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Your Award Winning Seniors’ Newspaper - Written for Seniors by Seniors Vol 11 - Issue No. 9
OCTOBER 2014
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Merchant Navy mates drop anchor at Southbank for a unique reunion By JIM BOWDEN
Attention on deck.. ex-merchant mariners Dave Witcombe, 69, Jack Secker, 80, Brian Hunt, 80, and Terry Docker, 75, visit HMAS Diamantina at the Queensland Maritime Museum at Southbank. The ship was the last World War 2-era frigate to serve Australia and was active from 1945 until 1946 and commissioned as a survey vessel from 1959 until 1980
IN the late evening of September 3, 1939 – the day Britain and France declared war on Germany – a U-boat commanded by Fritz-Julius Lemp was submerged and cutting through the North Atlantic Ocean at 22 knots. Dropping speed at periscope depth off the Scottish Outer Hebrides, Lemp observed a British vessel “of about 13,400 gross tonnes moving on a zig-zag course”. U-30 tracked the ship for three hours until eventually, at 19.40, Lemp ordered two torpedoes to be fired. The first struck home and exploded. The ship was the S.S. Athenia under Captain James Cook and it was the first British ship to be sunk by Nazi Germany in World War 2. Of the 1418 aboard, 98 passengers and 19 crew were killed. The event was recalled by merchant seaman Brian Hunt, president of the Southeast Queensland Vindicatrix and Mariners Association, during a gathering of the Queensland section of the Naval Association at the Maritime Museum at Southbank on September 28.
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