When more smoke was sighted on July 13, the Atlantis approached the vessel, a large cargo-liner, cautiously, while gradually reducing the range, through slight alterations in course and speed, to 5,400 metres, at which point, on being told that the ship’s radio transmitter was being tuned up, Rogge ordered the battle flag to be raised, the disguise dropped and four rapid salvos fired from the main armament, concentrating on the radio shack.
All four salvos missed the target, but following some swift adjustments, salvos five and six found their mark, setting the liner on fire.
She did not transmit any distress calls, but signalled that she was preparing to stop and that she would require medical assistance.
Pleased that his new tactic of surprise-attack had paid off so smoothly, Rogge ordered the Atlantis to close with the vessel as her boats were being lowered.
Seeing that there were many passengers, including women and children, in the boats, he decided that he could well do without all these extra mouths to feed.
He was looking at the liner’s spacious passenger accomodation and thinking that she was an ideal ship onto which he could also transfer his one hundred and eighty prisoners and solve his overcrowding problem, when suddenly, a shot rang out from her 3-inch deck gun, sending a shell howling past the raider’s bridge.
Angry at having to open fire at point-blank range in such circumstances, Rogge called for full speed and ordered his gunners to rake the stern of the enemy ship.
When Navigator Kamenz pointed out that there had been just one man on the now abandoned gun, and that it could have been a mistake, Rogge ceased fire.
Realising that the second round of shelling meant that the vessel was no longer any use as a prison ship, he nonetheless dispatched the boarding party to inspect the damage as the liner’s boats drew alongside the Atlantis in mountainous seas.
They found that the 7,769-ton British & Burmese Steam Navigation Company, India-Burma cargo liner, Kemmendine, now firmly ablaze, was a write-off.
Bound for Rangoon from Glasgow via Gibraltar and Cape Town, she was carrying a crew of one hundred and twelve and thirty-five passengers, including five women and two children, and a small cargo of whiskey, beer and piece goods.
Unable to get below to place the demolition charges because of the raging fires, and having left them on the deck while they investigated and searched where they could, the boarding party returned to find them ringed by flames.
Dumping them swiftly overboard they evacuated the liner in a hurry!
By now blazing furiously, and sending huge plumes of black smoke high into the sky to attract enemy warships, the Kemmendine had to be sunk quickly.
Requiring two torpedos to do it, adding further to Rogge’s annoyance, it was the second one, combined with the heavy swell, that broke the liner’s back.
With her bow and stern briefly pointing skywards, she slid beneath the waves.
Amazingly, there were no casualties on either side, but the hazardous task of lifting the women and small children onto the raider from the violently pitching lifeboats, was overcome by the use of the raider’s coal buckets lowered on ropes!
After several hours all one hundred and forty-seven souls, including an expectant mother, were safely on board bringing the total number of prisoners on the Atlantis to just under three hundred and thirty.
A court of inquiry was held on board the Atlantis, to establish why the liner’s gun was fired a full nine minutes after she had signalled that she had surrendered and required medical assistance.
Consisting of Rogge, Mohr, Kammenz and the Kemmendine’s captain R.B.Reid, the court established that the gunner, a London window-cleaner in civilian life, had not heard the order to abandon his gun, while his captain, unaware of this, had signalled to the raider that he was heaving to and surrendering.
By June 25, radio messages were being sent to the overdue Tirranna from all around the Indian Ocean, and, as he had failed to find a tanker, Rogge decided that the Atlantis would provide his first prize-ship with sufficient fuel to reach Bordeaux with his 300 prisoners.
Keeping the rendezvous with her as planned on July 29, the arduous task of making sure she was sufficiently sea-worthy for the long voyage began.
The raider’s diesels were also long overdue for overhaul, so, while Kammenz began the transfer of over 400 tons of fuel and various supplies, and prisoners were being shuttled between the ships, Chief Kielhorn organised the stripping down and servicing of the starboard engine, and First Officer Kühn organised the repair and maintenance crews swarming all over both ships.
