MS Abbekerk

Deze website is in het Engels gemaakt, maar het verhaal van mijn vader, data hierna begint, is ook in het Nederlands. This website is mainly in English but my fathers story is also in Dutch

 My dad never talked much about the war. I knew he sailed with the dutch merchant navy and also that his ship was torpedoed. But that was about all. That all changed when my dad took me on a camping trip in Scotland. For the first time he talked about the ship, the MS Abbekerk, about how it was to work in the engineroom of a ship during the war, about the heavy casualties the merchan navy suffered and mostly about the sinking of a beautifull ship and how pointless a war is. I was about 13 at that time and didn’t really comprehend what he was telling and looking back now I think it was also an attempt to change my mind on joining the army or merchant navy.

Later I realized how special this kind of “untold stories” are to always remember how people in the second world war were just caught up in events totaly out of there controle or influence. Just doing their jobs. I was glad (my mother and) I convinced my dad to put his story on paper (harddisk it was), which he started in 1999. Unfortunatly he passed away before he completely finished his memoires. My mother and I finished them as good as we could, but getting deeper in the story actually raised more questions than it answered. Last years the Internet opened a whole new source of information. Thanks to Henk Meurs of the dutch merchant navy1939-1945 website for the first time I got a substatial amount of information about Abbekerk and restarted my search for information to complete my dads story.

In 2007 I came in contact with people who were in search of information about the evacuation of American and Autralian troops from Tjilatjap with Abbekerk in 1942, and I realized the logical next step will be a website, to share the story and all the information I collected.

This website is basicly his story with a lot of relevant information he couldn’t remember or simply never knew. Since he never kept a diary and most of his belongings were lost during the sinking of Abbekerk, he wasn’t sure of date’s and times. So reconstructing the timeline of events proved to be quite a challenge.

Most of the date’s that are in the chapter name’s are added later, but further the story is kept original as he wrote it. Although some of the humour and some of his ways of writing we were not able to translate proparly in English.

I did put in some comments were I have additional information.

Peter Kik,

Zaandam, 10 july 2007

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