Passage to destiny : the sinking of the troopship Khedive Ismail in the sea war against Japan /Brian James Crabb.

"This is the full story of the loss of the troopship SS Khedive Ismail in convoy KR8 in February 1944. 1,296 people lost their lives in the space of the 100 seconds it took to sink the ship, including seventy-seven women (the single worst loss of female 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 when torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-27 in the Indian Ocean. Only 209 men and 6 women survived the ordeal. The submarine was then 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 attack the submarine through some of the survivors (this incident inspired a similar detail in the novel The Cruel Sea). This compelling read draws on many eyewitness accounts and previously unpublished Admiralty papers, many of which were not released for forty years because of their sensitivity, for the sinking of the Khedive Ismail was the third worst Allied maritime shipping disaster of the Second World War. The book includes many appendices, including the names of the entire ship's complement and includes over 140 illustrations. The painting on the front cover is by maritime artist Robert Blackwell. This is the revised second edition of the book. The first appeared in 1997, but has long been out of print. This new edition includes a great many more photographs and many more eye-witness accounts, and more appendices, and there is a comprehensive index. The ship was built at Greenock in Scotland and launched in 1922 as the SS Aconcagua (owned by a South American company). She was sold in 1935 to an Egyptian line and renamed in honour of the famous nineteenth-century ruler of Egypt. In 1940 she was requisitioned to serve as a troop carrier and took part in many convoys in the Indian Ocean before being sunk in 1944."