She had been a tourist ship to the Arctic, a North Sea passenger ferry, and a coal-fired veteran of the Hurtigruten coastal route long before the war found her. On the evening of 13 February 1944, the SS Irma was steaming north along the Norwegian coast with 43 crew, 40 Norwegian passengers, probably seven Germans, and 1,800 tons of herring. Off Kristiansund, an explosion tore open her bow. A second blew her amidships. She sank in minutes. The two torpedoes that killed her had been fired by Norwegian motor torpedo boats - sailors fighting their occupied country's war from a base in Britain. Sixty-five Norwegian civilians died in the water that night. Eighty years later, the question of whether their own navy should have fired at all has never been satisfactorily answered.
The 1,322-ton Irma was built in 1905 by Sir Raylton Dixon & Co. Ltd., one of the great Victorian shipyards on the River Tees in Middlesbrough, in the northeast of England. She was delivered to Det Bergenske Dampskibsselskab - the Bergen Steamship Company - and went straight onto the Bergen-Newcastle route, carrying Norwegian passengers and freight across the North Sea to the English coast and back. In 1921 she was transferred to a more romantic duty: summer cruising for tourists who wanted to see Spitsbergen and the North Cape. Photographs from the period show her shouldering through Arctic drift ice off Svalbard, white-hulled against the floes. She was rebuilt in 1931 and again in 1932, modernised but kept in service. By the time of the German invasion of Norway in 1940, Irma was a well-known coastal steamer with three and a half decades of work behind her - the kind of ship that had carried a generation of Norwegians on holidays, business trips, and the slow business of moving along their long, indented coast.
During mobilisation in 1939, Irma was assigned to carry the first battalion of Infantry Regiment 14 north to Finnmark. The original orders required the entire battalion - more than twice the number of people Irma was certified to carry - to board the ship. Soldiers and officers protested vigorously over safety and overcrowding. The plan was abandoned. Half the battalion sailed on Irma; the rest followed days later on a sister Hurtigruten steamer. The incident embarrassed the military leadership. The Mosjøen newspaper Helgeland Arbeiderblad printed a stinging critique of how the troop transport had been handled. It was a small affair in the larger scale of what was coming, but it was an early warning that the Norwegian state had not thought carefully enough about the lives it was moving along its coast. When Germany invaded in April 1940, Bergen was one of the cities captured on the first day. Irma went back to her old work, ferrying Norwegian passengers and freight along the coast under German occupation - one of many vessels carrying ordinary life around the periphery of an occupied country.
On 13 February 1944 she left Bergen for Trondheim. With her sailed the cargo ship SS Henry, escorted, the Royal Norwegian Navy would later say, by a German naval trawler. The Norwegian MTBs - small, fast vessels based in the Shetland Islands and crewed by Norwegians fighting from exile - intercepted the convoy off Averøya in Møre og Romsdal. Two torpedoes hit Irma. A massive explosion in the bow was followed almost immediately by another amidships. She began to sink at once. The MTBs continued firing; in total the two ships were hit by 2,034 rounds of heavy machine-gun fire as well as the torpedoes. SS Henry was sunk shortly afterwards. Sixty-five Norwegians died, most of them civilians - passengers, crew, fishermen, the people who had simply been moving up the coast. The wreck of Irma was found by a geological survey vessel on 3 November 1999, lying at 200 metres depth north of Averøya. A monument at Røeggen on Sveggen, in Averøy Municipality, lists the names of every Norwegian killed.
The sinking of Irma and Henry has been controversial since the moment the news reached Norwegian shores. The Royal Norwegian Navy has always maintained that the two ships sailed without lights or national markings and were operating as a convoy under German escort - and that under those circumstances they were legitimate targets in a coastal interdiction campaign aimed at strangling German supply along Norway's shore. The families of the Norwegian dead, and many historians, have argued just as firmly that civilians were killed on a civilian coastal ship in their own waters, by their own navy, and that the operation was a tragic misjudgement of the cost. In Norway, the loss was acknowledged from the first; the Norwegian Postal Service released a 20-øre semi-postal stamp on 20 May 1944 commemorating Irma, alongside two other stamps for the SS Sanct Svithun (sunk the previous year) and SS Barøy (sunk in 1941). Decades later, King Harald V visited the site, unveiled the monument at Røeggen, and led a ceremony aboard the Hurtigruten ship MS Midnatsol over the wreck. Two Royal Norwegian Navy Motor Torpedo Boats took part in the ceremony, lowering a wreath into the water. It was an attempt at reconciliation between the present navy and the past one - and between two parts of the same country that still cannot quite agree on what was done in 1944.
The Irma's actual wreck site lies in Norwegian waters at about 200 m depth, north of Averøya in Møre og Romsdal - far from the geohash coordinates 49.48°N, 5.70°W recorded on this article, which fall in open ocean roughly halfway between Land's End and the Isles of Scilly. From those coordinates the nearest airports are Land's End (EGHC) about 16 nm east and St Mary's (EGHE) about 22 nm west. Recommended viewing altitude 2,000-4,000 ft AGL over open water. The actual story of Irma belongs to a far colder coastline; this is open Atlantic that her name now visits only on a chart.