Sinking Of The SS Tanais
   HOME
*





Sinking Of The SS Tanais
SS ''Tanais'' ( el, Τάναϊς), mistakenly referred to as Danae or Danais (Δανάη / Δαναΐς), was a British-built, Greek-owned cargo ship that German occupation forces in Greece requisitioned in WWII. In 1944 a Royal Navy submarine sank her off Heraklion, Crete, killing several hundred deported Cretan Jews, Cretan Christian civilians and Italian POWs aboard. Sources differ as to the number killed; estimates vary between 425 and 1,000. The ship John Blumer and Co Ltd of Sunderland, England built the ship as ''Holywood'' for William France, Fenwick and Company of London. She was launched on 14 December 1906 and completed in January 1907. She was a cargo steamship, and France, Fenwick operated her in the tramp trade. A Greek shipowner, Stefanos Synodinos, bought her in 1935, renamed her ''Tanais'' after the ancient Greek city of Tanais in the Don delta and registered her in Piraeus. On 26 May 1941 during the Battle of Crete the Luftwaffe sank ''Tanais'' in Souda Bay. S ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Tanais
Tanais ( el, Τάναϊς ''Tánaïs''; russian: Танаис) was an Ancient Greece, ancient Greek city in the Don River (Russia), Don river delta, called the Maeotian Swamp, Maeotian marshes in classical antiquity. It was a bishopric as Tana and remains a Latin Catholic titular see as Tanais. Location The delta reaches into the northeasternmost part of the Sea of Azov, which the Ancient Greeks called Lake Maeotis. The site of ancient Tanais is about 30 km west of modern Rostov-on-Don. The central city site lies on a plateau with a difference up to 20 m in elevation in the south. It is bordered by a natural valley to the east, and an artificial ditch to the west. History The site of Tanais was occupied long before the Milesians (Greek), Milesians founded an Marketplace, emporium there. A necropolis of over 300 burial kurgans near the ancient city shows that the site had already been occupied since the Bronze Age, and that kurgan burials continued through Ancient Greece ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Prisoner Of War
A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610. Belligerents hold prisoners of war in custody for a range of legitimate and illegitimate reasons, such as isolating them from the enemy combatants still in the field (releasing and repatriating them in an orderly manner after hostilities), demonstrating military victory, punishing them, prosecuting them for war crimes, exploiting them for their labour, recruiting or even conscripting them as their own combatants, collecting military and political intelligence from them, or indoctrinating them in new political or religious beliefs. Ancient times For most of human history, depending on the culture of the victors, enemy fighters on the losing side in a battle who had surrendered and been taken as prisoners of war could expect to be either slaughtered or enslaved. Ear ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Guard Ship
A guard ship is a warship assigned as a stationary guard in a port or harbour, as opposed to a coastal patrol boat, which serves its protective role at sea. Royal Navy In the Royal Navy of the eighteenth century, peacetime guard ships were usually third-rate or fourth-rate ships of the line. The larger ships in the fleet would be laid up "in ordinary" with skeleton crews, the spars, sails and rigging removed and the decks covered by canvas – the historic equivalent of a reserve fleet. By contrast the guard ships would carry sails and rigging aboard, be defouled below the waterline to increase their speed under sail, and be manned by at least one quarter of their normal crew. A port or major waterway may be assigned a single guardship which would also serve as the naval headquarters for the area. Multiple guardships were required at larger ports and Royal Dockyards, with the largest single vessel routinely serving as the Port Admiral's flagship. If war was declared, or an en ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Submarine Chaser
A submarine chaser or subchaser is a small naval vessel that is specifically intended for anti-submarine warfare. Many of the American submarine chasers used in World War I found their way to Allied nations by way of Lend-Lease in World War II. Submarine chaser variants U.S. Navy submarine chasers were designed specifically to destroy German submarines in World War I, and Japanese and German submarines in World War II. The small SC-1-class submarine chasers of the design used in World War I carried the hull designator SC (for Submarine Chaser). Their main weapon was the depth charge. They also carried machine guns and anti-aircraft guns. The similar-sized SC-497-class was built for World War II. Also in World War II, larger PC-461-class submarine chasers used the PC hull classification symbol (for Patrol, Coastal).Gardiner and Chesneau, pp. 71, 152-154 Class relationships: * 438 (98t, wooden hull) * 343 (450t, steel hull) * 68 (850t, steel hull) ** used in similar ro ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Mediterranean And Middle East Theatre Of World War II
The Mediterranean and Middle East Theatre was a major theatre of operations during the Second World War. The vast size of the Mediterranean and Middle East theatre saw interconnected naval, land, and air campaigns fought for control of the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and Southern Europe. The fighting in this theatre lasted from 10 June 1940, when Italy entered the war on the side of Germany, until 2 May 1945 when all Axis forces in Italy surrendered. However, fighting would continue in Greece – where British troops had been dispatched to aid the Greek government – during the early stages of the Greek Civil War. The British referred to this theatre as the Mediterranean and Middle East Theatre (so called due to the location of the fighting and the name of Middle East Command), the Americans called it the Mediterranean Theater of War and the German informal official history of the fighting is The Mediterranean, South-East Europe, and North A ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Government Of Nazi Germany
