🇪🇬 SS Thistlegorm

The ship

Built by J. L. Thompson and Sons at Sunderland, yard number 599, launched 9 April 1940 and completed that June: 4 898 gross tons, 126 m long, a triple-expansion steam engine, owned by the Albyn Line. She was armed — a 4.7-inch gun and a heavy machine gun on the stern — which made her an armed merchantman rather than a pure freighter, and put five DEMS gunners aboard alongside her crew of forty-one.

The cargo

She left Glasgow on 2 June 1941 for Alexandria with supplies for the Eighth Army in North Africa. The Mediterranean was shut, so she went the long way — round the Cape, up the east coast of Africa, into the Red Sea. In her holds were Bedford trucks, Universal Carriers, Norton 16H and BSA motorcycles, Bren guns, .303 rifles, radio equipment, aircraft spares (Lysander wings, Blenheim tailplanes, Bristol Mercury engines) and crates upon crates of Wellington boots. Chained to the deck were two LMS Stanier Class 8F steam locomotives with their tenders and water carriers.

The sinking

The Suez Canal was blocked by a bombed ship, so a convoy of vessels sat waiting at Safe Anchorage F off Ras Muhammad. At 01:30 on 6 October 1941 two Heinkel He 111s of II./KG 26, flying from Crete and hunting for a troopship they had been told was in the area, found the anchorage instead. Two 2 500 kg bombs went into hold 4, where the ammunition was. The explosion tore the stern open, threw one of the locomotives clear of the ship, and sank her in minutes. Nine men died — four sailors and five gunners.

Captain William Ellis was appointed OBE for what he did afterwards. Able Seaman Angus McLeay got the George Medal and Lloyd's War Medal for Bravery at Sea for going back for shipmates.

The wreck

Jacques Cousteau found her in the early 1950s, took a motorcycle, the captain's safe and the ship's bell, and published the dive in National Geographic in February 1956 — and then said nothing about where she was. She was lost again until the early 1990s, when the dive boat Poolster was led to her on information from an Israeli fishing skipper.

She lies upright in about 30 m, and because the explosion removed most of the midships superstructure the holds are wide open. The cargo is the dive: rows of trucks with motorcycles stacked on top of them, boots, rifles, the two locomotives thrown off to either side of the hull.

She is not doing well. In 2007 HEPCA put in 32 mooring buoys and drilled the hull to release trapped air; by 2009 every mooring had been lost to an inadequate design, and boats went back to tying directly to the wreck. Between that and eighty-five years of rust, sections are collapsing. The Times put her in the world's top ten wreck dives in 2007. She may not be diveable in the form Dennis saw her for very much longer.

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Image: Thistlegorm train parts minus red edit.jpg — Woodym555, edited by Fir0002, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.