SS Petrella: The Ghost Ship That Became a Floating Death Trap

The story of SS Petrella is one of the darkest and most disturbing maritime tragedies of World War II. Over 2,670 men drowned, were shot, or were blown apart in freezing Mediterranean waters , while the ship that was supposed to carry them to safety became their tomb. It wasn’t just a sinking. It was a massacre. And for decades, it remained buried under the fog of wartime secrecy. What happened on that cold February morning in 1944 still haunts historians, survivors’ families, and anyone who digs into the grim details.

The ship had already lived several lives before that final, catastrophic morning. Built in France, sold between companies, renamed multiple times, and finally seized by the Germans , it was a vessel that seemed cursed from the start. By the time it met its end north of Souda Bay, Crete, it carried a cargo no ship should ever carry: thousands of men locked in its holds, with no way out.

The Cursed History of SS Petrella

The ship began its life in 1923 under the name Pasteur. It was launched on 3 February from the Ateliers et Chantiers de la Gironde shipyard at Graville, Le Havre. The French government had commissioned nine cargo liners like it. The goal was simple , rebuild the merchant fleet destroyed during World War I.

It entered service on 10 August 1923. Over the next two decades, it changed hands repeatedly. It sailed to New Caledonia under charter. It was renamed Aveyron in 1928. Then the war came and changed everything.

After France fell, the ship was handed to Italy in July 1941 and renamed Capo Pino. It operated out of Genoa under Italian management. But Italy’s capitulation in September 1943 sealed its fate. German forces seized the vessel at Patras, Greece. They renamed it Petrella and put it under the Mittelmeer-Reederei GmbH , a state-owned company that managed captured Mediterranean ships for the Wehrmacht. Civilian crews worked under military jurisdiction. The ship was now a tool of war.

You can read more about the broader context of Italian forces during this period at Wikipedia’s entry on the Italian capitulation of 1943.

SS Petrella and the Men Locked in the Holds

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By early 1944, the Germans had a problem. Thousands of Italian soldiers were stranded on Crete. After the armistice, the Italian 51st Infantry Division Siena , some 21,700 men , had been disarmed without much resistance. The Germans gave them a brutal choice: fight alongside us, or go to Germany as forced laborers.

Most refused to fight. They became prisoners.

In early February 1944, 3,173 of these men were crammed into the holds of the ship. The letters “P.O.W.” were painted in white on the vessel’s sides. This was supposed to signal to Allied forces that the ship carried prisoners. It was a protection measure. It failed catastrophically.

On 8 February, the vessel left Souda Bay heading for Piraeus. The sea was cold. The holds were packed. The men had no real way to escape if something went wrong.

Something went very wrong.

The Sinking of SS Petrella: A Morning of Horror

At around 8:30 in the morning, the British submarine HMS Sportsman spotted the vessel. The submarine’s crew saw a ship. They fired four torpedoes from approximately 2,700 metres away. Two of them struck amidships.

The ship split in two. It sank fast. The bow was the last section to disappear beneath the surface.

What happened next is where this story crosses from tragedy into something darker. The German guards on board didn’t open the holds. They kept them locked. As the ship broke apart, Italian prisoners tried desperately to reach the deck. The guards responded with rifles, machine guns, hand grenades, and physical beatings.

Men were shot trying to escape a sinking ship.

Approximately 2,670 prisoners died. Only around 500 survived. The survivors clung to wreckage in freezing water. Some were rescued. Many were not.

The “P.O.W.” markings painted on the hull made no difference. Whether HMS Sportsman’s crew saw those markings remains a deeply uncomfortable historical question. Wartime reporting from early 1944 captured at Archive.org gives a sense of how chaotic information was during this period.

The actions of the German guards , shooting their own prisoners as the ship went under , were later investigated as a potential war crime. The men in those holds were unarmed. They were prisoners. They were killed not just by the sea, but by the people who were supposed to be guarding them.

A Forgotten Atrocity and Its Unanswered Questions

The sinking sits alongside other forgotten Mediterranean tragedies of the war. Ships like the SS Oria and MS Sinfra met similar ends. But the deliberate killing of prisoners trying to escape the holds sets this event apart. It isn’t just a maritime disaster. It’s something far more sinister.

Who gave the order to keep the holds locked? Were the guards acting on standing orders? Or did panic turn into murder in those chaotic minutes? These questions were never fully answered. The fog of war swallowed the details.

The Italian prisoners who died had already been betrayed once , by the collapse of their government. They were betrayed again when they were loaded onto a ship with no real protection. And they were betrayed a final time when guards chose bullets over mercy.

Survivors carried these memories for the rest of their lives. For the families of the 2,670 who died, there were no graves. Just cold water north of Crete.

The wreck still lies on the seafloor. The men who died in those locked holds have never been formally memorialized on a large scale. Their story deserves to be told , loudly and without flinching.

SS Petrella was more than a ship. It was a floating nightmare that exposed some of the worst cruelties of a brutal war. The sea keeps its secrets well. But the horror of that February morning refuses to stay buried.