The Indian 'Titanic' (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | Emile Solanki | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

In late 1943 the British India Steam Navigation Company's SS Tilawa was speeding through the Indian Ocean with a cargo of silver bullion heading for Durban. The 2,391 bars of silver were to be struck as coin in the South African mint. But on 23 November, fate intervened when Tilawa was torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-29 off the Seychelles.

After the first torpedo hit, the lifeboats were launched; but a second torpedo then sank the ship. Of the 732 passengers and 222 crew, 280 went down with the ship. The survivors drifted for two days until the early hours of 25 November, when HMS Birmingham arrived on the scene, rescuing 678 people with RMS Carthage later finding a further four.

Occurring three years before the end of the Second World War and five years before the end of British rule in India, the sinking of Tilawa represents a pivotal, yet neglected, moment of the war at sea. Beginning with the ship itself - its construction, purpose, routes, and role within the British imperial maritime network - this book reconstructs Tilawa's final journey in meticulous detail. It then turns to the night of the attack: the chaos, the separation of families, the desperate struggle for survival under a full moon at sea, and the silence that followed.

Beyond the sinking, the book explores the extraordinary afterlife of Tilawa. Central to this is the ship's concealed cargo of silver bullion and the unprecedented legal battle that followed its recovery decades later. Through clear and accessible analysis, the book explains how a forgotten wartime tragedy unexpectedly became a landmark moment in modern legal history.

Equally vital are the voices long excluded from the historical record. Through painstaking efforts to trace descendants, families, and the few surviving witnesses, this publication documents accounts of loss, resilience, displacement, and memory. These testimonies transform statistics into human lives and restore dignity to those who perished without recognition, and in so doing reveal the full story for the first time.