Warship Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025: Scary Freddy

Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025: Scary Freddy

Above we see the 16,000-ton Norddeutscher Lloyd liner SS Prinz Eitel Friedrich, in her 1918 dazzle camouflage warpaint as USS DeKalb (ID-3010), steaming with a bone in her teeth with what appears to be the New York City skyline behind her. At this time in her career, she carried a decent armament worthy of a cruiser.

Just three years earlier, she actually was a German (Hilfs) cruiser and had just claimed the first American ship lost during the Great War.

Meet the Prinz

Our subject is the second liner named for Prince Wilhelm Eitel Friedrich Christian Karl of Prussia, the second son of Emperor Wilhelm II, a generally unhappy and unsuccessful man whose career is beyond the scope of this post.

Of note, HAPAG had already named a smaller (4650 GRT) single-funnel steamer after him in 1902.

Ours was much more grand.

Ordered in 1901 from the fine Teutonic shipbuilding firm of Aktien-Gesellschaft Vulcan, Stettin, the NDL-owned and operated Reich postal steamer (Reichspostdampfer) Prinz Eitel Friedrich was completed in September 1904. She was constructed alongside the Deutschland-class battleship SMS Pommern and Bremen-class cruisers SMS Hamburg and SMS Lübeck.

A larger version of the preceding Feldherren class of liners– eleven 469-foot/9,000 GRT ships built between 1903 and 1908 for NDL, each with 107 1st class, 103 2nd class, 130 3rd class, and 2,040 steerage spaces– our Freddy had space for 158 1st, 156 2nd, 48 3rd, and 706 steerage in a hull some 35 feet longer and an engineering suite with about 1,500 extra shp.

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Capable of maintaining a steady 15 knots on a pair of quadruple-expansion steam engines generating 7,500 shp, Eitel Friedrich’s route was to be from Germany to Shanghai and the recently-acquired Imperial treaty port of Tsingtao, hence the focus on more luxurious cabins rather than steerage passengers.

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Likewise, Eitel Friedrich was slower and smaller than the 660-foot NDL express steamers SS Kronprinzessin Cecilie and Kronprinz Wilhelm, which were capable of making 23 knots on a 33,000shp plant and carried no steerage accommodations at all, offering cabins to just 1,761 passengers in the 1st-3rd classes.

Nonetheless, Eitel Friedrich was finely appointed.

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But she also was bred to fight.

Following the government subsidy provided by the Imperial Postal Steamer agreement (Reichspostdampfervertrages), the Reich could use these steamers in the event of mobilization, and ships built for the service had to pass a Kaiserliche Marine inspection, to include weight and space for deck guns and magazines.

The agreement further stipulated that the ships’ officers and deck and engine crews had to either be Imperial Navy reservists or had signed contracts to volunteer for the service in the event of mobilization.

The SS Prinz Eitel Friedrich left on her maiden voyage to Tsingtao on 13 October 1904 and would continue this peaceful trade for a decade.

It was the stuff of postcards.

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War!

When the lamps went out across Europe in August 1914, the Germans had several potential auxiliary cruisers at sea including Kronprinz Wilhelm, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, Cap Trafalgar, and our Freddie.

It didn’t go well for most.

The 18,000-ton, 613-foot-long Cap Trafalgar was disguised to look like a similar British Cunard line passenger liner called the 19,524-ton, 650-foot-long RMS Carmania-– then had the bad luck to meet the likewise armed actual Carmania and was promptly sunk in a 90-minute gun fight off the coast of Brazil just six weeks into the war.

The rakish four-funneled Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse had an even shorter career, sent to the bottom by the old British cruiser HMS Highflyer while being resupplied at Rio de Oro in late August 1914.

Other potential raiders were bagged by the Royal Navy early in the war before they could be armed including Tabora, Zieten, Kleist, Derfflinger, and Sudmark in the Med and Red Seas; while Princess Alice was interned in the Philippines.

Lucky enough to be at German-held Tsingtao in early August 1914 was our Freddie, along with the steamer Yorck. Realizing that the gig was shortly to be up for the colony as Japan moved to enter the war, German East Asian Squadron commander VADM von Spee made an effort to grab his five cruisers and leave that doomed port.

With that, the decision was made to convert Freddie as best possible for service as a commerce raider.

