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Posted on 07/06/2003 12:02:40 AM PDT by SAMWolf
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 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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The Sinking of HMT Rohna On November 26, 1943, the United States suffered the greatest loss at sea in its history when the HMT Rohna was sunk by a guided missile launched from a German bomber off the coast of North Africa. At the time of the disaster, the HMT Rohna, a British-registered troopship with a crew of one hundred ninety five, was transporting one thousand, nine hundred eighty one American troops and seven Red Cross personnel to the China-Burma-India theater of war. Before the dawn of November 27, 1943, one thousand and fifteen American troops, three Red Cross personnel and one hundred twenty crewmen perished. Hundreds died when the missile struck the Rohna at her shelter deck level and exploded near the after end of the engine room and the No. 6 troops deck. Others perished from cold and exhaustion when darkness and rough seas hampered rescue efforts.  News of this catastrophe was suppressed by the War Department and limited to the meager information in two telegrams to the parents. The following are representative of the information: "December 29, 1943. (Name) was passenger aboard troop ship which was sunk as a result of enemy action. Ship struck at night and sank very rapidly. Despite every effort many American soldiers listed as missing as a result of this action. (Name) still listed as missing but little hope held that he is still alive." "May 15, 1944. The Secretary of War asks that I assure you of his deep regret in the loss of your son (name) who was listed as missing in action. Report received in the War Department establishes the fact that your son's death occurred on twenty seven, November nineteen forty three."  To compound this tragedy, this is the extent of the details furnished the grieving fathers and mothers even to this day. This even remains virtually unknown to the public, and families still do not know how their loved ones died. Over eight hundred bodies were never recovered, and their remains are scattered over hundreds of miles at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. The question arises as to why the sinking of the Rohna was kept secret for decades after the war ended. Some say that very little information is available since it was a British ship, therefore, the Rohna never became an American household word, as did the Arizona and the Indianapolis. It is easy to understand why the British government has little information in their archives on the Rohna sinking. They certainly should be reluctant to let the public know that the Captain of the Rohna permitted the lives of American troops to be put in jeopardy by putting them on a ship with practically all of the lifeboats hanging on chains rusted in place, making launching all but impossible. Rafts that were supposed to save lives went down with their ship permanently rusted to their slides. Also, no captain would want it known that his crew was the first to leave the doomed Rohna leaving the American troops to try to launch the lifeboats and rafts as best they could, struggling with equpment totally unfamiliar to them. Is it any wonder that brothers and sisters and other family members are still searching for the circumstances that took the lives of their loved ones! Mothers and fathers went to their graves never knowing the circumstances of the death of their sons. Some, in desperation, went to fortune tellers in hopes that they could shed some light on their sons' last hours on this earth. As late as August 1993, a letter from a family member to the Pentagon requesting information on the event that took her brother's life went unanswered!  One can speculate endlessly, but there will never be justification for the callous and insensitive position taken by the War Department when details of this tragedy were withheld for decades from the families who lost loved ones on the Rohna. ******************************************* Thursday, November 26, 1943. British troopship Rohna is under way from Oran to Port Said in an Allied convoy. She carries two thousand American soldiers. At four-twenty that afternoon, German bombers find the convoy, and they begin circling it.  Troops on the Rohna are puzzled by several smaller airplanes flying below the bombers. Are they allied fighters, there to protect them? Then a couple of those small planes attack the ship ahead of the Rhona. Moments later another comes directly at Rohna. First it falls away from a mother plane, then it accelerates. At 5:30 PM, it strikes the Rohna's port flank at enormous speed. The device blows open a huge hole, killing hundreds outright. The burning ship sinks, and, when the smoke clears, 1135 troops and crew have died. The images of burned and damaged bodies are a horror that will remain etched on survivors and rescuers alike. One of the least-known weapons of WW-II has just inflicted the greatest American death toll on any ship that went down. As a pre-teenager, I followed the aerial war closely, yet this is news to me. For the Rohna disaster was hushed up. Its survivors were bundled off to the war in Asia without so much as the chance to grieve. We at home didn't hear about it at all.  What'd struck the ship was something called a glide bomb. Glide bombs had first been used in WW-I. Dirigibles had tried dropping bombs with stubby wings that could glide into the side, rather than the top, of a target. That idea came back in WW-II. The Germans, Russians, English, Japanese, and Americans all worked on it, but only the Germans and Americans made usable weapons of it. The Germans were first. They realized that such a device had to be radio-controlled, and it needed a rocket booster to get it past enemy fire. By 1943 the Germans were using glide bombs in combat. The Henschel-293 that destroyed Rohna was a small unmanned airplane with stubby wings and an 1100-pound bomb. Pilot Hans Dochterman dropped it from his Heinkel bomber at about four thousand feet. The rocket kicked in as it fell, and Dochterman's bombardier, Georg Zuther, steered it into the Rohna from a safe distance. It may've been moving over five hundred miles an hour when it struck.  America was developing its own glide bombs by then, and we imposed secrecy on the whole business. Soon after that we'd gained air superiority in Europe, and German glide bombs were no longer a threat. We went on to create our own glide bombs and were soon using them with murderous effect against enemy bridges. By war's end, the Japanese had developed an even more sinister version of the technology. It was the human-flown Kamikaze bomb. And so the cold waters of the Mediterranean closed over that terrible November day. Rohna went down, and we in America never knew. Secrets had to be kept. And a war had to be won. John Lienhard
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More than 1,000 U.S. servicemen died Nov. 26, 1943, when the HMT Rohna troopship was sunk in the Mediterranean.
