mv City of Rayville

American Pioneer Line

America

Built by Oscar Daniels Company Tampa, Florida Launched April 1920

length 401.90 ft, beam 54.20 ft and depth was 31.30 ft ,

5,910 GRT

1 × triple-expansion steam engine (as built)

1 × 6-cylinder Busch-Sulzer diesel engine (1927)

The American motor vessel City of Rayville loaded its cargo of lead at Port Pirie and then stopped at Adelaide to load more cargo. Captain Cronin then shaped a course towards Melbourne , before continuing to his final destination, New York.

To show her countries neutrality and as some sort of protection against submarines, City of Rayville had the stars and stripes painted on both sides of its hull. The City of Rayville took passage through the waters of Bass Strait and at 7.47pm on the 8th of November 1940, 10 miles off Cape Otway, she hit a German mine. The Cape Otway lighthouse keeper reported a shot of flame, and Apollo Bay locals playing billiards heard a loud explosion. The crew later described water and planks and hatch covers raining down on the superstructure of the vessel, and ingots from the cargo of lead in the forepart of the vessel were also thrown onto the superstructure, the force of the explosion tearing out the foremast.

The mine had struck the vessel forward between number 1 and 2 holds and City of Rayville was going down by the head and listing badly to starboard. Captain A.P. Cronin ordered wireless operator Fred A Gritzer to send out an S.O.S. with the ship's position, however both the main wireless and the emergency wireless were put out of action by the blast.

The men rushed to the starboard lifeboat, however they were going to exceed the capacity of that boat so Captain Cronin ordered some of the men to lower the port boat as well, within 5 minutes the bridge was awash. Many of the men jumped into the water and clung to wreckage until they were picked up by one of the lifeboats. Newspapers of the day note:- "The third engineer, Mr. Mack Bryan, was seen to jump into the water without a lifejacket. He could not swim, and although his cries were heard, the men in the boats could not find him." Some websites claim he went back into the ship to recover his belongings, though, as that it what had happened the previous day on ss Cambridge I personally would lean towards the newspaper account which was printed a matter of days after the sinking. The only other fatality was the ships cat.

An account of the sinking was given in the Mercury newspaper of November 11, 1940 -"Then a strange thing happened. The freighter stood on her nose absolutely perpendicular, buried to the forward bridge in the sea, and with the rest of her hull sticking straight up in the air. She stood in that position almost for an hour, then dived straight down to the bottom with a curious roaring sound. "

The Apollo Bay fishermen left at 8.15pm. and made their way out into Bass Strait in the dark, with a biting and brisk north-easterly wind to contend with, to search for any survivors in the choppy waters. The first lifeboat was sighted at 10.20pm, and eventually all the crew and rescuers returned safely to Apollo Bay and put up for the night in the Ballarat Hotel.

The City of Rayville was the America's first casualty of the Second World War , although the USA did not enter the war until over a year later after Pearl Harbour was attacked by the Japanese on 7 December 1941 .

The wreck is lying on the seafloor with her hull and topsides clear of the bottom by approximately 15' to 20' at position Latitude: -38.98, Longitude: 143.51