Merchant shipping often caught up in conflicts
Seafood outlet has origins in detention of German ship in 1939
APART from many of the players being different, current naval construction programmes parallel those of the 1930s. From aircraft carriers to frigates and sophisticated submarines, new ships are being built to the account of British, American, Russian, Chinese, Indian and numerous lesser navies.
The South China Sea is home to several new military bases that, thanks to Chinese inventiveness, have sprung from the sea. Many view these modifications of remote atolls – astride one of the busiest shipping lanes – as ominous portents of military expansionism. And merchant shipping should view these developments with concern.
Even localised conflicts drag in merchant shipping. The Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s affected the tanker trades greatly as some were attacked in the Arabian Gulf; some other vessels were also affected, caught in the crossfire between the belligerents.
Shipping buffs will remember the MSC containership, Stefania, later MSC Stefania. Built as Hakozaki Maru in 1969, she was operating on the Japan-Persian Gulf service at the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980 and was among nine vessels trapped in the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr when the authorities closed the harbour. Iranian rockets damaged her so severely that she was declared a war loss.
Once the war was over, she was bought as a hulk and partially repaired. She changed names twice during her time in Umm Qasr before being bought by MSC in 1988. After drydocking in Kuwait for more extensive repairs, she sailed in October 1988 after eight war-enforced idle years. For more than ten years thereafter, she called frequently in Cape Town while operating on several MSC services, testimony to her robust construction and regular maintenance.
Another MSC ship, Leila, was also trapped in port during that war. Shortly before hostilities began, she had arrived in Bandar Khomeini, the Iranian port on the northern Gulf coast. Her master, a seasoned salt who for years, commanded a small MSC freighter on the Durban-Indian Ocean trade, told me that frequent attacks on the port were very harrowing, particularly as the Iranians refused permission for anyone to leave the ship. When an oil installation at the port was set on fire, palls of choking smoke blocked the sun for days, adding to the misery of the ship’s crew.
The Iranians suddenly ordered her to leave – and she did, as fast as she could, given that she had been alongside for months!
From a Somerset West reader, Manfred Mickeleit, I learnt of another ship, the German freighter Hagen, that was one of many trapped in foreign ports by World War II. Completed in 1921 for the Deutsch-Autralische Dampschiff Gesellschaft and later a unit of HAPAG Lloyd, Hagen was on a voyage from Europe to Japan in 1939 when, after nearly a month’s passage, she called at Durban to bunker on August 22.
Engine trouble kept her in port, but as war loomed, her engineers worked frantically to complete engine repairs to get her back to sea. When South Africa declared war on Germany, the ship was detained as a war prize and her German crew effectively became prisoners of war. Among them was Chief Mate Hans Mickeleit who was interned initially in Durban, then in the camp at Baviaanspoort and in Leeuwkop prison before returning to Baviaanspoort whence he was released in December 1946.
As many ships had been sunk or damaged and many still repatriating troops, shipping services remained dislocated for several years after the end of the war, and Hans Mickeleit could not return home. Instead, he arranged for his wife and family in Germany to join him in South Africa, and they settled in Hout Bay. Using an old bus that Hans had converted skilfully for the purpose, the family opened a takeaway food shop – they called it Snoekies – next to West Fort on the present site of Fish on the Rocks in Hout Bay. Later, he was offered a site in the harbour where a new venture began.
As a lad in Swinemunde (now the north-western Polish port of Swinoujscie) on the Baltic Sea, Hans had watched people smoking fish, an art he put into practice in the new premises in Hout Bay. He sold the business, but its parochial name continues.
After a long and distinguished career, his son Manfred retired as the Chief Electrical Engineer (Technical Services) in the City of Cape Town.
And what of the old ship? Once taken over by the South African forces, she was renamed Ixia.
After a further name change to Empire Success, she was placed under the management of Union-Castle and used to carry military stores, surviving an aerial attack in the English Channel.
Growing tired and with machinery problems, she was laid up in Liverpool in 1948, and later that year, she was scuttled in a specially demarcated position in the Bay of Biscay with her holds full of poison gas shells.