There were more than 900 survivors.
“I’m going to say, the ones I know, there are possibly 100 (survivors still alive). That’s only a guess,” said Wayne L. Coy, 76, Syracuse-Webster Road, Syracuse. He is one of the few remaining survivors of the Rohna.
Yet, to this day, neither the survivors nor their families have received official recognition. Most of the families of the casualties have not even been told the fate of their loved ones.
“It has since been decided,” said Coy, “that it was the biggest loss of Americans in World War II.”
According to Coy, “The main reason it (wasn’t) declassified is because we were hit by a secret weapon at the time. ... When it was declassified, it was dropped in red tape.”
The weapon that sank the ship was the second Henschel 293 bomb dropped by a German aircraft, flown by Major Dochtermann. The first one was a dud, Coy said. At 20 feet long and 15 feet wide, the bomb was radio-controlled.
“The reason there’s never been a battle ribbon given out was because we were ... assigned to whoever needed it and we were earmarked to go on to the Far East, so we were never assigned to an outfit in this theater, and so there’s no one to give us a battle star or any other kind of citation,” Coy said.
Coy had been in the service for approximately three months when the bomb hit the ship. At 20 years old, he was one of the youngest private first classmen on the ship.
When the attack happened, Coy said, he and many others went below decks. “We just waited to be hit,” he said. “Everything went dead.” The ship had been hit “right in the middle, above the water line.” By the time he jumped off the ship into the water, the ship was at a 30-degree angle.
“It happened in the Mediterranean. Oran is the city we left from. The battle was probably along Algiers,” he said.
“Everybody was issued a life vest. I never thought I’d see one (again), but they had one at the 50th reunion.” The life jackets were gas filled, he said.
“The water was rough – 25-foot waves. ... It was at dusk. A bunch of us got together,” he said.
More than 600 of the men boarded the USS Pioneer, while other men boarded the British ships Atherstone, Clan Campbell and Mindful. Coy was on the Pioneer, a 125-foot mine sweeper.
After the Rohna sank and men began boarding other ships, Coy saved the life of an officer from New York, “Skip” Sullivan.
Sullivan was in the water and “he was having trouble, mainly with the waves,” Coy said. Coy helped Sullivan stay afloat and helped get him up the ropes of the USS Pioneer. Sullivan was approximately 36; Wayne was 20.
They were taken to Phillipeville and then went from there by rail to Bizerte. “At the time, that was the worst bombed place there was,” Coy said.
“Once we got aboard the next ship, we went on to the Suez Canal ... and landed in Bombay,” he said.
“All records were wiped out and they had to be redone,” said Coy.
A high school friend of Coy’s, Bill Wagoner of Warsaw, who was a pilot in Coy’s outfit, went home from the war ahead of Coy. “He said, ‘Anything you want me to take home, I’ll take home for you.’ So I wrote my story about the shipwreck and everything else and (told it) to my mother and dad. He carried it home in the bell of his trumpet. He never took it out of that bell until he was at my mom and dad’s house,” Coy said.
Betty Coy added, “Your mail was all censored and everything. You couldn’t get anything by.”
Coy still has the letter. He also has newspaper clippings, pictures and books on the sinking of the Rohna. “I have quite a collection,” he said.
Betty Coy said the effort to get Purple Hearts and battle stars for the men of Rohna “is nationwide. I don’t know if they’ll get anything accomplished, but they’re going full force with it, I guess.”
