Light Cruiser Koeln (1941)

Light Cruiser Köln
The last peaceful years before the next world war saw the cruiser participating in several training exercises in European waters. After the war broke out in September of 1939, Köln initially served as a minelayer and commerce raider. A scheduled refit, like her sister Karlsruhe was never completed, due to the shipyards now concentrating all of their efforts towards the war. The Invasion of Norway saw the cruiser together with her sistership Königsberg assigned to Warship Group 3 with the objective to capure Bergen. Unlike her sisters, however, Köln returned to Germany on April 11th, 1941 as the lat remaining ship of her class. The cruiser continued to serve in her function as both training cruiser and minelayer and sometimes as artillery support for land operations.

With the war, a degaussing cable was installed on the hull in 1940, after the Invasion of Norway. To further stabilized the aging cruiser, the big grate crane was removed and the older, smaller model reinstalled. Both lower searchlights on the cranes were removed, as were the aft torpedo tubes. All German cruisers had always carried a lot of torpedo tubes, but the war had shown that these would only be useful in certain situations. In 1941, now spoting the typical German striped camoflage paintjob, Köln served as a testbed for the newly developed helicopters. To find out the usefulness of shipborne helicopters, a large wooden platform was installed on the second of Köln's triple turrets (turret 'B' or Bruno).  Although the tests with both the Flettner Fl-265 and Fl-281 were successful, it was a purely temporary installation. After the tests were concluded, the platform was removed again.


Technical data:

• Lenght (overall): 174 m
• Width: 15,2 m
• Top speed: 32 kn
• Weapons:
• 9*150mm SK L/60 C/25 guns in triple turrets C/25
• 6*88mm Flak SK L/76 C/32 in twin mounts C/32
• 8*37mm Flak SK L/83 C/30 in twin mounts C/30
• 4*20mm SK L/65 C/38 Flak in single mounts C/30
• 6*533mm torpedo tubes in triple mounts
• 120 mines
  

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