Rifleman on 1 January 1917 during the rescue of troops from Ivernia |
|
| Career (UK) | |
|---|---|
| Name: | HMS Rifleman |
| Builder: | J. Samuel White & Company, Cowes |
| Launched: | 22 August 1910 |
| Fate: | Sold on 9 May 1921 Scrapped in 1923 |
| General characteristics | |
| Displacement: | 772 tons |
| Length: | 246 ft (75.0 m) |
| Beam: | 25.2 ft (7.7 m) |
| Draught: | 8.5 ft (2.6 m) |
| Propulsion: | 4 Yarrow boilers, Parsons turbines, 13,500 shp |
| Speed: | 27 knots |
| Complement: | 72 |
| Armament: |
2 × BL 4-inch (101.6 mm) L/40 Mark VIII guns, mounting P Mark V |
| Notes: | Pennant numbers: H82 (1914) H97 (from January 1918) |
HMS Rifleman was an Acorn-class destroyer built by J. Samuel White & Company, Cowes, completed on 4 November 1910 and sold for breaking up on 9 May 1921.
On 1 January 1917 the German submarine SM UB-47 torpedoed the Cunard liner Ivernia off Cape Matapan, Greece. She was en route to Alexandria with 2,400 Scottish troops aboard; of these 85 drowned, together with 36 crew. Rifleman, the escorting destroyer, took off 650 and armed trawlers towed the remainder of the survivors in their lifeboats to Crete.[1]
On 15 April 1917 the Cameronia was en-route from Marseilles to Alexandria, Egypt, when the German submarine SM U-33 torpedoed her 150 miles east of Malta. Cameronia was a 10,963 ton passenger liner that had been converted to a troopship in January 1917. She was carrying 2,650 troops and the exact number of deaths is unknown, though the number is likely to be 11 crew members and 129 troops. The Chatby Memorial in Egypt lists the names of 127 soldiers as having been lost with Cameronia. The vessel that carried the survivors to Suda was likely the Rifleman.
|
|
||||||||