She received four 10.5 cm/40 (4.1″) SK L/40 rapid-fire guns and 12 revolving 37mm Hotckiss from the Iltis-class gunboats (kanonenboot) SMS Tiger and Luchs, which were to be scuttled and left behind at Tsingtao. She would also take aboard six 88mm L/40 guns that could be used to equip other raiders.

She also fleshed out her 222-member crew with men from the two gunboats as well as their sister SMS Jaguar and the station ship SMS Titania until she had a total of 34 officers, and 368 ratings under 40-year-old Berlin-born Korvettenkapitän Max Friedrich Euard Thierichens, late of the Luchs. Only 54 of the retained crew were reservists or new volunteers, and many of the NDL mariners were released– often to fill slots on German steamers in the port and at Shanghai. The previous captain of the Prinz Eitel in her life as a liner, NDL Capt. Karl Mundt, remained on board as the navigation and executive officer.

A breakdown of Eitel Friedrich’s wartime officers via a Tsingtao history site shows that just 15 officers out of 34 came from the liner’s commercial crew, with the rest coming from Tiger (8), Luchs (9), and Titania (2):

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Ready for war, she slipped out of Tsingtao on 6 August, just after Von Spee left with his cruiser force and, meeting up with the cruiser SMS Emden and her tender SS Markomannia, arrived at Pagan Island in the Marianas on the 12th where she would remain with a growing set of colliers until the 30th.

Setting out for Majuro in the Marshall Islands via Eniwetok to drop off Von Spee’s collier train (eight ships including the steamers Seydlitz, Baden, Santa Maria, and Santa Isabel) she then joined up with the hilfkruezer Cormoran (manned by the crew of the old SMS Cormoran about the captured 3,400-ton Russian freighter SS Ryazan) for two weeks to raid Australian waters with the object, so the crews were told, of misleading the British Admirals and facilitating Von Spee’s main squadron’s escape to South American waters.

Without much luck, the two vessels parted on 15 September, with Eitel Friedrich headed for the west coast of the Americas, and Cormoran for the Western Carolines, with Cormoran eventually putting into Guam for internment after her bunkers ran out.

Freddie crossed the Southern Pacific on an uneventful patrol for the next five weeks, not taking any prizes.

Eventually, she rejoined Von Spee’s squadron at Mas a Tierra by the end of October as a collier escort, and, chasing contacts off Chile, she ran the British steamer SS Colusa, so close into Valparaiso that a Chilean gunboat had to come out to intervene.

Serving as an over-the-horizon escort to Von Spee’s collier train, she adjacent to the Battle of Coronel in November.

With Von Spee electing to take the fight to the Atlantic, he left Freddie behind once again on 29 November, with the auxiliary cruiser sent out to hunt alone. As Von Spee sailed to his death and his squadron’s defeat at the Falklands, Eitel Friedrich set off up the Chilean coast and captured the British steamer SS Charcas (5067 GRT) off the coast of Corral on 5 December, landing her crew at Papudo.

On 11 December, she captured the French barque Jean (2207 GRT) with 3,500 tons of badly needed coal, steaming with her as a prize to Easter Island. On the way, she sank the British barque Kidalton (1784 GRT) the next day.

Unloading Jean and sinking her near Easter Island on the 23rd, while at the same time sending a landing party ashore to slaughter a herd of oxen for meat, Freddie left the captured French and British crews voluntarily behind and made for the Atlantic on New Year’s Eve via Cape Horn.

Once in the South Atlantic, she found more victims.

On 26 January 1915 she captured the Russian barque Isabela Browne (1315 BRT) with a cargo of saltpeter the spotted a pair of windjammers that she trailed overnight until she could try for the capture. Once stopped, the two clippers, French barque Pierre Loti (2196 BRT) and the American-flagged four-masted steel barque William P. Frye (3605 BRT) turned out to be carrying wheat to Britain.

While Frye was flying the flag of what was then a neutral country, her Plymouth-bound grain was seen as contraband, and Thierichens, sinking the Pierre Boti, ordered Frye’s crew to toss her 186,950 bushels of wheat over the side before allowing them to continue. Still finding the American ship partially laden the next morning, he removed the ship’s crew and passengers and scuttled the ship on January 28, 1915.

Frye was the first American ship lost in the Great War and the loss kicked off a series of increasingly salty diplomatic notes between Washington and Berlin that never helped put weight on the scale of neutrality.

