This two-part article was written by Stuart Gill and was first published in the Bulletin of the Liverpool Maritime Society in June and September 2025.
Part I
Sunday, 18th January 1942, Liverpool docks. A group of men, all dressed in tropical civilian clothes, have just disembarked from SS Awatea, a ship requisitioned by the Royal Navy in 1939 as a troopship. The air is cold, sleet and snow threaten to fall from a grey sky, and the men are shivering and wondering where to go. The Awatea, their third ship in eight weeks, has brought them home after an ordeal none of them will ever forget. Among them is twenty-year-old Able Seaman Albert Cooke of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, a Liverpool lad, and finally close to home.
Another twenty-year-old, my father, Royal Marine William (Bill) Gill, stood on the Liverpool dockside a troubled young man. Along with Albert and the others gathered on the dock, he had left behind some four hundred shipmates who had perished in a torpedo attack, and he had endured an appalling ordeal adrift in the South Atlantic in the days that followed. When the torpedoes had hit, Bill and Albert had scrambled off the light cruiser, HMS Dunedin, into the water and onto separate Carley rafts. Within minutes, Bill was crammed on the raft with twenty other men, most of whom would be lost by the time he was rescued four days later.
As Bill stood on Liverpool docks, the memories were still fresh and the faces of the men he had seen perish swirled round his mind. In the freezing breeze, cursing his lack of a coat, he snapped his mind shut, gave his head a slight shake, and walked along the docks to find his train on the last leg of a long journey that had begun the previous April at Plymouth where he had joined HMS Dunedin. Albert headed towards the city and home.
—
Designed for the First World War, Dunedin, had been built too late to play any part in it. Launched in 1919, she was a 4,850 ton ‘D’ Class light cruiser with six six-inch guns and had spent much of the inter-war years attached to the Royal Navy of New Zealand, flying the flag for the British Empire in grand tours of the South Pacific, island-hopping and generally having a good time.
By 1938, as another war looked increasingly inevitable, Dunedin found herself back in the British fleet to get ready for the coming conflict. Her first task, once war had been declared the following year, was to join the Northern Patrol based at Scapa Flow as part of the 12th Cruiser Squadron. In often hostile weather, in rough seas and freezing temperatures, the Navy’s task was to control the exits from the North Sea and enforce a blockade against ships – not just German – trying to reach German ports or breaking out into the Atlantic. It was a hard and gruelling role for Dunedin in the bleak winter of the North Sea, the North Atlantic and close to the Arctic Circle, but she proved herself adept at intercepting and boarding merchant ships and dropped depth charges on a suspected U-boat.
Dunedin would develop a reputation as a hardened war-horse. Nothing glamorous, nothing state-of-the-art, but she was a ship the Admiralty could rely on to be dogged in her pursuit of enemy surface ships wherever she was sent. And next she was asked to do the same job as she had done on the Northern Patrol, but in the warmer waters of the Caribbean, where she bagged two significant German merchant prizes, the Heidelberg and the Hannover. Both ships were attempting to break out into the Atlantic back to Germany and both were intercepted by Dunedin.
In March 1940, Dunedin found Heidelberg and fired three shots across her bows to encourage her to stop but Heidelberg’s captain had ordered the crew to scuttle the ship rather than allow it to be captured. As the crew took to the lifeboats, Heidelberg was in flames and starting to sink (see next photo). Dunedin was left with no choice but to pick up the prisoners and finish off the stricken merchantman with her six-inch guns.
A few days later, Dunedin went one better in an Anglo-Canadian operation and captured the Hannover, a 5,600-ton merchant ship on her way back to Germany. Her Captain tried to scuttle her but Captain Lambe, in Dunedin, was quick to despatch a boarding party. Once on board they could see that the Germans had opened several valves and set off some fires. In a sinking ship, Dunedin’s courageous boarding party closed off the valves and put out some of the fires.
