German cruiser Prinz Eugen

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Career

Type:	Heavy cruiser
Class	Enlarged Admiral Hipper class
Ordered:
Laid down:	23 April 1936
Launched:	22 August 1938
Commissioned:	1 August 1940
Fate:	Towed to Kwajalein Atoll after nuclear weapons test, capsized December 1946.
General Characteristics
Displacement:	15,000 tons (Empty) 18,400 tons (Max)
Length:	212.5 m
Beam:	21.8 m
Draught:	7.2 m
Propulsion:	136,000 shp (98 MW)
Speed:	33.5 knots (62.04 km/h)
Range:	7,200 miles at 20 kn
Complement:	ca 1,600
Armament:	8× 20.3 cm SK 12× 10.5 cm L/65 C/33 17× 4 cm FlaK 8× 3.7 cm L/83 28× 2 cm MG L/64 12× 53.3 cm Torpedoes
Aircraft	3× Arado Ar 196

The German cruiser Prinz Eugen (ger. IPA-pron. [ɔɪˈgeːn], the stressed "e" as "é" in French) was an enlarged Admiral Hipper class heavy cruiser which served with the Kriegsmarine of Germany during World War II.

She was named after Prince Eugene of Savoy (Prinz Eugen in German).

Prinz Eugen was the third ship of the Hipper class heavy cruisers. Like her sister ships, Admiral Hipper and Blücher, she was built in the mid-1930s. During the planning and design stage she was known as "Kreuzer J" (Cruiser J). Her keel was laid at the Krupp Germania shipyard in Kiel on April 23, 1936, and her full cost would be 104.5 million Reichsmark. Prinz Eugen was launched on August 22, 1938, and commissioned on August 1, 1940. Considered a "lucky ship", she survived to the end of the war although she participated in only one major action at sea.

1 Battle of Denmark Strait
2 Channel Dash
3 Baltic Deployment
4 USS Prinz Eugen
5 Commanding Officers
6 Tradition
7 Other ships of the class
8 See also
9 External links

[edit] Battle of Denmark Strait

On 24 May 1941, Prinz Eugen fought alongside Bismarck in the Battle of the Denmark Strait against HMS Hood, hitting the British battlecruiser at least once and starting a huge fire, and HMS Prince of Wales, hitting that battleship three times. The Hood was sunk during the engagement and the Prince of Wales damaged but the German ships were still shadowed by British warships. Later that day she was ordered off on her own from Bismarck, escaping the British ships, and headed south to rendezvous with the tanker Spichern and prepare for eventual commerce raiding in the Atlantic. After narrowly avoiding several British heavy units which were looking for Bismarck, she arrived at Brest, France, on 1 June 1941. The port was regularly bombed by the RAF, and on the night on 1 July Prinz Eugen was hit on the port side behind the bridge. The bomb detonated in the forward main artillery command centre, killing 60 of the crew.

[edit] Channel Dash

After the loss of Bismarck Hitler banned further Atlantic surface raids. Fearing an Allied invasion of Norway, he wanted all capital ships back in home waters. Together with the battlecruisers (or battleships) Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, Prinz Eugen made the "Channel Dash" - Operation Cerberus - back to Germany during 11 February–12 February 1942.

Prinz Eugen left Germany for Norway in February 1942. On 23 February she was torpedoed by the British submarine HMS Trident, destroying her stern. After some preliminary patch-up repairs in Trondheim, the cruiser returned to Kiel on 16 May 1942 to receive a new stern. Prinz Eugen was not operational again until January 1943. Two attempts to relocate to Norway, where she could pose a threat to Allied convoys, failed and she was assigned instead to training duties in home waters.

[edit] Baltic Deployment

From August 1944 onward, Prinz Eugen was deployed to shell advancing Soviet troop concentrations along the Baltic coast and to transport German refugees to the west. On 15 October 1944, she collided with the light cruiser Leipzig in heavy fog in the Baltic Sea, nearly cutting the smaller ship in two. For 14 hours the two ships drifted, locked together, until they could be separated. Prinz Eugen was repaired at Gotenhafen (Gdynia) and continued her tasks of shelling Soviet land forces and evacuating German refugees. On 29 March 1945 she left Gotenhafen for the last time with a load of refugees, reaching Swinemünde on 8 April 1945. The ship then departed for Copenhagen arriving on 20 April 1945. Lack of fuel meant that she did not leave port again. At the end of the war, she was one of only two operational German cruisers left (the other was the light cruiser Nürnberg), and was surrendered at Copenhagen on 7 May 1945.

[edit] USS Prinz Eugen

She was awarded to the United States and commissioned into the US Navy as the unclassified miscellaneous vessel USS Prinz Eugen (IX-300). After examination and tests she was allocated to the target fleet for the Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests. She survived the Able and Baker tests (July 1946) but was too radioactive to have leaks repaired. In September 1946 she was towed to Kwajalein Atoll and capsized on 22 December 1946 over Enubuj reef where she remains to this day (8°45'9.49"N 167°40'59.60"E). In 1978 her port propeller was salvaged and is preserved at the German Naval Memorial at Laboe.

[edit] Commanding Officers

KzS Helmuth Brinkmann - 1 August 1940 - 1 August 1942

KK Wilhelm Beck - 1 August 1942 - 8 October 1942

KzS Hans-Erich Voss - 8 October 1942 - 28 February 1943

KzS Werner Ehrhardt - 28 February 1943 - 5 January 1944

KzS Hans-Jürgen Reinicke - 5 January 1944 - 8 May 1945

Capt. A. H. Graubart, USN - 1945 - 1946

[edit] Tradition

After the annexation of Austria in 1938 former Austrian naval officers and sailors were reactivated and served with the Kriegsmarine. The naming of the ship was a tribute to the maritime tradition of the Austro-Hungarian Navy. The Prinz Eugen carried the bell of the Austro-Hungarian dreadnought Tegetthoff. The four main gun turrets were names after the Austrian towns of Graz, Braunau, Innsbruck and Wien (Vienna).