HNoMS Olav Tryggvason

HNoMS Olav Tryggvason

**HNoMS *Olav Tryggvason*** was a minelayer that was built by the naval shipyard at Horten in the early 1930s with the yard number 119. She served in the Royal Norwegian Navy until captured by the Germans in 1940. The Germans renamed her first ***Albatros II***, and a few days later ***Brummer***. She was wrecked in a British bombing raid in northern Germany in April 1945.

### Description

The *Olav Tryggvason* was considered a well armed and balanced ship, with an engine plant consisting of both steam turbines and diesel engines. *Olav Tryggvason* was the first Norwegian warship equipped with a basic gun computer, allowing all four main guns to be fired at the same time at one target with some degree of accuracy.

### Career

Before the outbreak of the Second World War, the *Olav Tryggvason* served as a cadet training ship in the summer season, taking aboard 55 cadets and showing the flag around Western Europe on training cruises. One of the cadets serving on board in the 1930s was Crown Prince Olav of Norway.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, the *Olav Tryggvason* took part in neutrality protection duties. Her first armed action came on 3 November 1939, when the US merchant ship *City of Flint* entered Norwegian territorial waters. The *City of Flint* had been taken as a prize by the German pocket battleship *Deutschland* in the Atlantic and was on its way to Germany with the American crew as prisoners. According to public international law, the ship could have passed through Norwegian waters without interference, but when she stopped and anchored in the port of Haugesund, the Germans broke Norwegian neutrality regulations. The German prize crew had brought the *City of Flint* into Haugesund to escape the British naval forces which searched for them. When the British cruiser HMS *Glasgow* approached the *City of Flint* on 2 November the escorting *Olav Tryggvason* had confronted the British warship and made it leave Norwegian waters. *Olav Tryggvason* boarded the *City of Flint* with one officer and thirty armed sailors, who returned control of the ship to the American captain, Joseph H. Gainard, on 6 November. He unloaded his cargo in Bergen and set sail in ballast for the US. The German prize crew was interned at Kongsvinger Fortress. In response, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs received several strongly worded and threatening notes from its German counterpart.

#### The Battle of Horten Harbor

The *Olav Tryggvason* was at Horten for minor engine repairs, manned only by a skeleton crew, when the Germans invaded on 9 April 1940. Along with the minesweeper HNoMS *Rauma*, she defended the harbour against the German torpedo boats *Albatros* and *Kondor*, and two 120-ton *räumboot* minesweepers; the *R 17* and the *R 27*.

"All through the chilly night of April 8–9 a happy welcoming party from the German legation had stood at quayside in Oslo Harbor waiting for the arrival of a German fleet troop transport. It was the strongest naval force sent to Norway, led by the pocket battle ship *Lützow* (its name changed from Deutschland because Hitler didn't want to risk losing a ship by that name), with six eleven-inch guns, and the new 10,000-ton heavy cruiser Blucher, flagship of the squadron, carrying 8 eigh- inch guns. The happy little party waited in vain. The big ships never arrived. They had been challenged at the very entrance to Oslo Fjord, where the Norwegian mine layer, Olav Trygverson, sank a German torpedo boat and damaged the light cruiser Emden."

The minelayer's commander, *kommandørkaptein* T. Briseid, had received warning of the intruding foreign naval forces and at 0215hrs anchored his ship to a buoy in the inner harbour to cover the harbour entrance with her guns. At 0435hrs two ships with no lights entered to harbour. At a range of 60 metres (66 yd) the *Reichskriegsflagge* was spotted and the ships identified as German. Much of the Norwegian defensive advantage was however lost as Briseid then decided to continue following neutrality protection guidelines and first blew a steam horn, then fired a blank shot, then two live warning shots at the foreign warships before opening up on them in earnest.

During the confusing battle at close range, *R 17* was sunk by the *Olav Tryggvason's* 12 cm guns off Apeneskaia quay. Of the forty-five strong German landing unit on board *R 17*, only fifteen made it ashore unwounded. Despite the best efforts of the Norwegian ships, the *R 27* managed to get to the cover of a peninsula and land her force of forty-five infantry in the harbour, having suffered several hits in the process. After landing her infantry the *R 27* ran aground, then dislodged herself and suffered more hits before making her escape from the area. At the same time as the German minesweepers made their charge into the harbour, the *Albatros* tried to engage the Norwegian ships, but suffered hits from *Olav Tryggvason* and was forced to take cover behind some nearby islands. The cruiser *Emden* also tried to interfere from a distance out in the Oslofjord, but without result.