Dunedin and the Canadian destroyer Assinnboine towed the heavily listing, and still smouldering, Hannover to Kingson, Jamaica (see next photo). This excellent prize was later converted to the Royal Navy’s first escort aircraft carrier, Audacity.
When Dunedin returned to Britain in the autumn of 1940, she was again tasked with chasing down surface ships, including those controlled by the French Vichy Government. She had several more successes and, in the early spring of 1941, she was berthed at Plymouth for maintenance and repairs, where my father found her on his first deployment to a warship. Only nineteen years old, he joined a crowded and bustling ship. By now showing her age, Dunedin was again put to work patrolling the Atlantic in search of enemy surface vessels.
My father’s first departure from Britain in one of His Majesty’s ships turned out to be Dunedin’s last. It would end in tragedy, but not before Dunedin had become involved in one of the war’s greatest secrets – the breaking of the Germans’ Enigma code.
In her last eight months of life, many of Dunedin’s movements were determined by what the Admiralty knew about the activities of German U-boats and surface ships, most notably in June and November 1941.
The great secret of Bletchley Park is, of course, well known to us all now. There are books, films, documentaries and the museum at Bletchley Park itself, to tell the incredible stories that brought the Allies so much success. It is worth pointing out, nevertheless, that it was not always straightforward. In a wartime situation, intelligence is at its most useful the quicker it can be gathered and then deployed. At times, the Admiralty was reading German messages virtually at the same time as the German High Command. This was the case in June 1941, but less so in November.
In June, the quality of the intelligence was so high that the Navy’s success had begun to worry Churchill that the Germans might start to wonder whether their Enigma code had been compromised. The Admiralty had learned – through Enigma material – the whereabouts of German supply ships in the aftermath of the sinking of the Bismarck at the end of May. One by one, the Navy picked them off, and even when they were ordered to leave one of the ships alone for fear of giving the game away, HMS Marsdale came across it by chance and sunk it.
By the second week of June, only one of the fleet of supply ships was left afloat, SS Lothringen, a former Dutch tanker now on a mission to re-supply a group of U-boats. And the Admiralty knew where she was heading.
In tandem with Swordfish aircraft from the carrier HMS Eagle, Dunedin was ordered to go in search of Lothringen. It is fascinating to read the Bletchley Park decrypts, which show clearly that the Admiralty’s intelligence was first class. By the 14th of June, not only did the Admiralty know the positions at which named U-boats were being asked to rendezvous with Lothringen, they knew the deadlines they had been given. In short, four U-boats were to hook up with Lothringen: U-103 and U-107 on the 17th, and U-69 and UA the day after, to take on supplies and eight torpedoes each. The job of Dunedin and Eagle’s Swordfish was to get to Lothringen first. Operation Salvage, as it was called, was on.
Having been re-fuelled herself the day before, Dunedin carried on her sweeps of the ocean all day on Saturday and into Sunday morning with Eagle. And then, just before 1.00 pm on Sunday the 15th, one of Eagle’s Swordfish, piloted by William Hughes, spotted Lothringen and signalled to her to stop. When Lothringen’s captain failed to respond, the Swordfish opened fire ahead of the ship only to be hit herself with return fire, fortunately with no real damage. Hughes then circled for an attack, scoring two direct hits with two 250-pound bombs and following up with machine gun fire. Within minutes, Lothringen began to list and circle, her mission effectively over.
Dunedin now raced to the scene with the intention of capturing the tanker before she sank. A second Swordfish could see that Lothringen was flying white flags and that some of the crew were trying to lower a motor boat. Pilot Charles Camidge opened fire to prevent anyone abandoning ship, in the hope of preventing it being scuttled. The boat dropped into the sea with only one man on board and no one else attempted to flea.
By 5.00 pm, Dunedin had arrived at the scene and was circling Lothringen. Captain Lovatt hoisted the international signal, ‘Stop. Do not lower boats. Do not use radio. Do not scuttle. If you disobey, I open fire.’ He also dropped two depth charges in case any U-boats had already arrived. Then he sent over a boarding party, led by Lieutenant-Commander Sowdon.