The good-natured mood that had permeated this hive of activity was shattered on August 1, when Mohr discovered that the eleven-man Tirranna prize-crew had rifled the mailbags on the Norwegian vessel, looted their contents for items of value, and then dumped the mail overboard.
When he had discovered this, the prize-crew captain, Leutnant Mund, had ordered the men to replace everything, bar one or two essential items of winter clothing, but when he and the Adjutant searched their lockers, they found that all eleven of them had disobeyed the order.
On hearing this, and that someone had stolen binoculars belonging to Captain White of the City of Bagdad, Rogge immediately convened a court martial.
He made it known to the crew that if the guilty man returned the binoculars there would be no further action taken, but when they were not returned, and he then threatened to punish the entire crew, an anonymous note was found stating that the thief had thrown the glasses overboard.
With Mohr investigating, the list of possible culprits was narrowed down to five, at which point the Adjutant donned his handwriting analyst’s hat and quickly identified the probable thief, who, under the mounting pressure, soon confessed.
Although the British captain pleaded on behalf of the guilty man, Rogge insisted on initiating court martial proceedings against him, which, in due course, sentenced him to be shipped home on the next available ship to serve two years in prison in Germany, to be dismissed from the Navy, and to pay compensation to Captain White for the loss of his property.
When he had completed this task, Rogge called the crew together and gave them a stern lecture on how he expected them to conduct themselves in future.
He assured them that if souvenir hunting was conducted under the supervision of their officers, all members of the crew could select suitable mementoes, and not just the members of the boarding parties.
With this unfortunate incident out of the way, attention returned to the task of completing the transfer of fuel to the Tirranna and preparing her for her journey.
On August 2, as both she and the Atlantis, resplendent in new coats of paint and with engine overhauls nearing completion, drifted side by side with a fuel line rigged between them, 450 tons of fuel was transferred into the freighter’s tanks.
As the work details were applying their finishing touches, a ship was spotted emerging from a rain squall and heading straight towards them at high speed.
With the sudden arrival of this ship out of the rain cloud, the alarm bells sounded, and hundreds of men dropped what they were doing and leapt into action.
Chief Kielhorn fired up his one fully re-assembled engine and got the Atlantis under way, leaving many of her officers and crew on the Tirranna or stranded in small boats between the two ships.
After a six-minute chase and four 150mm salvoes, the newcomer stopped and surrendered, but as all of the launches and cutters normally used by the boarding parties had been left behind, Rogge had to hold the Atlantis alongside her until they caught up, before sending a squad to board her.
The peculiar and seemingly reckless approach of this vessel, the 6,732-ton German-built Norwegian freighter Talleyrand, a sister-ship of the Tirranna, and yet another Wilhelmsen liner, was explained by the fact that her Second Officer, seeing the familiar shape of the Tirranna and another ship side by side, with small boats moving between them, has assumed that one or other of them had stopped with engine trouble and was being assisted by the other, and so he had decided to approach to offer a helping hand.
Like the Tirranna, she was a valuable ship, carrying a cargo of 4,500 tons of steel, 16,000 bales of wool, 22,686 sacks of wheat and 240 tons of teak, and would have made a suitable prize.
With a crew of thirty-six, one of them a woman, and, also like the Tirranna, armed with one 4.7-inch gun, she had been on her way from Sydney to the UK via Fremantle, and, again like her sister, she was low in fuel.
What fuel she had, just over 400 tons, was transferred to the Atlantis, thereby gaining the raider an extra two month’s endurance, as well as an excellent motorboat, while her crew and ammunition were transferred to the Tirranna.
Briefly used as a target-ship for Bulla’s Heinkel He-114, which dropped dummy bombs on her, strafed her with machine-gun fire and practiced tearing away her radio antenna with a trailing grapnel hook, the Tallyrand was scuttled by Fehler’s demolition crew which completed its deadly business in under eight minutes.
