B.Sc. Nautical Science is a 3-year residential undergraduate program designed to prepare students for careers as deck officers in the Merchant Navy and maritime sector. Affiliated with Indian Maritime University and approved by the Directorate General of Shipping, the course at HIMT College provides academic, practical, and onboard training for service on cargo ships, tankers, passenger vessels, and offshore fleets.

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#deckofficer #merchantnavy #careergrowth

Redemption in Leith: the thread about HMS Cossack

The neat, well kept war graves at Seafield Cemetery include 5 men from the destroyer HMS Cossack, who lost their lives in an accident at sea on November 7th 1939, when their ship collided with the Leith steamer Borthwick off the Isle of May.

The protagonists in this accident were the Cossack, one of the Navy’s big, new “Tribal class” destroyers: two and a half thousand tons of guns and torpedoes which could cut through the sea at 36 knots (over 40mph).

The other was the George Gibson & Co. steamer Borthwick, a ship built and owned in Leith which plied the North Sea on the Antwerp and Rotterdam route. She was much smaller than the big warship’,; over 100 feet shorter, about 1/4 her displacement and barely capable of double digit speeds on her single steam engine which had an output 1/300th of that of Cossack.

It was a dark winter night on the Firth of Forth and ships were showing only the bare minimum of navigation lights. The Borthwick and Cossack were on a parallel course, heading east off the Isle of May, with the destroyer overtaking the little steamer when, for reasons of his own, Captain Daniel De Pass of the Cossack turned across the path of Borthwick. De Pass had a bit of a reputation for poor seamanship, having done something like this before on pre-war exercises. The outcome was inevitable, the bows of the Borthwick cutting into the side of Cossack, right into the seamen’s mess where the men were just sitting down to dinner. Three men died where they sat. Able Seaman Heatherley and Ordinary Seaman Clarke were pulled into the cold, dark North Sea as the water rushed in to their compartment, never to be seen again. Three more men were seriously injured (Ordinary Seaman Clifford Harmer would be invalided out of the Navy with a hand injury) and those in the mess below were trapped for an hour, up to their necks in water. Their ship limped back to Leith for extensive repairs, the men boarded in the Seamen’s Mission. In an interview in 2005, a survivor – Trevor Tipping – pointed out the steel plate of the ship was only 3/8 inch thick and “folded back, like a sardine tin” when the collision happened.

The repairs – by Leith shipyard Henry Robb – took almost 2 months and cost £11,250 (£504k in 2023). Captain De Pass faced a Board of Inquiry, which put him 75% at fault. He was court martialled, relieved of his command and posted away elsewhere before taking retirement. His replacement was the dashing yet thoroughly competent Captain Philip Vian.

The men of Cossack, cooling their heels in Leith while their ship was repaired, raised a subscription to fund a memorial stoner to their lost shipmates out of their own pockets. It was erected in Seafield cemetery, and is situated by the Cossack war graves.

The Borthwick was patched up and soon back on the dangerous Leith to Holland route. She was sunk 4 months later – on March 9th 1940 – by the German submarine U-14 off the River Scheldt, on her way home from Rotterdam to Leith. All 21 on board survived and were picked up. The newspapers celebrated on 11th March when news reached home that the men of the Borthwick had all been landed safely in Flushing.

Cossack did not leave Leith until 10th January, but was back 3 days later for more repairs after an embarrassing – but fortunately minor – collision with the cable laying ship Royal Scot in Leith Roads. She left again, returning to the 4th Destroyer Flotilla with Captain Vian now installed in command. But she wouldn’t be gone long and would return with the month. This time should would be an international hero, the victor of the daring “Altmark Incident“, a swashbuckling tale that can always do with retelling.

On the face of it, Altmark was a humble German merchant ship. In reality, she was a supply tanker for the Kriegsmarine – the German Navy – and had on board almost 300 British and Allied prisoners, merchant seamen whose ships had been sunk by the “pocket battleship” commerce raider Admiral Graf Spee in the South Atlantic.

The Graf Spee had been scuttled just off Montevideo after the Royal Navy had cornered her into a fight in the Battle of the River Plate on December 17th – while Cossack was laid up in a Leith drydock undergoing repairs. Before the battle she had transferred most of her prisoners to her supply ship, which was heading back to Germany. Conditions on board caused the British press to call her a “hell ship” and a “floating concentration camp“.

