WARTIME PERILS

New Zealand Herald, Volume 79, Issue 24178, 21 January 1942, Page 8

WARTIME PERILS

SEAMAN'S . ADVENTURES PRISONER ON A RAIDER A full share of wartime adventure has fallen to the lot of an Australian seaman, Mr. Louis Solomon, who is visiting Auckland. He saw the sinking of the German pocket-battleship Graf Spee, and later was on a British ship captured by a German raider, spending dreary months as a prisoner on the raider and later in an Italian prison camp, in Mogadiscio, Somaliland, before being released by British troops. On his subsement return to England, he found he wd been reported "provisionally" killed. In May, 1940, Mr. Solomon was on a ship captured by the German raider Atlantis 11., south-west of Madagascar. He was gun-layer on the British vessel, and managed to fire two rounds before the German set the ship on fire. He learned hater that one of the two shots had killed two Germans and wounded three others. ' "I was in a lifeboat which the Germans peppered with machine-gun fire," he said. "Two of our men were wounded. •We were taken aboard the German, and closely questioned. We remained on her for two months, during which she sank several other ships, before we were transferred to a Yugoslav vessel that the Germans took as a prize. On the raider the ration of drinking water for 24 hours for each man was three-quarters of a cup." After 28 days on the Yugoslav ship, on which the Germans put a prize crew, the vessel ran aground a little north of Mogadiscio. The Italian garrison mistook her for the advance guard of a British invading force, and promptly called up reinforcements. The hungry prisoners, who got ashore in the boats, were in no state to offer resistance to the Italians, but were taken back to Mogadiscio in troop-carriers, and proudly displayed publicly _by the Italians as "captured British invaders." British forces released them on February 25 last year, and they were taken by warship to Mombasa and thence tc England.