SS Robin Moor

SS Robin Moor was a Hog Islander steamship that sailed under the American flag from 1919 until being sunk by GS U-69 (1940) on 21 May 1941, before the United States had entered World War II, after allowing the passengers and crew to disembark. This sinking of a neutral nation's ship in an area considered until then to be relatively safe from U-boats, and the plight of her crew and passengers, caused a political incident in the United States.

Construction, prior names and owners
The ship was completed in 1919 by the emergency shipbuilding works of American International Shipbuilding Corp. at Hog Island, just outside Philadelphia. She was a "Hog Islander," the name for the class of ugly but sturdy merchant vessels built at the works during that period. She was laid down as the SS Shetucket, and completed as the SS Nobles. In 1928 she was renamed the SS Exmoor for American Export Lines Inc, of New York. In 1940 she was sold to Seas Shipping Co Inc., of New York, and renamed the SS Robin Moor.

Her sinking
In May 1941 the Robin Moor was carrying nine officers, 29 crewmen, seven or eight passengers, and a commercial cargo from New York to Mozambique via South Africa, without a protective convoy. On 21 May, the ship was stopped by GS U-69 (1940) in the tropical Atlantic 750 miles west of the British-controlled port of Freetown, Sierra Leone. Although the Robin Moor was flying the flag of a neutral country, her mate was told by the U-boat crew that they had decided to "let us have it." After a brief period for the ship's crew and passengers to board her four lifeboats, the U-boat fired a torpedo at the rudder and then shelled the vacated ship at the bridge. Once the ship was scuttled beneath the waves, the submarine's crew pulled up to Captain W.E. Myers' lifeboat, left him with four tins of ersatz bread and two tins of butter, and explained that the ship had been sunk by her own crew because she was carrying supplies to Germany's enemy.

Eventual rescue
When the Robin Moor was stopped, the Germans had forbidden the ship's crew to touch their wireless, but after the sinking U-69's captain Jost Metzler reportedly promised the ship's crew to radio their position. Yet nearly two weeks passed before any of her four lifeboats of survivors were discovered. As President Roosevelt would later state in a message to Congress regarding the sinking, the survivors were "accidentally discovered and rescued by friendly vessels." The lifeboat containing the captain and 10 others was rescued on 8 June after 18 days, and taken to Brazil. The occupants of that boat presumed that the remaining crew and passengers were lost, but they later learned that the three lifeboats containing the others had been discovered by chance on June 2, 13 days after the sinking, and taken to South Africa. Remarkably, all of the crew and passengers were rescued. One rescued crew member, however, later jumped overboard apparently due to the lingering effects of the ordeal, and drowned.

The political, diplomatic and legal aftermath
While President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to the episode with strong words, the strength of his administration's actions was disputed. His message to Congress described Germany's decision to sink the ship as "a disclosure of policy as well as an example of method." His message concluded: In brief, we must take the sinking of the Robin Moor as a warning to the United States not to resist the Nazi movement of world conquest. It is a warning that the United States may use the high seas of the world only with Nazi consent. Were we to yield on this we would inevitably submit to world domination at the hands of the present leaders of the German Reich. We are not yielding and we do not propose to yield.

The State Department then required Germany and Italy to close all of their consulates in the United States except for their embassies, prompting Germany to issue the same directive to the United States in return. The U.S. also demanded damages and reparations from Germany, without success. In Congress, isolationist Senator Burton K. Wheeler claimed that 70 percent of the ship's cargo constituted the kind of materials meeting the German and British standards for contraband, defended the legality of Germany's right to destroy her, and characterized Roosevelt's message as an effort to bring the United States into the war. Others, such as Senator Claude Pepper, urged their colleagues to require the arming of merchant vessels.

In October 1941, federal prosecutors in the espionage case against a group of 33 defendants known as the "Duquesne Spy Ring" adduced testimony that Leo Waalen, one of the 14 accused men who had pled not guilty, had submitted the sailing date of the Robin Moor for radio transmission to Germany, five days before the ship began her final voyage. Waalen and the others were found guilty on December 13, 1941.

In Literature
John J. Banigan, the 3rd officer of the SS Robin Moor, went on to write "How to Abandon Ship" (ISBN 0870333887), which details his experience and serves as a survival guide for sailors serving in a wartime environment.