Cap Norte (ship, 1922)
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The combined ship Cap Norte was launched on May 8, 1922 for the Hamburg Süd shipping company at the Vulkan shipyard in Hamburg . Later it drove at times under the name Sierra Salvada and most recently from 1940 to 1955 under the British flag as an Empire Trooper .
fate
Interwar years
The ship, like its sister ship Antonio Delfino , was built as part of the first newbuilding program with state funding (1921–1923) and used in the shipping company's La Plata service, which was of great importance in the transport of German ships in the years after the First World War Was emigrant to South America. The Cap Norte had space for almost 200 passengers in the first and more than 300 passengers in the third class as well as almost 1,400 emigrants in the tween deck .
The Cap Norte made her maiden voyage on September 14, 1922 from Hamburg to the Río de la Plata . By 1939 she ran a total of 58 times to Buenos Aires and back to Hamburg. The typical route was Hamburg, Boulogne , La Coruña , Lisbon , Tenerife , Pernambuco , Bahia , Rio de Janeiro , Santos , Montevideo , Buenos Aires; the typical return route was Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santos, Rio de Janeiro, Tenerife, Lisbon, Vigo , Boulogne, Hamburg. From 1932 to 1934 the ship went on a practically forced charter basis for the NDL and was named Sierra Salvada. Because of the increasing reprisals in Germany, numerous Jews also used the ship to emigrate.
World War II and post-war period
When the Second World War began on September 1, 1939, the Cap Norte was in South America. On September 16, 1939, she left Recife with final destination Hamburg. After she had put her passengers ashore in Lisbon, she tried, disguised as the Swedish ship Ancona , to break through the British naval blockade to Germany. It was applied on October 9, 1939 between Iceland and the Faroe Islands by the light cruiser HMS Belfast and escorted to Scapa Flow . In June 1940, the ship was assigned to the Ministry of War Transport (MoWT), converted into a troop transport , assigned to the British India Line for ship management and put into service under the new name Empire Trooper .
On the morning of December 25, 1940, the Empire Trooper , part of the convoy WS-5A , which consisted of ten troop carriers and twelve transport ships, was supposed to bring 13,800 men and material for British and New Zealand tank units to Suez, north of the Azores from the German heavy Cruiser Admiral Hipper shot at and damaged. The Admiral Hipper broke off her attack on the convoy, which was heavily secured by the Royal Navy , and the Empire Trooper escaped to Ponta Delgada in the Azores, where she was makeshift repairs. After complete repairs, it continued to serve as a troop transport.
After a modernization carried out in Falmouth in 1949/50 , with space for 336 cabin passengers and 924 troops, it transported troops and their families within the British Commonwealth until 1955 . On April 9, 1955, coming from Hong Kong , she moored after her last troop voyage in Southampton , where she was then put up and advertised for sale.
In the same month it was sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation (BISCO) for scrapping and in May it was transferred to the scrapping yard of Thomas W. Ward Shipbreakers Ltd. in Inverkeithing on the north bank of the Firth of Forth in Scotland . There the ship caught fire and went aground, but was lifted on June 19, 1955 and then finally scrapped.
Footnotes
- ^ Nautical Gazette, June 10, 1922, p. 727
- ↑ The Antonio Delfino had space for 184 in the first and 334 in the third class /
- ↑ https://www.hebrewsurnames.com/ships_CAP.%20NORTE
- ^ Hamburg-Süd, at maritime timetable images
- ↑ Reinhardt Schmelzkopf: The German Merchant Shipping 1919-1939. Stalling, Oldenburg, 1974, ISBN 3-7979-1847-X , pp. 132ff; Arnold Kludas : The ships of Hamburg-Süd 1871 to 1951 . Stalling, Oldenburg, 1976, ISBN 3-7979-1875-5 , pp. 10, 88f, 109ff., 116ff.
- ↑ Sibylle Krause-Burger: Greetings from Mr. Wolle: History of my German-Jewish family. DVA, Munich, 2009, ISBN 3-4427-3953-5 , p. 12