SS Soesterberg

SS Soesterberg was a Dutch-owned cargo steamship that was built in Belgium in 1927 and sunk by a U-boat in 1940 in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Building
Antwerp Engineering Co Ltd, of Hoboken built the ship, completing her in April 1927. Her owner was Stoomboot Mij Hillegersberg NV, who named her after the town of Soesterberg in the province of Utrecht, registered her in Amsterdam and appointed Vinke & Co of Rotterdam to manage her.

Soesterberg had six corrugated furnaces with a combined grate area of 93 sqft that heated two 180 lbf/in2 single-ended boilers with a combined heating surface of 3632 sqft. The boilers fed a three-cylinder triple expansion steam engine that was rated at 214 NHP and drove a single screw.

Wartime career
After the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940 Soesterberg remained in Allied service, making transatlantic crossings between Canada and Britain. In June 1940 she sailed in Convoy OB 174 from Liverpool to Halifax, Nova Scotia. In July she returned from Halifax to Liverpool in Convoy HX 59 with a cargo of pit props. Early in September she sailed with Convoy OA 208 from Methil in Scotland to Halifax. Early in October she sailed from Chatham, New Brunswick, carrying 790 fathom of pit props bound for Hull. She went via Sydney, Nova Scotia, where she joined Convoy SC 7 bound for Liverpool.

Sinking
SC 7 left Sydney on 5 October. At first the convoy had only one escort ship, the Hastings-class sloop sloop HMS Scarborough (L25). A wolf pack of U-boats found the convoy on 16 October and quickly overwhelmed it, sinking many ships over the next few days. At 0122 hours on 19 October SC 7 was about 102 nmi west by north of Barra Head, Outer Hebrides when GS U-101 (1940), commanded by Fritz Frauenheim, fired three bow torpedoes at the convoy. Frauenheim followed this two minutes later with a stern torpedo. He hit two ships: SS Assyrian (1914) with a bow torpedo, and Soesterberg with the stern torpedo.

The explosion on Soesterberg blew four men overboard and wrecked her starboard lifeboat. The other survivors abandoned ship: three DEMS gunners on a liferaft, and the rest in the port lifeboat. A headcount showed that the men from the engine room were missing. The Master and the First Officer re-boarded the ship in search of them, but concluded they had been killed on watch below. The two officers then returned to the lifeboat.

The now abandoned Soesterberg remained afloat and drifting, as did the stricken Assyrian. Soesterberg collided with Assyrian's stern, then suddenly turned upright. Shortly thereafter Soesterberg sank, spilling her cargo of pit props, several of which fell on survivors of the Assyrian. This wrecked most of their liferafts, but the survivors then clung to the floating pit props as they awaited rescue.

Six of the 25 men aboard Soesterberg had been killed. One of her stokers survived the sinking and was rescued by a lifeboat from the SS Empire Brigade, which had been sunk by Otto Kretschmer's GS U-99 (1940) in the same Wolfpack attack. The Grimsby-class sloop sloop HMS Leith (U36) rescued the various survivors and landed them at Greenock.