David Slone
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Metcalf) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. METCALF. Mr. Speaker, the greatest naval disaster in the United States during World War II was the sinking of the USS Arizona. 1,177 were killed.
The Arizona has been memorialized in the national consciousness.
On November 26, 1943, however, a loss of American military personnel of almost identical magnitude occurred when the British troop transport ship, the HMT Rohna, was sunk by a radio-controlled rocket-boosted bomb launched from a German bomber off the coast of North Africa. By the next day, 1,015 American troops and more than 100 British and Allied officers and crewmen had perished.
It is a grim story. Hundreds died when the German missile struck. The majority, however, died from exposure and drowning when darkness and rough seas limited the rescue efforts. Less than half, over 900, survived, which was less than half. American, British and French rescue workers worked valiantly to save those Rohna passengers and crew who made it off the ship and into the ocean. The USS Pioneer picked up two-thirds of all those that were saved, 606 GIs. Many of those in the water had to endure hours of chilling temperatures before being picked up. As the evening moved into the middle of the night and the early morning hours, some men were speechless with the cold. Many died deaths of unbelievable agony.
The United States Government had not properly acknowledged this event.
Because inadequate records were kept, some survivors had to fight for years to prove that the Rohna even existed, let alone that survivors might be due some recognition.
I dedicate this memorial to the memory of those who fell in the service of our country. I dedicate it in the names of those who offered their lives that justice, freedom and democracy might survive to be the victorious ideals of the world. The lives of those who made the supreme sacrifice are glorious before us. Their deeds are an inspiration. As they served America in the time of war, yielding their last full measure of devotion, may we serve America in time of peace. I dedicate this monument to them, and with it, I dedicate this society to the faithful service of our country and the preservation of the memory of those who died, that liberty might live.
The men who gave their lives for their country on board this ship were heroes who deserve to be recognized and not forgotten. Parents of virtually all of them died without learning how their sons had died, because this was something that was not made public. Their brothers and sisters, wives and children need to hear their story. All Americans need to learn of their bravery and sacrifice. Not only do the victims of the tragic sinking need to be honored, but also their comrades, who survived, to be sent on to the Burma-India-China theater of the war and there to serve valiantly.
On November 11, 1993, Charles Osgood featured the Rohna story on his widespread radio program. For the first time, in 1993, a broad cross-section of America got to hear the story of some of its unknown warriors. Osgood revisited the subject two weeks later. According to Osgood, `It is not that we forgot, it is just that we never knew.'
Americans need to know about the Rohna. They need to know about the men, who died on board, sacrificing their lives in the fight against tyranny.
Americans need to know, and certainly must never forget.
Additional Sources:
www.uh.edu/engines/epi1583.htm
www.timeswrsw.com/N0804002.HTM
www.whidbey.net/rohna/congress.html
www.kcts.org
www.concentric.net
Passed the U.S. Senate by Unanimous Consent October 27, 2000 Whereas on November 26, 1943, a German bomber off the coast of North Africa sunk the British transport HMT ROHNA with a radio controlled, rocket-boosted bomb; Whereas 1,015 United States service members and more than 100 British and Allied officers and crewmen perished as a result of the attack; Whereas hundreds died immediately when the bomb struck and hundreds more died when darkness and rough seas limited rescue efforts; Whereas many families still do not know the circumstances of the deaths of loved ones who died as a result of the attack; Whereas more than 900 United States service members survived the attack under extremely adverse circumstances; Whereas United States, British, and French rescuers worked valiantly to save the passengers and crew who made it off the HMT ROHNA into the sea; Whereas one United States ship, the USS PIONEER, picked up many of those who were saved; Whereas because of inadequate record keeping, some survivors of the attack struggled for years to verify the details of the sinking of the HMT ROHNA; Whereas the men who died as a result of the attack on the HMT ROHNA have been largely forgotten by the Nation and; Whereas the Congress and the people of the United States have never recognized the bravery and sacrifice of the United States service members who died as a result of the sinking of the HMT ROHNA or the United States service members who survived the sinking and continued to serve the Nation valiantly abroad during the war: Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That the Congress expresses appreciation for--
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.......FALL IN to the FReeper Foxhole! The video History Undercover: The Rohna Disaster: WWII's Secret Tragedy is available - $24.95 VHS. Also on DVD.
James G. Bennett's book, The Rohna Disaster: World War II's Secret Tragedy is available on Half.com for $17.50 (paperback)
Both of these incidences were not widely known until years after the war.
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