Captain Dau of the Altmark intended to sneak back home by hugging the coasts of the (then) neutral Greenland, Iceland and Norway. He had almost made it when, on Feb. 15th, reconnaissance aircraft out of RAF Leuchars spotted her in Norwegian waters off Bergen. The British destroyers HMS Ivanhoe and Intrepid from Vian’s squadron made to board her but the Altmark sought refuge in the safety of Jøssingfjord. The Royal Navy could only look on as the German ship was escorted into the fjord by the Norwegian Navy, who politely but firmly affirmed their neutrality and turned the British ships around.

Captain Vian, as commander of the squadron, made contact with the ancient Norwegian gunboat Kjell but was asshured that the Norwegian had searched the Altmark, that all was in order and it was a simple German merchant ship and not an armed, Kriegsmarine prison ship. Vian knew this was rubbish, but had no option but to retreat a respectful distance and to signal the Admiralty for orders.

Further reconnaissance flights by the Royal Air Force confirmed that the Altmark was safely holed up right at the end of Jøssingfjord. Meanwhile, Vian’s signal found its way to the desk of the First Lord of the Admiralty, a man who had a reputation for sticking his oar in to operational matters and trying to direct operations from Whitehall. You might be familiar with his name, it was Winston Churchill.

Churchill sent Vian a signal telling him that if the Altmark wasn’t escorted to Bergen for inspection under a joint Anglo-Norwegian guard, he was to board her and free the prisoners, that he had permission to use lethal force in order to do so and that he was to politely but firmly make sure the Royal Norwegian Navy butted out of matters. This was a blatant violation of Norwegian neutrality of course, but there was not a lot the little old gunboat Kjell could do to stop the Cossack beyond yell at her – Vian had permission to fire on her if they fired first, but to stop when they stopped.

And so Vian was set on a course of action and turned his ship around, entering the mouth of Jøssingfjord at 2200 hours on February 16th 1940. He once more went on board the Kjell, this time to give her Captain the ultimatum to either escort the Altmark to Bergen with him, or step aside. When he declined, Vian invited him aboard the Cossack for a grandstand view of what was about to follow, but again he declined. On board the Altmark, Captain Dau saw the threatening shape of the destroyer looming down the Fjord towards him. At first he made to ram her, but instead ended up running his ship aground instead. He next tried to dazzle the Cossack with his searchlight, but the British ship was brought skillfully alongside and in true Nelsonian fashion, a party of 2 officers and 30 men leapt across the gap and boarded the German ship. Legend has it that 4 cutlasses, kept on board for ceremonial purposes, were carried by the boarding party. If true, it would be the last boarding action in which such a weapon was known to be used in anger.

There was a brief skirmish on board but the German crew were soon overpowered. Just as things were almost over however, a German sailor fired at and injured a British sailor, and for his trouble 9 of his shipmates were shot and wounded in the return fire; 4 died and a further 4 were fatally wounded. Having taken the Altmark, the boarders now combed the ship looking for the captives they knew were held somewhere within. One sailor called “Any Englishmen in there?” into a dark hold and on hearing a cheer replied the immortal words “The Navy’s here! Come up out of it!“

Less than two hours after she first entered the fjord, Vian’s ship was on her way out again with 299 freed prisoners on board (including one, an Indian seaman, suffering from Leprosy). She plotted a course for Leith and set off for home at top speed. The Cossack had last entered Leith with a cloud hanging over her reputation, but on her return on February 17th she did so triumphantly. The press cameras were assembled and waiting to welcome her back and to make the most out of this propaganda opportunity.

Ambulances were ready and waiting to take the injured away to hospital while the newsreel cameras rolled.

It was a rare bit of good news so early in the war, so reporting restrictions were not observed. The Scotsman carried a full page spread of photos. Many of those pictured coming ashore had lost all their possessions, some had been prisoners for almost 6 months and their families had no word of what had become of them. For weeks the papers were full of stories of reunions and heroes welcomes.

The Dundee Courier and Advertiser printed a picture of some 1940s medical care, with a nurse at Leith Hospital lighting a recuperative cigarette for Third Officer Leslie Ross of the ship Huntsman. 250 of the his companions were sent to the Eastern General Hospital in Leith for attention, with officials from the City and the Shipwrecked Mariner’s Society on hand to sort out replacement clothing, papers, money, cigarettes etc. and arrange lodging and travel. The sailor who had been suffering from Leprosy was taken to the Infectious Diseases Hospital (the “City Hospital”).

