Qualla: SS Irma (1905)

SS Irma (1905): Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Read more: SS Irma (1905) on Qualla

SS Irma (1905): Built on the Tees, Sold to Bergen

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Read more: SS Irma (1905) on Qualla

SS Irma (1905): Conscripts and Controversy

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 p...

Read more: SS Irma (1905) on Qualla

SS Irma (1905): Off Averøya, in the Dark

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Read more: SS Irma (1905) on Qualla

SS Irma (1905): The Argument That Will Not End

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 unde...

Read more: SS Irma (1905) on Qualla