SS Robin Moor

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History
Name:	SS Robin Moor
Operator:	Seas Shipping Co Inc, New York
Builder:	American International Shipbuilding Corp., Hog Island
Completed:	1919
Fate:	torpedoed and shelled on 21 May 1941
General characteristics
Tonnage:	4,999 tons
Crew:	46

SS Robin Moor was a Hog Islander steamship that sailed under the American flag from 1919 until being sunk by German submarine U-69 on 21 May 1941, before the United States had entered World War II, after allowing the passengers and crew to disembark. This sinking of a neutral nation's ship in an area considered until then to be relatively safe from U-boats, and the plight of her crew and passengers, caused a political incident in the United States. On the 75th anniversary of its sinking, the American Merchant Marine Museum in Kings Point, NY, opened an exhibit on the sinking of the Robin Moor entitled "How to Abandon ship."

Construction, prior names and owners

The ship was completed in 1919 by the emergency shipbuilding works of American International Shipbuilding Corp. at Hog Island, just outside Philadelphia. She was a "Hog Islander," the name for the class of ugly but sturdy merchant vessels built at the works during that period. She was laid down as the SS Shetucket, and completed as the SS Nobles. In 1928 she was renamed the SS Exmoor for American Export Lines Inc, of New York. In 1940 she was sold to Seas Shipping Co. Inc., of New York, and renamed the SS Robin Moor.

Her sinking

In May 1941 the Robin Moor was carrying nine officers, 29 crewmen, eight passengers, and a commercial cargo from New York to Mozambique via South Africa, without a protective convoy. On 21 May, the ship was stopped by German submarine U-69 in the tropical Atlantic 750 miles west of the British-controlled port of Freetown, Sierra Leone. Although the Robin Moor was flying the flag of a neutral country, her mate was told by the U-boat crew that they had decided to "let us have it." After a brief period for the ship's crew and passengers to board her four lifeboats, the U-boat fired a torpedo at the rudder and then shelled the vacated ship at the bridge. Once the ship was scuttled beneath the waves, the submarine's crew pulled up to Captain W.E. Myers' lifeboat, left him with four tins of ersatz bread and two tins of butter, and explained that the ship had been sunk by her own crew because she was carrying supplies to Germany's enemy.

Eventual rescue

When the Robin Moor was stopped, the Germans had forbidden the ship's crew to touch their wireless, but after the sinking U-69's captain Jost Metzler reportedly promised the ship's crew to radio their position. Yet nearly two weeks passed before any of her four lifeboats of survivors were discovered. As President Roosevelt would later state in a message to Congress regarding the sinking, the survivors were "accidentally discovered and rescued by friendly vessels." The lifeboat containing the captain and 10 others was rescued on 8 June after 18 days, and taken to Brazil. The occupants of that boat presumed that the remaining crew and passengers were lost, but they later learned that the three lifeboats containing the others had been discovered by chance on 13 June, two days after the sinking, and taken to South Africa by the cargo vessel City of Wellington. Remarkably, all of the crew and passengers were rescued. One rescued crew member, however, later jumped overboard apparently due to the lingering effects of the ordeal, and drowned.

The political, diplomatic and legal aftermath

File:Fbi leo waalen.jpg

Leo Waalen, FBI file photo.

While President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to the episode with strong words, the strength of his administration's actions was disputed. His message to Congress described Germany's decision to sink the ship as "a disclosure of policy as well as an example of method." His message concluded:

In brief, we must take the sinking of the Robin Moor as a warning to the United States not to resist the Nazi movement of world conquest. It is a warning that the United States may use the high seas of the world only with Nazi consent. Were we to yield on this we would inevitably submit to world domination at the hands of the present leaders of the German Reich. We are not yielding and we do not propose to yield.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

The State Department then required Germany and Italy to close all of their consulates in the United States except for their embassies, prompting Germany to issue the same directive to the United States in return. The US also demanded damages and reparations from Germany, without success. In Congress, isolationist Senator Burton K. Wheeler claimed that 70 percent of the ship's cargo constituted the kind of materials meeting the German and British standards for contraband, defended the legality of Germany's right to destroy her, and characterised Roosevelt's message as an effort to bring the United States into the war. Others, such as Senator Claude Pepper, urged their colleagues to require the arming of merchant vessels.

In October 1941, federal prosecutors in the espionage case against a group of 33 defendants known as the "Duquesne Spy Ring" adduced testimony that Leo Waalen, one of the 14 accused men who had pleaded not guilty, had submitted the sailing date of the Robin Moor for radio transmission to Germany, five days before the ship began her final voyage. Waalen and the others were found guilty on 13 December 1941.

In literature

John J. Banigan, the Third Officer of the SS Robin Moor, went on to write How to Abandon Ship (ISBN 0870333887), which details his experience and serves as a survival guide for sailors serving in a wartime environment.

See also

• First American shots fired in World War II

References

• "Robin Moor," at Uboat.net
• Stewart Atkins, Robin Moor Survivor, on Visit in County, tells a Vivid Story of Incident Gastonia (N.C.) Daily Gazette, 1941-08-01, a 1, available at NewspaperArchive.com
• George Haber, ''Outrageous and Indefensible: The Sinking of the SS Robin Moor, 1941 Kings Point, NY: American Merchant Marine Museum, 2016. ISBN 978-0-9975687-0-7.
• President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Message to the Congress on the Sinking of the Robin Moor' 20 June 1941.
• United Press, Reparations held unlikely, Oakland Tribune, 1941-06-22, at 1, available at NewspaperArchive.com.
• United Press, Roosevelt Supporters Urge Arming of US Merchant Vessels, Oakland Tribune, 1941-06-22 at 4.
• Associated Press, Alleged Spy Accused of Tip on Robin Moor, Salamanca Republican Press, 1941-10-18, at 10, available at NewspaperArchive.com.
• Schaffer, Amanda Lost at Sea on Brink of the Second World War