In Stornoway, the Daily Record interviewed the 75 year old Elizabeth Mackenzie of Newton Street, who had not heard from her merchant seaman son – Donald Morrison – for over a year. She was making a public appeal for his whereabouts, he had last written to her over a year ago and was last known to be on the SS Newton Beech: that ship had been sunk by the Graf Spee on 5th October 1939. “I have been very worried because I am going blind, and I am living here with a brother who is over 80” she told the reporter. “I haven’t many friends, but the Lord is my friend, and that is enough.” The happy news about the safety of her son was soon brought to her by Donald Macleod, another Leodsach sailor who had been with him on the Altmark. “It is good news my boy is safe” she told the Record. Donald Murdo Macleod of Tolsta Chaolais had been on the SS Tairoa which had been intercepted by the Graf Spee in the middle of the South Atlantic on December 2nd 1939. Tairoa had been the penultimate victim of the German raider, and had managed to transmit a distress signal that eventually allowed the the Royal Navy to catch up with her assailant.

Donald Morrison however seemed reluctant to return home and instead went to Hull, telling Macleod to let his mother know he “might go home later“. Instead he went back to sea. It seems the whole experience may have left an indelible mark on him and changed his character. He forfeited bail of £1 in Buckhaven on a charge of drunkeness in February 1941. He was soon in trouble again for going absent from his ship. In May 1941 he was hauled before the Lord Mayor of Portsmouth at the Police Court there, again for deserting a ship. Morrison could offer no explanation for being 31 hours overdue and potentially making his ship miss its convoy, beyond “I just had a good time, that is all“. The Master had dismissed him but told the court he was of good character and had been through “unpleasant experiences” and would gladly take him back again. It turned out Morrison had another ship sunk from underneath him recently and had once again lost all his papers and possessions. The Lord Mayor fined him £5 (half a month’s wages) and allowed him to return to his ship on account of his value to the war effort. He won’t have been the only merchant sailor in the War in the Atlantic to have an experience such as this, and in retrospect we can understand his reluctance to return to his ship and potential death and to want to have one more night of fun on earth…

Back in Leith, the Fife Free Press reported that the Altmark Incident was commemorated with the gift of £500 to the Leith Hospital by an anonymous benefactor on the condition that a bed be dedicated to HMS Cossack for rescuing the prisoners. For his “outstanding ability, determination and resource” and “for daring, leadership and masterly handling of his ship“, Captain Vian received the Distinguished Service Order medal and was promoted off of Cossack in July 1941. He would go on to have a glittering wartime career, and would retire in 1952 as Admiral of the Fleet. Cossack had an eventful 18 months after the Altmark, taking part in the 2nd Battle of Narvik and the hunt for the German Battleship Bismarck

The ship’s luck would soon run out however and she was torpedoed and sunk in October 1941 by the German submarine U-563, west of Gibraltar. In November 1941, the Edinburgh Evening News reported that three local men were missing, presumed killed, from her:

• Petty Officer Alexander Burton Colthart, 22, 20 India Place
• Petty Officer Douglas Maurice Gammack, 32 Parsons Green Terrace
• Assistant Cook Robert “Sonny” O’Hara, 23, 205 Crewe Road North

Her cat, Oskar, survived this sinking: legend has it that he had been the ship’s cat on the Bismarck and was plucked from the Atlantic by Cossack after her sinking. His name was said to have been derived from the code letter for “O” (with a German spelling) which was used to mean “man overboard“. Further legend has it that after surviving the loss of his second home he went on to serve on HMS Ark Royal and survived her sinking also. The whole thing was probably just a sailor’s yarn but Unsinkable Sam has garnered a cult following on the internet: you will find Facebook pages, pop history articles, Youtube videos and even computer game cameos in his memory.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

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The mining of the “Saucy” and the “Firefly”: the thread about the WW2 loss of forty-two lives in the Forth

I was looking for something in Seafield Cemetery last week and couldn’t help but stop by the war graves. Some are for merchant seamen and many of them were from HMS Saucy, lost with all hands on this day (September 4th) in 1940. As yesterday was Merchant Navy Day, this is a doubly appropriate time to relate their story.

The Saucy was built for the Royal Navy in Hull in 1918 as a 600-ton, 155ft-long Frisky-class rescue tug. She was sold out of service in 1924 but kept her name and was requisitioned in 1939, returning to the UK from Shanghai. She was crewed by merchant seamen, serving under officers of the Royal Navy Reserve (RNR men were professional merchant naval officers who had joined the reserves to be called up in times of war).

