Raider Voyage
One of the first auxiliary cruisers operated by Germany in World War II, Orion left Germany on 6 April 1940, under the command of Korvettenkapitän (later Fregattenkapitän Kurt Weyher. She passed south through the Atlantic disguised as a neutral vessel, where she attacked and sank SS Haxby, a 5,207-ton freighter.
In May 1940 Orion rounded Cape Horn and entered the Pacific. She entered New Zealand waters in June 1940 and laid mines off Auckland during the night of 13/14 June 1940, one of which sank the liner RMS Niagara five days later. Two other ships were caught by mines from Orion, as well as two trawlers and an auxiliary minesweeper.
This done, Orion raided across the Indian and Pacific Oceans attacking four more ships. One she sent to occupied France as a prize; the others were sunk.
On 20 October 1940 she made rendezvous with the raider German auxiliary cruiser Komet, and the supply ship Kulmerland; operating together they accounted for a further seven ships, including the liner Rangitane and five ships off Nauru, before going their separate ways in the new year.
One Nakajima E8N float plane was purchased in early 1941 by the German naval attaché to Japan, Vice-Admiral Wenneker, and dispatched on board the supply ship Münsterland to rendezvous with the Orion at Maug Island in the Marianas. The meeting occurred on 1 February 1941, and Orion thus became the only German naval vessel of the World War II to employ a Japanese float plane.
A further six months passed cruising in the Indian Ocean yielded nothing, though she did encounter and capture her final victim, the SS Chaucer, in July 1941, in the South Atlantic when Orion was on her way home.
Orion returned to Bordeaux in occupied France on 23 August 1941.
After 510 days and 127,337 nautical miles (235,828 km) at sea she had sunk ten ships with a combined tonnage of 62,915 gross register tons (GRT), plus two more (totalling 21,125 GRT) in cooperation with Komet.
Read more about this topic: German Auxiliary Cruiser Orion
Famous quotes containing the word voyage:
“He makes his voyage too late, perhaps, by a true water clock who delays too long.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)