Many Allied ships were sunk during World War II, some with huge losses of life. For the U.S. military, the oft-cited cases include the 1,177 sailors killed on board the USS Arizona (BB-39) at Pearl Harbor and the 879 who died when the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) was torpedoed in the Pacific.
However, the greatest loss of U.S. military personnel at sea from enemy attack—in any war in the nation’s history—involved a ship mostly ignored by naval historians: His Majesty’s Transport Rohna. Among the 1,157 who perished when the converted passenger ship was sunk off the coast of Algeria on 26 November 1943 were 1,015 U.S. soldiers. The total Allied casualties almost match those of the Arizona (which was moored when sunk, not at sea), while the Rohna’s U.S. casualties alone far exceeded those of the Indianapolis. Yet the sinking of the Rohna remains comparatively unknown.
Why has so little been documented about this loss? One possible reason is that the critical details about the attack, and the subsequent investigations, were kept classified by the U.S. government for decades after the war’s end. Moreover, those minimal facts about the loss that were released by the War Department in June 1945 appear to have been officially ignored after that one exposure. Perhaps it was not in the interest of the organizations responsible for this disaster to expose the details of the sinking.
What happened? What information was released when? And how were those decisions made?
Desperately Needed: Adequate Sea Transport
In 1943, the United States was transferring Army personnel to the Chinese-Burma-India theater, including on a route via the Mediterranean Sea. Units first were transported from the United States in American troopships to Oran, where they next would board British troopships and join a convoy that had earlier departed the United Kingdom for Egypt. These “KMF” convoys (UK to the Mediterranean, Fast) typically left the Clyde or Liverpool, stopped in Algiers, and then proceeded to Alexandria or Port Said in Egypt. From there they would continue their journey via Aden, Bombay, and Calcutta to destinations in Burma or China.
The Allies struggled in 1943 to find adequate sea transport for the journey across the Mediterranean to Egypt. Most U.S. troops on this route were carried in British troopships: converted passenger liners, requisitioned as His Majesty’s Transports (HMT). When more capacity was required in 1943, the British transferred from the Indian Ocean four smaller cargo/passenger ships operated by the British India Steam Navigation Company. One of these was the Rohna, along with her sister ship Rajula and fleet companions Karoa and Egra.
The Rohna was not a luxury ocean liner, except perhaps for the 414 passengers who could be accommodated on board in cabins. In commercial use, she was more akin to a crowded bus, certified to carry thousands of unberthed “deck” passengers. She originally was certified to carry 5,064 unberthed passengers, who would find whatever room they could on deck for relatively short passages. This was later reduced to 3,851. These deck passengers often had been poor Indians looking for manual-labor work outside India. By 1943 the ship was 17 years old and had seen almost continuous service since the outbreak of war, completing 120 voyages in the Indian Ocean before being transferred to the eastern Mediterranean in April. When she arrived to collect U.S. personnel for convoy KMF-26 in October 1943, it was the first time the ship had operated in the western Mediterranean carrying U.S. soldiers.
The Rohna’s Australian captain, Thomas J. Murphy, was an experienced officer who had worked in the Indian Ocean for decades. Thirteen Royal Navy and British Merchant Navy officers supported him. The ship’s crew was composed of 182 Indian sailors, known as “lascars.”
An Explosion—and a Chaotic ‘Abandon Ship’
KMF-26 formed in the Clyde in western Scotland, departing for the Mediterranean on 15 November 1943. As it passed Oran on 25 November, the convoy was joined by a U.S. contingent encompassing the Rohna, Rajula, Karoa, and Egra; the destroyer escorts USS Herbert C. Jones (DE-137) and Frederick C. Davis (DE-136); and the minesweepers Pioneer (AM-105) and Portent (AM-106). The Rajula suffered a mechanical failure almost immediately and returned to Oran that same day.
The Rohna, stuffed with almost 2,000 U.S. soldiers and three dozen other passengers, continued with the convoy toward Alexandria, Egypt.
The following afternoon, the Luftwaffe attacked. Allied fighter aircraft disrupted much of that attack, and several bombers were destroyed. KMF-26 avoided losses until an He-177A-3 bomber, piloted by Hans Dochterman, launched a rocket-propelled Hs 293 radio-guided “glide bomb” at the convoy. Dochterman’s bombardier steered the Hs 293 into the port side of the Rohna, causing a massive explosion, fire, and complete loss of power. (Dochterman later suggested he was not targeting the Rohna.)1 She began to sink and, in the absence of clear communications, many on board made the decision to abandon ship.
Of the 1,981 U.S. soldiers on board, it is estimated that about 300 perished almost immediately from the explosion or resulting conflagration, leaving about 1,700 soldiers to abandon ship, along with the surviving officers, crew, and several dozen British military and medical personnel aboard.
