Category: Sea Stories

When the ignorance of British Seamen saved lives

WORLD WAR II FOCUS: In 1940 An Austrian Jewish publisher named Goldschmidt retreated to England.  Alas, it was a frying pan into the fire.  This legitimate citizen of Hitler’s Germany in England was considered an alien and promptly arrested.  Perhaps he could be forgiven for wishing he had remained in Austria where Jewish publishers were in truth not persecuted. 

U-Boat Commander Extraordinary

Exactly one month after Britain’s declaration of war on the German Reich (September 3, 1939) a U-boot skipper’s audacious opportunism sent the first of five of Britain’s battleships and battlecruisers to the bottom of Scapa Flow. Situated on Scotland’s stormy west coast this fortress harbour served as an English lair from which Royal Navy ships ambushed German shipping navigating the North Sea.

The Fate of a Passenger liner seized as a prize of war by the Soviets

After the defeat of the Workers Reich on May 8, 1945, the armies of the British, Soviet and American empires plundered everything they could lay their hands on. Soviet plunder of the defeated Reich included the seizing of the German-built transatlantic liner SS Berlin III. This super liner, after providing German workers with affordable Mediterranean cruises, in July 1939 was converted into a hospital ship and later evacuated thousands of troops and civilians fleeing the rapacious Red Army.