The Arandora Star at anchor |
|
| Career | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Arandora Star |
| Owner: | Blue Star Line |
| Port of registry: | United Kingdom |
| Route: |
Great Britain - South America |
| Builder: | Cammel Laird & Company of Birkenhead |
| Yard number: | 921 |
| Launched: | 1 April 1927 |
| Completed: | May 1927 |
| Refit: | 1929 as cruise liner by Fairfield Shipbuilding & Engineering Co. Ltd., Glasgow 1936 Main mast removed and accommodation extended to poop deck |
| Nickname: | "The Wedding Cake" or the "Chocolate Box" due to its paint scheme. |
| Fate: | Torpedoed and sunk on 2 July 1940 |
| General characteristics | |
| Class and type: | Cruise Liner |
| Tonnage: |
as built:
after refit:
|
| Length: | 512.2 ft |
| Beam: | 68.3 ft |
| Height: |
as built:
after refit:
|
| Installed power: | four steam turbines by shipbuilder |
| Propulsion: | single reduction geared to two shafts |
| Speed: | 16 knots |
| Capacity: |
Passengers:
|
SS Arandora Star was a British registered cruise ship operated by the Blue Star Line from the late 1920s through the 1930s. At the onset of World War II she was assigned as a troop transport and moving refugees. At the end of June 1940 she was assigned the task of transporting German and Italian internees along with prisoners of war to Canada. On 2 July 1940 she was sunk in controversial circumstances by a German U-boat with a large loss of life.
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Initially named Arandora, she was built by Cammell Laird & Company, Limited for the Blue Star Line in 1927. As completed the Arandora measured 12,847 gross register tons (GRT), was 512.2 feet long, a beam of 68.3 ft and accommodated 164 first class passengers. She cruised at a service speed of 16 knots. After a refit in 1929, she could accommodate 354 first class passengers, her tonnage was increased to 14,694 gross tons
As Arandora she sailed from London to the east coast of South America from 1927 to 1928. In 1929 she was sent to Fairfield Shipbuilding & Engineering Company Ltd. of Glasgow for refitting. During the refit, her gross tonnage was increased to 14,694 and first class accommodation was increased to 354 passengers. A tennis court was also placed abaft the funnels on the boat deck, and a swimming pool was installed in the after well deck. Upon completion, she returned to service as a full-time luxury cruise ship. At the time of this refit, she was also renamed Arandora Star. The renaming was done to avoid confusion with Royal Mail Ships which typically bore names beginning and ending in 'A'.
As a cruise ship, the Arandora Star was based mainly in Southampton, and travelled to many different destinations. These included Norway, the Northern capitals, the Mediterranean, the West Indies, Panama, Cuba, and Florida, to name a few. The Arandora Star also had two unique nicknames because of her colour scheme of a white hull with scarlet ribbon. The nicknames most frequently used were "The Wedding Cake" or the "Chocolate Box".
At the onset of World War II, the Arandora Star was refitted and was assigned as a transport ship. She evacuated troops from Norway and from France in June 1940 before undertaking what was to be her final voyage transporting Axis nationals and prisoners of war to Canada.[1]
On 2 July 1940, having left Liverpool unescorted the day before, under the command of Edgar Wallace Moulton, she was bound for St John's, Newfoundland and Canadian internment camps with nearly 1,200 German and Italian internees, including 86 POWs, being transported from Britain. There were also 374 British men, comprising both military guards and the ship's crew. The Italians numbered 712 men of all ages, most of whom had been residing in Britain when Benito Mussolini declared war on 10 June. The ship was bearing no Red Cross sign, which could have shown that she was carrying prisoners, and especially civilians.
At 6.58 am off the northwest coast of Ireland, she was struck by a torpedo from the U-47, commanded by U-Boat ace Günther Prien. U-47 fired its single damaged[2] torpedo at Arandora Star. All power was lost at once, and thirty five minutes after the torpedo impact, Arandora Star sank. Over eight hundred lives were lost.