The three following photos were taken from Swordfish aircraft. The first shows Dunedin circling Lothringen. You can see Dunedin’s cutter between the two ships. The second and third photos show Lothringen with her motorboat alongside after it was prevented from leaving with crew members aboard.
Sowdon found the Germans, including some in military uniforms, lined up on deck. On the bridge, he found a very grumpy and tight-lipped captain. Below decks, Lieutenant-Commander Hughes had discovered six explosive charges spread around the ship ready for a scuttling operation. While none had been set to go off, they would have to be removed safely – no easy task in the dark of a listing and unstable tanker. Hughes and his team worked carefully to remove the charges, but not without a few scares. One fuse went off and had to be cut, other charges came with extra equipment attached, which could have been clockwork fuses. In the end, all the charges were rendered safe or thrown overboard.
Elsewhere, Telegraphist Percy Jackson was searching the wireless office. All the equipment had been smashed and Lothringen’s wireless officer told Percy that he had destroyed all the secret papers. Percy left the office, taking the wireless operator with him, and reported that he could find very few papers of any intelligence value. However, he returned to the wireless office later, without the German wireless operator, wondering whether he could have missed something. He looked again at the wreckage and shambles caused by the wireless operator taking a sledgehammer to the equipment and there – behind the demolished radio-gramophone – he found the W/T cypher log in plain language. In it would be all the ship’s movements which could be matched with ciphered versions of the signals he had found earlier. Naturally, Percy knew nothing of Bletchley Park, but this material would eventually find its way back there as one more small part of the continued unmasking of Enigma.
Meanwhile, Bletchley Park was still producing incredible results, decrypting German messages at top speed. The four U-boats destined for Lothringen had been given slightly altered coordinates for the rendezvous, but the plan to re-supply all four U-boats – on the 17th and 18th of June – was still in place. Bletchley Park had seen no German messages specifically warning the U-boats of any danger to Lothringen or any major change of plan. By the evening of Monday 16th June, Bletchley Park had concluded that the Germans did not know that Lothringen had been captured.
“Would it be possible,” asked Bletchley Park of the Admiralty, “for Lothringen to be at the rendezvous after all, with prize crew, in readiness to meet U-boats?”
Bletchley Park acknowledged that “this might entail the risk of compromising the source of our information, but otherwise we can see no objection to this plan. But it may be impractical for reasons not appreciated by us”.
Even after Bletchley Park had made this incredible suggestion, yet another German message was decrypted confirming that the German High Command still did not know that Lothringen had been captured.
For the time being, the documentary evidence in the archives has run dry, so we do not know the nature of any discussion the Admiralty might have had about this astonishing idea. We do know, however, that the plan was rejected. No ambush was set and Lothringen was sent with a prize crew to Bermuda. I strongly suspect that the risk of compromising the Enigma secret was the main reason for turning down Bletchley Park’s suggestion, so we are left only to imagine how such an operation would have been staged. Just think of the tension on board the tanker as the British prize crew waited anxiously for a U-Boat to surface. One for the movie makers perhaps.
As well as severely denting the German High Command’s ability to service its U-boats and surface ships at sea (four U-boats were forced to return early to their home port), the capture of Lothringen brought the Admiralty a 10,746-ton prize asset in itself.
Originally the Dutch SS Papendrecht, she had been launched in April 1940 and commandeered a year later by the German Navy. Re-named Lothringen she served as a supply ship for Bismarck, as we have seen, and (until Dunedin caught her), Bismarck’s sister ship Prinz Eugen. After Dunedin’s prize crew had taken her to Bermuda, Lothringen was crewed by the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) and renamed Empire Salvage. An examination of Lothringen’s equipment revealed very useful information about techniques for refuelling at sea, including through the use of buoyant rubber hoses, which was deployed by the Admiralty for its warships. She was eventually returned to the Dutch in 1946 and broken up in Japan nearly two decades later.
