- GREEK SHIPS

ANTONIOS CHANDRIS

Photo. www.greekshippingmiracle.org

Built: 1918

Tonnage: 5,866 / 9,096 tons

Cargo: 6,616 tons of coal

Route: Cardiff – Buenos Aires

Sunk  9 September 1940 by Raider Widder on pos.  12° 00”N 35° 00”W.

0 Dead

29 Survivors

In the night of 9 Sep. 1940 the Greek Freighter Antonios Chandris  appeared, heading straight towards the raider.

Turning on her lights and ordering the approaching vessel to stop, under the light of a star shell, she obeyed without any signals, or a shot being fired.

The boarding party identified her as the 5,866-ton Greek J.D.Chandris collier, Antonios Chandris, bound for Buenos Aires from Cardiff with 6,616 tons of coal, and a crew of tewnty-nine.

With one hundred and forty-two prisoners already on board, Ruckteschell instructed the boarding party to tell her captain, George Gafos, to provision his ‘well founded’ lifeboats, and make for the west coast of Africa, adding that as there was so much rain falling, there would be no a shortage of drinking water! Having provided the raider with meat and other foodstuffs, the Antonios Chandris was sunk by demolition charges at first light the next morning.

Thirty-one days later, on October 8, Gafos and his twenty-one starving half-dead men were lucky to be picked up by the Portuguese freighter Serpa Pinto, over 1,400 miles from where they had been set adrift and landed at Rio de Janeiro.

By www.bismarck-class.dk/hilfskreuzer