie - the ship could carry 367 first-class, 340 second-class, and 1054 third-class passengers. Considering the fact that the basis for the profitability of a transatlantic liner at the beginning of the last century was the third, emigrant class, and “Big Willie” could carry slightly fewer third-class passengers with a more gluttonous power plant, economic calculations during the construction of the “Kronprinz” prevailed over the indispensable desire to become the king of speed in the vastness of the Atlantic. The cabins of the first two classes were distinguished by the presence of large windows and portholes, were much lighter and were made in a much less ponderous style than the “original Teutonic” spirit that reigned in the cabins and salons of “Big Willie”. Thus, the specialists of North German Lloyd have at their disposal a very economically balanced transatlantic airliner that is attractive to the public of any income.

Like any fast liner being built at that time, the Kronprinz Wilhelm was supposed to be able to act as an auxiliary cruiser in the event of war. For this purpose, reinforcements were provided on the forecastle and superstructure of the ship for the installation of artillery guns, and the most vulnerable parts of the hull - in particular, boiler rooms and engine room– received constructive protection. To store ammunition in the immediate vicinity of the reinforcements for the guns, special storage rooms were provided, which, in the event of conversion to a warship, were converted into artillery cellars. In addition, there were innovations in the design of the new liner, although not directly related to its potential military purpose, but very useful during conversion into an auxiliary cruiser. These included, in particular, the presence of an extensive telephone network, providing good communication between the bridge and most posts throughout the ship, a radio room equipped with the latest technology, which, by the way, had 4-mm steel walls and a roof, as well as very voluminous refrigerators, which could provide the crew of the auxiliary cruiser with quality food for several months.

The liner made its first flight from Bremen to New York in September 1901. And on one of its subsequent voyages, exactly a year later, in September 1902, the Kronprinz Wilhelm took the Blue Riband of the Atlantic from the Deutschland. Upon arrival in New York, the liner had a rather unpresentable appearance - the powerful waves through which the Crown Prince sailed without slowing down stripped the paint off its bow. But even this was perceived by the public as battle scars and only increased the prestige of the new ship and its owners. The Kronprinz Wilhelm became one of the most popular liners on the Atlantic. Working according to schedule, the ship crossed the ocean in five and a half days.

In 1903 and 1904, the Big Willy and the Crown Prince Wilhelm were joined by two more fast liners, somewhat larger and quite economical, named in the tradition of the North German Lloyd: Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Crown Princess Cecilie. Having a similar four in regular operation between Bremen and New York, North German Lloyd became one of the dominant companies on the Atlantic, forcing both the British Cunard and the German Hamburg-America Line to make room. By the way, after the commercial collapse that followed the fall of the Deutschland liner's record, the owner company decided to thoroughly modernize it, removing half of the boilers and placing third-class cabins in their place. In this form, the ship, renamed Victoria Louise and repainted entirely white, was used mainly for cruise voyages and executive missions until the outbreak of World War II.

SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse (“Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse” German - Emperor Wilhelm the Great) was a German transatlantic liner owned by the shipping company North German Lloyd.

Named after the first Emperor of the German Empire, Wilhelm.

The ship became famous for being the first German ship to win the Atlantic Blue Riband.

Construction, launching, first voyage

The liner was built at the Vulkan shipyard in Stettin and was launched on May 4, 1897. He set off on his first voyage on September 19 of the same year, from Bremerhaven to New York.

In November 1897, he set a speed record for crossing North Atlantic, going from west to east, and four months later the liner intercepted the Blue Riband of the Atlantic in a westerly direction, taking it away from the British Cunard Line liner Lucania.
It held the record until the HAPAG liner Deutschland broke it eastbound in July 1900 and westbound in September 1903. The fact that German ships took away this famous prize ultimately prompted Great Britain to build its fast duo, the Lusitania and the Mauretania.

Further career

Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse became the first liner to have a commercial wireless telegraphy system installed when the Marconi company equipped the ship in February 1900.

The ship was also the first four-tube liner. It is the four chimneys that will become a sign of the prestige and safety of the ships. But unlike later four-pipe liners, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse had only two boiler shafts, which bifurcated at the top. This is the reason for the placement of pipes at unequal intervals. Although, like many other four-pipe liners, it did not need as many pipes. Two would be enough.

The ship escaped a massive fire at the North German Lloyd's pier in Hoboken, New Jersey, in June 1900, which seriously damaged her linemates Main, Bremen and Saale. 161 crew members died on those ships.

Six years later, in November 1906, the liner suffered extensive damage while attempting to clip the bow of the British RMS Orinoco; Five passengers of the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse were killed in the collision, and a hole 21 meters wide and 8 meters high was formed in the side of the ship. The Admiralty Court found the German airliner guilty of the incident.

In 1914, the liner was modernized to accommodate additional 3rd and 4th class passengers in order to make maximum use of the ship for transporting emigrants from Europe to North America.

World War I

Service

In August 1914, the ship was requisitioned by the Kaiser's Navy and converted into the auxiliary cruiser SMS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, intended for raids on merchant ships in the Atlantic.
It was equipped with six 4-inch guns and two 37 mm guns. After missing two passenger ships because they were carrying many women and children, he sank two cargo ships and was sunk himself on August 26, 1914. Death

The auxiliary cruiser was taken by surprise while bunkering with coal off the coast of the then Spanish colony of Rio de Oro (now Western Sahara) in West Africa, the old British cruiser HMS Highflyer, armed with 6-inch guns. "Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse" tried to fire back, but soon ran out of ammunition. The crew abandoned the ship and sank it in shallow water.
British sources at this time insisted that the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse sank due to damage caused by the cruiser. Whatever the reason, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was the first commercial raider lost during the First World War. The liner lay on its starboard side above the water until 1952, when it was dismantled for metal.