Rio De Janeiro
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In
April 1940 Rio de Janeiro leaves the harbor in Stettin
with 200 soldiers from 307.Infantry division, 100 men from
Luftwaffe, 80 horses and other military equipment. Rio was
requisitioned in March 1940 by Kriegsmarine and sailed for
1.Seetransport staffel in Operation Weserübung, the German
invasion of Norway. Outisde the Norwegian coastline she is
hit by torpedoes 8.April 1940 from the Polish submarine
ORP Orzel. Full panic emerged and the crew on the
submarine watches in astonishment how many people there
are on board. Many jumps over board in the cold water,
while others throws out life buoys or other emergency
material. Orzel now circles around her and several
Norwegian vessels arrived to assist with rescuing the
survivors. The last torpedo was fired and hit the
transport on her port side at 13:15. This torpedo teared
her in two parts and the bow immediately disappeared in
the deep. The stern rised slowly and the propellers could
be seen briefly before she finally went down. 183 men were
rescued out of the water, and its believed that more than
150 men perished. The surviving Germans were taken in to
Norway, and they told they were on their way to Bergen to
help with the defense against a planned British-French
invasion. The tensed political situation those days that
had emerged in the months before could give a realistic
picture of such a situation, considering the Altmark
affair earlier and the British minefields that had been
laid out at several locations along the coastline. The
wreck of Rio de Janeiro was found in 2015 on a depth of
115 to 135 meter outside the city of Lillesand.
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 Picture: Rio de Janeiro Originally from skovheim.org |
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