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SMS Magdeburg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Career |  |
|---|---|
| Builder: | AG Weser, Bremen |
| Laid down: | 1910 |
| Launched: | May 13, 1911 |
| Completed: | August 1912 |
| Commissioned: | December 10, 1912 |
| Fate: | Ran aground and sunk on August 26, 1914 off Odensholm |
| General Characteristics | |
| Displacement: | 4,550 tons |
| Length: | 136 meters (446 ft approx.) |
| Beam: | 13.3 meters (43 ft 7 in approx.) |
| Draught: | 5.1 m (16 ft 9 in approx.) |
| Machinery: | 33,500 HP, Germania turbines |
| Speed: | Maximum speed 27.6 knots |
| Range: | 5,000 nm |
| Complement: | Approximately 373 officers and crew |
| Armament: | twelve 10.5 cm guns, two 50 cm guns, one torpedo tube and 120 mines. |
Seiner Majestät Schiff Magdeburg was a light cruiser (kleine kreuzer) of the Kaiserliche Marine (German Imperial Navy). The first of her class, she was built as part of the 1908 German naval program. Her class was notable for being the first to introduce a new hull form and replace the bow ram with a cruiser bow shape. She was also one of the first light cruisers to be fitted with an armored waterline.
On commissioning (December 10, 1912), she was first used as a torpoedo ship, and at the outbreak of World War I was assigned to the Baltic Sea. It was her sinking a few weeks after this, and the recovery by the Russians of one of the ship's codebooks, that provided British cryptologists with the means of breaking secret German military communications.
The Magdeburg, under the command of Korvettenkapitän Richard Habenicht, had set out from Memel at the eastern tip of Prussia to join other German warships attacking Russian ships at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland. In the early hours of August 26, 1914, while trying to evade approaching Russian vessels, the ship entered fog near the island of Odensholm and ran aground. While efforts were being made to free the ship, as a precaution most of the codebooks and cipher keys were destroyed; some were retained, however, for communication with rescuers.
While the escorting destroyer V-26 and the the light cruiser SMS Amazone were unsuccessfully trying to free the Magdeburg and had rescued most of the crew, Habenicht decided to destroy the ship because of the approach of Russian warships. However, there was considerable confusion as the Russian cruisers Bogatyr and Pallada [1] came within range and began firing. The German escort ships were driven off, and the scuttling charges in the fore magazine were lit before the order had been given, and remaining crew hastily abandoned ship. In the commotion, as the charges exploded, some codebooks were lost. Fifteen men died in the evacuation; fifty-six crewmen, as well as Captain Habenicht, were captured by the Russians.
The Russians quickly took possession of the wrecked cruiser, and the subsequent search yielded a codebook forgotten at the bottom of a locker in the ship's aft section. Later, Russian divers found another codebook, along with the pertinent cipher key, that had been weighted with lead and thrown overboard, as well as a third one lost in abandoning ship. Other documents seized by the Russians included the war signal book, the war diary, and charts of the Baltic. The Magdeburg was afterwards completely destroyed.
Realizing the value of their find, the Russians immediately offered the undamaged codebook to their British allies. The codebook was carried to the United Kingdom by a Royal Navy warship, via Arkhangelsk, arriving October 13 at the British Admiralty. The book was handed personally to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. He in turn passed it on to Rear Admiral Henry Oliver, Director of Naval Intelligence, who had just that August established the cryptologic section called "Room 40 ."
Despite this windfall, however, the British were unable to break into the German Navy's messages until another codebook had been seized from a German merchant ship off Melbourne, Australia and delivered to the Admiralty. It held the second key needed to break into German naval communications, giving the superencipherments.[2]
There was afterward a persistent myth, repeated in Churchill's writings, that the Russians had found the codebook clutched in the rigid arms of a drowned German sailor who had been washed ashore.
- ^ Baltic Navy Campaigns 1914-1918. The 7800-ton Pallada, a Bayan class cruiser and launched in 1911, exploded when it was hit by a single torpedo from the submarine U-26 on October 11, 1914, killing her entire 600-man crew.
- ^ The Imperial German Navy, in a subsequent series of reviews of its communications security during the war, found that it was uncertain whether the encipherment key to the codebook had been destroyed with the loss of the Magdeburg. Although the Germans captured the Russian naval officer who had recovered the codebooks and received confirmation of the book's capture and delivery to the British, the Germans refused to believe in any serious consequences having resulted from this loss.
Mäkelä, Matti E. Das Geheimnis der "Magdeburg" : die Geschichte des Kleinen Kreuzers und die Bedeutung seiner Signalbücher im Ersten Weltkrieg. Koblenz: Bernhard & Graefe Verlag, 1984.
- General information on the Magdeburg-class light cruisers
- SMS Magdeburg (1) Kleiner Kreuzer der kaiserlichen Marine (in German)
- Some more information on the Magdeburg-class cruisers, with images
| Magdeburg-class light cruiser |
| SMS Magdeburg|SMS Breslau|SMS Strassburg|SMS Stralsund |
| List of German Imperial Navy ships List of naval ships of Germany |