We can see some more detail of the Lothringen prize in the four photos, below.
With the job done, Dunedin returned to Freetown at the end of one of her longest spells at sea. No one aboard was fond of Freetown, but it would bring a break and the chance to get some long-awaited mail from home.
Throughout the rest of the summer months and into the autumn, Dunedin plied in and out of Freetown, looking for more surface vessels, putting in some convoy duty, and patrolling as far south as St Helena. In a three-week period in June and July, Dunedin captured three French Vichy merchant ships: the Ville de Tamatave; the D’Entrecasteaux; and the Ville de Rouen, the last ship to be captured by Dunedin. Including her Caribbean successes, Dunedin had amassed an impressive haul of 40,695 tonnes of enemy shipping since March 1940.
By early November, Dunedin had been away from England for seven months, with seemingly no let-up in her activity. As one of the stokers, Jack Pitt, wrote home on 14th November, probably reflecting the views of most of the ship’s company, “There’s a war on I know, and we can’t expect too much pleasure, but we haven’t had a break since we left England.” My father would have sympathised with this, I know. He was certainly not a fan of Freetown, and each time Dunedin left for the open Atlantic he allowed himself to wonder if they would be heading north towards England.
Meanwhile, Bletchley Park and the Admiralty were getting wind of an operation involving a number of U-boats heading south towards the shipping lanes off southern Africa. By Friday 21st November, the Admiralty knew that this could involve five U-boats and their supply ships. Dunedin was sent out that night to look for one of the supply ships while the cruiser HMS Devonshire was tasked with looking further south for another one.
As Dunedin left Freetown, a young U-boat captain, Johan Mohr, was guiding U-124, a type VII U-boat, southwards, some 500 miles southwest of the Cape Verde, on his way to join the other U-boats for the southern operation. Four days earlier, U-124 had been re-provisioned and re-fuelled at sea by the supply ship Python, the ship that Dunedin had now been sent to find.
As the codebreakers of Bletchley Park and the officers of the Admiralty tried to make sense of the flow of German decrypts, Dunedin and her men were unknowingly on their last voyage. Enigma was again determining the fate of Dunedin, but unlike in June, her fate would be a tragic one.
All through the weekend, while Dunedin swept her patrol area in search of the German supply ship, Captain Mohr, to the north in U-124, continued to head south. The paths of the British light cruiser and the German U-boat edged ever closer to each other and around lunchtime on Monday 24th November, U-124 was sailing on the surface on a gentle swell when the forward lookout spotted the thin outline of a mast on the northeast horizon. Mohr kept his U-boat on the surface and tracked the ship to get a closer look. Soon, he had identified her as a British D Class cruiser.
At the same time, my father was finishing his lunchtime duties and was about to have his own lunch in the Royal Marines mess, below decks, forward of the bridge and beneath the ship’s recreation room. He and his best mate Nobby ate lunch side by side and chatted about the buzzes doing the rounds about a return to England. Likewise, Albert Cooke was ‘off watch’ and perhaps also mulling the possibility of seeing his Liverpool home and family sometime soon.
Meanwhile, Captain Mohr continued to watch the ship on the horizon and calculated where he needed to be to give him a clear sight of the ship’s port side. He ordered “Dive!” and began his manoeuvre.
Part II
At the end of Part I of this story, the light cruiser HMS Dunedin was unknowingly being pursued by Captain Mohr in U-124 in the South Atlantic in the early afternoon of Monday, 24th November 1941. Within the hour, two torpedoes would slam into Dunedin. By the time Captain Mohr took his U-boat in for a closer look Dunedin had almost gone, her bow upended as she slid beneath the waves, and the remaining members of the ship’s company desperately clinging to wreckage or scrambling to get on the few Carley rafts bobbing up and down on the swell of the sea. Many were wounded from the explosions, others were unharmed, and everyone was fighting for their lives. After the cramped conditions of life on board, the wide-open sea was a cruel wilderness. Men were shouting, calling out, screaming.
