Amiral Ganteaume
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The Amiral Ganteaume was a steamship put into service in 1902 , which was initially used as a freighter under the British flag, but from 1904 as a passenger ship and from 1913 was used as a ferry on the English Channel by the French shipping company Chargeurs Réunis .
On October 26, 1914, the ship was torpedoed and damaged by a German submarine off Cap Gris-Nez on the French Channel coast . It was the first time that a passenger ship (which was used as an auxiliary warship) was attacked by a German submarine without warning during the First World War . The Amiral Ganteaume did not sink and could be towed, but 40 passengers were killed in the attack, which sparked heavy anti-German criticism in the press. The Amiral Ganteaume was repaired and scrapped in Italy in 1934 .
The ship
The 4,590 GRT steamship was built as Orient Point at the shipyard C. Napier & Miller Ltd. built in Glasgow for the Liverpool-based shipping company Norfolk & North American Steam Shipping Company (Simpson, Spence & Young), founded in 1893 and operating trade between Liverpool and Philadelphia . She had an identical sister ship , the South Point (4,604 GRT, 1902) , also built by C. Napier & Miller . The 122.10 meter long and 15.24 meter wide Orient Point had a funnel, two masts and a propeller and was powered by a two-cylinder triple expansion steam engine that could accelerate the ship to 10.5 knots.
The Orient Point was launched on August 7, 1902 and was put into service in the same year. In 1904 she was sold together with her sister ship to the British Allan Line , which she renamed Hibernian (II) and Hungarian (II) and used in passenger service . In 1913 both ships were sold again, this time to the French shipping company Chargeurs Réunis based in Le Havre . The Orient Point was renamed Amiral Ganteaume (after Honoré Ganteaume ) and the South Point was renamed Amiral Charner (after Léonard Victor Charner ).
On September 1, 1914, the Amiral Ganteaume was requisitioned by the French government for military service. She then took part in the transport of troops for the Battle of the Marne . On 5th / 6th October 1914 brought the 87th Territorial Division from Le Havre to Dunkirk and on 10/11. October 1914 the 89th Territorial Division from Cherbourg to Dunkirk.
Submarine attack
On Monday, October 26, 1914, the Amiral Ganteaume was on a crossing from Calais to Le Havre. It had 2,500 Belgian civilians on board, including many women and children. About twelve nautical miles from Cap Gris-Nez , the steamer was torpedoed by the German submarine U 17 (Kapitänleutnant Johannes Feldkirchner) around 4.30 p.m.
The nearby British canal ferry Queen (1,676 GRT, 1903) of the South Eastern and Chatham Railway Company (Captain Robert Carey) saw smoke rise and came to the aid of the Amiral Ganteaume that had been hit . Eyewitnesses on board the Queen later described that there was great panic aboard the Amiral Ganteaume and that passengers jumped overboard or were pushed. Others, frightened, climbed into the rigging . Captain Carey brought his ship parallel to the Amiral Ganteaume and began taking in survivors. A total of 40 passengers and crew were killed in the attack; many directly from the explosion, others drowned after jumping off the ship.
The Queen then set course for England and arrived at around 7 p.m. with the survivors on board in the port city of Folkestone , where the injured were first brought to the Pavilion Hotel and later to Folkestone Hospital and the uninjured were put on a train to London .
The Amiral Ganteaume remained buoyant and made it to Boulogne . She was then towed to Bordeaux for inspections and repairs , where she arrived on October 27th.
Aftermath
At first it was believed that the Amiral Ganteaume had run into a sea mine . The German government denied having torpedoed the ship. Only when a piece of a torpedo with German lettering was found in one of the lifeboats did the torpedoing by U 17 come to light (some sources incorrectly state that U 24 torpedoed the Amiral Ganteaume ).
Newspapers described the attack without warning as "murder" and pilloried the empire . During the official investigation into the incident in Paris , the surviving captain of the Amiral Ganteaume described that the torpedo had struck on the starboard side between the engine room and the coal bunker and had created a column of water up to 45 meters high.
The Amiral Ganteaume was repaired and finally released from military service on January 19, 1918. From April 1919 it was used in passenger traffic from Le Havre to Haiphong (Vietnam) until it was sold to Italy for demolition in January 1934. It left Le Havre for the last time on February 3, 1934 and, after a stopover in Cardiff, arrived in Savona on March 14, 1934 , where it was subsequently scrapped .
See also
- Sussex , British Channel Ferry, torpedoed and damaged in the English Channel in 1916 (50 dead)
literature
- Tad Fitch and Michael Poirier. Into the Danger Zone. Sea Crossings of the First World War . The History Press (Gloucestershire), 2014
Web links
- Entry in the submarine database
- Entry in the database of ships built on the Clyde in Scotland
- Report by eyewitness Thomas McClune on board the Queen
- Key data on the operational history of the Amiral Ganteaume (French)
- History of the ferry Queen including her participation in the rescue of the passengers of the Amiral Ganteaume