Chitral (ship)
.jpg) The identical sister ship Cathay
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The Chitral (I) was an ocean liner put into service in 1925 by the British shipping company Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O), which was used in passenger and mail traffic between Great Britain and Australia and later India . She served as an auxiliary cruiser in World War II and then again as a passenger ship . In 1953 the Chitral was scrapped in Scotland .
Passenger ship
The 15,248 GRT steamship Chitral was commissioned in October 1923 together with two identical sister ships . The Cathay (15,104 GRT) and the Comorin (15,116 GRT) were built at Barclay, Curle and Company in Glasgow and both launched on October 31, 1924. The third ship, the Chitral (15,248 GRT), was built at the Alexander Stephen and Sons shipyard in the Linthouse district of Glasgow and was launched on January 27, 1925. The sister ships were built for P & O's Royal Mail service to Australia and were intended to restore the high pre-war standard. Ultimately, however, they turned out to be too slow for this purpose.
The three ships each had two funnels, two masts and two propellers and were propelled by two four-cylinder quadruple expansion steam engines with an output of 13,000 PSi and a cruising speed of 16 knots. The ships could carry 203 passengers in first class and 103 in second class. The 166.72 meter long and 21.45 meter wide passenger and mail ship Chitral was christened by Lady Elsie Mackay . She was the youngest daughter of P&O Chairman James Mackay, 1st Earl of Inchcape. The ship was named after the town of the same name in the Hindu Kush.
On June 12, 1925, both the test drives and the takeover by the shipping company took place. On July 3, 1925, ran Chitral in London on her maiden voyage to Australia via Marseille , Suez , Aden and Colombo from. In 1930 a Wyndham heating system and low-pressure turbines from Bauer-Wach were installed, increasing the achievable speed to 17 knots. This should also optimize fuel consumption. In 1933 the Chitral towed the gunboat Sandpiper from Southampton to Shanghai so that it could be used there on the Yangtze . In 1935 the Chitral was moved to the route from England to the Far East .
War effort
On August 30, 1939, was Chitral by the British Admiralty for the service as an armed merchant cruiser requested (Armed Merchant Cruiser). The second chimney, which was just a dummy, was dismantled to make room for seven 152 mm cannons and three 102 mm cannons. The ship was put into service as an auxiliary cruiser with the registration number F57 on October 4, 1939. Ten days later the ship was in Scapa Flow when the British battleship Royal Oak was sunk by U 47 there.
On November 20, 1939, the Chitral received news from the captured German merchant ship Bertha Fisser that the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were approaching and attempting to break through the GIUK gap from the European Arctic Ocean into the North Atlantic . Three days later, the Chitral picked up some survivors of the auxiliary cruiser Rawalpindi , which had been sunk south of Iceland by the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau .
In September 1940, the Chitral made three troop trips to Reykjavík , as the garrisons there should be increased. On November 11, 1940, she was dispatched to search for survivors of the auxiliary cruiser Jervis Bay , which had been sunk six days earlier as part of convoy HX-84 by the German warship Admiral Scheer . In November 1941, the Chitral was incorporated into the East Indies Fleet and operated in the Indian Ocean until December 1943 . On April 10, 1944, she was returned to the Admiralty. At the Maryland Drydock Company in Baltimore , the Chitral was then converted into a troop transport, with a second chimney being added again. On September 14, 1944, she ran from Baltimore to New York , from where she set sail with troops for England.
After the war
On September 14, 1947, the Chitral was returned to P&O after eight years of uninterrupted military service and sold to R. & H. Green & Silly Weir Ltd. refurbished again for passenger service. The hull and chimneys were painted black as they were before the war and were not given the new, completely white paint that has become typical for P&O. The main mast was also removed. On December 30, 1948, she left for her first civilian post-war voyage with 740 emigrants on board.
In 1950, the Chitral took part in the repatriation of Dutch citizens who left Indonesia after the Indonesian War of Independence and returned to Europe. On March 22, 1953, the 28-year-old ship ran for the last time in London. On April 2, 1953, it was sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation for £ 167,500 and scrapped at WH Arnott, Young & Company in Dalmuir, Scotland.