Saucy was based on the Forth at Rosyth, her duties to assist in any damaged vessels entering the estuary and was at sea on September 3rd (Merchant Navy Day and exactly 1 year into the war) when she brought in a damaged Dutch merchant ship that had been bombed by German aircraft. With this charge safely brought in, she headed back out on patrol in the early morning of the 4th. Contact was soon lost with her when she was in a position about 1.5 miles west of the island of Inchkeith; the unfortunate tug had hit a mine and gone down almost instantly, taking all 281 on board with her. It is not clear whose mine she had struck, it may have been dropped by a German aircraft, but just as likely it may have been a “friendly” mine that had broken free from its moorings and had floated further into the Firth.

Of the crew the 3 officers were all RNR men and the 25 ratings were all merchant seamen. Eighteen came from the Devonshire fishing town of Brixham, 7 from the same extended family. Eight bodies were recovered, 5 of them of Brixham men and all were buried at Seafield – although one was never formally identified.

On this day in 2004, a memorial plaque was dedicated in Brixham Harbour to the men who were lost – it has 26 individual names, however different sources list 27 names and some say there were 28 on the ship’s roll. See footnote.

A new HMS Saucy was named in her honour in 1942, an Assurance-class rescue tug. The wreck of her predecessor was marked with a buoy in 1940, but it was largely lost by 1945. Sonar surveys by the Navy in 1967 and 1871 failed to locate it, but it was found again by the minehunter HMS Sandown in 1992, and her divers explored the wreck in 1993 and found it to be remarkably intact in 15m of water, position 56° 2′ 10″N, 3° 10′ 33″W.

The men whose bodies were never found are further commemorated on the Liverpool Naval Memorial, which commemorates almost 1,400 merchant sailors who died serving with the Royal Navy during WW2 and have no known resting place.

Alongside the men from the Saucy at Seafield lie three others who lost their lives to sea mines that year; Lt. D. B. Johnstone RNVR, Chief Petty Officer C. E. Baldwin RN D.S.M. and Sub Lt. C. Dobson RNVR. All three died on HMS Firefly in February 1940. Baldwin had earned the Distinguished Service Medal early in the war for being the first to defuse a German magnetic mine, allowing it to be captured, inspected and countermeasures devised.

Firefly was a requisitioned civilian trawler, hired from her owners as a minesweeper. Trawlers were perfect for this sort of work, which required a seaworthy vessel that could handle the towing of “sweeps” that cut mines free from their moorings before the crew destroyed them (usually by shooting it with a rifle until it exploded).

On February 3rd 1940, Firefly was in the Forth, her crew attempting to defuse a British mine that had gotten loose and was posing a hazard to shipping. These sort of mines look exactly like they do in cartoons; a buoyant, black sphere with spiky “horns” in which the detonators are mounted.

Firefly was stopped in the water, her crew watching from the railings while a detachment in the row boat carefully manoeuvred alongside the mine to defuse it; dangerous but routine work. Without warning they were hit by the wake of a passing destroyer, which pushed the mine onto the boat. The horn contacted one of the boat’s oars, and 200-250lb of explosives was detonated. Everyone on the boat was killed instantly, as were all except one watching on deck (who would die the next day from his wounds). Only the 3 men in the wheelhouse and 1 in the galley survived from a crew of 18. Sadly one of the four survivors, Lt. Andrew Macgavin Maclean RNVR, would die in the Royal Infirmary two weeks later as a result of infection, he was laid to rest in Strathblane Parish Churchyard (I am indebted to Pat Davy of Strathblane Heritage Society for this information).

Remarkably, the vessel herself was largely intact – apart from damage to her superstructure – and she was towed into Leith by the minesweeping trawler HMS Wardour and repaired. She returned to service, recommissioning in June 1940, and serving out the rest of the war. Returned to her owners and renamed St. Just, she fished out of Harwich until 1961. Wardour herself was sunk by a mine she was clearing in October 1940 but her crew survived. In a curious coincidence, a previous HMS Firefly was one of the first ships to strike a naval mine (which at the time were referred to as “Infernal Machines”) when she and HMS Merlin ran into a Russian minefield off Sveaborg in the Baltic Campaign of 1855, although both survived. In another odd twist of fate, the Firth of Forth was the location of both the first loss of a ship to a torpedo in WW1 (the cruiser HMS Pathfinder), and the last such in WW2 (the Canadian steamer Avondale Park and the Norwegian collier “Sneland I).