At 0735hrs, after threats of aerial bombardment of the naval base and the adjacent city, as well as a misguided impression of the size of the 60-strong German landing party, the Norwegian land and naval forces surrendered. During the battle *Olav Tryggvason* fired almost sixty 12 cm shells, suffered at least thirty-five hits from the 20 mm guns aboard the räumboots and had two sailors wounded.

#### German Service

The *Olav Tryggvason* was taken into the Kriegsmarine and renamed ***Albatros II*** on 11 April, to commemorate the torpedo boat she had damaged. Five days later, on 16 April, she was renamed again, as the ***Brummer***, after an artillery training ship torpedoed in the Kattegat 14 April 1940.

After capture, the ship was rearmed with new main and secondary guns. Her original four 12 cm main guns were at first stored by the Germans before being installed in a coastal artillery battery at Hundvåg in Vestlandet in May 1945, only days before VE day.

*Brummer* spent her first year as a Kriegsmarine minelayer on the coasts of the Netherlands and Belgium as part of the naval contingent for the planned invasion of England.

After the cancellation of the invasion of the UK she was transferred to the Baltic Sea in time to participate in Operation Barbarossa, carrying out mining operations in the Gulf of Finland.

*Brummer* arrived at Utö in Finland together with the German minelayers *Tannenberg* and *Hansestadt Danzig* on 14 June 1941, and was concealed in the Nagu area in preparation for the outbreak of war eight days later.

On 22 June the minelayers, designated Mine Group *Nord*, laid a minefield in the Gulf of Finland, west of Hanko. The mine barrage, codenamed *Apolda*, channelled shipping in the Gulf either to the north, within reach of Finnish coastal artillery, or to the south, where German guns were in range. For most of the mining operation, which was initiated in the early hours of the day, the minelaying group worked unchallenged even though the ships were spotted by Soviet naval forces. Only at 0228hrs did *Brummer* and an escorting E-Boat came under unsuccessful attack from two Soviet Beriev MBR-2 flying boats. The attack on *Brummer* was the first engagement between the Baltic Fleet and German forces during the Second World War.

In addition to forcing Soviet shipping into vulnerable bottlenecks, *Brummer's* mines accounted for the loss of a Soviet destroyer and one submarine. The *Gnevny*-class destroyer *Gnevny* hit one of the *Apolda* mines on 23 June. On 1 July the Baltic Fleet *M* class submarine *M-81* struck one of the mines laid by *Brummer* and sank off the island of Vormsi in Estonia.

Of the total of six German-controlled minelayers operating in the Northern Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland in 1941-1942 *Brummer* was the only vessel purpose-built for minelaying.

Amongst the operations that *Brummer* took part in while stationed in the Baltic was the joint German-Finnish Operation Nordwind in September 1941, a naval deception operation to divert Soviet attention from the German landings on the Estonian islands Hiiumaa and Saaremaa. *Brummer* was part of the German contingent in the operation's II Group. The operation was meant to be carried out by a diversionary naval manoeuvre during daytime on 13 September, with the force turning back towards their base at Utö by 2030hrs. In the end, the operation failed to attract Soviet interest and saw the loss of the Finnish coastal defence ship *Ilmarinen* to naval mines.

After spending close to a year in the Baltic she was again deployed in Western Europe, serving between 1942 and 1944 mainly in the North Sea and off Norway. On 9 April 1943 the Soviet submarine *K-21* fired six torpedoes at *Brummer* off Båtsfjord in Finnmark. The minelayer was not hit.

In 1944 *Brummer* resumed mining operations in the Baltic. She was used for mining until the spring of 1945 when she was employed as part of the armada that evacuated German troops and civilians from the path of the Red Army.

The end of *Brummer* came on 3 April 1945, when she was wrecked by RAF bombers while dry docked for repairs at the Deutsche Werke shipyard in the Baltic port of Kiel.

After the war, the wreck was scrapped between 1945 and 1948.