At midnight on August 5, Leutnant zur See Waldmann and Leutnant Mund, with an eighteen-man prize crew, and two hundred and seventy-four of Rogge’s three hundred and sixty-five prisoners, set sail for France in the the refitted Tirranna.
On the night of August 10, she narrowly and unknowingly, avoided a potentially lethal encounter with the raider Pinguin, which was disguised as the Greek freighter Kassos, and only because her captain, Ernst-Felix Krüder, thought that she may have been a British Armed Merchant Cruiser and avoided her.
Negotiating the heavily-patrolled shipping lanes off the Cape of Good Hope and in the South Atlantic, surviving encounters with eight ships, including a British cruiser, and making it through the U-Boat hunting grounds, the Tirranna arrived safely off Cap Le Ferret on September 22.
Seeking sailing instructions from Naval Command in Berlin and a pilot from the harbour authorities, Waldmann received no response until the following day, when he was told to remain where he was to await an escort.
Just after midday on September 23, while still waiting for the minesweepers to escort her into Bordeaux, the Tirranna was hit by three torpedoes fired by the British Trident-class submarine HMS Tuna, and sank within two minutes.
Eighty-seven people, including women and children, and one of the prize-crew, Obermaschinenmaat Karl Seeger, who evidently died trying to save a terrified woman passenger who would not leave the ship, lost their lives.
All this, despite the fact that Rogge, at no small risk to his own ship, had done everything in his power to ensure that the SKL was aware of the prize ship’s imminent arrival, only to find out later that Berlin had been sending instructions to her on the wrong radio frequency.
Early in the morning of August 24, the peculiar, suspicious behaviour and continually changing speed of a freighter off Madagascar, intrigued Rogge so much that he shadowed her for two hours before coming to the conclusion that she was a Q-Ship, and that his ship was being drawn into some sort of trap.
Opening fire without any warning, first with a torpedo, which missed, and then with a 155mm salvo, which did not, the virtually stationary vessel was soon ablaze, with four cadets and a cabin boy lying dead.
Realising his mistake, and that the now fiercely burning ‘enemy’ was a harmless merchantman, Rogge immediately ordered that two motor-boats be launched to assist her surviving crew, all of whom were rescued from the mountainous seas.
One man succumbed to his wounds later on board the Atlantis.
Identified as the 4,744-ton British Reardon Smith Line freighter King City, bound for Singapore from Cardiff carrying 7,300 tons of coal and coke on board for the British Admiralty, her strange manoeuvring was explained as having been the result of chronic engine trouble.
Reduced to a blazing inferno, with her cargo of coal pouring out through the holes in her side creating a column of black smoke and steam that could be seen for miles above the busy shipping-lane, she was swiftly sunk by gunfire.
On September 9, approaching to within 8,500 metres of a yellow-funnelled tanker without appearing to be menacing, in the Australia to Africa shipping-lane during the International Distress Call period, Rogge did not respond when the vessel briefly raised her ensign in a polite request for him to do likewise and identify himself, waiting instead for the allotted ‘silent time’ to elapse.
Closing to 6,500 metres, Rogge opened fire, causing the ship to instantly radio her position, at which critical point, the Atlantis somehow went out of control, with her steering jammed to starboard, enabling the tanker to try to escape.
Regaining control, Rogge quickly caught up with her, and resumed his attack, with the enemy again radioing her position and returning fire.
Several salvos later the gun was abandoned, the signalling stopped, and she came to a halt, but with her hull so badly damaged that it was clearly no longer possible for the Atlantis to take on any of her valuable cargo of oil.
With a boat on its way in response to a signal requesting medical assistance, fresh radio signals were picked up by Radio Officer Wenzel, which were initially thought to be coming from the stricken ship, causing Rogge to re-open fire, but were then found to coming from another ship somewhere not very far away.
