A naval mine is a self-contained explosive device placed in water to damage or destroy surface ships or submarines. Unlike depth charges, mines are deposited and left to wait until they are triggered by the approach of, or contact with, any vessel or a particular vessel type, akin to anti-infantry vs. anti-vehicle mines. Naval mines can be used offensively, to hamper enemy shipping movements or lock vessels into a harbour; or defensively, to protect friendly vessels and create "safe" zones. Mines allow the minelaying force commander to concentrate warships or defensive assets in mine-free areas giving the adversary three choices: undertake an expensive and time-consuming minesweeping effort, accept the casualties of challenging the minefield, or use the unmined waters where the greatest concentration of enemy firepower will be encountered.
A warship or combatant ship is a naval ship that is built and primarily intended for naval warfare. Usually they belong to the armed forces of a state. As well as being armed, warships are designed to withstand damage and are usually faster and more maneuverable than merchant ships. Unlike a merchant ship, which carries cargo, a warship typically carries only weapons, ammunition and supplies for its crew. Warships usually belong to a navy, though they have also been operated by individuals, cooperatives and corporations.
The Finnish Navy is one of the branches of the Finnish Defence Forces. The navy employs 2,300 people and about 4,300 conscripts are trained each year. Finnish Navy vessels are given the ship prefix "FNS", short for "Finnish Navy ship", but this is not used in Finnish language contexts. The Finnish Navy also includes coastal forces and coastal artillery.
The Romanian Navy is the navy branch of the Romanian Armed Forces; it operates in the Black Sea and on the Danube. It traces its history back to 1860.
The Baltic Sea Campaigns were conducted by Axis and Allied naval forces in the Baltic Sea, its coastal regions, and the Gulf of Finland during World War II. After early fighting between Polish and German forces, the main combatants were Germany and Finland, opposed by the Soviet Union. Sweden's navy and merchant fleet played important roles, and the British Royal Navy planned Operation Catherine for the control of the Baltic Sea and its exit choke point into the North Sea.
The North Sea Mine Barrage, also known as the Northern Barrage, was a large minefield laid easterly from the Orkney Islands to Norway by the United States Navy during World War I. The objective was to inhibit the movement of U-boats from bases in Germany to the Atlantic shipping lanes bringing supplies to the British Isles. Rear Admiral Lewis Clinton-Baker, commanding the Royal Navy minelaying force at the time, described the barrage as the "biggest mine planting stunt in the world's history." Larger fields with greater numbers of mines were laid during World War II.
The minelayer HNoMS Olav Tryggvason was built by the naval shipyard at Horten in the early 1930s and had build 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.
HMS Adventure, pennant number M23, was an Adventure-class minelaying cruiser of the Royal Navy built in the 1920s that saw service during the Second World War. Her commander between 1928 and 1929 was the future First Sea Lord John H. D. Cunningham. Laid down at Devonport in November 1922 and launched in June 1924, Adventure was the first vessel built for service as a minelayer; she was also the first warship to use diesel engines, which were used for cruising. Adventure first joined the Atlantic Fleet, then was transferred to the China Station in 1935. In World War II, the ship was damaged in 1941 and 1944, and was converted to a landing craft repair in 1944. In 1945 Adventure was reduced to reserve and in 1947 she was sold and broken up for scrap.
A naval race had developed in the Aegean after the end of the Balkan Wars, with the Ottoman government ordering several ships, including two dreadnoughts, in Britain. In the event, with the outbreak of World War I, these ships, including further two scout cruisers and four destroyers, were confiscated and pressed into service with the Royal Navy. This disappointed the Ottomans, contributing to their joining the Central Powers in the Great War.
USS Wassuc (CMc-3), originally a steel-hulled, coastal passenger vessel built in 1924 at Elizabethport, New Jersey, by the New Jersey Drydock and Transportation Corp. of New York City as SS Yale, was acquired by the U.S. Navy on 20 December 1940. SS Yale then began conversion to a coastal minelayer at the New York Navy Yard. Classified CMc-3 on 30 December 1940 and renamed USS Wassuc on 10 January 1941, the ship was commissioned at the New York Navy Yard on 15 May 1941.
The Royal Navy, commonly the Royal Yugoslav Navy, was the naval warfare service branch of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It was brought into existence in 1921, and initially consisted of a few former Austro-Hungarian Navy vessels surrendered at the conclusion of World War I and transferred to the new nation state under the terms of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The only modern sea-going warships transferred to the new state were twelve steam-powered torpedo boats, although it did receive four capable river monitors for use on the Danube and other large rivers. Significant new acquisitions began in 1926 with a former German light cruiser, followed by the commissioning of two motor torpedo boats (MTBs) and a small submarine flotilla over the next few years. When the name of the state was changed to Yugoslavia in 1929, the name of its navy was changed to reflect this. In the late 1920s, several of the original vessels were discarded.