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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The thread about a charity shop book that lead to the story of Captain William Thomson Dawson and the loss of the Leith tanker “Peder Bogen”

This thread was originally written and published in April 2023.

I was recently fortunate to acquire this book on the history of the Trinity House in Leith at my favourite charity book shop (St. Columba’s in Canonmills, go visit them!), for a very reasonable price.

It is signed on the inside cover, not by the author as I first thought, but by a “Captain Dawson OBE, the Master of Trinity House”.

The award of the OBE piqued my interest enough to look up our Captain Dawson, and it did not take long to find him: William Thomson Dawson. This is why his signature reads “W. Thomson“. Captain Dawson was a local man, born in Leith in 1910, the son of Margaret Alexander and James Dawson – a merchant navy officer. He was named after his grandfather, a Leith shipmaster. Our Captain Dawson was master of the Leith tanker SS Peder Bogen, a tanker owned by Leith’s Christian Salvesen shipping line. This steam-powered ship was 480 feet long, 62 feet wide and drew 37 feet (146 x 18.9 x 11.2m) with a gross tonnage (a measure of the carrying capacity of a merchant ship) of some 9,700 tons.

The Peder Bogen had been built in the Dutch city of Dordrecht in 1925 for the Norwegian whaling company Johan Rasmussen, being sold to the Salvesen’s whaling subsidiary The South Georgia Company in 1933, along with the base of Stromness on that island. She was a supply ship supporting the Salvesen’s whaling operations and fleet at South Georgia, carrying fuel and goods south and whale oil north, with the seasons.

When war broke out, the Peder Bogen found itself called up for convoy duty, bringing precious fuel oil east across the Atlantic, for which purposes she was given a token armament for self defence. She had made a number of such passages during the first years of the war until on 19th March 1942 she left Port of Spain in Trinidad, heading for Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she would join an eastbound convoy across the Atlantic. On board she had 11,000 tons of fuel oil for the Admiralty 52 crew (including Dawson) and a single passenger, the radio operator of the French tanker SS Melpomene, which had been sunk a few weeks previously en route from Belfast to Baton Rouge.

The journey north proceeded quietly for 4 days, until on the 23rd March she was hit without warning by two torpedoes from the Italian submarine Morosino, about 700 miles northeast of Puerto Rico and 745 miles southeast of Bermuda, in the position 24° 25′ 48″N by 57° 26′ 24″W.

The ship was holed, and with water pouring into her tanks and machinery spaces and the prospect of the 11,000 tons of oil (not to mention the ships own 2,000 tons of fuel) catching fire, Dawson assembled his crew on deck. He ordered the crew to take to the lifeboats, but asked for volunteers to stay aboard and form a skeleton crew to see if there was a chance of saving the tanker and its precious cargo. He and five others remained on the Peder Bogen, relit the boilers, raised steam and began pumping the water out. They fought a losing battle, and when there was 16 feet of water in the engine room had to abandon the fight and join the lifeboats too. The two little boats then retreated a safe distance to await rescue. For the second time in 3 weeks, the unlucky radio operator of the Melpomene found himself abandoning a torpedoed tanker.

Three hours later, the Peder Bogen had still neither sunk nor caught fire, so once again Dawson and his volunteers made the brave decision to board her and try to save her. The Morosini however had been stalking them, and as they made to do this she surfaced just a mile distant and opened fire with her two 4″ deck guns. The Italian’s gunfire was inaccurate, and it took them 40 rounds to score 5 hits, enough to set the tanker on fire and seal her fate.

The crew were all safe however, and spent a rather unhappy night watching the remains of their ship and its cargo on fire. The next day the two lifeboats set a course for the Virgin islands before becoming separated. They were well equipped for their journey, with food, water and survival gear, and the weather was favourable, so their chances were good. After 4 days rowing against the winds, Dawson’s boat was sighted by the “Clyde-built” Spanish ship Gobeo, which took all aboard. The Spaniards were sympathetic to the plight of the British merchant mariners and treated them well. They landed them in Lisbon, Portugal, 3 weeks later. The men of the other boat, carrying the remains of the Peder Bogen’s crew under First Officer Duncan were picked up the following day after becoming separated. The Argentinian ship Rio Gallegos took them to New York, where they landed 4 days later on March 31st.

