WW2 GERMAN KRIEGSMARINE SHIPS ENGINE STATUS TELEGRAPH FROM Z10 HANS LODY
History
Z10 Hans Lody was a Type 1943A Class Destroyer built for Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine in the mid-1930s. At the beginning of World War ll on 1 September 1939, the ship was initially deployed to blockade the Polish coast, but she was quickly transferred to the North Sea to lay defensive minefields. In late 1939 the ship laid multiple offensive minefields off the English coast that claimed nine merchant ships and she crippled a British a destroyer during one of these missions.
Hans Lody was under repair for most of the Norweigan campaign and was transferred to France in late 1940 where she participated in several engagements with British ships, crippling another destroyer. The ship returned to Germany in late 1940 for a refit and was transferred to Norway in June 1941 as part of the preparations for Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Hans Lody spent some time at the beginning of the campaign conducting anti-shipping patrols in Soviet waters, but these were generally fruitless. She escorted a number of German convoys in the Arctic later in the year before returning to Germany in September for machinery repairs.
The ship returned to Norway in mid-1942, but was badly damaged when she ran aground in July and did not return until April 1943. Hans Lody participated in the German attack (Operation Zitronella) on the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen, well north of the Arctic Circle and then spent the next six months on convoy duties in southern Norway. The ship began a lengthy refit in April 1944 and was not operational for the next year. She spent April 1945 escorting convoys in Danish waters before making one voyage to rescue refugees in East Prussia in May. Hans Lody was assigned to the Royal Navy after the war and used as a training ship and then a barracks ship before being broken up for scrap in 1949.
The Hans Lody was named after Karl Hans Lody, he grew up in Nordhausen in central Germany and was orphaned at an early age. After embarking on a nautical career at the age of 16, he served briefly in the Imperial German Navy at the start of the 20th century. His ill health forced him to abandon a naval career, but he remained in the naval reserve. He joined the Hamburg America Line to work as a tour guide. While escorting a party of tourists, he met and married a German-American woman, but the marriage broke down after only a few months. His wife divorced him and he returned to Berlin.Carl Hans Lody, alias Charles A. Inglis (20 January 1877 – 6 November 1914; name occasionally given as Karl Hans Lody), was a reserve officer of the Imperial German Navy who spied in the United Kingdom in the first few months of the First World War
In May 1914, two months before war broke out, Lody was approached by German naval intelligence officials. He agreed to their proposal to employ him as a peacetime spy in southern France, but the outbreak of the First World War on 28 July 1914 resulted in a change of plans. In late August, he was sent to the United Kingdom with orders to spy on the Royal Navy. He posed as an American — he could speak English fluently, with an American accent — using a genuine U.S. passport purloined from an American citizen in Germany. Over the course of a month, Lody travelled around Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth observing naval movements and coastal defences. By the end of September 1914, he was becoming increasingly worried for his safety as a rising spy panic in Britain led to foreigners coming under suspicion. He travelled to Ireland, where he intended to keep a low profile until he could make his escape from the UK.
Lody had been given no training in espionage before embarking on his mission and within only a few days of arriving he was detected by the British authorities. His un-coded communications were detected by British censors when he sent his first reports to an address in Stockholm that the British knew was a postbox for German agents. The British counter-espionage agency MI5, then known as MO5(g), allowed him to continue his activities in the hope of finding out more information about the German spy network. His first two messages were allowed to reach the Germans but later messages were stopped, as they contained sensitive military information. At the start of October 1914, concern over the increasingly sensitive nature of his messages prompted MO5(g) to order Lody's arrest. He had left a trail of clues that enabled the police to track him to a hotel in Killarney, Ireland, in less than a day.
Lody was put on public trial — the only one held for a German spy captured in the UK in either World War — before a military court in London at the end of October. He did not attempt to deny that he was a German spy. His bearing in court was widely praised as forthright and courageous by the British press and even by the police and MO5(g) officers who had tracked him down. He was convicted and sentenced to death after a three-day hearing. Four days later, on 6 November 1914, Lody was shot at dawn by a firing squad at the Tower of London in the first execution there in 167 years. His body was buried in an unmarked grave in East London. When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933, it declared him a national hero. Lody became the subject of memorials, namesake for a Destroyer Ship eulogies and commemorations in Germany before and during the Second World war.
For sale is the ships Engine Status Telegraph from the Hans Lody. It was purchased during a recent buying trip to the UK. It was made by Wilkens & Co Bremerhaven and has the ships name stamped on the trafficator arm. It still has the chains attached. It is a very heavy piece of equipment possibly 30kg in weight. This is a great item for the nautical or Kriegsmarine collector.