A controlled mine was a circuit fired weapon used in coastal defenses with ancestry going back to 1805 when Robert Fulton termed his underwater explosive device a torpedo:
Robert Fulton invented the word torpedo to describe his underwater explosive device and successfully destroyed a ship in 1805. In the 1840s Samuel Colt began experimenting with underwater mines fired by electric current and in 1842, he blew up an old schooner in the Potomac River from a shore station five miles away.
Mine planter and the earlier "torpedo planter" was a term used for mine warfare ships into the early days of World War I. In later terminology, particularly in the United States, a mine planter was a ship specifically designed to install controlled mines or contact mines in coastal fortifications. This type of ship diverged in both function and design from a ship operating as a naval minelayer. Though the vessel may be seagoing it is not designed to lay large numbers of mines in open sea. A mine planter was designed to place controlled minefields in exact locations so that they might be fired individually or as a group from shore when observers noted a target to be at or near a designated mine's position. The terms and types of specialized ship existed from the 1860s where "torpedoes" were made famous in the American Civil War until the demise of large, fixed coastal fortifications brought on by the changes of World War II.
Zmaj was built in Germany as a seaplane tender for the Royal Yugoslav Navy between 1928 and 1930. She does not appear to have been much used in that role and was converted to a minelayer in 1937. Shortly before the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, she laid minefields along the Dalmatian coast, perhaps inadvertently leading to the sinking of two Yugoslav passenger ships. Slightly damaged by Italian dive bombers and then captured by the Italians during the invasion, she was soon handed over to the Germans. While in their service the ship was renamed Drache, had her anti-aircraft (AA) armament improved, and was used as a seaplane tender and later as a troop transport. In the latter role she participated in over a dozen convoys between the Greek port of Piraeus and the Greek island of Crete between December 1941 and March 1942.
The Z39 was a Type 1936A (Mob) destroyer built for Germany's Kriegsmarine during World War II. She was laid down in August 1940 and completed three years later. Her anti-aircraft armament was increased extensively during the war. Z39 served with the 6th Destroyer Flotilla her entire German career, which she spent escorting transports in the Baltic Sea, laying mines, and bombarding land forces. The destroyer served the navies of a total of three different countries: from 1943 to 1945 with the Kriegsmarine as Z39, from 1945 to 1947 with the US Navy as DD-939, and from 1948 to 1964 with the French Navy as Q-128.
HMS Tarpon was a Royal Navy R-class destroyer constructed and operational in the First World War. She is named after the large fish Tarpon; one species of which is native to the Atlantic, and the other to the Indo-Pacific Oceans. Tarpon was built by the shipbuilders John Brown & Company at their Clydebank shipyard and was launched in March 1917 and entered service in April that year.
The Romanian Navy during World War II was the main Axis naval force in the Black Sea campaigns and fought against the Soviet Union's Black Sea Fleet from 1941 to 1944. Operations consisted mainly of mine warfare, but there were also escort missions and localized naval engagements. The largest naval action fought by the Romanian Navy was the 26 June 1941 Raid on Constanța, and its most extensive operation was the 1944 evacuation of the Crimea.
HMS Telemachus was a R-class destroyer of the British Royal Navy that took part in the First World War. She was built in 1916–1917 by the Scottish shipbuilder John Brown at their Clydebank shipyard. Telemachus was modified to serve as a minelayer, laying minefields in the German Bight and English Channel to restrict the operation of German submarines. The ship survived the war and was sold for scrap in 1927.
Kondor was the fifth of six Type 23 torpedo boats built for the German Navy. The boat made multiple non-intervention patrols during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. During World War II, she played a minor role in the attack on Oslo, the capital of Norway, during the Norwegian Campaign of 1940. Kondor spent the next several months escorting minelayers as they laid minefields and damaged heavy ships back to Germany before she was transferred to France around September. She started laying minefields herself that month and continued to do so for the rest of the war. The boat returned to France in 1942 and helped to escort blockade runners, commerce raiders and submarines through the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay. Damaged by a mine shortly before the Allied Invasion of Normandy in June 1944, Kondor was under repair on the day of the landings. Recognizing that she could not be repaired quickly, the boat was decommissioned later that month and was then further damaged by British bombers so that she was declared a constructive total loss.
HMS Princess Margaret was a minelayer operated by the British Royal Navy during and after the First World War. She was built by the Scottish shipbuilder William Denny for the Canadian Pacific Railway as a liner to serve on the Pacific West Coast, and as such was powered by geared steam turbines, giving a speed of 23 knots.
