SS Khedive Ismail

My paternal Uncle, Cyril Hubert May, a Gunner attd, 301 Field Regiment, East African Artillery, was killed on the 12/1/1944 when the SS Khedive Ismail was torpedoed by a Japanese Submarine, killing 1,297 on board including 77 female service personel.
I found the information, firstly, by going to the War Graves Commission, Debt of Honour site, finding my Uncle's name, and the name of the ship. Consequently, on searching the Internet, I came up with the following article about a book called 'Passage to Destiny' which includes pictures and many eye-witness accounts of the tragic sinking of the Khedive Ismail. An index at the back of the book gives the names of all the dead.
A memorial for these men and women stands at the East Africa Memorial Cemetery in Kenya.
Apparently, the many Admiralty papers on this sinking, were not released for 40 years because of their sensitivity, for the Khedive Ismail was Britain's third worst Allied shipping disaster of the Second World War
A brief summary of the book is below.

PASSAGE TO DESTINY
The Story of the Tragic Loss of the SS Khedive Ismail
by Brian James Crabb

This book tells the untold story of the loss of the troopship SS Khedive Ismail in Convoy KR8 in February, 1944. No less than 1,297 people lost their lives in the space of the two minutes it took to sink the ship, including seventy-seven women (the single worst loss of female service personnel in the history of the British Commonwealth). Carrying 1,511 personnel from the Army and the Royal and Merchant Navies, the Khedive Ismail sank on Saturday 12 February 1944, torpedoed by Japanese submarine I-27 in the Indian Ocean. Only 208 men and 6 women survived the ordeal.
The submarine was depth-charged to the surface by the destroyers Paladin and Petard, and the book includes an account of their difficult but successful attempt to sink her, a campaign which forced the Navy to depth-charge the submarine through some of the survivors.
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Maybe, one day, some one at the BBC will dedicate a story to those brave men and women, who had the misfortune to be sailing on the Khedive Ismail on that fateful day in 1944.

Regards,
Jane Joy.

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