The government of Nazi Germany was totalitarian, run by the Nazi Party in Germany according to the Führerprinzip through the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler. Nazi Germany began with the fact that the Enabling Act was enacted to give Hitler's government the power to make and enforce laws without the involvement of the Reichstag or president on 23 March 1933, and ended with the German surrender in World War II on 8 May 1945. As the successor to the government of the Weimar Republic, it inherited the government structure and institutions of the previous state. Although the Weimar Constitution technically remained in effect until Germany's surrender in 1945, there were no actual restraints on the exercise of state power. In addition to the already extant government of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi leadership created a large number of different organizations for the purpose of helping them govern and remain in power. They rearmed and strengthened the military, set up an extensive stat ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Souda Bay
Souda Bay is a bay and natural harbour near the town of Souda on the northwest coast of the Greece, Greek island of Crete. The bay is about 15 km long and only two to four km wide, and a deep natural harbour. It is formed between the Akrotiri (Crete), Akrotiri peninsula and Cape Drapano, and runs west to east. The bay is overlooked on both sides by hills, with a relatively low and narrow isthmus in the west near Chania. Near the mouth of Souda bay, between the Akrotiri and the town of Kalives, there is a group of small islands with Venice, Venetian fortifications. The largest island is Souda Island, giving its name to the bay. Souda Bay is now a popular tourist destination although there are no formal public beaches designed in the area, due to the presence of the Crete Naval Base, a major naval installation of the Hellenic Navy and NATO in the eastern Mediterranean. Villages such as Megala Chorafia and Kalives afford fine views of the bay, and house-building, particular ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Luftwaffe
The ''Luftwaffe'' () was the aerial-warfare branch of the German ''Wehrmacht'' before and during World War II. Germany's military air arms during World War I, the ''Luftstreitkräfte'' of the Imperial Army and the '' Marine-Fliegerabteilung'' of the Imperial Navy, had been disbanded in May 1920 in accordance with the terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles which banned Germany from having any air force. During the interwar period, German pilots were trained secretly in violation of the treaty at Lipetsk Air Base in the Soviet Union. With the rise of the Nazi Party and the repudiation of the Versailles Treaty, the ''Luftwaffe''s existence was publicly acknowledged on 26 February 1935, just over two weeks before open defiance of the Versailles Treaty through German rearmament and conscription would be announced on 16 March. The Condor Legion, a ''Luftwaffe'' detachment sent to aid Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War, provided the force with a valuable testing grou ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Battle Of Crete
The Battle of Crete (german: Luftlandeschlacht um Kreta, el, Μάχη της Κρήτης), codenamed Operation Mercury (german: Unternehmen Merkur), was a major Axis airborne and amphibious operation during World War II to capture the island of Crete. It began on the morning of 20 May 1941, with a multiple German airborne landings on Crete. Greek and other Allied forces, along with Cretan civilians, defended the island. After only one day of fighting, the Germans had suffered heavy casualties and the Allied troops were confident that they would defeat the invasion. The next day, through communication failures, Allied tactical hesitation, and German offensive operations, Maleme Airfield in western Crete fell, enabling the Germans to land reinforcements and overwhelm the defensive positions on the north of the island. Allied forces withdrew to the south coast. More than half were evacuated by the British Royal Navy and the remainder surrendered or joined the Cretan resistance. T ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Don (river)
The Don ( rus, Дон, p=don) is the fifth-longest river in Europe. Flowing from Central Russia to the Sea of Azov in Southern Russia, it is one of Russia's largest rivers and played an important role for traders from the Byzantine Empire. Its basin is between the Dnieper basin to the west, the lower Volga basin immediately to the east, and the Oka basin (tributary of the Volga) to the north. Native to much of the basin were Slavic nomads. The Don rises in the town of Novomoskovsk southeast of Tula (in turn south of Moscow), and flows 1,870 kilometres to the Sea of Azov. The river's upper half ribbles (meanders subtly) south; however, its lower half consists of a great eastern curve, including Voronezh, making its final stretch, an estuary, run west south-west. The main city on the river is Rostov-on-Don. Its main tributary is the Seversky Donets, centred on the mid-eastern end of Ukraine, thus the other country in the overall basin. To the east of a series of three ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece ( el, Ἑλλάς, Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity ( AD 600), that comprised a loose collection of culturally and linguistically related city-states and other territories. Most of these regions were officially unified only once, for 13 years, under Alexander the Great's empire from 336 to 323 BC (though this excludes a number of Greek city-states free from Alexander's jurisdiction in the western Mediterranean, around the Black Sea, Cyprus, and Cyrenaica). In Western history, the era of classical antiquity was immediately followed by the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine period. Roughly three centuries after the Late Bronze Age collapse of Mycenaean Greece, Greek urban poleis began to form in the 8th century BC, ushering in the Archaic period and the colonization of the Mediterranean Basin. This was followed by the age of Classical G ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]