RMS Nova Scotia (1926)

RMS Nova Scotia was a British Royal Mail Ship that was requisitioned as a troop ship in the Second World War. In 1942 a German submarine sank her in the Indian Ocean with the loss of 858 of the 1,052 people aboard.

Building
Vickers, Sons & Maxim, Ltd of Barrow-in-Furness built Nova Scotia for Furness, Withy & Co of Liverpool. She was the sister ship of RMS Newfoundland, which Vickers had launched for the same owner 11 months previously. Her 1,047 NHP quadruple expansion steam engine was fed by five 215 lbf/in2 single-ended boilers with a total heating surface of 16095 sqft. Her boilers were heated by 20 oil-fuelled corrugated furnaces with a grate surface of 377 sqft. Her boat deck had six lifeboats, mounted on Welin-Maclachlan davits.

Civilian service
Nova Scotia joined Newfoundland on Furness, Withy's regular transatlantic mail route between Liverpool and Boston via St John's, Newfoundland and Halifax, Nova Scotia. Passengers included Roald Dahl, then aged 17, who in August 1934 was one of 50 public school boys who sailed from Liverpool on an expedition to Newfoundland of the recently founded Public Schools Exploring Society. Their passage to St John's took a week.

Troop ship
Early in 1941 the Ministry of War Transport requisitioned Nova Scotia as a troop ship, and on 3 February she embarked 1,200 troops. She joined a convoy from Britain to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where she arrived on 2 March. Nova Scotia continued south, crossing the Equator on 12 March and reaching Cape Town, South Africa, on 22 March.

In the autumn of 1942 Nova Scotia left Port Tewfik in Egypt and sailed down the Red Sea to Massawa in British-occupied Eritrea, where she put US troops ashore and embarked Italian prisoners of war. She also called at the British Colony of Aden and then proceeded southwards unescorted, carrying over 750 Italian prisoners of war and civilian internees and 3,000 bags of mail bound for Durban, South Africa.

Nova Scotia had passed through the Mozambique Channel and was off the coast of Natal Province, South Africa, when at 0715 hrs on the morning of 28 November the GS U-177 hit her with three torpedoes. Nova Scotia rolled to port, caught fire and sank by the bow within 10 minutes. The crew managed to launch only one lifeboat; other survivors depended on life rafts or pieces of wreckage. Those who were left in the water either drowned or were eaten by sharks.

In order to identify what ship it had just sunk, U-177 recovered two survivors. They were interned Italian merchant sailors who explained that most of those aboard had been Italian internees. Because of the Laconia Order that Admiral Dönitz had issued two months previously, the submarine's commander, Robert Gysae, withdrew U-177 from the area and radioed the Befehlshaber der U-Boote (BdU) for orders. The BdU ordered him to leave survivors in the water and continue on patrol. The BdU requested help from Portugal, which sent the frigate NRP Afonso de Albuquerque from Lourenço Marques in neighbouring Mozambique.

The Afonso de Albuquerque reached the area on 29 November. Five survivors fired a distress flare and were rescued by the frigate. The next day the Afonso de Albuquerque found herself surrounded by hundreds of floating corpses. In all the frigate rescued 130 Italian internees, 42 guards, 17 crew members, three military and naval personnel, one DEMS gunner and one passenger. 858 people were lost: 650 Italian internees, 96 crew members, 88 South African guards, 10 DEMS gunners, eight military and naval personnel, five passengers, and Nova Scotia's master.

Two further survivors reached safety. One was rescued on the third day after the attack; the other was an Italian who drifted on a liferaft for a fortnight until he came ashore at Mtunzini in Natal.

Memorials
Many corpses were washed ashore in Natal. The bodies of 120 Italian prisoners of war and internees were buried in a mass grave in the Hillary suburb of Durban, forming the nucleus of what became the Italian Military Cemetery there. In 1982 a substantial monoment was erected on the grave. Nova Scotia's Italian dead are commemorated also in a monument at the Italian church at Adi Quala, Eritrea.