Accounts of the chaos during the process of abandoning ship survive by virtue of 85 detailed interviews with survivors completed in 1944 and additional firsthand accounts collected over the postwar years. They consistently describe a horrific experience.
Many of the Indian crewmen on board were killed in the initial explosion. Others, according to survivors, launched one lifeboat and rowed away, leaving the soldiers to fend for themselves. The soldiers, however, had not been trained in deploying lifeboats: During lifeboat drills, no lifeboats had been actually lowered. Moreover, the davits, winches, and cables were decrepit. Much of the equipment was immobilized by rust, covered by layers of paint.
When the untrained soldiers attempted to lower the lifeboats, either the davits would not operate at all, or one line would jam while the other broke loose, and the lifeboat would crash into the sea. Only a handful of the 18 lifeboats that survived the attack were launched successfully, and those often capsized from overcrowding or were in such poor condition that they could not be used.
The soldiers also attempted to use the smaller life rafts, only to find that they, too, had been “welded” to the hull by layers of rust and paint. Few could be released, and many that could had been tossed overboard while the ship was still making headway and thus disappeared unused into the darkness behind the ship.
When it became apparent that they would have to enter the water directly, the soldiers relied on their M1926 life belts. These were not kapok life jackets or inflatable life vests (“Mae Wests”), designed for use in the oceans. Instead, these were inflatable tubes designed to be worn around the chest under the armpits, and intended for use in shallow water for short periods, e.g., leaving a landing craft while storming a beach. However, many soldiers had not been trained properly in their use, so they wore these lifebelts around their waists, which meant that, on entering the cold Mediterranean, they would be upended head-down into the sea. Often survivors drowned as a result.
Other ships in the convoy moved in for the rescue, notably the Pioneer, which, in a heroic effort while under attack, rescued more than 600 survivors. The cargo ships Clan Campbell and Atherstone and the convoy escort HMS Holcombe rescued others, and within hours additional rescue ships arrived to search for survivors.
In the end, 1,015 U.S. soldiers died in the attack or in the water. (Some sources suggest another 35 died of injuries after the sinking. However, extensive research has been unable to associate these losses with any names or other identification.) Five of the 13 British officers were killed along with 108 of the lascars and another 29 of the others on board.
The U.S. survivors for the most part were taken to a British camp at Philippeville (now Skikda). There they were informed that any communication about this event to others, or in letters back home, would result in court-martial.
Three official accounts were made soon after the loss of the Rohna. All were immediately preceded by the near-instant arrival of Captain Elmer W. Grimes of the U.S. Army Transportation Corps, who reached Philippeville by 1530 the day after the attack. The first report was from survivor and British Army Major James C. Lindsell, written on 28 November, the day after Captain Grimes’ arrival. His note also was signed by U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander J. Frolich, the senior U.S. officer on board the Rohna. Grimes wrote the second report himself on 29 November. The final report by Frolich was written on 30 November.2
All the reports describe the attack in similar ways—one wonders if Grimes had been dispatched to control the narrative—and they also either ignore or understate the difficulties encountered in abandoning ship. None mentions the poor condition of the lifesaving systems on board the Rohna. For example, Grimes incorrectly reports that the soldiers had life jackets. The reports by Lindsell, Grimes, and Frolich were instantly classified “Secret.” The official silence had begun.
The U.S. War Department informed the families of those lost that their soldiers were missing, leaving out the detail that the incident involved a troopship lost at sea. For all they knew, the families believed their soldiers would soon return, or were alive as prisoners of war.
U.S.-British Friction
In early 1944 the U.S. War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations (BPR), concerned that the families of those lost in the attack were being misled, sought permission to update their status to killed in action (KIA) and inform the families. These requests, made on 4, 10, and 15 January, were forwarded up the chain—and rejected.3
The first request, from BPR director Major General Alexander D. Surles to the Allied North African Theater Operations headquarters, was rejected by persons unrecorded. The second request, also from Surles, was disapproved by British General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, who had just taken over as overall theater commander from General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The third request also was disapproved by Wilson, who nonetheless gave permission for the Admiralty to override his disapproval if the Royal Navy felt such release was critical. The Allied Naval Forces commander in the Mediterranean, Royal Navy Admiral Sir John H. D. Cunningham, reaffirmed Wilson’s disapproval.
