The wreck of the SS Thistlegorm is widely acknowledged to be one of the world’s foremost diving attractions, although its location had been obfuscated until the early 1990’s.
The wreck was first discovered by a young Jacques Cousteau, who made a short film and documented it. Because he wanted to preserve the site as much as possible, he gave everyone the slip and deliberately registered the wrong coordinates.
She was built by Joseph Thompson and Sons of Sunderland and launched in 1940. The ‘Thistle’ trademark originated with her operator, the Albyn Shipping Line, who had a number of other vessels all carrying a thistle prefix.
In May 1941, she was loaded up with supplies for the Eighth Army and relief of Tobruk, as well as two sets of rolling stock for the Egyptian Railways Company. Unfortunately for her, as the Mediterranean was well under German control, she had to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and eventually to Suez, where she anchored in what was thought to be a safe place.
This wasn’t to be the case. Two German Heinkel bombers were dispatched from Cyprus to intercept what was perceived to be a large vessel, and one of them managed to discharge its payload on top of her, ripping out the bridge and one of the holds and catapulting the deck cargo into the sea.
It sank very quickly, and thirteen lives were lost. As the wreck sits upright with all her holds exposed, divers can still clearly see much of its cargo: armored vehicles, motorcycles, small arms, ammunition, shells, and so on. The midsection is where the bombs took their toll along the midsection. Scattered both on deck as well as on the sea floor are the remnants of the railway engine and tenders. It has often been described as a submerged army-surplus store… which, in effect, it was.
As exciting as the real history of this ill-fated ship may be, the dramatic events around the SS Thistlegorm found in the pages of Siptah’s Legacy are, of course, completely fictional!