Identified by the boarding party as the 9,557-ton United Molasses Company, Athel Line motor-tanker Athelking, bound for East Africa from Australia, she was so badly damaged as to constitute a major hazard, and was sunk by gunfire.
It took ninety-one 150mm rounds to finally sink her.
With her Captain and two others killed, and three missing, the surviving forty members of her crew, were picked up.
Moving north-eastwards to avoid overlapping with Pinguin’s area of operations, which had been extended by the SKL, the Atlantis quickly found her next victim, when her lookouts spotted another ship the following day.
Rogge immediately called Flying-Officer Bulla to the bridge and instructed him and Borchert to overfly the target, shoot up the bridge and the funnel and to try to remove her radio aerials with a grappling-hook.
While being followed closely by the Atlantis, the freighter altered course several times before Rogge spotted his chance to launch the aircraft unseen.
As he increased his speed to close with the enemy vessel, she began to transmit the usual QQQ distress signals, at which point she was was bombed and strafed with machine-gun fire, and had her aerials ripped away by the seaplane, preventing her from sending any more.
Returning to their mother ship, and setting down the airmen were surprised when she continued on her way towards the enemy vessel, leaving them behind.
Approaching at top speed with battle-flag flying, guns uncovered, and ordering her to heave to, Rogge was astonished when there was absolutely no reaction.
Hoping to capture this ship without having to fire on her, Rogge ordered Kasch to fire a couple of warning shots across her bows, but having still failed to produce any response, the next salvo was aimed over the bridge, bringing her to a halt.
With Mohr’s boarding-party already on its way, the enemy ship began to transmit more distress signals, via an emergency aerial, leaving Rogge with no alternative but to open fire in earnest, setting the vessel’s cargo ablaze.
The crew, which was busy abandoning ship just as the boarding-party came alongside, was ordered back on board to fight the fire, as the boarding party was joined by a fire-fighting team from the Atlantis.
Identified as the 5,800 ton Ben Line Steamers William Thompson & Co. ship, Benarty, with a mixed, but valuable cargo of lead, zinc and wolfram, en route to Liverpool from Rangoon via Durban, and a crew of forty-nine, this was the ship that had betrayed her presence the previous day by re-transmitting Athelking’s distress signals, causing Rogge to re-open fire on the luckless tanker.
Official documents, thirty bags of mail, including secret mails for the British Admiralty, and fragments of paper found in the ship’s wrecked wireless-room made it possible for Mohr and Radio Officer Wenzel, with a little help from the code-breakers in Berlin, to read part of the new British Merchant Navy codes, which had replaced those taken earlier from the City of Bagdad.
Rogge was pleased to discover that not one of the freighter’s 49-man crew had been wounded, and so, having removed sacks of documents and mail, and kept two of her boats for further use, the Benarty was sunk by demolition charges.
Another satisfying piece of news, gleaned from the captain of the Benarty was that the Atlantis’ disguise as an Allied ship had worked very well.
Rogge decided to enhance this still further by making the raider’s aft 155mm gun appear more like a British 4.7-inch, and by leaving it fully exposed to view.
Over the week that followed the sinking of the Benarty, ever careful to remain clear of any possible overlapping with the Pinguin, the Atlantis spent some time drifting to conserve fuel and to attend to some maintenance.
When a lookout spotted dense smoke astern late on September 19, while the crew were so engaged, Rogge called for full speed, and soon closed with what appeared to be a large passenger-liner travelling at high speed without lights.
Approaching to within 3,500 metres of the vessel shortly after midnight, and signalling to her to stop, maintain radio silence, and await a boarding party, she signalled agreement, identifying herself as the Commissaire Ramel.
Stopped and with her lights on, her radio operator commenced sending distress signals, forcing Rogge to open fire at point-blank range, setting her on fire.