Amidst this chaos and confusion, a submarine’s bridge appeared from beneath the sea, then the full bulk of a U-boat, grey and threatening, the sea washing off its slatted deck to reveal its guns. The survivors in the sea watched with a new sense of jeopardy, contemplating what extra fate awaited them.
–
Only a few days earlier, these men in the sea and those who had already been lost had been wondering about a different future. Dunedin had been awash with buzzes about a return to England for a refit and a rest, a chance for the men to see their families again and to see how the war was affecting their country after more than seven months away. One rumour doing the rounds even suggested a trip to America for the refit, but the Admiralty would have other ideas for Dunedin.
By the time Dunedin was once again approaching the sweaty and pungent air of Freetown, Sierra Leone, on Monday 17th November, after another patrol, the Admiralty in London was getting wind of German activity involving a surface ship. In the next few days, a picture emerged of an impending German operation off the west coast of southern Africa involving two surface ships and a group of U-boats.
Unlike in June, when the codebreakers of Bletchley Park were reading German messages incredibly rapidly, the flow of Enigma-based intelligence in November was not quite so efficient. At best, it would be a few hours from the interception of a message; at worst, several days. Which meant the Admiralty knew broadly what was going to happen, but not always precisely when, leaving them to piece the story together with incomplete information.
In the course of the next few days, as the men of Dunedin took a breather in Freetown, the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) in London and Bletchley Park had worked out that a German surface ship would be returning home via the South Atlantic and would be re-supplying U-boats on Saturday 22nd November. This turned out to be Atlantis, a merchant ship disguised as an armed raider, which the cruiser HMS Devonshire successfully sank on Saturday morning.
Late on the previous evening, Dunedin had been sent out in pursuit of a second surface ship, Python, to the west of Freetown. Soon, it would dawn on everyone aboard that this was another patrol, not a return to England. Oh well, maybe next time.
One of the last photos of Dunedin, leaving Freetown in the summer of 1941
(courtesy of Gwen Jackson, sister of Telegraphist Joseph Jackson who was
lost when Dunedin was sunk)
On Saturday afternoon U-124, on her way to the south, had been re-routed along with U-129 to help out with around 300 Atlantis survivors who were being carried and towed by U-126 en route to neutral Brazil. The German plans for an operation off the coast of southern Africa were now in ruins. With one surface ship down, three U-boats involved in the rescue of survivors, and the other surface vessel engaged in the same rescue operation, the Admiralty and Bletchley Park had the upper hand. However, whereas Enigma-derived intelligence had been priceless for finding Atlantis, nothing as precise had yet come in for Python. The Admiralty knew that she was at sea, but not exactly where. The instruction for Mohr to head for U-126 had involved a minor course change that would bring major consequences for Dunedin.
As we saw at the end of Part I of this article, Dunedin was spotted on the distant horizon while U-124 was cruising on the surface. Soon, Mohr had identified her as a British ‘D’ Class cruiser, and he had worked out where he would need to be to fire his torpedoes to maximum effect.
Mohr took his U-boat beneath the waves and began his manoeuvre. It took around forty minutes from the time Dunedin was spotted to when the torpedoes struck, but it was not as straightforward an attack as Mohr had been hoping for. At some point, a mechanical fault caused the U-boat to momentarily break the surface, running the risk that she would be seen by her target, but once Mohr had resumed control of his U-boat he continued on his course under the water.
U-124 leaves Lorient, northwestern France, in August 1941. Source: Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives)
Meanwhile, on Dunedin, at about the same time as Mohr was struggling to keep his U-boat under the water, the loft lookout reported seeing the single mast of a ship. Was this the supply ship they were searching for? Or was it a submarine? Might it have been U-124? We will never know the answer to these questions, but Dunedin’s captain, Richard Lovatt, took the sighting seriously enough to change course in pursuit and to increase speed. This meant that Lovatt was unknowingly speeding away from U-124 while Mohr was positioning himself for what he thought would be an easy pot shot.
