TSS Rawalpindi

TSS Rawalpindi was a Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) R-class ocean liner.  The 17,000-ton ship was built by Harland and Wolff's shipyard in Belfast, with interiors designed by actress and aviatrix Elsie Mackay, and was launched by Lady Birkenhead in 1925.  It spent the interwar period sailing between Britain and India, carrying about 600 passengers, until it was drafted into the Royal Navy as the armed merchant cruiser HMS Rawalpindi.  Early in World War II, while patrolling the Denmark Strait, it sank the Nazi tanker Gonzenheim, which was trying to return to Germany from Argentina.  A month later, on November 23, 1939, HMS Rawalpindi encountered the Nazi battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau near the Faeroe Islands.  The Nazis ordered Captain Edward Coverley Kennedy to surrender, but he chose to fight to the death, telling his crew "We’ll fight them both, they’ll sink us, and that will be that. Good-bye."  In under an hour, the Nazis sank HMS Rawalpindi and captured 37 sailors, while the other 11 survivors returned to Britain aboard HMS Chitral.  Captain Kennedy went down with his ship.  The two Nazi battleships eventually sank too; Scharnhorst was sunk by HMS Duke of York in the 1943 Battle of the North Cape, while Gneisenau was scuttled off the Polish coast in 1945 and then cut up for scrap after Germany surrendered.  These days, there are no German battleships left anywhere in the world, and not that many ocean liners either.

This 1/48 scale model of TSS Rawalpindi is on display at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.