German cruiser Prinz Eugen
| | Career | |
|---|
| Ordered: |
| Laid down: | 23 April 1936 |
| Launched: | 22 August 1938 |
| Commissioned: | 1 August 1940 |
| Fate: | Scuttled at Kwajalein Atoll after nuclear weapons test, sunk summer 1946. |
| Costs: | 104.5 million Reichsmark |
| General characteristics |
|---|
| Displacement: | 15,000 tons (Empty) 18,400 tons (Max) |
| Dimensions: | Length: 212.5 m Beam: 21.8 m Draft: 7.2 m |
| Armament: | SK (8") 203 mm: 8
L/65 C/33 10.5 mm: 12
4 cm Flak: 17
L/83: 3.7 cm 8
MG L/64 2 cm :28
533 mm Torpedoes: 12 |
| Aircraft: | Arado Ar 196: 3 |
| Propulsion: | Total Performance: 136,000 shp (98 MW)
Maximum speed 33.5 knots (62.04 km/h)
Range: 7,200 miles at 20 kn |
| Crew: | ~1,600 |
The
German cruiser Prinz Eugen (pron. 'Oy-geen') 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 a
Hipper class heavy cruiser: like her sister ships,
Admiral Hipper and
Blücher, she was built in the mid-
1930s. Her keel was laid at the
Krupp Germania shipyard in
Kiel on
April 23 1936, and she 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.
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
PoW 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.
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 Februaryâ€"
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.
From August 1944 onward,
Prinz Eugen was used to shell advancing
Russian units along the Baltic coast and to transport German refugees back to Germany. 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, a target for any lurking Russian
submarines, 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
Nürnberg), and was surrendered at
Copenhagen on
7 May 1945.
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. In 1979 her port propeller was salvaged and is preserved at the German Naval Memorial at
Kiel.
*
List of World War II ships*
List of Kriegsmarine ships*
List of naval ships of Germany*
List of ship launches in 1938*
List of ship commissionings in 1940*
List of ship decommissionings in 1945*
List of shipwrecks in 1946*
7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen* Other
Hipper class cruisers:
**
German cruiser Admiral Hipper**
German cruiser Blücher**
German cruiser Seydlitz**
German cruiser Lützow (Hipper class)*
The Heavy Cruiser Prinz Eugen at
KBismarck.com*
Prinz Eugen - An Illustrated Technical History*
Prinz Eugen technical data â€" From German naval history website
german-navy.de*
Maritimequest Prinz Eugen photo gallery