Having initially seen this as the ideal vessel to solve his overcrowding problems, and reluctant to fire on a passenger ship, particularly at close range, his gunners continued firing until her radio fell silent, at which point he ordered a cease fire.
Almost immediately the distress signals recommenced, leaving him with no choice but to open fire again, this time telling Kasch to fire at will. When over fifty high-explosive 150mm shells had slammed into her, destroying the radio room and setting her firmly ablaze, she signalled for a boat to be sent.
By the time they reached the 10,061-ton former French Services Contractuels des Messageries Maritimes liner, she was blazing so furiously that the boarding-party were unable to board her, and with the sea running high it took them some time to rescue the surviving members of the 66-man crew.
Furious that she had commenced transmitting distress signals after she had surrendered, Rogge demanded an explanation from her skipper, Captain MacKenzie, who explained that while on his way to the bridge he had told the radio-operator to send the usual distress signal, only to arrive on the bridge to find that his French First Officer had already agreed to surrender!
The largest ship yet taken by the Atlantis, and potentially an ideal prison-ship, the Commissaire Ramel had a largely Australian crew, and a valuable cargo of steel, wheat, soap, leather and fruit.
Once the survivors were safely aboard the raider, the by now worthless hulk was sunk by gunfire, burning fiercely as she went down in a cloud of smoke and steam, her red-hot hull hissing under the waves.
The new prisoners added a further sixty-three to the two hundred and thirty already on board the Atlantis.
Once they had cleared the immediate vicinity of their latest success, Rogge gave Chief Kielhorn the go-ahead to service the engines, to dismantle the giant diesels and overhaul them one at a time.
As the work progressed on the first engine over the next few days, and Kühn’s work crews touched up her camouflage, the raider drifted, with the crew enjoying the break, until on September 27, they received the shattering news of the sinking of the Tirranna off the coast of France, with eighty-seven people that the crew of the Atlantis had come to know during their long stay on board, losing their lives, including one of their shipmates, Karl Seeger.
Apart from the loss of so many innocent people, a fine prize ship and its valuable cargo, all of their personal mail, the first communication any of them had had with their loved ones in over six months, had also been lost.
Clearly caused by a combination of inefficiencies at Naval Command in Berlin, which failed to establish contact with the Tirranna and neglected to provide her with an escort into port, and carelessness by local shore units instructing her commander, Leutnant Waldmann, to sail to Bordeaux without adequately warning him of the danger of submarine attack, this news had such a serious impact on the morale of the Atlantis’s crew that Rogge decided to lay up for a while.
Having kept his ship well away from the shipping-lanes for several days in order to give the crew a chance to recover from the news, Rogge set course for the entrance of the Sunda Strait on October 1, to resume hunting, but found the normally busy intersection of several shipping-lanes strangely empty.
As the long days of inactivity dragged on into weeks, the crew, and the several hundred prisoners on board the Atlantis became increasingly ill at ease. The tension among the prisoners was spreading to the German crew and there was a very real danger of a breakdown in discipline.
With so many prisoners on board, and the food and water situation becoming ever more critical, Rogge was anxious to capture a ship to which he could transfer them, and they in turn were anxious to get off the raider. It was not pleasant to be locked into a sweltering hold next to a mine storage room on a ship that could be blown to smithereens at any moment.
When the lookouts spotted a ship in the early hours of October 22, and Rogge closed to within 2,000 metres of her, ran up the battle ensign and ordered the rusty old ship to heave to, it was some time before there was any response.
When a man dressed in pyjamas eventually appeared and acknowledged the signal, both ships came to a standstill, but when the freighter then briefly used her radio, although inexplicably neglecting to include her position, Rogge decided not to open fire, but simply uncovered his guns, and the signalling stopped.
Mohr’s boarding-party reported that the filthy 27-year-old, 5,623-ton neutral Yugoslav, identified as the Dubrovacka Plovidba liner, Durmitor, formerly the Lamport and Holt ship Plutarch, was en route to Japan from Spain with a cargo of 8,200 tons of salt, and was due to call at an enemy port ‘for orders’.