Newspaper coverage helped sway public opinion in the States.

Chasing down further Allied merchantmen in the remoteness of the South Atlantic, Thierichens kept stacking captured crews in the converted liner’s old passenger cabins– sorting by class, with officers and passengers getting 1st class cabins, while mates got 2nd, crews 3rd. 

She bagged the Europe-bound French barque Jacobsen (2195 BRT) on 28 January and the British barque Invercoe (1421 BRT) on 12 February– 80 years ago this week, both sunk with their grain cargos.

Over three days from 18 to 20 February, she took three additional ships out of trade: the British steamer SS Mary Ada Short (3605 BRT) with a cargo of corn, the French steamer SS Floride (6629 BRT) with 86 passengers and a cargo of mail, and the British steamer SS Willerby (3630 BRT), the latter sailing in ballast to La Plata. The skipper of the Willerby, one Capt. Wedgewood, having no guns to fight back, attempted to use his steamer as a ram, ordering “full speed astern” as the German closed.

With this, the game was done.

Low on food, low on coal, and high on mouths to feed between his 403 crew and more than 350 “guests,” Thierichens made for Hampton Roads where he sought sanctuary on humanitarian grounds.

The Hilfkruezer Prinz Eitel Friederich was placed under the eyes of the U.S. Navy at Newport News on 11 March, near but not alongside the interned German tanker Jupiter. She reportedly exchanged salutes with the fleet, whose “bands played the German national anthem.”

Even though she had captured and sunk 11 ships across her 218-day/30,000-nm war cruise, she had never fired a “war shot” round in anger, lost a member of her crew, nor taken a life. She arrived in the U.S. with every soul she had found on the sea.

The gentlemanly early days of WWI indeed.

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German Ambassador Johann Heinrich Graf von Bernstorff negotiated for Eitel Friederich to land her Allied prisoners– including over 30 Americans– while provisions and enough coal (1,000 tons) were sold to the embassy allowing the possibility that Freddie could somehow sail the Atlantic to Bremen. This was as French, Russian, and British diplomats bombarded Washington with calls to arrest or expel the pirate ship into their waiting arms.

The ship, her discharged 350 guests, her grinning skipper, and her crew were the subject of much media attention.

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With the cruiser watched by the battleship USS Alabama and the big 12-inch guns at Fort Monroe, a detachment sent from the Fort set up camp at the end of her dock, watched by a sandbagged machine gun emplacement.

The stalemate endured for nearly a month as deadlines were set, and then passed. The cruisers HMS Cumberland and HMCS Niobe were just outside American waters at the tip of the Virginia Capes. While old, each was an easy overmatch for Eitel Freidrich.

Painted into a corner, Thierichens agreed in writing to pass his ship peacefully into internment at Norfolk at 3:00 p.m., on 9 April 1915.

The next day, she was joined by her old NDL fleet member Kronprinz Wilhelm, who had amazingly been armed at sea with two 3.4-inch guns and 50 rifles hoisted on board the liner, from the old cruiser SMS Karlsruhe. With the scant armament and sailing under Karlsruhe’s skipper, Kvtlnt Wolfgang Thierfelder, Kronprinz Wilhelm chalked up 14 prizes– some 58,201 tons of British, French, and Norwegian shipping— in the North Atlantic.

The two would spend the next two years side by side, in the weird limbo of never really being fully in, nor fully out of, the war. Neither free to leave nor directly under custody.

Of the nearly 20 German commerce raiders made from converted steamers and windjammers (see Seeadler), Eitel Fredrich was in the “top scorers” club, only surpassed by her aforementioned cousin Kronprinz Wilhelm and the much more famous late-war hilfskreuzers SMS Wolf (14 captured/sunk directly plus another 14 enemy ships claimed by her mines), Seeadler (15), and Mowe (40 ships).

Interned

Eitel Friederich’s propelling machinery, radio, and armament were immobilized with components removed to shore.

With provisions paid for by the German embassy, her crew was to live aboard, with a party of as many as 50 of her sailors allowed shore liberties at a time while officers could freely travel to nearby cities.

With such liberal parole, naturally, several of Freddie’s crew released themselves under their own recognizance. Her third surgeon, Dr. Richard A. Nolte, who was the ship’s doctor when she was a liner back in 1914, vanished after buying “civilian clothing and a big trunk” in June 1915. Other men just wandered off with less fanfare.

