USS Edsall (DD-219), was the first of two United States Navy ships named after Seaman Norman Eckley Edsall (1873–1899) and was a Clemson-class destroyer. She was sunk by a combined Japanese air and sea attack, approximately 200 miles east of Christmas Island on 1 March 1942.
The K-ration was an individual daily combat food ration which was introduced by the United States Army during World War II. It was originally intended as an individually packaged daily ration for issue to airborne troops, tank crews, motorcycle couriers, and other mobile forces for short durations. The K-ration provided three separately boxed meal units: Breakfast, ʽLunchʼ and Dinner.
Operation Rimau was an attack on Japanese shipping in Singapore Harbour, carried out by an Allied commando unit Z Special Unit, during World War II using Australian built Hoehn military MKIII folboats. It was a follow-up to the successful Operation Jaywick which had taken place in September 1943, and was again led by Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Lyon of the Gordon Highlanders, an infantry regiment of the British Army.
Burns Philp was once a major Australian shipping line and merchant that operated in the South Pacific. When the well-populated islands around New Guinea were targeted for blackbirding in the 1880s, a new rush for labour from these islands began. James Burns and Robert Philp purchased several well-known blackbirding ships to quickly exploit the human resource in this region, and Burns Philp entered the slave trade. The company ended its involvement in blackbirding in 1886. In later years the company was a major player in the food manufacturing business. Since its delisting from the Australian Securities Exchange in December 2006 and the subsequent sale of its assets, the company has mainly become a cashed up shell company. It is wholly owned by Graeme Hart's Rank Group.
A hell ship is a ship with extremely inhumane living conditions or with a reputation for cruelty among the crew. It now generally refers to the ships used by the Imperial Japanese Navy and Imperial Japanese Army to transport Allied prisoners of war (POWs) and romushas out of the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Hong Kong and Singapore in World War II. These POWs were taken to the Japanese Islands, Formosa, Manchukuo, Korea, the Moluccas, Sumatra, Burma, or Siam to be used as forced labor.
The motor vessel MV Mamutu was an Australian merchant ship built in Hong Kong in 1938. She was of 300 gross tons, 113 feet (34.4 m) in length, and had a beam of 25 feet (7.6 m). She operated on an inter-island trade route for Burns Philp & Company, and at the outbreak of World War II, she was engaged in the evacuation of civilians ahead of advancing Japanese forces in New Guinea. The Mamutu sunk in August 1942 after being attacked by a Japanese submarine Ro-33 in the Gulf of Papua near Murray Island.
Hong Kong and Whampoa Dock was a Hong Kong dockyard, once among the largest in Asia.
SS Rooseboom was a 1,035 ton Dutch steamship owned by KPM (Koninklijke Paketvaart-Maatschappij of the Netherlands East Indies built in 1926 by Rijkee & Co of Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
HMS Carlisle was a C-class light cruiser of the Royal Navy, named after the English city of Carlisle. She was the name ship of the Carlisle group of the C-class of cruisers. Carlisle was credited with shooting down eleven Axis aircraft during the Second World War and was the top scoring anti-aircraft ship in the Royal Navy.
SS Peleus was a steam merchant ship built in 1928 by William Gray & Company of West Hartlepool. Originally named Egglestone, she was acquired by E. E. Hadjilias, Syros and renamed after Pēleús, the mythical King of Aegina, and father of Achilles. Peleus was sold in 1933 to the Nereus Steam Navigation company. She had an uneventful career in peacetime, until the Second World War. She worked under charter for the British government during the war, and operated in the South Atlantic, until her loss in March 1944 when she was torpedoed and sunk by U-852.
The Carley float was a form of invertible liferaft designed by American inventor Horace Carley (1838–1918). Supplied mainly to warships, it saw widespread use in a number of navies during peacetime and both World Wars until superseded by more modern rigid or inflatable designs. Carley was awarded a patent in 1903 after establishing the Carley Life Float Company of Philadelphia.
MV Port Fairy was a UK merchant vessel built in 1928 by Swan Hunter for the Commonwealth & Dominion Line Ltd shipping company and sold in 1965 to Embajada Compania Naviera SA of Piraeus. Named after the coastal town of Port Fairy in Australia, she was renamed Taishikan for her final commercial voyage to Hong Kong where she was scrapped.
The SS Bokhara was a P&O steamship which sank in a typhoon on 10 October 1892, off the coast of Sand Island in the Pescadores, Formosa. Of the 150 people who perished, eleven were members of the Hong Kong cricket team.
Comet was an 1851 California clipper built by William H. Webb which sailed in the Australia trade and the tea trade. This extreme clipper was very fast. She had record passages on two different routes: New York City to San Francisco, and Liverpool to Hong Kong, and beat the famous clipper Flying Dutchman in an 1853 race around the Horn to San Francisco.
HMS Li Wo was an auxiliary patrol vessel of the British Royal Navy, which was sunk on 14 February 1942 by Japanese warships as she single-handedly attacked an enemy convoy during the Malayan Campaign.
SS Anglo Saxon was a cargo ship carrying coal from Wales to Argentina that was sunk by the German auxiliary cruiser Widder on 21 August 1940. Several of the crew managed to get in a jolly boat, an all purpose small boat that could also be used as a lifeboat. It carried the surviving members of the ship's crew west across the Atlantic Ocean for 70 days, before finally landing in Eleuthera. By the time the jolly boat made landfall, only two of the seven survivors of the attack were still alive.
MV Melbourne Star was a British refrigerated cargo liner. She was built by Cammell Laird and Co in 1936 as one of Blue Star Line's Imperial Star-class ships, designed to ship frozen meat from Australia and New Zealand to the United Kingdom. She served in the Second World War and is distinguished for her role in Operation Pedestal to relieve the siege of Malta in August 1942. She was sunk by torpedo in 1943 with the loss of 115 lives.
Merchant seamen crewed the ships of the British Merchant Navy which kept the United Kingdom supplied with raw materials, arms, ammunition, fuel, food and all of the necessities of a nation at war throughout World War II — literally enabling the country to defend itself. In doing this, they sustained a considerably greater casualty rate than almost every other branch of the armed services and suffered great hardship. Seamen were aged from fourteen through to their late seventies.
The vessel MV Blythe Star was a coastal freighter which foundered off south-western Tasmania in October 1973, leading to the largest maritime search operation conducted in Australia to that time. No sign of the vessel was ever found. The crew of ten successfully took to a small inflatable liferaft, but it was not until after 11 days and the deaths of three seamen that the survivors were found ashore in rugged terrain near Deep Glen Bay on Tasmania's south east coast. As a result of this tragedy, the AUSREP maritime position reporting system was introduced to the Australian Navigation Act.
I-37, originally numbered I-49, was a Japanese Type B1 submarine in service with the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II. Commissioned in 1943, she made three war patrols, all in the Indian Ocean, during the last of which her crew committed war crimes by massacring the survivors of the merchant ships she sank. Subsequently, converted into a kaiten manned suicide attack torpedo carrier, she was sunk during her first kaiten mission in 1944.
