Avoceta
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
The Avoceta was a passenger ship of the British shipping company Yeoward Line put into service in 1923 , which carried passengers, freight and mail between Great Britain , Portugal and Spain . On September 26, 1941, the Avoceta was sunk in the North Atlantic by a German submarine . 123 people were killed.
The ship
The 3,442 GRT steel passenger and cargo ship Avoceta was built at the Caledon Shipbuilding & Engineering Company in Dundee , Scotland and was launched on September 21, 1922 with hull number 279. In January 1923 the ship was completed. The Avoceta was 97.23 meters long, 13.47 meters wide and had a maximum draft of 8.08 meters. The triple expansion steam engine , which drove a single propeller , developed 395 nominal horsepower and accelerated the steamer to 12.5 knots. She was the sister ship of the Alondra (II) (3,445 GRT), completed in 1922 .
The ship was built for the Liverpool-based shipping company Yeoward Line, founded in 1894 , which originally only imported fruit, but since 1900 has maintained regular passenger and freight traffic from Liverpool to Spain, Portugal and the Canary Islands . The names of the ships in the Yeoward Line all began with an A. The funnel was black and had a red-edged yellow stripe with the letter Y.
On Monday, August 18, 1941, the Avoceta left Liverpool under the command of Captain Harold Martin and steamed to Gibraltar as part of Convoy OG-72 . From there, she left for Lisbon on the afternoon of September 17 without escort , where she took 469 tons of cargo and 573 mail bags as well as passengers on board. The passengers were mainly the wives and children of British military personnel who had fled Nazi- occupied France and were to be evacuated to the United Kingdom.
Sinking
On the way back from Lisbon to Liverpool, the Avoceta drove in convoy HG-73, which consisted of a total of 25 ships and was accompanied by ten corvettes and destroyers as well as the CAM ship Springbank . She drove in the fifth of seven rows and had the convoy's commander, Rear Adm. Sir Kenelm Everard Lane Creighton, and five other escort men on board. In addition, 66 crew members, 88 passengers and six artillerymen from the Royal Navy were on board to defend the ship. Among the passengers were the ten survivors of the sinking of the passenger steamer Aguila , which belonged to the same shipping company and which had been sunk by U 201 four weeks earlier . A total of 166 people were on the ship.
The attack on the northbound convoy began on the night of September 24-25, 1941 in the North Atlantic north of the Azores , when U 124 under Corvette Captain Johann Mohr sank the steamer Empire Stream , which belonged to the British War Office . The following night, in line with Karl Dönitz 's pack tactics, U 203 was added, a German type VII C submarine under the command of Lieutenant Rolf Mützelburg .
At 0.31 a.m. on September 26, Mützelburg fired a volley of four torpedoes on the convoy. He heard all four detonate, but did not see which ships he had hit as he was attacked by the corvette HMS Larkspur and had to submerge. The Avoceta and the Norwegian passenger ship Varangberg had been hit by the torpedoes and sank. The Avoceta went down almost vertically in just two minutes, tail first. 43 crew members, four artillerymen and 76 passengers, a total of 123 people, were killed, including 32 women and 20 children. The oldest fatality was 73-year-old Ernest F. Andrews. The youngest victims were four toddlers under one year. The 43-year-old passenger Ida Winifred Barker died with her seven children. Also among the victims were the British clergyman Rev. Edward John Theodore Stanley, 61, and his sister Elizabeth Rebecca Frances Stanley, 58, who were returning home from missionary work in Vichy France .
Captain Martin, Rear Admiral Creighton, the five men from Escort Command, two artillerymen and twelve passengers, including two women, were picked up by the corvettes HMS Periwinkle and HMS Jasmine and brought ashore on September 30th in Milford Haven, Wales. Arthur Firth, former captain of the Aguila, was among the surviving passengers . The steamer Cervantes saved another three crew members, but was sunk by U 201 the following day . The three men from the Avoceta survived this sinking and arrived in Liverpool on the steamer Starling on October 1st.
Other submarines that attacked convoy HG-73 on its journey were U 201 , U 205 and U 371 as well as the Italian submarines Torelli , Morosini and Da Vinci . The convoy lost ten ships with a total volume of 25,818 GRT. The wreck of Avoceta located in position 47 ° 57 ' N , 24 ° 5' W .
Web links
- Entry in the ship directory Miramar Ship Index
- Technical and historical data of the Avoceta (with photo)
- The sinking of the Avoceta by U 203 in the submarine database (with photo)
- The Avoceta in a listing of the Yeoward Line ships
- Eyewitness account of the surviving third radio operator Grahame Morris (then 19 years old)