Concept

USS DeKalb

Résumé
USS DeKalb (ID-3010) was the German mail ship that served during the early part of the First World War as an auxiliary cruiser (Hilfkreuzer) in the Imperial German Navy and later after the US entry into the war, as a US Navy troop ship. Post war she returned to civilian service as the US transatlantic liner SS Mount Clay. SS Prinz Eitel Friedrich (1904) The ship was a North German Lloyd (NDL) mail ship and ocean liner built by AG Vulcan, Stettin, Germany, and launched on 18 June 1904 as . NDL had ordered her for the German Mail route between Germany and the Far East, for which she began her maiden voyage on 13 October. When the First World War broke out on 1 August 1914 she was in Shanghai, China and was ordered to Tsingtao in the then German Kiaochow Bay concession. There she was quickly converted to an auxiliary cruiser for the Imperial German Navy by transferring the guns and crews of the German gunboats and to Prinz Eitel Friedrich. For the next seven months she operated on the high seas with Vice Admiral Maximilian von Spee's squadron off South American and then as a detached commerce raider. She sank or captured eleven ships in the Pacific and the South Atlantic. Among these was the schooner William P. Frye, captured on 27 January 1915 and scuttled the next day, the first U.S. flagged vessel sunk in World War I. On 11 March 1915 Prinz Eitel Friedrich, now low on supplies and burdened by over 300 prisoners, arrived at Newport News, Virginia. Allied warships were lying outside US waters and to avoid them she exceeded the time limit under international law for a combatant ship to remain in a neutral port. As a result, the US authorities interned her. Later she was moved, still under the German flag, to Philadelphia Navy Yard. On 11 April another NDL liner that had been operating as an auxiliary cruiser, , was interned alongside her. When the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, US Customs officials seized her and she was transferred to the US Navy.
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