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Battle or Action:
SS Victolite II, Sinking of
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Detail : |
| "On her final voyage the Victolite set out from Halifax on Thursday the 5th of February 1942 bound for Las Piedras, Venezuela. She had just completed a laden passage from Caripito, Venezuela (for cargo) and Trinidad (for bunkers, or engine fuel), between the 21st of January and the first day of February, and was heading back down south without any cargo, but rather with just ballast water in her tanks. Captain Peter McLean Smith, aged 45, was the Master of the Victolite at the time. He was responsible for a total complement of 47 men, of whom two were Gunners manning the ship's defensive weaponry, usually consisting of a large 4-inch artillery gun, possibly with a smaller 12-pound gun and a number of mounted and hand-held machine guns. All of the crew were Canadian nationals, with the exception of two men (one British, and one Norwegian). There were six teenagers aboard. By the afternoon of Tuesday the tenth of February Captain Smith and his men had made it to a point 260 nautical miles north-northwest of Bermuda, 400 miles east of Cape Hatteras, 400 miles southeast of New York, and 325 miles south-southeast of Nantucket. This position is 42 miles southeast of the Caryn Seamount. At that time and in that place the hapless tanker sailed across the sites of the German submarine U-564 under the command of the aggressive veteran skipper then-Kapitaenleutnant Reinhard Suhren." |
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