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THE FLEETS

In Remembrance

Australian-owned ships and their crews - deck, engine-room, catering and pursering departments - helped win the Second World War, particularly, but not only or exclusively, in the Asia-Pacific theatre of operations.

This website details the ships involved and the corporations that owned them. It will provide for some recollections and diary records of experiences of the people who crewed them and it acknowledges the allies alongside whom they served.

It is dedicated to mercantile mariners who, across the ages, have carried the world's goods from producer to user, but in particular it is intended as a tribute to all the Merchant Seamen who served in the 1939-1945 conflict, and indeed universally and especially to those who did not return, those who have no known grave but the depths of the oceans.

"They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters"

Iron Chieftain (B.H.P.)

En route on the night of 3 June 1942 from Newcastle to Whyalla, Iron Chieftain was torpedoed and sunk by the Japanese submarine I.24. Her Master and Chief Engineer were among the twelve crew lost. The thirty-seven survivors were rescued, some from a raft, by HMAS “Bingera”, and others from a lifeboat washed onto the beach at The Entrance, New South Wales.