The crew was further reduced in size, as she suffered her first loss of the war, one Seaman Prei, killed on 8 April 1915 when he fell down a companionway. Another sailor, one W.S. Wisneweki, was jailed in Norfolk in July 1915 for assorted “rowdyism” while ashore and, receiving a year sentence from the local magistrate, was drummed out of the crew and surrendered to the authorities for punishment.

Meanwhile, a two-acre overgrown plot, cleared for port expansion years prior but never used for that purpose, was turned over to the care of her crew, which included several men from farming families. Soon, it was filled with cabbage, spinach, tomatoes, potatoes, beets and turnips.

Those handy enough to craft toys and curios did so and soon a market was open. With no shortage of cabins, the crew spread out and made themselves at home, and could entertain visitors. Some of the sailors married local American girls and later became citizens themselves.

With paint purchased from the Navy, her crew restored her topside appearance to something approaching her pre-war livery. 

Biergartens were set up aboard– with some of the men having been Braumeisters at Tsingtao— and locals were soon able to avail themselves of a nice stein of authentic German beer for 2 cents, a bargain! That was until controversy hit.

As reported in the June 27 1915 NYT:

At first, these ship beer gardens were open to all. But a local clergyman and an ex-chaplain of the navy, with several friends, one Sunday went aboard one of the ships, enjoyed the hospitality of the Germans, and drank beer. Then the clergyman fired a bombshell at his congregation. It was the story of how the law was being violated each Sunday on the German cruisers by the sale of intoxicants. It was the sensation of a day, but local police officials found themselves helpless, inasmuch as the alleged violations were committed on a Federal reservation and on a foreign warship.

The Navy Department ruled that it had no jurisdiction, further than a request to the German commanders not to permit the indiscriminate sale of intoxicants on Sunday. Such a request was made, and as a result, the sale of beer and other drinks to Americans was discontinued.

Besides homebrew, there was a brisk underground trade in selling uniform items such as caps and medals along with pocketable souvenirs from the elegant ocean liner-turned-pirate to locals. I’m sure there are likely forgotten trinkets from Eitel Friedrich and her crew in dozens of heirloom boxes across Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Why Pennsylvania?

By September 1916 the combined crews of the two commerce raiders had shrunk from slightly over 800 to just 744 officers and men and it was thought that they could be better isolated at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Plus, with the ongoing expansion by the Navy, the space they were taking up at Norfolk was needed for the construction of new maintenance shops.

On, 1 October, Kronprinz Wilhelm and Prinz Eitel Friedrich arrived at PNSY, towed at 8 knots by a task force of 12 U.S. warships led by the Great White Fleet battlewagons USS Minnesota (BB-22) and Vermont (BB-20) just in case either German raider attempted to make for the open ocean– or a British force aimed to bushwhack them. The force sailed in a tight box that was kept as much inside the three-mile limit as possible. Certainly one of the more curious convoys of 1916.

Once at League Island, moored some 150 yards from the foot of Broad Street with the ships’ stern pointed at the city, the German sailors had their movements curtailed, only allowed monitored shore leave twice a week in small groups, with regular daily roll calls taken. Even this was revoked at the end of January 1917, with the men confined to their ships.

On 3 February 1917, still some two months before Congress would vote for War, SECNAV Josephus Daniels, acting on orders from the White House, sent in Navy, Marine, and Coast Guardsmen to remove the crews from the German and Austrian ships interned in American ports.

This included the German-seized British steamship SS Appam in Newport News– impounded by the USCGC Yamacraw with a U.S. Marshal aboard– the massive four-funneled NDL liner SS Kronprinzessin Cecilie in Boston (seized with the help of 120 Boston policemen), two German and three Austrian steamers in New Orleans, and four Hamburg-American Line ships in Cristobal in the Canal Zone (Prinz Sigismund, Fazoia, Sachenwald, and Grunewald). SS Vaterland, the largest German liner, was seized at Hoboken.

Naturally, Eitel Frederich and Kronprinz Wilhelm were also visited.

With the NYTs noting that “The local navy yard virtually has been placed upon a war basis,” the two auxiliary cruisers were seized and their crews moved ashore to barracks which were placed in isolation with a strict “no visitors” policy enforced for the first time since they came to America. A wire stockade, watched by billy club-armed sailors, was built around the barracks. Armed Marines suddenly appeared on patrol of the landside boundary to the Government preserve while “Motorboats and other light craft with machineguns aboard patrolled the river and prevented vessels from entering a prescribed area.”