On April 14th 1942, The Scotsman reported the happy news to Leith that all onboard the ship had been saved. A table at the bottom of this page lists the names, home towns and ranks and roles of all of the men, as reported by the paper.Captain Dawson was awarded the OBE in 1943 for his part, having “showed splendid courage, resource and leadership and made determined efforts to save his ship in circumstances of great difficulty and danger “. Three of the engineering officers were awarded the MBE and two Firemen recieved the BEM.

Dawson was made Master of Trinity House in 1964, a position he held until 1977. His medals, cap and ephemera were sold at auction in December 2022.

The Morosini was lost at sea on August 8th 1942 with all hands, to causes unknown. In a curious twist to the tale, Captain Dawson’s father, Captain James Dawson, was almost certainly the Captain James Dawson of Leith who was master of the steamer Fingal when she was sunk by a torpedo or mine in the North Sea in March 1915. Six of the crew lost their lives that day. James Dawson, father to the 5 year old William, did not abandon his ship until it slipped under the water but survived.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

An Awful Endurance: the thread about the seizure of “SS Alster” and the sinking of “Empire Endurance”

Sometimes I go looking for interesting rabbit holes to go down in the hopes of finding a story. Sometimes people send me the strand that will lead me to a thread of the story. And sometimes unique and unusual inspiration just drops itself straight into my inbox, begging to be looked into.

You see way back whenever, I set up email alerts for online auction houses with the words “Edinburgh” or “Leith“, to keep a watchful eye on whatever interesting objets may be coming up for sale with those words in the listing. Mainly it’s sets of Edinburgh Crystal, kitsch Duke of Edinburgh memorabilia or job lots of Prue Leith cookbooks: but sometimes it will be something unusual. Very occasionally it’s something very unusual indeed, something you never knew you were looking for until it arrived in your email at 3:30AM one morning. And today’s Auction House Artefact is one such, because it is the original “Writ of Summons” from the WW2 seizure of the German merchant ship SS Alster in Leith in June 1940: the prize rules dictating that the officer who served this writ had to board the vessel and nail this very paper to its mast!

The Alster was a 12,000 deadweight tonnage cargo ship of the German Norddeutscher Lloyd line (NDL). Built in Hamburg in 1927, she was intended to sail the routes between Bremen, Australia and the far east. Her name is taken from a tributary river of the Elbe which flows through the city and port of Hamburg.

The ship was requisitioned by the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) in 1940 in advance of the German invasion of Norway. She surreptitiously departed for that country on April 3rd, destination Narvik, loaded up with military supplies. On board were guns, ammunition, 80 lorries, thousands of tons of coke fuel, food, hundreds of tons of hay for horses and even toys to distribute to children in a hearts and minds effort. She arrived in Norwegian waters under cover of being a regular merchant ship four days before the invasion proper began in order that she would be in position and ready to supply the landing. The old Norwegian torpedo boat Trygg was deceived and cleared her to pass and escorted her towards land.

On the 8th April Alster reached Vestfjorden and was warned off of a British minefield by a Norwegian patrol boat Syrian. This latter vessel, a converted trawler inspected the Alster and– deciding there was nothing odd about this heavily laden German merchant ship – let her pass on her way to Bodø. When war officially broke out two days later the Syrian caught up with Alster once again but, worried that the much larger ship was probably armed and carrying German troops, decided that discretion was the better part of valour and stood off. Instead, as the Alster plodded off at her leisurely top speed of 14 knots, Syrian passed the details to the Royal Navy instead. Realising the value of the thousands of tons of supplies in the merchantman, a force was quickly dispatched to capture her, consisting of the cruiser HMS Penelope and four destroyers led by HMS Icarus.

On paper it was a hugely one-sided fight stacked in the favour of the Royal Navy, but things very quickly started to go wrong. The Penelope ran into a few navigational difficulties which caused her to run into the island of Fleinvær on April 11th. The big destroyer HMS Eskimo managed to pull the damaged ship free and, with the assistance of Norwegian tugs, on to Skjelfjorden where temporary repairs could be made. She would limp back to the UK and be out of the war for 14 months, requiring an extensive rebuild below the water line.

The next day it was Eskimo, erstwhile saviour of Penelope, that needed help when the German destroyer Georg Thiele hit her with a torpedo in the Second Battle of Narvik, causing a significant rearrangement and truncation of her bows. Amazingly, despite the damage, Eskimo survived, was patched up at Skjelfjorden and sent back to the Tyne to get a new front end. She was back in action within 5 months, going on to survive the war.

