Ocean vigor
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
The Ocean Vigor was a cargo ship of the Ocean-type . The ship gained particular fame through its use in Operation Igloo , and even more so in Operation Oasis , as part of which the passengers of the Exodus were deported to Germany .
history
Construction and war effort
The ship was built at Permanente Metals Corporation's # 1 shipyard, one of Todd-California Shipbuilding Corp.'s nine makeshift yards built in 1940 for the construction of the Ocean ships for Great Britain . Half of the 60 Ocean ships were built at Todd-California, all of these ships had names that began with "Ocean" and the second part began with the letter "V". The other 30 ships were built at Todd-Bath Iron Shipbuilding Corp. built in Portland . These ships also had names that began with "Ocean", but the second part of the name of those ships never began with "V".
The construction of the ocean ship type took little time; the construction principle of the ocean type was further improved and refined for the Liberty ships . The Ocean Vigor was launched as the thirteenth ocean ship at Todd-California or the fourteenth ocean ship ever on February 14, 1942 and was put into service the following month. The ship survived the war effort without any incidents worth mentioning.
In 1946, the cargo ship was converted into a deportation ship in order to deport illegal immigrants from Palestine to Cyprus as part of Operation Igloo . For this purpose, the ship was converted into a floating prison with strong wire fences . In 1948 the ship was sold to civilian operators and the ship was used as a cargo ship under changing owners and different names. In 1957 it was sold to Genoa , and after ten years of service in La Spezia, it was scrapped.
Deportation ship
The Ocean Vigor was used as a deportation ship from November 1946 when the passengers of the Latrun were deported to Cyprus. Further voyages in the context of Operation Igloo were in June 1947 with the passengers of the Yehuda Halevi , and in late December 1947 with the passengers of the 19th November . On April 2, 1947, the Ocean Vigor in the port of Famagusta was the target of a sabotage attack by the Palyam group Ha'Chulya , who blew a hole in the ship's hull with a self-made depth charge. However, the damage could soon be repaired.
From July 18, 1947, the Ocean Vigor was used together with the two other deportation ships Empire Rival and Runnymede Park for Operation Oasis, which made them known worldwide. Meier Schwarz was the commander during this voyage . Of the passengers on the Exodus , 1,464 people were transferred to the Ocean Vigor in Haifa , which initially went to Port-de-Bouc near Marseille . Only a few passengers left the ship there, most of them refused to disembark. The deportation ships then went on to Gibraltar , then to Hamburg . The first of the three ships, the Ocean Vigor, arrived in Hamburg on September 8th and docked around 6 a.m. - probably - at the Petersenkai at shed 29. Only some of the passengers followed the instructions given in six languages to leave the ship without resistance. The rest of the people were driven from the ship by around 300 British soldiers with rubber clubs, batons, water hoses and tear gas. The negative worldwide response that Operation Oasis sparked moved the British government to stop deporting illegal immigrants to Europe. The Ocean Vigor continued to be used for deportation trips to Cyprus. When the British mandate for Palestine ended, the MoWT sold the ship to civilian operators.
literature
- Fritz Liebreich: Britain's Naval and Political Reaction to the Illegal Immigration of Jews to Palestine, 1945-1948 . Routledge, ISBN 0-7146-5637-2
- Amnon Yonah: Missions with No Traces: Sixty Years of Israeli Underground National Security . Devora 2006, ISBN 978-1-932687-64-4
Web links
- TIME magazine dated September 1, 1947
- Todd California ocean ship data
- Data on all ocean ships
- Ocean Vigor at Wertheimer.info
- Ocean Vigor in Operation Oasis at century.guardian.co.uk
- Ocean Vigor in Operation Oasis ( Memento from February 1, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
- Image of the Ocean Vigor as a deportation ship.
- Image of the Ocean Vigor , side by side with the Exodus .
Footnotes
- ↑ http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/rz3a035//exodus194711.html ( Memento from April 20, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ http://www.palyam.org/English/Volunteers/13570555.pdf