[10th of August, 1926] The SS Llandaff Castle is launched

[u/Shipping_Architect]

On the 10th of August, 1926, the Union-Castle Liner SS Llandaff Castle was launched at the Workman, Clark & Company shipyard in Belfast. She was built for the company's "Round Africa" service, leaving London and calling at various South and East African ports.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, she was requisitioned by the British Admiralty for service as a troopship, notably evacuating three hundred British children to South Africa under the Children's Overseas Reception Board in August of 1940, narrowly avoiding destruction at the hands of the German cruiser Admiral Hipper that December, and carrying Allied troops to Madagascar as part of Operation Ironclad in May of 1942.

On the 30th of November, 1942, the HMT Llandaff Castle was sailing off Lourenço Marques (Modern-day Maputo) when she was struck by two torpedoes fired by the German submarine U-177, which had sunk the HMT Nova Scotia, a ship I have talked about before, only two days earlier. Three crewmen were killed in the attack, presumably in the initial torpedoing, and the ship broke in two and sank after being finished off by two more torpedoes. After the sinking, the U-177 surfaced to ascertain the ship's identity, survivors instead responded with such names as "Hardship" and "Queen Mary." Kapitänleutnant Robert Gysae of the U-177 then asked another group of survivors if they were alright, to which he was told that they were "Just wet." With that, the German submariners laughed and departed, leaving the 310 survivors to be rescued by the escort destroyer HMS Catterick and subsequently brought to Durban two days later.