It was thus left to HMS Icarus to round up the Alster The crew of the German ship tried and failed to set of a scuttling charge and quickly found themselves British captives. The Royal Navy was surprised to find that the German captain was none other than Oskar Scharf, the Norddeutscher Lloyd line’s most senior officer and something of a celebrity in maritime circles.

Scharf was – or had been – the captain of the NDL transatlantic liner Europa, the pride of the fleet. He found himself on the Alster as a demotion after it proved impossible for him to work under the political supervision of the Nazi party and Robert Ley. Ley was a fanatic, close to Hitler and in charge of the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF).

Scharf was adamant to the end of his days that he was no Nazi . Although he admitted he had joined the party for a year from 1934-35, this he said was purely in order to keep his job. His later actions would lend some credence to that position and as an old fashioned captain, he was not used to taking orders on his own ship, particularly political orders, and he was not about to change. But Scharf was also a German officer and therefore wasn’t about to hand over his ship to the Royal Navy without a struggle: six of his men would die resisting the boarding parties.

The captive Alster and her crew were moved to the British advanced naval base at Skjelfjord and all the supplies and materiel aboard were turned over to the Norwegians who were more than happy to turn them against their former owners. The Royal Navy used the ship as a temporary base for repairing ships; ironically one of the first ships she would assist would be the truncated Eskimo. Scharf and his crew, still aboard, managed to make one more attempt to scuttle their ship by opening seawater valves to try and flood the ship. They failed again and the officers found themselves taken off for their trouble and locked up on other Royal Navy ships for onward transport to Scotland.

The Navy now needed a prize crew to man the Alster and as many of the men of the cruiser Penelope now found themselves without a ship to sail they were put on-board and given the task. The Germans now made multiple attempts to sink her by aerial bombing, but somehow she survived them all.

On April 27th, Alster arrived in Tromsø to unload the last of her supplies for the Norwegian forces defending that port. To satisfy Navy regulations the British consul observed the unloading and gave the Norwegians an official receipt. After almost a month, she was then sent on to the port of Kirkenes in the far north of the country to load 10,000 tons of iron ore to be taken to the UK. On her way south again catastrophe was narrowly averted after she was sighted and attacked by the British submarine HMS Truant. This was despite her having been made aware of the submarine’s patrol area and being given orders to avoid it, and despite messages being sent to Truant to make her aware the vessel was friendly. Fortuitously the two torpedoes fired at Alster missed and exploded harmlessly on the shore.

Four days after this narrow escape, she finally departed Norwegian waters for the last time and sailed across the North Sea. As well as her cargo she evacuated 209 British and 46 Norwegian military personnel, 72 German prisoners of war (her crew, minus the officers who made their way separately) and the surviving forward gun turret from HMS Eskimo, which currently had little use for it in her new configuration. British newspapers reported the capture of the Alster with great enthusiasm as there wasn’t much other good news to tell at the time, plus Captain Scharf was a high-status prisoner of war and his old ship the Europa was a household name.

Alster unloaded her passengers at Scapa Flow on 31st May and arrived at the naval base of Rosyth on the Firth of Forth on June 4th. Shortly thereafter, she was sent across the Firth to Leith to unload and conclude the legal formalities of making her a prize. And so it was that Robert Robertson, a man from Morningside and a Customs & Excise Officer at the Leith Custom House, went aboard the ship on the 13th of the month and nailed the official writ to the mast. At a stroke, she officially became the property of the British Admiralty.

The ship was now passed to the Ministry of War Transport who made her an Empire Ship, a ship owned by the Government and allocated to a British merchant shipping company to make good wartime losses. Her new managers were Alfred Booth & Co. of Liverpool. After being refitted to bring her to a British standard and being renamed SS Empire Endurance she left Southend in Convoy FN255 and started her new career in the middle of the Battle of the Atlantic, plying the dangerous waters between British ports and Canada. This she did for six months after which she was ordered to Egypt via Cape Town with a mixed load of cargo and passengers. She departed on this new journey from the Welsh port of Milford Haven on the 19th April 1941.

Early the next morning, at 3:32AM German time she was hit by a torpedo from the German submarine U73. She was far out into the Atlantic, some 425 miles southwest of Rockall, and 460 miles west of the nearest dry land on the west coast of Ireland. A second torpedo 25 minutes later broke her in two and sent her to the bottom, with the ultimate loss of 66 souls from the 95 passengers and crew on board. The Canadian warship HMCS Trillium found and picked up twenty-four survivors (sixteen merchant seamen and eight servicemen who were on board to man the guns) the next day, landing them at Greenock four days later.

