This Day in History: November 23, 1939

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by Simonov

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This Day in History

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On November 23, 1939, the British ship HMS Rawalpindi was sunk by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Rawalpindi began life as an ocean liner in service with Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company in 1925 before being requisitioned by the British government in August 1939 and converted into an armed merchant cruiser, equipped with eight 6" guns and two 3" guns. The ship was then assigned to patrol the waters near Iceland where it had an early success of intercepting a German tanker, though the German ship was scuttled by its crew before British boarding party could take the ship. On November 23, Rawalpindi was investigating a reported sighting of a German ship when it came across the two German battleships. Outgunned and outnumbered, the British ship reported the position of the Germans and attacked. Forty minutes later, Rawalpindi and 238 crew had been lost, 31 were rescued by the Germans, and 11 had been rescued by the British ship HMS Chitral. Scharnhorst was eventually sunk by Allied forces during the Battle of the North Cape on December 26, 1943. Gneisenau was forced into drydock after striking a wrecked ship in 1942 and eventually stripped of its guns and decommissioned. It was later sunk in the harbor as a blockship in the final months of World War II and scrapped in the years following the war.

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