"I could see hundreds of men clinging to the ship. They were like ants and then the ship went up at one end and slid rapidly down, taking the men with her.... Many men had broken their necks jumping or diving into the water. Others injured themselves by landing on drifting wreckage and floating debris near the sinking ship"
— Sergeant Norman Price[3]
At 0705 hours Malin Head radio received the distress call, which it retransmitted to Land's End and to Portpatrick. Throughout August bodies were washed up on the Irish shore. The first was 71-year-old Ernesto Moruzzi, who was found near Burtonport. Four others were found on the same day, 30 July. During August 1940, 213 bodies were washed up on the Irish Coast, 35 were from the Arandora Star. There were a further 92 unidentified, most probably from the Arandora Star.[4]
The modified cruise ship carried fourteen lifeboats, of which one was immediately destroyed upon torpedo impact. Another could not be lowered off its winches, and two were damaged during their launch and thus useless. At least four of the remaining lifeboats were launched with a very small number of survivors. One other lifeboat was swamped and sank shortly after the sinking. Captain Otto Burfeind, who had become an internee after the sinking of his ship, the SS Adolph Woermann, stayed aboard the Arandora Star organizing the ship's evacuation until he was lost when it finally sank.
After a brief scout by a Short Sunderland flying boat that was following their SOS distress signal, the Canadian destroyer HMCS St. Laurent arrived to pick up the survivors. There were 586 survivors out of the 1,216 detainees. The sick were taken to Mearnskirk Hospital. One of the survivors was the athletics coach Franz Stampfl.
The British War Cabinet received a report on the disaster on 3 July 1940,[5] although its impact was over-shadowed to an extent by the British attack that day on the French fleet at Oran.
Arandora Star's Master, Edgar Wallace Moulton, was posthumously awarded the Lloyd's War Medal for Bravery at Sea, and the Canadian commander Harry DeWolf was cited for his heroism in the rescue operation, as was Captain Burfeind.
The wreck is located at .
In the weeks following the Arandora Star's sinking many bodies of those who perished were carried by the sea to various points in Ireland and the Hebrides.
In the small graveyard of Termoncarragh, Belmullet Luigi Tapparo, an internee, from Edinburgh, and John Connelly a Lovat Scout lay buried, side-by-side.
Ceazar Camozzi (1891–1940) from Iseo, Italy was washed ashore somewhere on the Inishowen peninsula Co. Donegal and is buried in the Secret Heart graveyard Carndonagh.
A memorial chapel was built in a cemetery in Bardi, home town of 48 of the dead. Bardi has also named a street Via Arandora Star.
St Peter's Italian Church in Clerkenwell, London, unveiled a memorial plaque in 1960. Each year a mass is held on the first Sunday in November, close to the anniversary of the unveiling of the plaque.
In 2004 the Italian town of Lucca unveiled a monument to 31 local men lost in the sinking, located in the courtyard of the museum of the Paolo Cresci Foundation for the History of Italian Emigration.
The Scottish island of Colonsay unveiled a memorial on 2 July 2005, the sixty-fifth anniversary of the tragedy, at the cliff where the body of Giuseppe Delgrosso was found.[6]
A bronze memorial plaque was unveiled on 2 July 2008 at the Church of Our Lady and St Nicholas, Liverpool. It was relocated to the Pier Head in front of the old Mersey Docks and Harbour Board building after building work was finished.
In 2009, on the 69th anniversary, the Mayor of Middlesbrough unveiled a memorial in the town hall commemorating the town's thirteen interned Italians held in cells there prior to deportation and death on the Arandora Star's final voyage.[7]
On 2 July 2010, the 70th anniversary of the sinking, a new memorial was unveiled in St David's Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral, Cardiff by the Arandora Star Memorial Fund in Wales.[8]
On the same day, 2 July 2010, a memorial cloister garden was opened next to St Andrew's Roman Catholic Cathedral in Glasgow.[9]
The wreckage of one of the lifeboats remains visible at Knockvologan beach on the Ross of Mull, largely buried but with its iron suspension hooks still above the sand.