THOMAS SWEENEY WITNESS TO GRAF SPEE SEA BATTLE
Drogheda man sailed the seven seas for 40 years and honoured by Brazil for saving shipwrecked sailors
IT WAS late December 1939 and Captain Thomas Joseph Sweeney was slightly bemused.
As he looked out from the bridge of his ship, he remarked ‘ looks like a big fire in Pinta del Este’.
He was entering Montevideo, the capital of Uruguary, and for once Captain Sweeney was wrong.
The ‘ blaze’ was closer to Lobos Island and it was actually a smokescreen - for Thomas Sweeney from Drogheda was witnessing one of the most remarkable events of World War II - right in front of him.
The smoke was being released by the Admiral Graf Spee as she fled from the Battle of the River Plate. Hot on her tail were the British cruisers, Ajax and Achilles and she was making for Uruguayan waters and the port at Montevideo.
The pocket battleship was deployed to the South Atlantic in the weeks before the outbreak of World War II, to be positioned in merchant sea lanes once war was declared. Between September and December 1939, the ship sank nine ships before meeting the British cruisers on 13 December.
Badly damaged, her skipper Hans Langsdorff, ordered the vessel to be scuttled close to the port.
For some, witnessing such events might be a once in a lifetime experience, but Thomas Sweeney saw much in his life.
For over 40 years he lived on the sea and after that initial brush with the war, he would see much more action.
He was part of the North African convoys with Lamport and Holt shipping and would later receive medals for action in the Atlantic, North Africa, India and Burma. But his proudest moment came in 1945. At the end of hostilities in the Europe, various warships of the Allied nations, including Brazil’s, were assigned to patrol in the Atlantic as rescue ships.
One of them was the Bahia. Crewmen were firing the ship’s 20 mm guns at a kite that was being towed behind the ship for target practice, but also accidentally hit the depth charges on the stern. The ship blew up and sank in minutes.
The survivors of the blast endured four or five days of no food, high temperatures and exposure to the sun on makeshift rafts, many jumping into the shark infested waters. On 8 July 1945, Captain Sweeney was looking out from his position on the freighter, Balfe, when he spotted three men on a raft. They were 250 miles off the island of Fernando de Noronha in the south Atlantic.
By noon, the Balfe had rescued another 30 men. They were so exhausted that the skipper ordered his ship alongside the rafts and hauled the men on board.
For his actions, Sweeney was called to Brazil and awarded the Brazilian War Service medal by the government.
Later, he would return to where the adventure began in Montevideo, bringing in the Belfast reconditioned 7,000 ton motor vessel called ‘Devis’ in 1948.
What became of Captain Sweeney I don’t know, but a Captain Thomas Joseph Sweeney died in 1974 and is buried in Termonfeckin.
Today, I wonder where the medals of a courageous sailor also lie....