As he reached his position Mohr was shocked to find that Dunedin was not where he had expected to see her. Swinging the periscope round, he finally saw her sailing in the distance in the opposite direction. Despite an apparently hopeless situation, Mohr quickly recalculated and issued new orders to reset the torpedoes. From an impossibly long way, some three miles, Mohr fired a salvo of three torpedoes. And waited.
Loading a torpedo on U-124. Source: Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives)
From Dunedin’s bridge there was no sign of what the loft lookout had seen, and no one could know that three torpedoes were coursing their way through the water towards them. The ship’s company were going about their duties or resting between their watches. They had reached a point about 200 miles northeast of St Paul’s Rocks, roughly six hundred miles from Freetown. And then….
At 1326 the first torpedo thundered into Dunedin’s starboard side, midships, and a second one, aft, a few seconds later. The third torpedo missed.
From three miles out, the torpedoes had taken five minutes to reach a speeding and zig-zagging cruiser. Mohr was either a brilliant captain or a very lucky one.
The senior surviving officer, Lieutenant Commander Watson, RN, later wrote this succinct account of what happened in those opening moments:
DUNEDIN was struck by a torpedo on the starboard side near the seamen P.O’s mess, and after a short interval, variously estimated at between 6 and 15 seconds, by a second torpedo which struck on the starboard side abreast the Wardroom flat. It has been impossible to ascertain the extent of the damage sustained by the hull, as the ship took a list of about 15deg to starboard immediately after the first impact, and this list increased to about 35deg within 5 minutes. It was observed, however, that the explosion from the second torpedo had torn up the Quarterdeck, dislodged No 6. 6” gun, and blown off the port propeller, the bare shaft of which could be seen as DUNEDIN finally turned onto her beam ends.
Attempts were made to send a distress message, but none was ever received. Within a few moments, Captain Lovatt had issued the ‘Abandon Ship’ order and those men who had survived the two blasts were attempting to do just that. Thrown from a bench in the Royal Marines mess by the first blast, my father, Royal Marine Bill Gill, quickly made his way out amid the growing pandemonium as the ship lurched violently and fell to starboard. His ‘Abandon Ship’ task was to release one of the Carley floats into the sea, which he managed to do quite quickly given the rapidly deteriorating tragedy unfolding around him. Men were jumping into the water to find the Carley rafts and any wreckage they could cling to. My father, a decent swimmer, scrambled on to ‘his’ Carley along with others doing the same thing. Seven Carley rafts and one Flottanet (a rope mesh buoyed by corks) made it into the water, but none of the ship’s few lifeboats were successfully got away.
Looking aft, with my father’s Carley raft, in the foreground.
Source: The Dunedin Society
While the surviving men of Dunedin in the water were jostling and scrambling for some semblance of safety, Mohr had edged closer and fired a fourth torpedo at the stricken cruiser. This would be the final kill, the ‘Fangschuss’ in German. He was still some 3,000 metres away, but this time Dunedin was a sitting duck, easy prey. And yet, having hit with two out of three torpedoes from nearly 5,000 metres, Mohr missed, sparing Dunedin and her men from an added catastrophe.
Having failed to deliver the coup de grâce, Mohr came closer still and surfaced among the men in the water, bringing them a new terror to face. Had they escaped the horror of the torpedo attacks only to be shot?
Stories emerged, years later, of these moments. Some remembered seeing a couple of crew members appear on the U-boat’s bridge, others thought one of them held a camera. My father told me that some of the men on his raft defiantly sang “There’ll Always Be An England”. But Mohr was only taking a look, he was not interested in shooting these unarmed men, and neither did he want to take any prisoners. Instead, the men on the bridge disappeared below and U-124 slipped back under the waves. Within a couple of hours, Mohr had signalled that he had sunk a British ‘D’ class cruiser.
U-124 radio operator, with Enigma machine by his left arm.