Another lifeboat had been filled with survivors but was destroyed when the second torpedo hit the ship and only one of the occupants survived. He was blown overboard but made it into a further lifeboat. Also sent into the water at this time was the Captain, William Willis R. D. Torkington, who was was also picked up. David Selwyn Davies, the Chief Officer, took charge of the survivors in this boat and was credited with pulling his injured captain aboard. For these few survivors, the name Endurance would be cruelly ironic, as they would spend the next nineteen days adrift in an open lifeboat in the North Atlantic Ocean.

As the senior ranking man in the boat, Davies took charge as best as he could. His board was not found – by the Royal Mail Line liner Highland Brigade – until the 9th of May. During this time twenty of those onboard had died and only eight remained alive, the last two on the day of rescue. Of the slim remainder who made it aboard the Highland Brigade, three more died aboard her including the Captain and Second Engineer. A fourth would die in hospital in Liverpool, leaving only four survivors from the boat. Including the first boat, only twenty souls survived from the eighty-five who had been onboard Empire Endurance. (Thank you to Kirby Grant for providing me with additional details and corrected numbers for the losses and survivors from the ship.)

For these efforts he would receive the MBE and the Lloyd’s Medal. “No one would have lived to be rescued but for the skill, seamanship and courage of the chief officer” reported the London Gazette.

Oskar Scharf found himself sent to Canada for internment. Because of his seniority and because he was neither a military or political man, he was put in charge of the internees in Camp R in the pleasant lakeside township of Red Rock, Ontario. This institution had around 1,100 inmates, mainly merchant and naval seamen. Some were ardent Nazis, others were Communists, many were politically apathetic and amongst their number there were 78 Jews, interned in Britain as “enemy aliens“, including 11 of school age. Scharf is credited in a number of sources as going out of his way to protect the Jews in his charge from the Nazis within his ranks. This he did for about 6 months before the authorities came to their senses and released the Jewish inmates back to Britain in January 1941.

Scharf had an awkward balancing act to maintain between those he was in charge of and his Canadian captors – with whom he was no collaborator. He found that the Nazis in the camp went out of their way to make life difficult for him, they heckled and humiliated him for refusing to give a “Sieg Heil” after official announcements. The Canadian authorities eventually decided that Scharf posed no threat and somewhat surprisingly released him in April 1944, allowing him the option to return to Germany as a civilian. This he did, departing for home on a Swedish ship in New York and taking a dangerous and convoluted journey via Algiers, Barcelona and Marseilles. He was reunited with his family after a 4 year absence but would be interrogated by the Gestapo on-and-off until the end of the war. Nevertheless, he was given back his job and rank with NDL and put back in charge of the liner Europa which was laid up in Bremerhaven as a barracks ship.

He was still in charge of her in May 1945 when first the British and then the Americans entered Bremerhaven, capturing the port and the ship. The Americans claimed her as a war prize, Scharf symbolically handing over his pistol to an American sailor. He thus found himself in the unusual position of having not one but two of his ships boarded and taken off his hands by the Allies in the war. However the Americans had need of the Europa, commissioning her into their navy as USS Europa, for use as a transport ship repatriating servicemen from Europe back home across the Atlantic. As they didn’t know how to operate her Scharf and some of his officers were allowed to remain on board to ensure the operation of the ship. They departed for Southampton, picked up the first 4,500 men for repatriation, arriving in New York on September 24th 1945 under Scharf’s command.

Europa made 3 further transatlantic repatriation trips, before being laid up in her home port of Bremerhaven in May 1946 and decommissioned by the US Navy. Later that year she was allocated to France as a war reparation, and given to the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT) line, who renamed her Liberté and refitted her for post-war service as their flagship, to replace the SS Normandie which had been lost in a wartime accident.

Scharf resigned from the NDL after the war and took up the job of port captain of Bremerhaven, helping oversee the restoration of the docks. The post-war de-Nazification process classified him as Level II (Follower), which was the 2nd lowest level and which incurred a fine – nearly worthless as it was denominated in Reichsmarks – of 18,000 Marks. He died in 1953, aged 67.

Chief Officer Selwyn Davies MBE returned home to Moreton in Cheshire, to his neat suburban house, his wife Helen and his daughter Sadie. He died at home in 1952, aged 64.

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