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DANMARK
Sail Training Ship
Københaven, Danmark

Click on this image to download two detail photos of the ship

With the coming of the war, European participation diminished rapidly and by 1940 what contingents remained, were small. One member of the Danish contingent was the stately white-hulled sail -training ship Danmark. The Nazi invasion of Denmark in May 1940, however trapped the ship in New York and rather than return home to an uncertain future, the decision was made to remain in the United States. As a result, the ship and her crew were offered to the Americans as a training ship. This offer was destined to have a significant impact upon U.S. military training and the Coast Guard trained some some 5,000 cadets on the ship during the wartime years. The experience emphasized the need for a training ship and following the Second World War the Coast Guard obtained the former Nazi training barque Horst Wessel, renaming it Eagle. The Eagle still serves with the USCG.

Launched in 1933 at Denmark's Nakskov Shipyard to train officers for the Danish Merchant Navy, the steel-hulled, Danmark can be rigged with fifteen square sails, five sails on each mast, and ten staysails, of which four are headsails. The ship also has a Frichs engine that enables it to do 9 knots under power should the wind fail. Originally meant to accomodate 120 cadets, modernization in 1959 cut the Danmark’s capacity to eighty. Every officer who serves on a Danish flagged ship must first serve his or her time on the ship. Formerly, this meant a 12 month course, but with the increased demand for officers, cadets are moving though the ship after as little as four months.

This copy of the Danmark , was commissioned by a gentleman who joined the ship as a cadet in 1952 -and served on it for six years - finally becoming one of her officers. He sent me this photocopy of his favorite photo of the ship with the request that I try and build a three-dimensional copy of that photo inside the bottle. This is the result and he was quite pleased. "She is beautiful..." were his words when the bottle sailed into port.
When the ship sailed I told him that I expected it would take about a week to arrive. When she arrived in a scant four days later, he remarked “She always was fast, but this beats all records!”

In a ship like this, details are important. While examining the ship’s photo with a magnifying glass, I observed that she was flying signals - in addition to the swallow-tailed Danish ensign. I could make out two of the four flags but the others were too indistinct to read - they could each be read as two or three different flags. I ran some combinations and on a hunch, I called the local library. I asked the reference librarian if she would mind looking up the ship’s entry in the Lloyd’s Shipping List (I knew they had three large volumes of it on one of the back shelves) and tell me what the ship’s call sign was. Two minutes later, I had my answer: OXDK. It matched one of the combinations perfectly, so I drew up the necessary flags and added them to the signal hoist...

Displacement: 16,320 Tons Length: 253 (77.1 m) Beam: 33 ft (10 m) Sail area: 1956 sq yards ( 1636 m2)
Scale: 1 in 518 Length of Model: 6.5" (165 mm)

Model ship photos & text © D.S. Smith 2003

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