Matunga (ship)
_vor_Neuguinea,_August_1917.jpg) The Matunga , August 1917
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The Matunga (ex Zweena ) was an Australian combi ship , which in the First World War was used by the Australian government as a provider and troop transport. The ship was brought up on August 6, 1917 by the auxiliary cruiser Wolf off German New Guinea and sunk on August 26. The Matunga was apparently named after the eponymous district of Bombay .
history
The Zweena was delivered in May 1900 by the Napier & Miller shipyard in the Glasgow district of Yoker to the client, the Liverpool shipping company Mersey Steam Shipping, and entered in the register of the home port of Liverpool on May 31. The ship management was carried out by the Liverpool cotton trading company Leech, Harrison & Forwood. The combined passenger and cargo steamer was apparently used in the Morocco - Madeira area . In 1909 the shipping company Burns, Philp & Company from Sydney took over the ship and renamed it Matunga . From 1910 the Matunga ran in traffic between Australia and the Solomon Islands . Since 1912, unusual for this era and its small size, it had a radio telegraph system .
Since the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 was Matunga as a civilian provider of garrison of Rabaul in the German colony of New Guinea used, which had been occupied in September 1914 by Australian troops. The journeys from Australia to Rabaul and back to Australia usually lasted six weeks, during which she transported supplies and reliefs from the Australian Army. On the way back, she mainly transported copra from the New Guinea plantations .
On July 27, 1917, the Matunga left Sydney under Captain Alec Donaldson and First Officer William McBride, without having been warned by Australian government agencies or the shipping company about the possible presence of a German auxiliary cruiser in the waters there. The July 6, 1917. Gabo Iceland by a sea mine of the Wolf struck and soon stranded Cumberland was after the official presentation by an internal explosion, possibly caused by saboteurs , declined. The British-Australian press made it a. a. Members of the anarchist union Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
The wolf learned of the journey and the cargo of the Matunga through intercepted radio traffic. She would then arrive in Rabaul on August 8, 1917, from Brisbane , Queensland . Thereupon the commander of the Wolf , frigate captain Karl August Nerger , decided to intercept the Matunga at the entrance of Sankt-Georgs-Straße because the auxiliary cruiser urgently needed coal. In fact, as predicted by Nerger , the Matunga appeared in front of the passage on the morning of 6 August and was stopped by a shot in front of the bow.
The ship was manned by a prize squad under Leutnant zur See of the Reserve Karl Rose. There were around 800 tons of coal on board, destined for the yacht Una , the former German station yacht Komet , which was now used by the Australian occupation forces. In addition to the valuable coal cargo, the Matunga carried the entire monthly supply of alcohol, including hundreds of crates of beer, wine and whiskey, for the Rabaul garrison. There were also 3.5 tons of frozen meat, as well as cigarettes and tobacco, cookies and chocolate, vegetables and fruit, books and newspapers. Among the passengers were u. a. the new governor for the occupied colony, Colonel Cecil Lucius Strangman and two majors , a captain , a medical officer and 10 soldiers of the Australian occupation corps in New Guinea, so-called khakiboys . Strangman's predecessor had malaria and was already in Australia.
When the Matunga did not arrive in Rabaul despite the best weather conditions, the radio telegraphic search began through fixed stations and units of the Royal Navy , the Australian and Japanese Navy . In particular, the authorities in Rabaul requested exact weather information for the past week. Ultimately, the whereabouts of the Matunga remained a mystery until February 1918, especially since no wreckage , lifeboats or cargo remains had been found. The Australian authorities and the press therefore did not rule out a seaquake as the cause of the sinking.
Since the extensive cargo of the Matunga could not be taken over by the Wolf on the high seas, both ships headed for Offakhafen on the island of Waigiu northwest of New Guinea, which belongs to the Dutch East Indies . On the way, the Matunga dragged a target for the Wolf's artillery exercises . The ships arrived in Offakhafen on August 14th. By August 25, the Matunga was unloaded and three horses on board were slaughtered. In addition, the Wolf crew used their stay for shore leave and barter with the islanders.
On August 26, 1917, the Matunga was sunk ten nautical miles north of Waigeo by detonators . The Australian authorities and family members of the prisoners did not find out that the steamer had been brought up by a marine casualty but as a pinch only after the Wolf had returned to Kiel in February 1918. Captain Donaldson, who was most recently a prisoner of war in the Clausthal officers' camp in the Harz Mountains , published his travel memories in 1941 under the title The Amazing Cruise of the German Raider "Wolf" (Sydney, New Century Press). Donaldson was released from captivity in mid-December 1918 and traveled to London via Warnemünde and Copenhagen , from where he returned to Australia on board the troop transport Barambah (ex Hobart of the German-Australian Steamship Company , a sister ship of the Canstatt ).
literature
- Frigate Captain Nerger: SMS Wolf , Berlin (August Scherl GmbH) 1918.
- Fritz Witschetzky : The Black Ship , Stuttgart 1926.
- Richard Guilliatt / Peter Hohnen: The WOLF. How One German Raider Terrorized the Allies in the Most Epic Voyage of WWI , New York u. a. (Free Press) 2010. ISBN 978-1-4165-7317-3
- Alec Donaldson: The Amazing Cruise of the German Raider "Wolf" , Sydney (New Century Press) 1941.
Web links
Footnotes
- ↑ Data from the Zweena according to the Miramar Ship Index viewed on March 3, 2019.