This World War 2 disaster took an astonishing 2,571 lives. It was the result of mistaken identification by British RAF planes. In November 1944, MS Rigel was sailing south under the German flag. It was picking up prisoners of war at various ports and planned to disembark them at Trondheim. Not too far from this destination on November 27, the Rigel was spotted by a British air patrol, mistakenly identified as a troopship, and attacked and sunk. In terms of lives lost, this was the third worst sinking in history, exceeding even the 1912 sinking of the Titanic.

A Norwegian steamship built in Copenhagen in 1924, MS Rigel was requisitioned by the German invaders in 1940 to transport allied prisoners of war. On November 21, 1944, the Rigel began its ill-fated journey at Bjerkvik in northern Norway, taking on board 951 POWs and 110 guards. Close by in Narvik, another 349 POWs, 95 German deserters and 8 Norwegian prisoners were loaded. Then at Tommerneset the ship picked up 948 more POWs and proceeded to Bodo. On leaving Bodo and heading for Trondheim, the Rigel had 2838 on board (2,248 Soviet, Polish and Serbian POWs, 95 German deserters, 8 Norwegian prisoners, 455 German soldiers, 29 crew and 3 pilots). 

The Rigel, sailing under German flag between the islands of Rosoya and Tjotta, was discovered and identified as a troop ship and attacked by the British air patrol on the morning of November 27. Captain Heinrich Rhode, with his defenceless ship severely damaged, managed to ground his ship on the island of Rosoya. It is claimed that this last desperate action saved some 267 lives. But most of those on board had perished before this grounding. A majority of the prisoners died in the hold as the initial attack damaged all the stairway exits. Some managed to swim to safety, but few survived the cold North Sea waters.

Statistics cannot really convey the horrors of this incident. However, a novel written some seventy years later brings alive some of the dreadful suffering that must have followed the attack on the Rigel--the second novel in Roy Jacobsen’s trilogy, White Shadow.

At the start of the novel, a young woman, Ingrid, is living alone on the fictional island Barroy. She first sees some brown cloth beneath the snow: “She pulled out a tattered shirt, and some wood shavings from it. Attached to the shirt with hemp twine was a pair of breeches, missing half a leg and specked with more wood shavings.” Ingrid hangs these objects on a fish-drying rack. Later she sees these hanging clothes as a man with one leg and no head--a proleptic image as it turns out. 

She finds more clothes and comes to realise they are all men’s. Finally she sees a body, “the man [was] lying halfway up on the rock with his legs dangling in the sea as though someone had moored him to the anchor peg.” She knows the exposed body would be prey to the many birds in the area, so she drags it ashore and covers it with scraps of sail material. 

But while doing this she sees tracks in the snow “as though someone had dragged a sack through the garden.” She follows the tracks to a shed and sees two legs “sticking out from under some old sheepskins.” These belong to a dead man, “middle-aged, bald, with bluish black bristles in a wasted chalk-white face.” Then she finds another man under a horsecloth. He is young and wears a German uniform with brown rags and wood shavings underneath.

Ingrid immediately tries to keep the young man alive. He has a deep thigh wound, and one hand burnt, the other nail-less. He is extremely weak. While she is treating him, more bodies turn up and she rescues at least six more and again covers them with pieces of sailcloth. Jacobsen writes, “In her schooldays Ingrid had read about mission fields and dreamed of saving the living, now she was saving the dead, husks emptied of their contents by maggots and birds.”

Scant attention has been paid to this disaster since WW2. Even the half-sunk wreck of  the MS Rigel remained beached for 25 years before it was demolished in 1969. Human remains are buried nearby at the Tjotta International War Cemetery.

This World War 2 disaster took an astonishing 2,571 lives. It was the result of mistaken identification by British RAF planes. In November 1944, MS Rigel was sailing south under the German flag. It was picking up prisoners of war at various ports and planned to disembark them at Trondheim. Not too far from this destination on November 27, the Rigel was spotted by a British air patrol, mistakenly identified as a troopship, and attacked and sunk. In terms of lives lost, this was the third worst sinking in history, exceeding even the 1912 sinking of the Titanic.

A Norwegian steamship built in Copenhagen in 1924, MS Rigel was requisitioned by the German invaders in 1940 to transport allied prisoners of war. On November 21, 1944, the Rigel began its ill-fated journey at Bjerkvik in northern Norway, taking on board 951 POWs and 110 guards. Close by in Narvik, another 349 POWs, 95 German deserters and 8 Norwegian prisoners were loaded. Then at Tommerneset the ship picked up 948 more POWs and proceeded to Bodo. On leaving Bodo and heading for Trondheim, the Rigel had 2838 on board (2,248 Soviet, Polish and Serbian POWs, 95 German deserters, 8 Norwegian prisoners, 455 German soldiers, 29 crew and 3 pilots). 

The Rigel, sailing under German flag between the islands of Rosoya and Tjotta, was discovered and identified as a troop ship and attacked by the British air patrol on the morning of November 27. Captain Heinrich Rhode, with his defenceless ship severely damaged, managed to ground his ship on the island of Rosoya. It is claimed that this last desperate action saved some 267 lives. But most of those on board had perished before this grounding. A majority of the prisoners died in the hold as the initial attack damaged all the stairway exits. Some managed to swim to safety, but few survived the cold North Sea waters.

Statistics cannot really convey the horrors of this incident. However, a novel written some seventy years later brings alive some of the dreadful suffering that must have followed the attack on the Rigel--the second novel in Roy Jacobsen’s trilogy, White Shadow.

At the start of the novel, a young woman, Ingrid, is living alone on the fictional island Barroy. She first sees some brown cloth beneath the snow: “She pulled out a tattered shirt, and some wood shavings from it. Attached to the shirt with hemp twine was a pair of breeches, missing half a leg and specked with more wood shavings.” Ingrid hangs these objects on a fish-drying rack. Later she sees these hanging clothes as a man with one leg and no head--a proleptic image as it turns out. 

She finds more clothes and comes to realise they are all men’s. Finally she sees a body, “the man [was] lying halfway up on the rock with his legs dangling in the sea as though someone had moored him to the anchor peg.” She knows the exposed body would be prey to the many birds in the area, so she drags it ashore and covers it with scraps of sail material. 

But while doing this she sees tracks in the snow “as though someone had dragged a sack through the garden.” She follows the tracks to a shed and sees two legs “sticking out from under some old sheepskins.” These belong to a dead man, “middle-aged, bald, with bluish black bristles in a wasted chalk-white face.” Then she finds another man under a horsecloth. He is young and wears a German uniform with brown rags and wood shavings underneath.

Ingrid immediately tries to keep the young man alive. He has a deep thigh wound, and one hand burnt, the other nail-less. He is extremely weak. While she is treating him, more bodies turn up and she rescues at least six more and again covers them with pieces of sailcloth. Jacobsen writes, “In her schooldays Ingrid had read about mission fields and dreamed of saving the living, now she was saving the dead, husks emptied of their contents by maggots and birds.”

Scant attention has been paid to this disaster since WW2. Even the half-sunk wreck of  the MS Rigel remained beached for 25 years before it was demolished in 1969. Human remains are buried nearby at the Tjotta International War Cemetery.