The Wicklow Mountains is one of the last places you’d expect to find a World War Two German War Cemetery. There are 134 graves two of which are for crew members of a German destroyer and two torpedo boats sunk by the British in 1943.
This story came to light when the General was patrolling the waterfront at Wexford on Monday morning. He spotted this memorial, put up in 2015.
The Kerlogue was a coaster built in Rotterdam in 1939. She was only 143 feet long and her deck only a foot above sea level. She was designed to move cargo between Irish ports but on the outbreak of war made much longer journeys than she was designed for. She took Irish agricultural exports to Britain and then would take a cargo of coal to Lisbon for the power station there. Lisbon was used as a safe destination by American vessels carrying goods destined for Ireland: agricultural machinery, fertiliser or wheat. The Kerlogue would carry this back to Ireland or, if there was no American freight, would buy food such as oranges to take to Ireland.
In 1941 the Kerlogue went to the rescue of the collier, the Wild Rose of Liverpool, that had been crippled by German bombers some seven miles off the Wexford coast. Thirteen crew members were saved and the Wild Rose was beached at Rosslare. Later that year the Kerlogue survived after hitting a mine off the Welsh coast.
In October 1943 she was strafed by Mosquito fighters flown by a Polish Squadron. She limped back to Cobh only saved from sinking by the protection to her hull given by her cargo of coal. Subsequently the British government authorised ex gratia payments to her injured crew members. By December she was at sea again taking a cargo of oranges from Lisbon to Dublin. A German long range reconnaissance aircraft directed her to where a German destroyer and two torpedo boats had been sunk by two British cruisers in the Bay of Biscay. There were some 700 men in the water, many of them dead. As the monument attests she rescued 168 of them and defying German instructions to take them to a French port, then British orders to take them to Fishguard, docked at Cobh The survivors were interned at the Curragh Camp for the duration of the war. The crew of the MV Kerlogue was indeed brave and a credit to Wexford.
Well researched. I am struck by the courteous tone of the German Minister’s letter, albeit to the citizen of a neutral state. A far cry from the recent description of the President of the European Commission as a ‘pound-shop Bismarck’ by a British politician.
I wonder why the memorial took 72 years to erect?
As tales of small cargo ships go, this was a very moody one. To those who like such things, I hope I can recommend my account of SS Fawn and her cargo of nuns in the 1870’s. (At my website, if you can bear to absent yourself from this one momentarily.)
SS Fawn and the Carmelites reads like an English Channel version of CS Forester’s African Queen. Here is the link to RDN’s account: http://richarddnorth.com/2016/12/ss-fawn-the-bowyers-and-the-nuns-1870/