Word: arandora
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Little Fortune was interned at war's beginning, but he was not shipped to Canada on the ill-fated Arandora Star along with most of London's Italian major-domos. Instead he was assigned to the backbreaking work of clearing away bomb debris. Later he volunteered for "special duties...
More than gas masks were needed by 1,640 war prisoners, mostly German but including some middle-aged Italian merchants and businessmen interned when Italy declared war. They were loaded into the 15,501-ton Arandora Star and headed for Canada around the north end of Ireland, guarded by 200 British soldiers and a crew of 300. Early the second day out, without warning, a German torpedo took the Arandora Star full in the waist, blew such a hole in her that she sank in two minutes. Survivors told a hideous story of how the Germans fought and trampled...
Calmly the British waited until the Germans had announced the sinking before telling that the Arandora Star was a prison ship-thereby preventing Nazi propagandists from claiming that the British had scuttled her deliberately. Afterwards the Germans, who ruthlessly attacked hospital ships at Dunkirk, had to content them selves with grumbling that the British should have marked the ship so that it would not be attacked. The British announced that the U-boat commander who struck the blow was Germany's Scapa Flow hero, Lieut. Captain Günther Prien...
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