Source: Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives)
As U-124 resumed her passage south, the next terrible stage of the Dunedin story began. We know that, by now, there were at least 145 men in the water, either on Carley rafts or the Flottanet, or on bits of wreckage, or in the water with nothing to cling to. Their ship – their home – had gone, and now the men were left adrift in the vast expanse of the South Atlantic.
In the next seventy-eight hours, more than half the men who had made it off the ship would perish. Those who had sustained wounds in the blasts were the most vulnerable. One man had broken both his legs but had somehow made it onto one of the Carleys, only to die a few hours later. Others, without drinking water, died of exposure in the heat of the tropical sun; some were attacked by sharks or Portuguese Men o’ War, deadly jelly fish; others were bitten by Barracuda, and some drank sea water in desperation only to make things worse for themselves. Some thought they could see the ship or even a taxi and swam off in a haze of hallucination, never to be seen again. Others just quietly expired in the night and were gently pushed over the side when the sun came up, a few solemn words spoken and a little more room created.
Throughout this terrible ordeal, countless acts of bravery, courage and leadership at all levels punctuated the unfolding horror engulfing the dwindling band of men, such as Lieutenant Commander Sowdon, who was last seen holding onto a wooden spar, refusing to take up a space on a Carley raft while spaces existed for others. Likewise, Commander Unwin refused to board a raft ahead of others in the water. Royal Marine Sergeant Allen, on my father’s raft, gave up his place to make way for an older comrade in the water. Captain Lovatt was seen walking along the hull of the ship as she went down and was last seen in the water clinging to a box. None of these men survived.
As the sun dipped towards the horizon around five o’clock on Thursday afternoon, seventy-two surviving members of Dunedin’s ship’s company of 480 were spread across a tiny armada of six remaining Carley rafts and the Flottanet (a seventh Carley raft having drifted away early on the first day). My father had counted twenty-one other men on his raft on Monday and now he was one of only three left. He was weak, he was hot, he was sunburnt. He told me years later that he had not expected to make it to Friday morning. Neither, I suspect, would many of the others.
And then, just as a fourth night beckoned, the faint outline of a ship appeared on the horizon.
SS Nishmaha, a 5,000 gross tons American merchant ship carrying bauxite from Takoradi in West Africa to Philadelphia, had drifted off the shipping routes after her engine had developed a problem and had to be stopped for several hours while it was repaired. As the men of Dunedin contemplated their fourth night adrift, Nishmaha was steaming to regain her course home. On watch on the bridge, twenty-two year-old Third Officer Roy Murray was scanning the horizon when he spotted something in the sea about three miles away. Taking up his binoculars he could see a small raft in the distance with two or three people on board. He immediately informed his captain, H.S. Olsen, who slowed the ship and altered course to bring him closer to what Murray had seen.
SS Nishmaha. Source: State Library of Victoria, Australia
As they moved nearer, they could see the raft contained three men. They were Royal Marine Colour Sergeant MacAulay; Ship’s Joiner, Thomas Moore; and my father.
For the next couple of hours, in dimming light, and then darkness, Nishmaha’s boats picked up the last remaining Dunedin survivors spread across the sea. Seventy-two men were hauled aboard, although sadly five of them did not live through the night. On this day, America’s Thanksgiving Day, the remaining sixty-seven survivors said their own thanks to the American crew members for saving them and looking after them. Every survivor who later spoke or wrote about their experience praised the ship’s company of Nishmaha for their miraculous rescue and for the compassion and care given to them on board. Not only had they conducted an extraordinary rescue, but they had also given up their food, their beds, their clothes and their time to bring solace and comfort to the last men of Dunedin. Captain Olsen took them to the nearest British base, at Trinidad, arriving there on 7th December, the day Pearl Harbour was attacked and the day the USA entered the war.