The scout cruiser USS Salem (CL-3) was moored to where her main guns could rake the vessels if needed. 

On 10 March 1917, Eitel Frederich’s skipper, Max Thierichens, was charged in U.S. federal court along with his wife and a naturalized U.S. citizen, Henry K. Rohner, with various conspiracy charges, primarily that of moving 19 ship’s valuable chronometers from the raider to shore. These charges later beefed up to include violating the Mann Act for “bringing a woman from Ithaca New York to Philadelphia for immoral purposes.” These allegations reported salaciously on both sides of the Atlantic, would follow him to Germany.

In early April, John Sickel, a former Eitel Friedrich sailor who had previously escaped the interned cruiser, was arrested by federal officials, suspected of being involved in an explosion at the Eddystone munitions plant in Chester, Pennsylvania that blew 133 workers “to bits.”

Once the U.S. entered the war on April 6, 1917, U.S. Customs officials seized the Prinz Eitel Friedrich and Kronprinz Wilhelm on paper, then, in the same motion, swiftly transferred them to the U.S. Navy. A Government tug was sent to pull and noticed a cork float in the water behind the vessels about 50 feet from the stern.

Inspecting divers found mines.

Meanwhile, with their status changed from merely “interned” to that of full-on POWs, the crews of Prinz Eitel Friedrich and Kronprinz Wilhelm were moved by the Army under guard by train from their isolation barracks at Philadelphia Naval Yard to newly established POW camps at Forts Oglethorpe and McPherson in Georgia for the next 30 months.

There, they continued their arts and crafts work, helped plant and harvest crops, and fielded some pretty mean baseball teams.

American Service

Prinz Eitel Friedrich was swiftly refitted for U.S. Navy service as a troop transport at the Philadelphia Navy Yard renamed USS DeKalb— after Maj. Gen. Johann von Robais, Baron de Kalb, the Bavarian-born Revolutionary War hero, who was killed in battle in South Carolina in 1780– and commissioned on 12 May 1917. A Civil War-era casemate gunboat had previously carried the name. 

Similarly, Kronprinz Wilhelm became the USS Von Steuben, Vaterland became the USS Leviathan, and Kronprinzessin Cecilie became the USS Mount Vernon.

Immediate modifications were the removal of the German armament and the detritus of their two-year inhabitation, including a mountain of beer barrels and wine bottles.

She received a thick coat of haze grey paint, minesweeping paravanes, and a bow skeg to help control them, as well as her most heavy armament yet: eight 5″/51 mounts, four 3″/50 low-angle mounts, two 3″/50 high-angle AA mounts, four 1-pounders, and two machine guns. She also received several tall “bandstand” searchlight platforms.

Freddie/DeKalb was described by the NHHC as being one of only three commissioned Navy vessels ready to carry troops to England in June 1917, with the other two being the transports USS Hancock and Henderson, the first very old and the second very new– still with workmen from the yard on board when she sailed for France.

These transports were tasked with joining the first convoy carrying 14,000 soldiers and Marines and their weapons. of Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force (AEF) to France.

Specifically, DeKalb carried 816 men of the 2nd Bn/5th Marines to St. Nazaire, France in a 12-day run.

Sometime in early 1918, she picked up a striking dazzle camouflage scheme.

She continued her trips across the Atlantic to France including:

• 821 Army Troops from New York to St. Nazaire in September 1917.
• 588 Marines of the 73rd Machine Gun Company and the Headquarters & Supply Companies, 6th Marine Regiment along with 230 sailors from Philadelphia to St. Nazaire in October 1917.
• 750 Marines of the 1st Machine Gun Battalion– including Capt. Allen Melancthon Sumner (MoH)– along with the 12th and 26th Replacement Units from Philadelphia to St. Nazaire in December 1917.
• 480 Army troops and 300 Sailors from Philadelphia to France in February 1918.
• 803 Army troops from Newport News to France in April 1918.
• 769 Army troops from Hoboken to Brest in June 1918.
• Headquarters Company and Squadrons A, B, and C of the First Marine Aviation Force from Hoboken to Brest in July 1918.
• 1,559 Army troops from Hoboken to Brest in August 1918.
• 1,593 Army troops from Philadelphia to Brest in October 1918.