This, plus the fact that she had used her radio when specifically ordered not to, led to Rogge’s decision to declare her a legitimate prize.
When it was further established that she had enough coal on board to get her as far as Japan, her future role as a prison-ship was assured!
Under the command of Leutnant z.S. Emil Dehnel, and a prize-crew of fourteen, she was sent to a rendezvous point, while Rogge took the Atlantis into the Sunda Strait to continue his search for enemy shipping in the hope of capturing some much needed water and provisions for the soon-departing prisoners.
Hearing that there was growing disenchantment among the crew, Rogge had them assembled before him and spoke to them in very plain terms about how all their lives depended on unity and discipline on board.
He also announced some relief measures, including a ‘Leave-On-Board’ scheme, whereby members of the crew would have days off, and reduced work schedules.
Meeting up with the Durmitor as arranged on October 26, two hundred and sixty prisoners were transferred, and as much food and water as could be spared to cover the estimated three-week journey to Italian-occupied Somaliland.
Totally ill-suited for carrying passengers, conditions on board the Durmitor were appalling, as she was infested with rats and cockroaches.
The prisoners had to sleep in the holds on top of the cargo of salt, without any bedding, and with even less fuel on board than originally thought, and her hull badly fouled, she was barely capable of making 7 knots.
Anything and everything that could be used to supplement the diminishing supply of coal was burned, including ‘home-made’ briquettes, made from coal dust, paint, sawdust, petrol, ashes and grease.
Dehnel had ‘sails’, made from hatch-cover tarpaulins, rigged to keep her moving.
Barely making any headway in the intense heat and humidity, and with the mutinous prisoners, upon whom discipline was only being maintained by a constantly manned machine-gun trained on them, down to one cup of water per man per day, the Durmitor soon became a ‘hell-ship’.
Arriving off the port of Warsheik, 70 km north of Mogadishu, on November 22, and in the absence of a pilot to take him in, Dehnel initially ran the Durmitor aground, and was then ‘taken prisoner’ by his Italian allies.
Managing to re-float her, and to transfer his prisoners to an uncertain fate ashore, he took the freighter down the coast to the port of Kismaayo, where he and his crew very happily bid the Durmitor farewell.
* They were to re-join the Atlantis in February, from the supply ship Tannenfels, which had been detained in neutral Somaliland at the outbreak of war, but then released once Italy had joined in the conflict on the German side.
* Incredibly, the Durmitor, commandeered by the British in 1943 and re-named the Radwinter, was to survive the war, and, having been returned to her owners in Dubrovnik, remained in service for a further twenty years, until finally being scrapped in 1963!
Continuing to search in the Sunda Strait, in early November the Atlantis headed for the Bay of Bengal, where, on the night of November 8, a tanker was spotted against the moonlit horizon.
Approaching to within 500 metres, Rogge ordered his powerful searchlight to be trained on the vessel’s bridge, signalled to her to heave to, and not to use her wireless, and asked her to identify herself.
Immediately identifying their ship as the Teddy from Oslo, the temporarily blinded Norwegian officers requested that the raider identify herself in turn.
Claiming to be the British Auxiliary Cruiser HMS Antenor, Rogge had a boarding party alongside her, and Mohr, disguised as a Royal Navy officer, identifying himself as an officer of the Kriegsmarine on her deck, before her startled crew realised what they were dealing with!
The 6748-ton Klaveness and Company vessel, carrying 10,000 tons of fuel oil, and 500 tons of diesel oil from Abadan to Singapore, had been taken by a ploy, without a single shot being fired.
A prize-crew was put on board under Leutnant Breuers, and she was sent five hundred miles to the south to await further orders at ‘Point Mangrove’.
There, her cargo of precious diesel oil could be safely transferred into the raider’s bunkers, effectively extending her raiding cruise by two months.