Other parts of the U.S. War Department added to BPR’s pressure in early February, including the Adjutant General (Major General James A. Ulio), the Operations Division (Major General Thomas T. Handy, Assistant Chief of Staff) and the U.S. Navy (Rear Admiral Bernard H. Bieri, U.S. naval commander in the Mediterranean). Perhaps from the growing public pressure and congressional inquiries, the U.S. Army on 17 February finally released an abbreviated announcement that a troopship had been sunk “in European waters” with the loss of 1,000 soldiers. Newspapers picked up this story, embellishing it with suspicions that the ship had been sunk by a submarine.4 No further details were released.
One obvious reason for secrecy might have been to avoid providing useful intelligence to the enemy. Another explanation involves the weapon used. The Hs 293 was a radio-controlled, rocket-boosted glide bomb that had wreaked havoc on Allied navies in the Bay of Biscay in August, off Salerno in September, and in the Atlantic and Mediterranean in October and November.5 Commanders were concerned about the effect on morale if sailors and soldiers concluded the Germans had achieved a superweapon against which the Allies had limited defenses. (Journalists embedded on board ship had been advised not to report the use of these glide bombs, and official reports often mistakenly attributed such attacks to “aerial torpedoes.”)6
Incidentally, the presence of the two destroyer escorts Frederick C. Davis and Herbert C. Jones represented part of those hoped-for defenses. They were equipped with radio-jamming gear designed to disrupt the guidance system of the Hs 293. Unfortunately, the frequency they used that day was wrong thanks to faulty intelligence, so the jammers were ineffective. The destroyer escorts also carried advanced radio-signal recording systems, and once they had recorded the actual guidance signals, the two ships abandoned the convoy and steamed straight for Bizerte, where an officer took the recordings and flew direct to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.
Classification: ‘Secret’
By early 1944, there were additional rumblings in Congress that families were being misled as to the status of their soldiers lost with the Rohna. In February 1944, the Adjutant General’s Office entered the fray and concluded that a proper investigation was warranted, including interviews with survivors. This was not a trivial matter. The survivors by that point had been scattered across remote Burma and China. In the end, 85 survivors were tracked down and interviewed.
Harvard-trained lawyer Joseph F. Hennessy led the subsequent investigation. His 5 May 1944 report is the first complete and accurate accounting of what happened on 26 November 1943. He details the flawed condition of the ship’s safety equipment, the poor response of the ship’s crew, the inadequate training provided to the soldiers, and the general panic that led to excessive casualties.7 As a result, the Army finally notified the families of those killed that their status had been changed from “Missing in Action” to “Killed in Action.”
Hennessy’s report was then classified “Secret.” It remained that way for decades.
On 13 June 1945, after Victory in Europe Day, the U.S. Army Transportation Corps issued a self-congratulatory press release that documented how losses on troopships represented only a minuscule fraction of total troop movements. This press release also provided to the public the first information about the Rohna attack, one of dozens of troopship incidents listed in that press release. The public was told only that 1,015 U.S. servicemen lost their lives on board the British transport Rohna when she was sunk in an air attack off the coast of Algeria on 26 November 1943.8 There were no details about the weapon involved, the poor condition of the ship, its operation as one of His Majesty’s Transports, or the chaos experienced in abandoning ship. While the press release was reported in virtually every U.S. newspaper, it quickly faded away as the nation moved on to the continuing battles in the Pacific.9
While the minimal facts about the loss of the Rohna had been made public, they might as well have stayed unrevealed given the limited coverage of the incident after the war’s end. Notably, the Rohna’s loss is completely ignored in Samuel Eliot Morison’s 15-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. The attack on convoy KMF-26 is not mentioned, though Morison devotes four pages to the previous convoy KMF-25A.10 The Official Chronology of the U.S. Navy in World War II does not reference this loss.11 The Army’s official chronology of World War II also ignores HMT Rohna.12
Nor did the British cover this loss in detail, though it involved a British ship in a convoy escorted primarily by British warships and under British command. The 34-volume History of the Second World War does describe the aerial combat over convoy KMF-26, but it does not mention the Rohna, concluding only that the attack was a Luftwaffe defeat because “though the aircraft sank one transport they paid heavily for this small success” (emphasis added.)13 The book Merchantmen at War: The Official Story of the Merchant Navy 1939–1944, prepared by Britain’s Ministry of Information for the Ministry of War Transport, does not mention the Rohna or KMF-26.14
The official silence continued for decades. In the 1960s, U.S. Air Force Colonel John M. Virden sought to author a book on the Rohna. He was refused permission by the Pentagon to publish his findings, because “any writing on the subject might possibly be embarrassing to the British Government.”15
Why this continuing silence? Perhaps the motive was one of organizational self-interest. The loss of soldiers on board the Rohna was an embarrassment to the U.S. Army Transportation Corps and to the British government, which together had failed to ensure adequate safety gear or proper training. Moreover, the Rohna appears to have been loaded with almost twice the number of soldiers one would expect given her capacity. This is based on the simple comparison of net register tonnage (NRT) to the number of soldiers. (NRT is a measure of the internal volume of a ship—one ton = 100 cubic feet—less that space used for machinery, fuel storage, or crew quarters.) Using the data for eight other troopships in KMF-26 and extrapolating the relationship between NRT and troops carried, the expected number for the Rohna would have been 1,167—versus the roughly 2,000 troops carried.
