With the last few posts about Hilfskreuzers I found this and thought I would share it with you. Another very interesting ship and its battles. Hilfskreuzer (Auxiliary Cruiser / Raider) Stier. Especially it's demise. Robert
"Early on September 27, while lying stopped with the Tannenfels, and with most of the crewmen who had been working outboard, scraping, cleaning and re-painting the ship's sides, just recalled on board due to the deteriorating visibility and rising seas, a ship was sighted nearby emerging from a rain squall.
As she had appeared so unexpectedly, leaving the two ships suddenly almost alongside one another, Gerlach immediately called for full speed, ran up the battle flag and signalling to the ship to stop, cleared his gun crews for action.
Within minutes of ordering full speed, the Stier opened fire on the stranger with a warning shot across the bow, which Gerlach believed would lead her captain, realising he was hopelessly outgunned, to obey his command to stop.
Instead, he turned his ship, as if attempting to escape, and returned fire, with his stern-mounted World War One era 4-inch gun, two 37mm anti-aircraft guns and six machine guns, leaving Gerlach with little option but to open fire in earnest.
With the Tannenfels keeping her distance, concentrating on jamming the vessel's frantic distress signals, the Stier, firing at will, moved to cut off her retreat, but instead sustained two hits herself, one jamming the rudder hard to starboard, the other cutting the oil-supply line to the engines, causing them to stop.
Drifting in a half-circle, Gerlach found that while he could now bring his port side armament to bear, he could not fire torpedoes, as the raider's electrical power plant had also been knocked out of action.
Lying no more than 1,000 metres apart, close enough for the lighter anti-aircraft weapons of both the Stier and the Tannenfels, which now joined in, to become effective, raking the freighter's decks and gun positions, the two ships hammered shells into one another at a devastating rate.
Despite the fact that the shells were being supplied to her guns by hand, as the ammunition hoists were out of action, the raider's superior firepower soon had the freighter firmly ablaze, but she too was now also ablaze, with several fires completely out of control being fed by the leaking oil in the engine-room.
Concentrating all his firepower on the freighter's stern gun, which was wreacking such havoc on his ship, Gerlach could not believe the tenacity with which the enemy gunners continued to resist.
As one crew was mown down or blown to pieces, it was immediately replaced by another, until there was simply no one left, and the gun fell silent.
Firing several more salvos, one of which destroyed the freighter's engine room, Gerlach finally ordered his gunners to cease firing.
With the two crippled ships drifting, side by side in the squally rain, their machine gunners still raking each other with murderous fire, what remained of the crew of the shattered freighter started getting off their burning, blood-spattered ship.
Their ‘conqueror' was little better off.
Holed below the water-line and taking water in several places, fires raging out of control all over the ship, including in her coal-bunker, no fire-fighting capability, her electrical power-plant out of action, and her helm jammed hard over, the raider Stier was doomed.
With the flooding valves out of reach, there was no hope of preventing the fires from reaching the nineteen torpedoes stored in Number 2 hold, and as the rudder was still hopelessly jammed, and the ship was likely to blow up at any moment, Gerlach informed his officers that he had decided to abandon ship.
Despite the fact that his engineers had managed to get the engines restarted, he instructed them to set the scuttling charges.
Informed of Gerlach's decision, Kapitän Haase of the Tannenfels manoeuvred the supply-ship in as close as he dared to the burning raider, her officers and crew still stunned by what they had witnessed.
As he did so, the enemy radio operator was, incredibly, still calling for assistance.
A couple of well aimed shells blew the radio cabin away, killing him instantly.
Unlike those on the raider, who believed they had been engaging an auxiliary cruiser of some sort, the crew of the Tannenfels could clearly see how few weapons the freighter had brought to bear, and could not believe that they had reduced such a well-armed ship as the Stier to a smouldering sinking wreck.
As the survivors of the Stier's crew, plus the wounded from the Stanvac Calcutta and other ships who had had to remain on board, took to the boats, the blazing hulk of their shattered adversary slid slowly beneath the waves.
Picked up by the Tannenfels, they watched, as the fires, now engulfing their ship in flames, finally reached the torpedo storage compartment, causing a massive explosion, after which the Stier sank quickly.
The battle had lasted just over an hour, during which the Stier had fired over fifty 150mm salvos, plus nine hundred rounds of anti-aircraft fire, and had sustained fifteen hits from the freighter's 4-inch stern gun.
Three of her men had lost their lives, including her doctor, Dr Meyer-Hamme, Leutnant Petersen's best friend, who said, "It's easy to die … greet our friends", and thirty-three others had been wounded, three seriously.
Searching for survivors from the sunken freighter in the squally conditions, which reduced visibility considerably, and finding none, Haase and Gerlach, reported that ‘Due to poor visibility, no prisoners were picked up'.
Thirty-one days later however, fifteen of the nineteen men, who had taken advantage of the same poor visibility to avoid rescue and escape in a lifeboat, landed in a remote fishing village on the coast of Brazil, after a horrific thirty-day, 1,800-mile journey.
Thirty-eight of their shipmates had died during the battle with the Stier.
With scarcely sufficient food to cater for the large number of people on board, the Tannenfels, which was also low in fuel, set course for France, reaching Bordeaux on November 2, where Gerlach immediately reported that he had engaged an ‘Unidentified American warship'.
When informed that his opponent was a lightly-armed cargo ship, he refused to believe it, stating that no cargo vessel with one 4-inch gun could have inflicted the damage his ship had sustained.
He later stated that he had believed her to be an Armed Merchant Cruiser or at least an auxiliary warship, and that she had replied with 6-inch and 4-inch guns as well as anti-aircraft and machine gun fire.
The ‘unidentified American warship' was in fact the 7,181-ton, four-month-old American ‘Liberty Ship', the Stephen Hopkins, of the Luckenbach Steamship Company, in ballast on her maiden voyage, en route from Capetown to Bahia and on to Paramaribo in Dutch Guiana, where she was to pick up a cargo of bauxite.
The last word from First Officer Ludolf Petersen: "We could not but feel that we had gone down at the hands of a gallant foe … that Liberty Ship had ended a very successful raiding voyage … we could have sunk many more ships". "She may have sunk us, but she saved most of our lives". "We would not have lasted much longer out there in those days, and there would not always have been a Tannenfels, around to pick us up".
The raider Stier had spent one hundred and forty days at sea, covering 50,000 sea miles and sinking just four ships, for a total of 30,728 tons."
"On September 27 1942, a day of very poor visibility, the Stier engaged the ‘Liberty Ship' Stephen Hopkins at close range, and as the two ships traded shots, with Gerlach convinced his opponent was an Armed Merchant Cruiser due to the volume of gunfire, the Stier was badly damaged and the Stephen Hopkins sunk.
With fires out of control and threatening the torpedo compartment, it was obvious that the Stier was doomed, and with a heavy heart, Gerlach abandoned her. He, his crew and their prisoners were rescued by the blockade-runner Tannenfels, and safely returned to France .
The Stephen Hopkins, in fact armed with only one 4-inch, two 37mm, four 50 cal and two 30 cal machine-guns, was later named a ‘Gallant Ship'."
link
's first experience with 1:4800 scale naval models.
