The wartime wrecks - Thistlegorm and Rosalie Moller
By the middle of the 1930's it was clear there would be a second European war in a generation, and Britain looked around to see who would be her allies and enemies. Germany would clearly be her immediate opponent, possibly supported by the Fascist regimes of Italy and Spain. France and the Low Countries would be her allies, as they had been in the First War.
Swimming into the after holds of Rosalie Mopller through the great v-shaped hole blown in her hull by the bomb which sank her
When war came the survival of Great Britain would once again depend on the Royal Navy keeping the sea-lanes open. Half the food consumed by the British population, to say nothing of the other imports of raw materials for her industires and exports of finished goods, came from abroad. All sea traffic coming from and leaving Britain needed to sail through the North Atlantic, and a great deal of it came through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. The modern Italian fleet would pose a serious threat in the Med, but with France as an ally that threat could be neutralised by the equally modern and powerful French fleet, leaving Britain to defend the North Atlantic, and the rest of the global sea-lanes.
Deck of Rosalie Moller. Her handrails are largely intact, and she's usually covered in great shoals of fish.
The Second World War began when Germany invaded Poland in autumn 1939, and then went quiet through the winter of 1939-40, until the Germans launched their blitzkreig assault and took possession of the French North Atlantic coast in a matter of weeks, routing the British Expeditionary Force in France and immediately using the coast to build u-boat bases from which the submarines could intercept and sink British shipping.
The bridge of Thistlegorm, seen from the coaling-hold
The interior of France was not occupied by the Germans, and remained under the control of the Vichy French regime, who clearly understood that German interests were paramount. Germany had never built a significant surface fleet, and there were fears that the French Mediterranean Fleet would be taken over and absorbed into the German Navy. British surface forces were despatched to give the French an choice of scuttling their your own ships, putting themselves under British command for the duration of the War or being sunk at anchor. The French made it clear they had no intention of either scuttling or agreeing to British control and the British therefore opened fire to neutralise the threat their ships posed. It was an episode that soured Anglo-French relations throughout the war, but it was necessary and it was done professionally and with skill by the Royal Navy.
Foremast of Rosalie Moller. She's deep, 35m to her decks, and the masts are an ideal place to ascend with plenty of marine life to look at, and their tops are at a decent depth for a deep stop.
In mid-1940 Italy entered the war as an ally of the Germans, and immediately sent troops across the Mediterranean narrows and into their old colony of Libya, thereby starting the desert war in North Africa, and in the autumn of 1940 they began the invasion of Greece. The loss of France as an ally meant that there was no-one to contain the Italian fleet, and they were therefore sunk at anchor in Taranto harbour in November 1940 by torpedo-carrying Swordfish aircraft launched from the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious, foreshadowing the Japanes attack on Pearl Harbour that took place a year later. The central Mediterranean, however, lay well inside the radius of action of aircraft based in Italy, and that effectively closed the Med to British merchant shipping.
It's the cargo that attracts diversd to Thistlegorm
At the beginning of 1941 Hitler had lost patience with Mussolini. The Italian army in North Africa had thrown the British back almost to Cairo, and then in turn been thrown back itself and was now further inside LiBya than it had been when it started and the Italian army in Greece had achieved nothing. Hitler decided to reinforce both Italian armies with German troops and sent Rommel North Africa to take overall command.
Deck-cargo locomotive, now upright in 30m on the seabed just a few yards from Thistlergorm
The British decided to take troops from North Africa to reinforce Greece, a task that fell to the Royal navy. The concern was that if the Germans and Italians succeeded in conquering Greece it would open a land route to the Middle-Eastern oilfields. Despite the reinforcements Greece fell quickly to the Germans, and Crete followed a few weeks later. The Royal Navy made a massive effort to uplift the troops they had only recently taken to Greece and were able to return almost 60 000 British troops were returned to Egypt, though without their kit and equipment, and with the loss or damge of half their eastern Mediterranean strength.