Back in the Admiralty, news of Dunedin’s demise had arrived slowly, firstly with the realisation on Tuesday morning – the day after the sinking – that Dunedin had not replied to instructions sent to them around 6.00 pm on Monday the 24th, the day of the sinking; and secondly with the interception and decryption of Mohr’s message that he had sunk a British ‘D’ Class cruiser, which had arrived from Bletchley Park in the Admiralty a little after five o’clock on Tuesday afternoon. Two ships operating in the area, Canton and Bridgewater (and later, Devonshire) were despatched to search for Dunedin, but nothing was found apart from a couple of oil patches, probably the last remaining signs of Dunedin’s existence. By December 1st, one week after Dunedin had been sunk, the Admiralty was forced to conclude that she had been lost. Devonshire continued the search for survivors for a few more days, but this was the end of Dunedin and most of the men who had served in her on her final voyage.
But this was not the end of the Dunedin story. The Admiralty now launched a frantic exercise to identify who had been on the ship the evening Dunedin had left Freetown and what had happened to those who had perished. Details were slow to emerge and by the time the Admiralty had publicly announced on December 17th that Dunedin had been lost, most of the next of kin could be told only that their loved ones were missing. It would be many months before the families of the lost men would be formally told by the Admiralty that their loved ones had been officially designated as Missing, Presumed Killed. Only in a few cases could the Admiralty confirm the death of a named individual, initially from the reports coming out of Trinidad. When news trickled back about the seventh Carley raft, some families clung to the hope that their man had been aboard it and would be found, while others convinced themselves that their loved ones would turn up in a POW camp. By the time the war ended nearly four years later, these desperate hopes had disappeared.
For the sixty-seven survivors recovering in Trinidad, their main thought was about getting home. Some were fit enough to travel after a few days in hospital, others would take longer before boarding a UK-bound ship.
We saw in Part I of this story, a group of those survivors on a Liverpool quayside having disembarked from SS Awatea, a converted Trans-Tasman liner serving as a troopship.
SS Awatea. Source: Australia War Memorial
Among them was my father, who would soon make his way back to the Royal Marine Barracks at Eastney, and Albert Cooke, a local Liverpool lad about to make the short journey home. These men and the others standing with them in the shivering February weather, and the others still in Trinidad, or on their way back in other ships, held stories in their head they would not reveal for many years, or even ever. Some of them would meet again from time to time as the war ground on, gently reminiscing about lost friends, but mostly exchanging unsaid messages in a nod or a shift of the eyes, in a quiet and private reflective atmosphere that only they recognised and only they could understand. Aside from this they simply got on with life. The war was still going badly in early 1942. There was a job to be done, so they got on with it.
It is the privilege of my generation and the ones that follow, that some of these men chose to tell their stories many years later, and it is my privilege to have met some of them. These men told their stories for the men who perished, never for themselves. No bravado, no heroic boasts, no triumphalism, just a desire to remember and honour their lost comrades. The Dunedin Society grew out of this desire for the story to be told. Each year, on or near the 24th November, members gather at the Portsmouth Naval Memorial on Southsea Common to pay homage to the men of Dunedin and to keep their memory alive. In the past twenty-five years a great many people have joined the Society, and we have witnessed many extraordinary moments when the living survivors told their stories to the families and descendants of the men who perished all those years ago. We recall, especially, Roy Murray, the man who spotted the rafts from the bridge of his American merchant ship. He discovered us in 2005 and, a few weeks later, he and his family came to see us to meet four of our living survivors who had last seen Roy and his shipmates from the quayside in Trinidad. Now, sixty-four years later, in an emotional reunion, they would thank him again for saving them. Without Roy, sixty-seven more men would have been on the casualty list, and we would never have known the Dunedin story.
Roy Murray, centre, with, L to R, survivors Andrew McCall, Les Barter,
Jim Davis, and William Gill, 2005. Photo by Michael Gill
All our survivors have gone now, but we retain the duty to remember all the men of Dunedin. We shall gather, as usual, at the Portsmouth Naval Memorial every November, but on Saturday 21st November 2026, Dunedin Society members will meet for a larger event than usual to mark the 85th anniversary of the sinking. Everyone who wishes to attend will be welcome.