Talk:German tanker Altmark

Untitled
In the novel Men at Arms, by Evelyn Waugh, on page 155 in my edition, the Altmark is "... now dubbed 'the Hell Ship'. There were long accounts of the indignities and discomforts of the prisoners, officially designed to rouse indignation among a public quite indifferent to those trains of locked vans still rolling East and West from Poland and the Baltic."

Does anyone know if the imprisoned sailors were particularly badly treated (or was it just propaganda). Should this be mentioned in the article? Seminumerical 20:54, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

To Seminumerical

My Dad was on the Ashlea and was taken prisoner by the Admiral Graf Spee and then transferred to the Altmark. His name was Robert Charles David Ritchie and he was 19 years old.

He told me about the "Altmark indecent" from his point of view and I will try to give a honest version of his story. After his ship was sunk by the Graf Spee he was treated well by the normal sailors of the pocket battleship as a prisoner of war. When he was transferred to the Altmark the "guards" treated all of the prisoners very badly, my dad was beaten for some small thing but he said that it was nothing compared to other prisoners. Dad tell of one of the prisoners who was beaten to death by the guards.

Generally he says of the time on the Altmark it was cold and he was hungry all the time, he would laugh at the fact that after being on the ship for a while and sharing a 44 Galen drum as a toilet, every one of the prisoners had body and crab lice and he itched non-stop.

When the Altmark was finally captured in Norway by HMS Cossack, Dad said that the sailors from the Cossack were ordered by their captain to "draw cutlasses" when they boarded the Altmark and it was like a Errol Flynn pirate movie.

After he and the other prisoners were released by the sailors and they were told to go to the Cossack, the prisoners didn't do this straight away but they found the guards who had beaten to death the British prisoner and they murdered them. Dad says they cracked their skulls on the bulk head doors.

The rest of the story is about how he and the other prisoners were returned to England and cleaned up and then went into service with the royal Navy.

I loved and respected my Dad and I believe that at 19 years old and have being beaten by prison guards there may well be a justification for the actions of the prisoners. I am and will always be opposed to war and violence but I don't know what I would have done in his position.

R.G. Ritchie

Doubts
The page german-navy.de gives completely different specs (length 178,25 m), builder (Howaldtswerke AG Kiel) and slightly different fate after 1940 (departure for Japan on 09.09.1942, so it could not be able to use help of Soviet ice-breakers). Also the page gives length of 582 ft (some 177 m) and 20,850 tons and confirms, that by March 1941 she was busy with Sharnhorst twins. Pibwl �?« 23:37, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Tag & Assess 2008
Article reassessed and graded as start class. --dashiellx (talk) 17:40, 6 May 2008 (UTC)