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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"

E&A Line

Later an associate of P&O Company

This line, founded in 1872, had a long relationship particularly with the Queensland (originally Colonial) Government through its Singapore-Brisbane-Sydney service. Its vessel Eastern carried Australian Expeditionary Force troops to Rabaul in 1914.

The following ships were owned by the company at the start of the Second World War:

Ship	Built	Gross Tons	In Service
Tanda	?	6956	1924-1944
Nellore	?	6856	1929-1944
Nankin	?	6069	1931-1942

All were lost. Nankin on 5 May 1942 was shelled and captured by the German surface raider vessel Thor and later lost by sabotage in Yokohama harbour. Nellore was torpedoed in the Indian Ocean on 30 June 1944, its forty-seven survivors escaping in a lifeboat which was washed up twenty eight days later on Madagascar, 2500 miles from the sinking. Tanda was torpedoed by a submarine off the Indian coast on 6 July 1944.

THE FLEETS

In Remembrance

E&A Line

Later an associate of P&O Company

Ship

Built

Gross Tons

In Service