WARTIME RAILWAYS
Torpedoed!
Four S160 Class locos were lost at sea in April 1943, while crossing the Atlantic to Britain as part of the war effort. Paul Bickerdyke tells the tale, and presents a first-hand account of the sinking from the captain of the cargo vessel torpedoed by a German submarine.
A still from the Strand Film Company’s ‘Passage to Freedom’ in 1943, a film showing how the Norwegian Merchant Navy was mobilised for the war effort. The picture shows an S160 Class loco being shipped across the Atlantic from the USA.
THE official notification simply said: “The MV Pacific Grove, notified on April 5 as bound for Glasgow, will not now arrive.” That simple statement disguised the fact that the 7117 ton cargo ship had been sunk on April 12, 1943 while roughly halfway through an Atlantic crossing from the USA to Britain.
The vessel – ironically built by Deutsche Werke, Keil, in 1928 – had been hit by a torpedo launched by the German submarine No. U-563 (see also footnote on page 36).
If it happened today, the news of such a vessel sinking would make headlines around the world. The fact that it did not only illustrates the tragedy of conflict, with the acceptance that such horrors had become commonplace during the Second World War.
The official logo for the 80th anniversary celebrations of Victory in Europe Day on May 8.
CROWN COPYRIGHT
Ten crew members and one gunner were recorded as lost, but Captain E R Pritchard, 38 crew members, one gunner and 16 passengers were picked up by HMS Azalea travelling in the same convoy and landed at Gourock.
Part of the cargo had been four United States Army Transportation Corps (USATC) 2-8-0 locomotives bound for Britain and eventual use on the Continent following the D-Day landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944. Some 2120 of these locos, now known as S160 Class (but without any official evidence of such designation, and given different classifications in other countries), were built in the USA by three manufacturers: American Locomotive Company (755 locos), Baldwin Locomotive Works (712), and Lima Locomotive Works (653). Eight hundred of these were shipped to Britain for commissioning and to help bolster the fleets of the ‘Big Four’ railway companies until required on the Continent. Those lost on the MV Pacific Grove were believed to include Nos. 2087 and 2909, which were built by ALC.