SMS Körös was part of the Austro-Hungarian Navy’s Danube Flotilla. She fought various Allied forces from Belgrade down the Danube to the Black Sea during World War I. After brief service with the Hungarian People’s Republic at the end of the war, she was transferred to the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes and renamed Morava. During the World War II German-led Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Morava was the flagship of the 2nd Mine Barrage Division, and operated on the River Tisza.
About SMS Körös in brief
SMS Körös was part of the Austro-Hungarian Navy’s Danube Flotilla. She fought various Allied forces from Belgrade down the Danube to the Black Sea during World War I. After brief service with the Hungarian People’s Republic at the end of the war, she was transferred to the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes and renamed Morava. She remained in service throughout the interwar period, although budget restrictions meant she was not always in full commission. During the World War II German-led Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Morava was the flagship of the 2nd Mine Barrage Division, and operated on the River Tisza. She was scuttled by her crew on 11 April, and later raised by the Navy of the Independent State of Croatia, an Axis puppet state, and continued in service as Bosna until June 1944, when she struck a mine and sank. Her sister ship Szamos was completed in 1893, and was identical except for 50 mm armour on her conning tower. The ship was powered using steam generated by two Yarrow boilers driving two triple-expansion steam engines, and carried 54 tonnes of coal.
Her main guns fired a 26 kg armour-piercing, high explosive, shrapnel or fragmentation shell to a maximum range of 8. 2 km at an elevation of 20°. They could depress to −6° and elevate to +25°. Her armour consisted of a belt and bulkheads 50mm thick, deck armour 19 mm thick, and gun turret armour 75 mm – thick. She had two single gun turrets of 120 mm L35 fore and aft, two superfiring 66-mm L42 anti-aircraft guns protected by gun shields on the superstructure fore and fore, and two machine guns. Her engines were rated at 1,200 ihp and she was designed to reach a top speed of 10 knots. She was laid down at Budapest on 30 March 1890 and commissioned on 21 April of the same year. The two monitors each had an overall length of 54 m, a beam of 9 m and a normal draught of 1.2 m. Her displacement was 448 tonnes, and her crew consisted of 77 officers and enlisted men. Kör Ös and her sister ship SMS Szamos doubled the size of Austria-Hungary’s Danube flotilla in 1914.
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This page is based on the article SMS Körös published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
