SS Norlantic
Open-knowledge reference entry
SS Norlantic was an American cargo ship of the Norlasco Steamship Company of New York that was scuttled after being damaged by U-69 in May 1942 with the loss of seven lives. The ship was built as SS Lake Fandango, a Design 1099 ship of the United States Shipping Board (USSB), in 1919 and had also sailed under the name SS Lexington.
Career
Lake Fandango was laid down by the Detroit Shipbuilding Company of Wyandotte, Michigan for the USSB and launched on 24 December 1919. Details of her merchant career after her March 1920 completion are not reported in secondary sources. In 1933, the ship was sold to the Merchants & Miners Transportation Company of Baltimore, Maryland, and was renamed Lexington. In 1941, the ship was sold to the Norlasco Steamship Company of New York and renamed Norlantic.
In May 1942, Norlantic, loaded with a 3,800-long-ton (3,860 t) general cargo that included cement and steel pipe, sailed from Pensacola, Florida for Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela. In the early morning hours of 13 May, while about 90 nautical miles (170 km) east of Bonaire, the vessel came under attack by U-69. At 03:38, U-69, under the command of Kapitänleutnant Ulrich Graf, launched two torpedoes that missed the ship. After closing to a distance of 2,000 metres (2,200 yd) from Norlantic, Graf began shelling the vessel at the bridge at 03:47.
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This entry incorporates text from “SS Norlantic” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.