HMT Rohna

[Bruno Stachel]

Below is an excerpt from the Rhona Survivors Memorial Association website. The Rohna Survivors Memorial Association

"On November 26, 1943, during WWII, one thousand, one hundred and thirty eight men perished when a British troopship, the HMT Rohna, was attacked from the air and destroyed in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Algeria. Two important but virtually unknown historical events occurred at that time.

It was the first successful "hit" of a merchant vessel at-sea carrying US troops by a German remote-controlled, rocket-boosted bomb, thus giving birth to the "Missile Age", and it resulted in the greatest loss of troops (1015) at sea in U.S. history. Combined with the loss of ship's crew and officers, and three Red Cross workers, more lives were lost than on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor."

My wife's grandmother mentioned a few times, how she lost her brother during WWII, when his troop ship, was sunk presumably by a German submarine. She was frustrated that very few details about the sinking were released.

I'm ashamed that I didn't dig for this earlier. I found the website last week, while thinking of her, the night before her burial. (I found her brother's name in the casulty list.) She passed away at the age of 97 years. I'm sure she knows the truth now anyway.

[Bruno Stachel]

I'm trying to understand why this was kept secret for so long. I can almost understand trying to keep a lid on it during the war. But why for so long afterward?

I'm also fascinated by the radio controlled bomb and it's technology. I'm guessing that the Germans weren't able to deploy more of these weapons, as they began to lose air superiority. (?)

I was hoping some who earn a living as historians/writers might chime in.

[Chock]

It was probably kept secret because of the D Notice system in the UK, and possibly similar security systems in other countries, which are often allied to the D Notice system.

The D Notice system - an abbreviation of Defence Notice - in case you don't know it, is (or rather was) an official request to news editors not to publish details of certain events which it was deemed would affect national security. That includes reporting stories that are likely to affect the morale of the public, which means they were very often a request to the press to 'hush things up' so people didn't get upset. D Notices were first issued just before the start of WW1 by the (then) War Office (now the Ministry of Defence), but they were only requests, and not legal constraints. However, it was usually the case that editors would abide by them, not least because many of them eventually hoped for various things such as knighthoods, peerages etc, from the British Government, and needless to say, if they didn't 'play the game' they'd damage their chances of that happening. Since by their nature, D Notices are not officially binding, it's rather vague as to how long they are in force, so they tended to prevent some stories coming out for a long time.

Although D Notices are not legally binding (unlike court reporting restrictions) breaking a D Notice can land a newspaper editor in hot water just as if it was a legally binding demand, and make things uncomfortable for an editor's career prospects. When I was a writer at a UK daily newspaper a few years back, the editor of that paper let such a story slip out, and he damn near ended up in prison because of it.

More recently, D Notices have been dropped and are now replaced by Standing Defence Advisory Notices to the Press, which are permanent requests not to do stories, or make mention of certain subjects. Typically this includes things such as, the UK's nuclear offensive missile capability, where any secret bases are, anything to do with codes, or the secret services such as MI5, MI6 etc, as well as where high profile people in the Government live. All that kind of stuff.

There were several major ship sinkings during WW2 which were the subject of D Notices, notably the sinking of the liner Lancastria whilst it was evacuating people from France to the UK in 1940. This was kept quiet because an estimated 4,000 people were killed when it went down, and right after the Dunkirk evacuation, it was deemed to be bad for morale in the UK to report such a story. Similarly, because the Rohna was one of quite a few ships sunk by advanced German guided missiles, it was often deemed to be bad for morale to concede that the Germans had the capability to knock out large ships with just one aircraft launching a stand-off attack.

Al

[Bruno Stachel]

Thanks Chock,

I recently viewed a documentary about bomb carrying balloons that the Japanese launched towards the U.S.. Similar concerns were taken into account as the U.S. government wanted to prevent panic, as more and more of the balloons arrived across the western U.S. (as well as Cananda and Mexico). I believe the War Department sent a memo to news editors, asking them to abstain from mentioning the ballon drop and landing sites - also to prevent the Japanese from getting any helpful targeting information.

All this is well and good. But again, I don't understand how it wasn't until after the Freedom of Information act, that all the HMT Rhona information was made public. (The website mentioned that details were released after the Freedom of Information act was invokded. I'm not sure exactly when this happened. I do know that the act was signed into law during Sept. 1966.) At the least, the survivors and next of kin had to wait 20 years before learning the details of what happened to their loved ones.

[Chock]

The UK's Freedom of Information Act is a fairly recent law of course, and it allows people to ask for (and get) information held by authorities and government bodies. But it is mostly pertaining to things such as, if you want to know whether a local library, or government organisation has your address, bank details, social security number etc on a computer record somewhere; trivial stuff like that. So, generally speaking, that act is not really to do with more serious matters, especially when you note that there are numerous exceptions to it, and as you can probably guess, most of the exceptions concern information gathered by, or held by the military.

Additionally, most people working in or with the military, or for companies in the UK that deal with the military, get asked to sign the Official Secrets Act, and that usually covers them talking about stuff; making it a criminal offence to do so. I had to sign it myself a few years ago when working on those ski-jump ramps that Royal Navy Harrier jets fly up at the front of their aircraft carriers, and was again asked if I had signed it some years later, when I was doing some artwork for the stickers that were applied to the access covers for radars on RAF aeroplanes. It was by no means what you would call top secret stuff; a big long ramp for a plane to drive up, and a few stickers for a radar panel is hardly the stuff of international intrigue, but me having signed that Act meant that until it was public knowledge, I was not supposed to say anything about it, and although one can hardly imagine the authorities hauling me off to prison for saying I made a sticker for a radar, they could theoretically have done so. For a more serious matter such as the sinking of a ship in wartime, one can imagine military personnel taking the mentioning of it a bit more seriously than I did when making a few stickers, so that might be why some people said little about it.

But a more likely reason for the tale remaining hidden, is the fact that when things get declared 'secret' in the UK, there is often a statute period of years before the documentation is released or declassified (the length of time varies). For example, earlier this year in the UK, there were a stack of files made available to the public relating to reports UFO sightings years ago over the UK (on that occasion 20 years after the info having been declared classified). Of course most of these reports were just nutters mistaking aeroplanes at night or whatever for alien spaceships after too many spliffs in the 1960s, and it was the source of much mirth for stand up comics in the UK when the info was made public. But the point is, despite it being harmless information, it had been stamped as secret for 20 years, so that's how long it remained shut away. The same thing probably occurred with files relating to the Rohna, with a specific 'classified until' rubber stamp on the file, which was in all probability an arbitrary figure that bears no relation to the need to keep it secret for that length of time. Just the way official things tend to work.

Al

[Bruno Stachel]

Thaks for your input Chock. I suppose that since both British and U.S. personel were involved, greater care was taken relative to what information was released.

Those jump jet ramps had to be a site to see in action!

Frank