George Terrill Thresher, Fireman
Information about George Terrill Thresher, Fireman on Titanic, who died November 18, 1939 when his ship, the 500-ton Parkhill, was torpedoed by the German U-18. All hands, nine in total, were lost.
Data about the Parkhill and its sinking
Crew List for the Parkhill
Crew page for George Thresher
The Parkhill left Blyth, England (near Sunderland) on November 17 with a cargo of 449 tons of coal, headed to Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands. At 8:45 PM on November 18th, the U-18 fired a first torpedo which missed the ship. At 9:16 PM, he fired a second torpedo which impacted the Parkhill. The British steamer sank immediately after a large explosion.
Thresher, age 52, was serving as trimmer and fireman aboard the Parkhill, the same job he performed aboard Titanic. He was the oldest of the 9 men aboard the Parkhill; the chief engineer, James Leworthy, was 50 and the master, Eric Charles Middleton, was 31.
The U-18 was a
Type IIB boat under the command of Kapitänleutnant Max-Hermann Bauer, born 1912, who had held command of U-18 since November 1937. (The Type IIB was a small 'coastal' boat with 5 torpedoes and 24 men aboard.) It had left Kiel, Germany, on November 15, 1939, on its fourth war patrol. The Parkhill was the first ship it sank. The G7e (also known as T2) torpedoes used were electrically powered and left no wake.
On his return to Kiel, Nov. 23, Bauer was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class and the 1939 U-Boat War Medal. He was put in command of U-50, a larger Type VIIB boat. He died, along with all 44 of the U-50's crew, on April 6, 1940 when the U-50 struck a British mine in the North Sea. The U-50 sank four ships, claiming 53 lives and 16,000 GRT of shipping. The U-18 continued in service and was eventually scuttled at the port of Constanza on the Black Sea in 1944.
During WW2, the Orkneys were strategically important because of the naval base at Scapa Flow. The town of Kirkwall, the largest town, was Parkhill's destination. Because of the small amount of coal it had on board (500 tons) and because naval vessels were mostly oil-powered, it seems most likely (but this is just speculation) that Parkhill's cargo was meant to be domestic coal for heating and cooking in the first winter of the war.
All this information is from U-Boat.Net.
- J