U-Boat Sinks Liner

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 157, 4 July 1940, Page 7

U-Boat Sinks Liner

With Internees

NAZIS AND ITALIANS

Hundreds Drowned In Panic On Arandora Star

RACIAL HATE REVEALED

(United Press Association.—Copyright.— Itec. 11.30 a.m.) LONDON, July 3. A thousand scantily-clad survivors of the Blue Star liner Arandora Star (15,305 tons), which was torpedoed by a U-boat when carrying 1500 German and Italian internees to Canada, were landed at a Scottish port.

British soldiers who were on board, guarding the internees on the ship, went down with many of the Germans and Italians, after panic conditions seriously hampered the launching of lifeboats.

Two soldiers said the ship was struck without warning "We cursed the U-boat," they said, "but the Germans and Italians cursed it more. They were almost ferocious in their denunciation of this type of warfare. Such was the scramble that we had no opportunity of getting into the lifeboats." Many Dead Among Wreckage. The water was strewn with wreckage and bodies. The captain and several of the ship's officers were seen standing on the bridge and decks. Several of them are feared to have been lost. A British ship picked up many of the survivors. The soldiers bittSrly criticised the conduct of the German prisoners, who were "big hulking brutes, who tried to sweep the Italians aside, and had to be forcibly restrained. Bitter hostility between the Germans and Italians developed, both on the liner and on the rescue ship." The troops had to be constantly on guard to prevent fights. No estimate is available of the casualties, but the Italians, who were mostly tradesmen in the United Kingdom, were apparently the worst sufferers. The Arandora Star was torpedoed off the west coast of Ireland, says a British official wireless- message. The attack was made in full daylight, in the early hours of the morning. It is not known whether, in addition to the British ship which brought the survivors to a west coast Scottish port, any other ships in the vicinity at the time rescued any internees or members of the crtw. The Blue Star liner Arandora Star was one of Britain's most luxurious uhe ships. Completed in 1927, as a passenger ship carrying first-class and general cargo from London to the River Plate and returning with passengers and refrigerated cargo, the Arandora Star is one of the few ships of the present time cruising which were specifically designed or converted for that purpose. It carried no third-class passengers and was aptly described as a luxury cruise yacht, after its reconstruction, when cargo facilities gave way to further room and comforts for passengers. It had a tonnage of 14,694 and Iβ knots speed.