Osmanieh
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The Osmanieh was a passenger and cargo ship put into service in 1906 , which served as a troop transport and supply ship for the Royal Navy from 1916 during the First World War . On December 31, 1917, the Osmanieh ran off Alexandria on a sea mine laid by a German submarine and sank. 199 people were killed, including crew members, soldiers and nurses.
The ship
The 4,041 GRT steamship Osmanieh was built at the Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson shipyard in Wallsend and was launched there on May 9, 1906. The 109.79 meter long and 13.77 meter wide ship had a maximum draft of 7.40 meters and was equipped with quadruple expansion steam engines that acted on two propellers and a maximum speed of 17 knots (31.5 km / h) made possible. The machines made 650 nominal horsepower.
The Osmanieh was built for the British-Egyptian shipping company Khedivial Mail Steamship & Graving Dock Co., Ltd. built with branches in London and Alexandria and designed as a combined passenger and cargo ship. This company was founded in 1898 to maintain ships and ports in the service of the Egyptian government. However, the ships sailed under the British flag and operated between Alexandria , Constantinople , Syria and other Mediterranean ports .
On May 12, 1916, the Osmanieh was hired by the Royal Navy as a Hired Transport (HT) for military service in World War I and from then on served to transport supplies of troops and supplies. The ship was named Fleet Messenger No. 61 registered and received the Admiralty No. Y4.61.
Sinking
On Monday, December 17, 1917, the Osmanieh set off under the command of 38-year-old Lieutenant Commander David Richard Mason with soldiers and medical personnel on board in Southampton for a crossing to Alexandria with a stopover in the southern Italian port city of Taranto . Taranto was reached on December 28th and Alexandria on December 31st. Before entering the port, the steamer ran amidships on the starboard side at position 31 ° 10 ′ 8 ″ N , 29 ° 48 ′ 3 ″ E into a minefield that had been destroyed a few days earlier by the German submarine UC 34 (Oberleutnant zur See Horst Obermüller ) had been laid.
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The ship went down in five to seven minutes, killing 199 people, including Commander Mason, two ship officers, 21 crew members, a Royal Navy officer, 166 other ranks and the eight nurses of Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS) Catherine Ball, Winifred Maud Brown, Gertrude Bytheway, Una Marguerite Duncanson, Nellie Hawley, Lilian Midwood, Margaret Dorothy Roberts and Hermione Angela Rogers.
The day before, the troop transport Aragon and the destroyer HMS Attack had been sunk by UC 34 with torpedoes at roughly the same point. 610 people were killed on the Aragon and 10 people on the Attack . Some of the victims of these sinkings are buried in the Alexandria Hadra War Memorial Cemetery, where name plaques also commemorate them. However, several hundred were never found.