Qualla: SS Vigrid

SS Vigrid: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Norway was officially neutral in the First World War. The neutrality did not save her merchant sailors. Through four years of conflict, while the country itself sent no soldiers to the trenches, Norway's two-thousand-ship merchant fleet kept the United Kingdom fed and fueled, and the German Empire's submarines hunted them by the hundred. The official Norwegian death toll for the war was 1,892 merchant seamen. Close to half the country's commercial tonnage was lost. The SS Vigrid was one number in that ledger. On the last day of 1917, ten nautical miles west-northwest of the Runnel Stone buoy off Cornwall, a torpedo struck her without warning, and she went down in the cold winter sea with five of her crew.

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SS Vigrid: The Ship

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Vigrid was new in 1917. She had been built two years earlier at the Bergens Mekaniske Verksted yard in Bergen, on the Norwegian west coast, launched on 29 October 1915 and completed the following month with yard number 191. She measured 74.5 metres between perpendiculars with a b...

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SS Vigrid: The Cargo and the Run

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 31 December 1917 she was sailing from Barry, the great coal port at the head of the Bristol Channel, to Rouen on the lower Seine. Her cargo was 2,102 tons of Welsh steam coal, the kind of fuel that drove French railways, French factories, and to no small extent the French armi...

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SS Vigrid: Athalwin Prinz

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The submarine that intercepted her was U-95, of the German 4th U-boat Flotilla, commanded by Kapitanleutnant Athalwin Prinz. He attacked without warning, the standard practice in the unrestricted submarine warfare campaign that Germany had resumed in February 1917 and that was a ...

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SS Vigrid: What Happened to U-95

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sixteen days after sinking Vigrid, on 16 January 1918, U-95 was lost with all thirty-six of her crew near Hardelot on the Pas-de-Calais coast. The cause has never been established. She may have struck a mine, she may have suffered a catastrophic mechanical failure, or she may hav...

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