Bureaucracies could always point the finger elsewhere. The U.S. Navy could remind critics that the Rohna was not a U.S. ship, the convoy was not under U.S. command, and not one U.S. sailor was killed. The U.S. Army could deflect attention by emphasizing that the victims were not under Army command or in a land-combat theater—they were just passengers whose unfortunate fate was in British hands. The Royal Navy might assert that it need not dwell on the subject because this was not a Royal Navy ship, and there were only a handful of British victims among the 1,157 killed.
The Full Story Finally Emerges
It was not until the 1967 Freedom of Information Act that the walls began to crumble. The first breach was when survivor John P. Fievet published an article in American History magazine in August 1993.16 CBS Radio commentor Charles Osgood then featured the Rohna story in a national broadcast. Author Carlton Jackson gained access to declassified files for his 1997 book Forgotten Secret: The Sinking of HMT Rohna, and other books soon followed.17 Congress passed a resolution honoring the Rohna victims and survivors in 2000. Michael Walsh of the Rohna Survivors Memorial Association interviewed on camera many aging Rohna survivors to document their firsthand accounts.18 Filmmaker Jack Ballo has integrated these interviews with extensive primary research for his forthcoming documentary Rohna Classified.
What conclusions can we draw from the silence around the Rohna? It is not surprising that organizations will seek to protect themselves from embarrassment or criticism. One method is to provide a minimal amount of detail in a public release while keeping details classified and then to maintain official silence. The deflection of attention is facilitated when the situation involves multiple players, with each explaining their silence by explaining that they do not “own” the problem. (One can easily draw a comparison between the Rohna and the loss of American soldiers on board U.S. Navy amphibious ships with British escorts during Operation Tiger at Slapton Sands in 1944. The War Department issued an accurate report on the loss just after D-Day but then went silent on the matter.)
The other lesson is that, eventually, the word gets out. Survivors want to tell their story as their numbers dwindle, and they fear the history will be lost. Official records, once declassified, can be found by researchers. For these reasons, the loss of the Rohna, once effectively hidden for three decades, is finally receiving the attention it warrants.
1. Shawn Dochtermann (grandson of Hans Dochterman), interview with the author.
2. The reports are contained in Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, Record Group (RG) 165, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, MD.
3. RG 165, NARA.
4. See, for example, “1,000 Saved of 2,000 on Ship in Biggest Transport Loss,” The New York Times, 18 February 1944.
5. See Martin J. Bollinger, Warriors & Wizards: The Development and Defeat of Radio-Controlled Glide Bombs of the Third Reich (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010).
6. Bollinger, Warriors & Wizards.
7. Memorandum to: Chief, Casualty Branch, A.G.O from CAPT Joseph F. Hennessey, “Review and Determination of Status of Casualties Incurred in the Sinking of SS ‘ROHNA’ in the Mediterranean Sea on 26 November 1943,” 5 May 1944, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, RG 407.3, NARA.
8. “Ship Sinkings in War Against Germany and Italy Cost 3,604 American Lives,” BPR press release, U.S War Department, 13 June 1945.
9. See, for example, “3,604 Troops Were Lost on Ships Taking 4,453,061 Men to Europe,” The New York Times, 14 June 1945.
10. Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, vol. 10, The Atlantic Battle Won (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1956).
11. Robert J. Cressman, The Official Chronology of the U.S. Navy in World War II (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999).
12. Mary H. Williams, United States Army in World War II: Chronology 1941–1945 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1999).
13. T. P. Maloney et. al., History of the Second World War: The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 5, The Campaign in Sicily 1943 and the Campaign in Italy 3rd September 1943 to 31st March 1944 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1973).
14. Ministry of Information, Merchantmen at War: The Official Story of the Merchant Navy 1939–1944 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1944).
15. Carlton Jackson, Forgotten Tragedy: The Sinking of HMT Rohna (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1977), 156.
16. John P. Fievet, “World War II’s Secret Disaster,” American History 29, no. 3 (August 1993): 24–35.
17. See Jackson, Forgotten Tragedy, and James G. Bennett, The Rohna Disaster: World War II’s Secret Tragedy (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Publishing, 1998).
18. See Michael J. Walsh, Rohna Memories: Eyewitness to Tragedy, 2 vols. (New York: iUniverse, 2005, 2008).