The Last Raider - July ‘97 World War II Feature

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The Last Raider

Following the exploits of her illustrious predecessors, the career
of the German commerce raider Stier came to an embarrassing end.

By Jon Guttman

It was a gloomy morning that greeted the crew of the 7,181-ton Liberty ship Stephen Hopkins on September 27, 1942. Rain squalls, high winds and poor visibility were cause enough for misery, even without the possibility of stumbling on a venturesome enemy submarine making her way from Cape Town to Paramaribo. Stephen Hopkins was somewhere in the southern Atlantic Ocean, east of Brazil, far from the crucial sea lanes between the United States and Britain that were then the object of a desperate struggle between the U-boats of Adolf Hitler’s Kriegsmarine and the Allied merchant fleets and their naval escorts. Even so, the German navy had a policy of keeping a worldwide presence, even if it was just a token presence. Whether one encountered a North Atlantic wolf pack or a lone sub taking a breather from the main action for easier pickings, one torpedo in the right spot was all that was required to bring an Allied merchant ship’s voyage to a violent end. If anything, though, the dirty weather was to Stephen Hopkins’ advantage, because it had an even more adverse effect on the visibility, speed and seaworthiness of a surfaced submarine.

At 8:52 a.m., Stephen Hopkins was warily approaching a squall that lay astride her path when the silhouette of another merchantman took shape within the curtain of rain, followed by yet another. As the strangers emerged from the squall, Third Mate Walter Nyberg, standing watch on Stephen Hopkins’ bridge, ordered hard right to avoid a collision, while the ship’s captain, Paul Buck, came up to look the strangers over. Suddenly, the two ships hoisted the swastika-bedecked ensigns of the Deutsches Kriegsmarine. As Stephen Hopkins turned and fled, the nearest German ship opened fire with a 37mm cannon. Six minutes later, Stephen Hopkins came under the fire of the deadly 5.9-inch shells of a light cruiser. Any hope of escape evaporated as the German ship gave chase at roughly twice Stephen Hopkins’ speed.

During Stephen Hopkins’ maiden voyage, Captain Buck had remarked to his men that he would fight if he ever encountered a German surface raider. Now he would have his chance, for the vessels whose paths he had crossed were the armed merchant cruiser Stier and the blockade-runner Tannenfels.

Stier, known in the German navy as “Schiff 23″ and to her British enemies as “Raider J,” had originally been the 4,418-ton merchant ship Cairo. Built at the Krupp-Germaniawerft at Kiel, Cairo had a length of 408.5 feet, a beam of 56.6 feet and a draft of 21.4 feet. As a cargo vessel, she had served in the Atlas-Levant Line. Then, in April 1941, she was armed with six 5.9-inch guns, two 37mm and four 20mm guns, two torpedo tubes and two Arado Ar-231 reconnaissance aircraft for a piratical existence in the service of the Third Reich. Formally commissioned on November 11, she was christened Stier (bull) by her captain, Kapitänleutnant Horst Gerlach, in reference to Taurus, which was his wife’s astrological sign.

Stier’s maximum speed of 14.5 knots was better than that of most of her mercantile counterparts, although one of her officers, Fregattenleutnant Ludolf Petersen, a veteran of earlier sea-raiding sorties, still thought her too slow to be as effective as her predecessors. Petersen also thought her crew to be too inexperienced. Her guns, mounted above decks, could not easily be disguised. Nevertheless, Stier was earmarked to take part in the second wave of disguised raiders that were to be unleashed in 1942. The earlier raiding campaign of 1940-1941 had been remarkably well-coordinated and brilliantly successful for the number of ships and the worldwide range involved. Although the number of Allied cargo vessels that the disguised raiders had sunk or captured was barely comparable to Allied losses to U-boats, the disguised raiders had accounted for far more Allied ships than had the regular warships of the Kriegsmarine. The disguised raiders also had been far more successful in accomplishing their other objective: to maintain a long-standing maritime menace that forced the Royal Navy to stretch its resources over the world’s oceans. In the course of that campaign, the daring and resourceful tactics of these lone privateers had put the names of the German vessels Orion, Widder, Komet, Pinguin, Thor, Kormoran and Atlantis in the newspapers and in the history books. And the devastation they wrought was not exclusively confined to unarmed or poorly armed merchantmen, either. Thor had sunk the British armed merchant cruiser Voltaire and damaged two others. When Kormoran was cornered and sunk on November 19, 1940, she managed to take her adversary with her–the damage she had inflicted on the Australian light cruiser Sydney caused it to blow up with all hands shortly after Kormoran sank.

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