In all, she would transport no less than 11,334 men to France in 11 voyages, more than wiping out the stain of the bloodless sinking of the William P. Frye three years prior.

Once the Armistice was signed, DeKalb carried 20,332 troops back home from “Over There,” making 8 ecstatic voyages back to East Coast ports from France by 5 September 1919.

Decommissioned on 22 September 1919, DeKalb was transferred to the U.S. Shipping Board for disposal the following day.

The Navy mulled turning her into an aviation tender– a role that eventually went to the collier USS Jupiter (AC-3), only narrowly missing the German from being converted into the U.S. Navy’s first aircraft carrier, USS Langley.

Post-war

Freddie/DeKalb, having been an ocean liner, commerce raider, and troop transport, was still thought to have some life in her, so long as her aging coal-fired boilers could be converted to more economical oilers. It was during this conversion that she suffered a serious fire.

Bought by W. Averell Harriman, she was converted and rebuilt by the United American Line of New York over a 15-month stint at the Morse Dry Dock & Repair Co in Brooklyn. In this, all of her cabin space was homogenized to 1,452 third-class steerage passengers for transport on the emigree trade.

Renamed SS Mount Clay, she sailed directly between Hamburg and New York until October 1925.

On her return trips from Germany, she was also used as a reparations ship, loading silver and gold from the Reichbank representatives for delivery to the U.S. Treasury Dept and banking officials in New York. On one such run back in July 1921, she brought 205 cases of silver Reichsmarks, worth some $800,000 at the time.

During this period, Mount Clay also inaugurated a new system of hybrid express mail delivery to Germany, in which special packages picked up in New York were handed over to aircraft in Cuxhaven for delivery by air within the Weimar Republic.

On 11 February 1921, while about 400 miles southeast of Halifax, the liner rescued the 37 crewmembers and ship’s cat from the sinking Belgian-flagged Lloyd Royal Belge cargo ship SS Bombardier. As Bombardier was bound from New York to Antwerp, they had their transit reversed as the New York-bound Mount Clay, loaded with 829 souls from Hamburg, put into the Big Apple a day late and landed her mid-ocean guests.

She was then laid up and acquired by the American Ship and Commerce Navigation Corp in 1926, who didn’t place her into service, then was passed on to the Pacific Motorship Company of San Francisco, who similarly left her in port pending a $1.5 million overhaul that never happened.

She was sold to the breakers in September 1934.

Epilogue

Little remains of our subject.

The National Archives holds a collection including the ship’s Tagebuch (logbook) starting in May 1913, press clippings of the vessel’s wartime operations, correspondence about the ship’s internment and leave/passes granted to her crew, correspondence and reports relating to the vessel’s transfer to Philadelphia Naval Yard and mechanical repairs, reports and copies of Executive Orders relating to the U.S. seizure of the ship, and general information concerning the ship’s operations in German service. Also in the archives is the documentation of these vessels’ subsequent service in the U.S. Navy. Little of it is digitized, with most of what is relating to the conversation to DeKalb.

One of her 10.5 cm/40 SK L/40s, originally transferred to the cruiser from either the gunboat Luchs or Tiger at Tsingtao in August 1914, has been preserved at Memorial Park in Cambridge, New York for some time.

The ship’s German crew was released from POW camps in 1919 and allowed to return home on the NDL steamer SS Princess Irene (which had served as USS Pocahontas during the war) via Rotterdam that October.

Her skipper, Max Thierichens, released in November 1919 despite a weird cloud of federal convictions, returned to a post-Imperial Germany and was promoted to Kapitän zur See in December 1919. Retained in the interbellum Reichsmarine, he retired in 1925, capping 29 years of service at age 51. Taking over his father’s furniture store in Berlin (Charlottenburg 4, Leibnizstr. 25), he passed in 1930 amid a very tough era in German history.

Of her four American skippers during her 28-month spell as DeKalb, all four earned the Navy Cross during the Great War, and two– SpanAm War vets CDR Walter Rockwell Gherardi (USNA 1895) and Capt. Luther Martin Overstreet (USNA 1897)– both retired as admirals.

Neither the German nor the U.S. Navies have fielded another vessel of the same name. 

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

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Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

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