Repatriation
Late October 1939: At this point, there was a substantial number of Scandinavian ships and sailors in Kirkwall that were not originally destined to be there. Some had been diverted with or without Royal Navy prize crews onboard. Others had ended up there without their ships, shipwrecked, like the Lorentz W. Hansen crew. Kirkwall was…
S/S Lorentz W. Hansen
The patrol boat did not take the soaking wet crew directly to Kirkwall; they first had to come along on a 14-hour patrol. Once in Kirkwall, the Wanja crew were accommodated in the Old Town Hall, where they experienced simple conditions but true Orkney hospitality and warm food. They were safe, dry and no longer…
On the reef
15 October 1939: The ship was not in immediate danger, but was stuck on the rocky reef on Whitemill Point. The crew was safe and unharmed and remained onboard to try and refloat their vessel. Early in the morning the day after the grounding, a Prize officer and a couple of crew rowed ashore to…
Adrift and aground
At 06:15 on Saturday 14 October, north of the Orkney Islands, S/S Wanja encountered a British destroyer and was ordered to stop her engines. According to a crew member´s account they were told a submarine hunt was ongoing in the area. On board Wanja they did not know what had happened in Scapa Flow a…
The fall of The Mighty Oak
14 October 1939: HMS Royal Oak was back in Scapa Flow after taking part in the search for the German battleship Gneisenau, the cruiser Köln and nine destroyers which were on an operation in the North Sea. This was part of a German diversionary manoeuvre to lure units of the British Home Fleet out of…
Atlantic crossing
October 1939: Having crossed the North Atlantic during a massive storm that delayed her considerably and also forced the crew to take a literal bite into their food supplies, S/S Wanja was approaching the waters south of Iceland. She had already encountered the British Royal Navy once, off the coast of Nantucket on 26 September.…
The early years
The star of this story is the S/S Wanja. And she was first named after a bright star. She was launched as S/S Aldebaran. Before continuing to reveal details of her fate and the aftermath, a short history of the life of S/S Wanja is in order. During her twenty year long career the S/S…
War again
NEW YORK Friday, 1 September, 1939 The steamship Wanja of Helsingborg arrived at New York immigration on 1 September 1939 after 16 days at sea. On board she has a crew of 26, 25 Swedes and 1 Norwegian. The world had changed substantially since S/S Wanja bunkered in Helsingborg on Tuesday 15 August and set…
How it started
You know that drawer or cupboard with miscellaneous…stuff. Things that do not belong with any other things and end up sitting there – undefined. Runar´s mother had one of those. The contents of this particular little drawer got thrown into a little cardboard box some time in the 1990s, and ended up being moved around…
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