"Death ship" - this is how the American sailors who boarded the ship in distress were called "Ourang Medan". The entire crew of the ship was dead. Eyewitnesses claimed that the faces of the crew members were turned towards the sky and distorted with agony.
save our souls
In June 1947, the listening radio stations in Britain and Holland received a very strange SOS signal, which someone was transmitting in Morse code. The transcript of the message read: “This is the Dutch ship SS Ourang Medan. The captain and all the officers lie dead in the cockpit and on the bridge. Maybe the whole team is dead. " Then there was an incomprehensible series of dots and dashes, but they still managed to decipher the end of the message. Somewhere in the vastness of the Indian Ocean, an unknown radio operator clearly tapped out: "I'm dying too."
Despite the brevity of the message, several merchant ships also managed to receive a distress signal near the Strait of Malacca, which separates the island of Sumatra from Malaysia. Among these ships, by a strange coincidence, there were two American ones who were the first to establish the approximate location of the ship in distress. One of them - Silver Star - went to help Medan.
Despite the fact that the width of the Strait of Malacca is only 40 kilometers, the length of the strait is more than 800 kilometers, so the drifting vessel was not immediately found. The sailors from the Silver Star immediately noticed that something was wrong - no one answered the greetings, and there was not a soul to be seen on deck. Therefore, the Silver Star captain decided to send a boat with a reconnaissance detachment to Medan.
The Americans who climbed aboard saw a terrible picture: the deck and bridge of the ship were littered with corpses. Even the dog died - apparently the favorite of one of the officers. The SOS radio operator was found in the radio room - he was also dead, and his hand was still on the transmitter. Most of all the horror of the Americans was overtaken by the fact that most of the dead lay with wide eyes and distorted faces, which testified to the unbearable torment at the time of death. The sailors wanted to go down into the hold to inspect the cargo, but they quickly abandoned this idea - an incredible cold reigned inside the ship, in some places the corridors were covered with frost.
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After consulting with the captain, the Silver Star sailors decided to take the Medan in tow and deliver it to the nearest port, where it would be possible to find out the cause of the sailors' death. But as soon as the ship was taken in tow, streams of smoke appeared over the deck of the unfortunate ship - a fire smoldering in the depths of the hold began to break out. It was a paradox - despite the polar cold, fire raged inside the ship.
The Silver Star crew barely had time to chop off the towing ropes and retreat from the ship when an explosion was heard in the Medan's hold that the ship was raised above the water, and then it quickly sank, forever depriving the Americans of the opportunity to find out what happened.
Search
60 years later, American researchers became interested in the history of Medan. But they were surprised to find that the only document confirming the authenticity of the story with the crew of the Medan was a brochure published by the US Coast Guard in 1952. The brochure published the testimonies of sailors boarding the Flying Dutchman. This proved that the story really happened.
As it turns out, US archives confirmed the existence of the Silver Star. According to the papers, it was sold in the same year 1947 to the Grace Line company and received a new name - Santa Juana. But to find documentary evidence of the existence of the Dutch ship "Ourang Medan" was not so easy. There has never been a ship with such a name in the International Register of Ships, nor in the Singapore Maritime Archives, nor in the archives of Amsterdam.
But it turned out that the traces of the ship must be looked for in … Germany. Scientist Theodor Sirsdorfer, who devoted 50 years of his life to the study of Medan and was able to establish the names of American ships that received the SOS signal (the second was a ship called the City of Baltimore), found a brochure by another German author - Otto Milke; The brochure was called Das Totenschiff in der Südsee (Death Ship in the South Sea) and was published in 1953.
In it, the author spoke in detail about the ship "Ourang Medan", indicated its technical characteristics and argued that the ship really died along with the crew in 1947. Moreover, Milke shed light on the reasons for the death of the ship, hinting that the fourth compartment in the hold of the ship was indeed filled with dangerous cargo, which caused the death of the crew - cyanide potassium and nitroglycerin.
Versions of the death of the team
But there was also an even more terrible version of the death of the Medan's crew, and it led from Nazi Germany to another country with a militarist regime - Japan.
Division 731, which the Japanese called "the division of Togo", was founded in 1932 by the Japanese bacteriologist Shiro Ishii and gained such terrible fame that people did not call it other than "cannibals' lair". The task of the department was to develop the most deadly bacteriological weapons and the most terrible toxic substances.
In Harbin laboratories, the Japanese tested these substances on Chinese and Russian prisoners of war, as well as on the civilian population of China - on women and children. Japanese doctors did not stop the suffering of people - they opened victims alive to make sure of the effect of poisonous gases on internal organs, frozen still living "patients" and infected them with various combinations of infections.
Despite the scientists' war crimes, the Americans granted them immunity in exchange for research results. The Medan, a Sumatran or Malaysian smuggler's ship not registered in any of the maritime registries, could have been chartered to carry the poisonous substances of Unit 731, whose task was to take the deadly substances to the United States. In the Medan's hold, the containers were leaking, the crew died, and the gas had evaporated by the time the Americans approached.
However, this is only one of many versions of the death of the Medan team. Some researchers suggested the effect on sailors of powerful ultrasound, which can occur in the ocean and kill people. The mystics believed that the team was killed by the undead or encountered a UFO. Materialists spoke of a cloud of methane that rose from the depths of the Strait of Malacca, covered the ship, and the crew simply suffocated without oxygen.
The version with the Nazis was also continued - the researchers found a publication in the Indonesian newspaper Lokomotiv dated February 3, 1948. It said that after the explosion on "Medan" on the coast of one of the Marshall Islands threw a boat with a starving man. The man spoke German and told the translator that the ship Ourang Medan actually belonged to Germany and sank 400 miles southeast of the Marshall Islands. In 1945, it allegedly transported containers of nerve gas, but upon learning of the surrender of Germany, it began hiding, moving from port to port and moving towards South America. The journey of the Germans was interrupted by an accident - one of the containers was depressurized, the team died.
But there is another plausible explanation for what happened on the ship. Perhaps the smugglers' ship was carrying such a seemingly ordinary cargo like ammonium nitrate. It is a fertilizer used in the production of explosives. After entering the hold of seawater, ammonium nitrate entered into a chemical reaction with water and began to decompose, releasing a laughing gas that causes narcotic intoxication and dulls vigilance. At the same time, a decrease in temperature occurred, since the reaction proceeds with the absorption of heat, which could explain the extreme cold in the hold. And the reaction of ammonium nitrate with any alkali on board could lead to the formation of ammonia, the suffocation from which could explain the terrible agony of the crew. Heating the fertilizer near a steam or diesel engine could lead to heating of the cargo,its detonation and explosion.
Most likely, a violation of safety rules when transporting hazardous chemicals is to blame for the death of the crew. The smugglers simply shoved the containers into the cargo bays of the ship and went out to sea, hoping for luck. But this time she turned her back on them.
Alexander Lavrentiev