Trucks for the desert war
In North Africa Rommel had attacked, and been fought to a halt almost exactly where the Italians had been stopped late the previous year, and for the same reason. He was only able to re-supply his forces through the ports of Tripoli and Benghazi, 1300 miles behind his lines, a nearly inconceivable distance over which to deliver anything in a timely fashion in the middle of a war.
Taken in 2007, steering wheel, windscreen and instruments still there!
The British, meanwhile, had equally acute supply problems. The only safe route from Britain meant ships needed to steam all the way around Africa, up the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal to Alexandria for off-loading. The war in North Africa boiled down to a supplies contest, with vistory going to the winners. Enter the two most famous wartime casualties still in the Red Sea, Thistlegorm and Rosalie Moller.
Rosalie Moller was built on the Glasgow slips of Barclay Curle in 910 as the Francis. She was a plain, workmanlike freighter and tramped the world for years until she was bought by the Moller Line in 1936, and then requisitioned by the Admiralty for use as a collier in 1938. The Navy had been oil-powered since before the First World War, but there were still a number of coal-fired warships in service, and much of the dockyard machinery in use, not to mention railways and fleet auxilliaries, also needed coal. In mid-1940 she was filled with 4760 tons of coal and sent to Aleaxandria, making her way around Africa and up the Red Sea.
Graceful stern of Rosalie Moller, endlessly steaming on a sea of sand.
Thistlegorm was built by Thompson of Sunderland and launched in June 1940. She went into service with the Albyn line, who operated 18 'Thistle' boats, all named Thislte plus a colour in Gaelic. Thistlegorm is Blue Thistle. She had been part funded by the Admiralty and went immediately into war service, making three voyages before docking in the Clyde and being loaded with a mixed cargo of trucks, munitions, small arms, motorcycles, rubber boots, two complete railway locomotives and more, all bound for North Africa. She left the Clyde on June 2nd 1941 in convoy.
Bow of Thistlegorm, her starboard anchor chain running out to the good holding ground of Safe Anchorage F
Both ships found themselves anchored near the mouth of the Gulf of Suez, Thistlegorm to the north in Safe Anchorage F, Rosalie Moller behind Gubal at Safe Anchorage H. They were called safe anchorages as they were too far from enemy airfields to be under threat, until the Germans took Crete and based aircraft there. On the night of 6/7th October 1941 two Heinkel He 111 aircraft left Crete in search of a troopship. They never found the troopship but they did find Thistlegorm. The Heinkels came in very low, at mast-top height, too low for the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Carlisle, anchored nearby as protection, to open fire for fear of hitting other merchant ships in Safe Anchorage F. The Heinkels dropped their bombs, one of which struck the hold packed with munitions, and simply blew Thistlegorm apart.
Both the Germans and the British now knew that the Safe Anchorages were no longer safe, and two nights later the Heinkels returned to sink Rosalie Moller. Her end must have been very different to that of Thistlegorm, the bomb which sank Rosalie Moller clearly struck between her cargo of coal and the skin of her hull. The blast blew a great gash in her hull, but left her otherwise untouched, allowing her to slowly settle and finally sink as the water flowed in.
Nine men died when Thistlegorm was sunk, two more when Rosalie Moller went down.
'Lest we forget'
Thistlegorm had been carrying supplies for the Western Desert Force, and they duly launched the offensive they had been preparing, Operation Crusader. Rommel was thrown back, but not far and soon counter-attacked. The war flowed back and forth across the desert., and it was another year before Bernard Law Montgomery took command of what had by then been renamed the Eighth Army, retrained and prepared them and smashed Rommel's Afrika Corps at El Alamein, the decisive battle that saw the beginning of the end of the war in North Africa.
Thistlegorm and Rosalie Moller were never particularly important ships in their time, they were just two of the thousands of merchant ships that kept the British and Allied war effort supplied. Without them, and the men who crewed them, the war could never have been won. Nine men died when Thistlegorm went down, another two when Rosalie Moller sank. The Merchant Navy had the highest casualty rate of all the Allied services, higher than any of the armed services, and their contribution to the war effort has only been recognised very recently with the issue of a War Medal for the Merchant Navy. You may like to remember the men who died, and the thousands upon thousands of others, when you dive either of these wrecks.
