Sea Monsters by Tony Matthews

Author:Tony Matthews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Big Sky Publishing
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

In what appears to be a moment of relative calm after all the violence, a merchant officer lowers his suitcase to a lifeboat before descending a Jacob’s ladder to abandon his ship which clearly is very low in the water at this point.

–U.S. Office of War Information Collection, Control Number 90714118.

U.S. Library of Congress.

east-south-east of Cape Agulhas (the Cape of Needles) which is a rocky headland at the southern tip of South Africa and the navigational dividing line between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Eck may have suspected that there was a massive hunt underway for him but he could have no knowledge of its scope or extent. He remained in the Cape region for a couple of weeks seeking targets. This was a regular shipping route and he expected to find more ships but his constant searching proved almost fruitless. He did locate another large vessel and believing that it might have been a troopship fired three torpedoes at it. However, all three missed which was probably another indication to Eck’s crew that they were being led by a submarine novice.

Yet Eck was wily enough to realise that by remaining in the Cape region he was inviting attack. He also reasoned that there were far too few ships in the area to warrant the risks involved. He decided to head north once again in the hope that the pickings might be richer.

It was at this point in the whole tragic story that the three survivors of the Peleus were found and the entire terrible saga of the massacre became known to the world.

The date was now 20 April, 1944. The Portuguese steamer, SS Alexandre Silva, unexpectedly came upon a raft drifting in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. On board were three emaciated and desperate survivors. These were the chief officer of the Peleus, Antonios Liossis; Rocco Said, one of the ship’s greasers, and the seaman Dimitrios Argyros. The ship’s third officer, (Agis Kephalas) who had been wounded during the massacre, had sadly not survived the long period adrift on the open raft. He had succumbed to a deadly combination of gangrene and yellow fever.

As we have seen, the three survivors were landed at Lobito in Angola a week after their rescue and it was there that the news was first heard of the destruction of the Peleus and the massacre of its crew. None of the survivors was able to state the identification number of the submarine (it had been dark), but it was now clear evidence, if any further evidence was needed, that a murderous German submarine commander was operating in these waters and he would have to be located and punished. The precise information about the attack and massacre, which was recorded by members of British Intelligence, was soon passed on to the British Admiralty in London.

Meanwhile, as Eck headed north, he should have been aware that he was heading into a storm of steel.

Orders were now issued to strengthen anti-submarine operations in the area and a hunter-killer group was assigned to find and destroy the German submarine.

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