With his seaplane repaired, Leutnant Bulla found another tanker on November 10.
Rogge decided not to approach her until nightfall, hoping to capture her in the same bloodless way he had captured the Teddy the night before, but, having spotted the Atlantis coming up fast astern at moonrise, she immediately changed course, increased speed and commenced sending a Raider Attack call.
Reluctant to open fire as he wished to keep both the ship and her precious cargo of, hopefully, diesel fuel, intact, Rogge again identified his ship as HMS Antenor, and signalled the tanker to heave to and to prepare to be boarded for inspection.
The response from the tanker was a request to the raider to stop following her, but a repitition of Rogge’s ‘British AMC signal’ ordering her to stop, finally brought her to a halt, although her Captain clearly did not believe his antagonist to be British, and continued sending distress signals.
Signalling that he was sending an officer in a boat to speak with the captain and inspect the ship, Rogge ordered the searchlight to be switched on.
With only Mohr, Kamenz and their helmsman visible, but with ten heavily-armed seamen hidden under the boat’s tarpaulin, the launch crossed to the enemy ship.
Aware that the tanker’s deck gun was manned and clearly trained on the Atlantis, and that her rail was lined with armed men, Mohr pulled alongside in his Royal Navy hat and coat and waited for the right opportunity to jump aboard.
With the tension palpable, and being challenged to identify himself, Mohr and the boarding-party leapt out of the launch, over the rail and onto the tanker.
Tearing off his Royal Navy coat, and placing his German Navy cap on his head, Mohr wrenched the rifle from the grasp of the nearest man and tossed it into the sea, after which he politely identified himself as an officer of the Kriegsmarine and commanded them to surrender, which, after a short, but extremely tense confrontation, they did.
Moments later, on the bridge, aware that a pitched gun-battle on a ship carrying 11,000 barrels of high-octane aviation spirit was not recommended, their Captain followed suit and identified his ship as the 8,306-ton Norwegian Ole Jacob.
Signalling the bad news about the type of cargo she carried to Rogge, Mohr also informed his captain that he was cancelling the tanker’s earlier distress calls.
Although captured in more or less the same way as the Teddy, this brand new Johannes Hansen Tankreederei vessel, on her way from Singapore to Suez, and yielding a valuable cargo of aviation fuel, had none of the vital diesel oil Rogge had hoped would keep him on the high seas for a few more months.
Transferring most of her crew onto the Atlantis, and replacing them with a prize crew under his Navigation Officer, Kapitanleutnant Paul Kamenz, she was sent several hundred miles to the south to wait at ‘Point Rattang’ off Christmas Island, close to where the Teddy was waiting, with orders to wait there until the raider rejoined them on November 15.
The next day was Armistice Day, and as the crew of the Atlantis gathered on deck to remember those who had lost their lives during World War One, they were quickly reminded of World War Two, when smoke was sighted astern.
Ordering the crew to action stations, and stopping briefly to calculate the approaching ship’s course and speed, Rogge then proceeded at a reduced speed, held his course and waited for the newcomer to catch up with him.
Spotting the Atlantis ahead holding the same course into the Sunda Strait as himself, and taking her for a Dutch freighter, the captain of the approaching ship saw no reason to take any sort of evasive action.
Finally coming clearly into view, and recognisable as a ‘Blue Funnel’ liner by her tall ‘old-fashioned’ smokestack, the freighter was holding her converging course, when at a range of 4,600 metres, Rogge raised his battle flag, ordered a sharp turn to starboard and fired a warning shot across her bows.
The vessel’s response was to send a Raider Attack signal, identifying herself as the Automedon, causing Rogge to open fire, completely destroying the bridge and the radio shack with the first salvo.
Despite this, the stricken vessel continued steaming at full speed, taking eleven more direct hits in the process, which devastated the entire midships area.
