City of New York (ship, 1930)
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The City of New York was put into service in 1930 as the first passenger ship of the US shipping company Farrell Lines . She was sunk by a German submarine on March 29, 1942 off Cape Hatteras , killing 26 passengers and crew members. She was the largest ship that Farrell Lines lost in World War II .
The ship
In 1925, the American entrepreneur and President of US Steel , James A. Farrell, founded the American South African Line (ASAL) to carry passengers and cargo from New York to South and West Africa . The City of New York was commissioned as the shipping company's first ship , which was built at the Sun Shipbuilding yard in Chester , Pennsylvania .
The 7,282 RT motor ship was launched on October 29, 1929 and was completed in January 1930. In February 1930 she left for her maiden voyage . The passenger and cargo ship was 143.6 meters long, 18.8 meters wide and had a draft of 7.3 meters. The City of New York was powered by two eight-cylinder diesel engines that developed 1,380 nominal horsepower and could accelerate the ship to 14 knots. In the following years, even after the outbreak of war, the City of New York operated regular services from New York to Africa.
Sinking
On Sunday, March 29, 1942 (it was Palm Sunday ) the City of New York , sailing without an escort, was under the command of Captain George T. Sullivan on a crossing from Lourenço Marques (now Maputo , Mozambique) via Cape Town , Port of Spain on Trinidad and Tobago to New York. She had 83 crew members, nine gunners and 41 passengers on board, including some women and children (133 people in total). In addition, 6,612 tons of ore , wood, wool, hides and asbestos were on board. On the evening of March 29, the ship was attacked about 40 nautical miles east of Cape Hatteras by the German submarine U 160 (Kapitänleutnant Georg Lassen ). The City of New York was traveling at full speed of 14 knots and battling waves about six meters high. Lassen had a G7a torpedo fired, which hit compartment No. 3 on the port side directly under the bridge at 19:36 after 29 seconds .
The gunners fired at the submarine from the poop deck and fired twelve rounds from four-inch cannons at the periscope of the U 160 . The submarine then drove around the stern of the City of New York and fired a catch into the starboard side. 20 minutes later the ship sank at position 35.16N / 74.25W. Most of the passengers and crew left the ship in four lifeboats. The gunners jumped overboard when the water reached them. The following day, a PBY "Catalina" reconnaissance aircraft searched the area for survivors, but found no one.
36 hours after the sinking, the US destroyer USS Roper picked up 70 survivors and the tug Acushnet 29 survivors from three lifeboats that were being brought to the Navy base in Norfolk , Virginia. The fourth boat was lost. On April 11, 13 days after the sinking, it was found by a US Army fighter-bomber . Of the original 20 inmates, nine had died in the meantime, including two women. The 11 survivors and two of the dead were brought to Lewes by a Coast Guard ship .
The "Lifeboat Baby"
A total of 16 crew members, a gunner and nine civilian passengers were killed in the sinking of the City of New York , including women and children. Among the survivors was Desanka Mohorovicic, the 28-year-old wife of an attaché of the Yugoslav consulate stationed in New York . She was traveling with her daughter Vesna and was heavily pregnant with her second child. The mother and daughter ended up in one of the lifeboats, where labor began while waiting for rescue . The ship's doctor , Dr. Leonard Hudson Conly from Brooklyn was luckily in the same boat and was able to give birth to the child despite meter-high waves in the middle of the Atlantic and without anesthesia (and even though he himself had two broken ribs after the evacuation).
It was a boy whom his mother named Jesse Roper Mohorovicic after the rescue ship USS Roper was named after him. The circumstances of the child's birth and baptism at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York made headlines. Desanka Mohorovicic was described as "Lifeboat Mother" and the child as "Lifeboat Baby", "Son of the Sea" and "The boy who Hitler couldn't get".