Sixty-two Years Ago Today...

In honor of my father-in-law, William A. Norrod, of San Antonio, TX, who survived the bombing and subsequent sinking of the HMT Rohna, and in honor of the hundreds who died in the service to our country sixty-two years ago, I would like to repost the following tribute written here last year:

"One of the reasons Thanksgiving is so special to our family is that my father-in-law, William A. Norrod, of San Antonio, TX., survived one of the worst WWII maritime disasters ever to have occurred. For more than the 30 years I have been married to his daughter, he related story after story about the HMT Rohna and prior to 1995, it was virtually impossible to find any information about this sea disaster. (Quite frankly, I often doubted his veracity regarding this incident.) It was so devastating that the gov't covered up the disaster so that Germany could not claim regional victory and dishearten our war resolve. The following information is from the Rohna Survivors Memorial Association website:

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 then on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor.

The "hit" was so devastating that the U.S. Government placed a veil of secrecy upon it. The events which followed were so shameful that the secrecy continued for decades until recently, when documents were grudgingly released under pressure of the Freedom of Information Act. The government still does not acknowledge this tragedy, thus most families of the casualties still do not know the fate of their loved ones.

In 1995, over fifty years later, a group of survivors, next-of-kin and rescuers, informally came together for the sole purpose of enabling the creation and dedication of a Rohna Memorial.

On Memorial Day, 1996, a monument was dedicated to the memory of the 1015 men who lost their lives in this incident, at Fort Mitchell National Cemetery in Seales, Alabama.

The Rohna Survivors Memorial Association is a website devoted to this WWII disaster. Please visit the site. The group of survivors gets smaller each year, but they are a devoted and loyal lot. God bless them all."