HISTORIC SHIPS ON A LEE SHORE
Germany’s Sail Training Ship Gorch Fock Returns to Sea
bundeswehr photo by steve back
by Gernot U. Gabel
I
n September 2021, the sailing vessel Gorch Fock, flagship of the German navy, proudly resumed active duty after more than six years in the shipyard. When she reached her home port of Kiel on the Baltic Sea, she was greeted by naval officials and hundreds of enthusiastic spectators ashore and on pleasure boats. The Gorch Fock is the second vessel bearing that name. The first was launched in 1933; she was named for a German writer of nautical tales who was killed in May 1916 during the British-German naval battle of Jutland. (One of her five sister ships, originally named Horst Wessel, now the Eagle, was transferred to American ownership and still serves in the US Coast Guard as its training ship). Gorch Fock was on active duty as a training ship for naval officers until the outbreak of the Second World War. In the closing days of WWII, she was sent to the bottom of the Baltic by her German crew; two years later, the Soviets lifted the hull, repaired the vessel, and relaunched her as a Russian training ship. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the ship was sold and passed through a number of owners until she eventually returned to Germany in 2003 to serve as a dockside tourist attraction in the Baltic port of Stralsund. The second Gorch Fock was built in 1958 after the Bundestag (German parliament) voted to join NATO in 1956. When German rearmament stirred some controversies barely a decade after the nation’s
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defeat, the government shrewdly countered public sentiment by putting an image of the navy’s flagship on the back of the 10mark bill in 1963. The note was legal tender until the introduction of the euro in 2002.
The pride of the German Navy fleet, the three-masted barque measuring 266 feet in length and hoisting twenty-three sails served primarily as a training ship for cadets, but she also assumed the role of Germany’s floating “peace ambassador.” She has participated in harbor festivals and international tall ship regattas around the world. Among other events, she represented Germany at the United States Bicentennial OpSail ’76 events, welcoming aboard thousands of visitors in New York City. After more than five decades on active duty, the Defense Ministry ordered a limited overhaul of the aging vessel. In late 2015, the ship entered a dockyard in the North Sea port of Bremerhaven. Officials had calculated that the repairs would cost about ten million euro, but on closer inspection, damages and material fatigue became more evident and the cost estimates began to rise sharply. Once the price tag had more
than quadrupled, the press was alerted and decried that the plans for the ship were rife with waste, embezzlement, and corruption. A parliamentary committee was assembled, and the ministry was put on the defensive. When shipyard representatives admitted that the project’s exact costs could not be calculated accurately in advance and could potentially even surpass the €100 million mark, opposition parties in the Bundestag demanded that it stop the project and send the ship to the scrapheap. The taxpayers’ union lamented a scandalous wastefulness of public monies, and even the federal auditing office called for an inquiry. Twice, the shipyard work was suspended for weeks at a time, but the ship had a champion in Ursula von der Leyen, then German Defense Secretary (today President of the European Commission), who was determined to save the vessel. When the shipyard, confronted with opaque calculations and financial mismanagement, declared bankruptcy, the hull was towed to another shipyard in Wilhelmshaven, where the overhaul was finally achieved. Recently, a surprised nation was told that the total costs had risen to the enormous sum of 135 million euro! Nevertheless, the expensive overhaul, more precisely a ninety-percent restoration of the vessel, had some positive effects on the ship’s handling and operations. Reconstruction modifications with lighter materials notably reduced the ship’s tonnage, resulting in improved stability and maneuverability in rough seas. With the German naval administration in full support, once the main crew is onboard and trained in autumn 2021, the Gorch Fock will take aboard a new crop of cadets and start its first voyage to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, planned for January 2022. Gernot Gabel began his studies in Berlin, came to the United States on an exchange student scholarship, received his PhD from Rice University, and taught at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. After returning to Germany in 1973, he held the position of deputy chief librarian at the Cologne University Library. 23