About to call a cease fire, Rogge’s attention was drawn to a member of the ship’s crew who had been spotted running towards the gun mounted in the stern.
Several further well-aimed salvoes put paid to any recklessly gallant ideas he may have had, and the burning ship slowly came to a halt.
When they finally clambered aboard the shattered vessel, Mohr’s boarding-party was appalled at the sight of dead and badly-wounded men everywhere.
The Captain, all of the officers but one, and everyone else who had either been in the vicinity of the bridge and in the radio shack, had been killed instantly.
En route to the Far East from Liverpool, the 7,528-ton Alfred Holt and Company ship was carrying a cargo of military and technical goods for the Allied war effort, that included aircraft, cars, machinery spares, medicines, service uniforms, bicycles, cameras, microscopes, steel, copper sheet, textiles, whiskey, beer, cigarettes and one hundred and twenty bags of mail.
She was also carrying Top-Secret documents and fifteen bags of Government mail, and with her Captain and all of his officers, bar the First Officer, killed before they could be destroyed or thrown overboard, all of these fell into the hands of Ulrich Mohr’s boarding-party.
They included notes of the military defences of Singapore, details of Naval and Royal Air Force deployment and strength in the Far East, Port defence layouts, Merchant Navy decoding tables and cipher pages, Royal Navy fleet orders, and many other top-secret documents prepared by the British War Cabinet.
Conscious of how suspicious the situation might look, with two ships, one of them a smouldering wreck, sitting stationary in the middle of a busy shipping-lane, and anxious to depart, Rogge ordered Leutnant Fehler and his demolition crew to complete the transfer of stores as quickly as possible, but had to keep granting extensions, as the indefatigable officer uncovered still more irresistable booty, such as 550 cases of whiskey and 2.5 million Chesterfield cigarettes!
Eighty-seven people, including twenty survivors of the sinking of the British freighter Anglo-Saxon by the Widder (Kpt.z.S.Hellmuth Von Ruckteschell) in the North Atlantic in August, and three passengers, including a woman, were taken on board the raider.
The British crew were so grateful at being, unexpectedly, allowed to retrieve their clothing and possessions from their ship, that they helped in the transfer of fresh food and frozen meat to the Atlantis.
They forgot however, to mention the 6,000 gallons of cider stored in a special cold room, only remembering it after the ship had been scuttled and sunk, much to the disappointment of just about everyone on board.
After the sinking of the Automedon, the Atlantis kept her rendezvous with the Teddy, and having taken the 500 tons of diesel fuel and everything else of use out of her, Rogge ordered Leutnant Fehler to scuttle her with demolition charges.
When the first charge failed to explode, ‘Dynamite’ had to hurriedly return to the tanker and place a second charge on board.
This one did not fail, detonating the tanker’s cargo of oil in a massive explosion that turned her into a raging inferno, sending first a gigantic fireball followed by a colossal column of thick black smoke high into the heavens that would certainly have been visible well beyond the horizon, causing Rogge to depart at top speed.
This action prompted the SKL to criticise Rogge for not sending her home as a prize, or for not at least passing her cargo of fuel oil on to another raider.
His view had simply been that the risks involved in contacting the SKL or other German ships by open-text messages, in the absence of any other secure way of doing so, in order to arrange the transfer of the fuel, were far too great.
On the following day the Atlantis rendezvoused with the tanker Ole Jacob.
Rogge had decided to send her, with her valuable cargo of aviation spirit, plus the secret documents found on the Automedon, to Japan under a prize crew. He knew that the fuel on board would be valuable in bargaining with the Japanese for fuel and supplies for German raiders in the Pacific, and that the documents would be of incalculable value to both the Japanese and German governments.
Taking on as much diesel oil as he could stow, leaving the tanker with just sufficient to enable her to reach Japan, Rogge placed his Navigation Officer Kapitänleutnant Paul Kammenz in command of a German prize-crew, her own original crew and the crew of the Teddy.
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