Career Completed just after the outbreak of
World War I, The
Transylvania was built in 1914 at the Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company shipyard in the Scottish city of
Greenock. The owner was the
Anchor Line, which had been part of the
Cunard Line since 1911. The long steamer was powered by two Parsons turbines and six
Scotch steam boilers, which acted on two
propellers and enabled a speed of . She was taken over for service as a
troopship from May 1915 the
Admiralty fixed her capacity at 200 officers and 2,860 men, plus crew compared to the 1,379 passengers she was designed to carry. Her sister ship was .
Loss On 3 May 1917,
Transylvania sailed from
Marseille to
Alexandria with a full complement of troops, escorted by the Japanese destroyers
Matsu and . At 10 am on 4 May
Transylvania was struck in the port engine room by a
torpedo fired by the German
U-boat under the command of
Otto Schultze. At the time the ship was about south of
Cape Vado near
Savona, in the
Gulf of Genoa.
Matsu came alongside
Transylvania and began to take on board troops while
Sakaki circled to force the submarine to remain submerged. Twenty minutes later a second torpedo was seen coming straight for
Matsu, which saved herself by going astern at full speed. The torpedo hit
Transylvania instead, which sank immediately. Ten crew members, 29 army officers and 373 soldiers lost their lives. Many bodies of victims were recovered at Savona and buried two days later, in a special plot in the town cemetery. Others are buried elsewhere in Italy, France,
Monaco and Spain. The Savona Town Cemetery contains 85 Commonwealth burials from the First World War, all but two of them casualties from
Transylvania. Within the cemetery is the Savona Memorial which commemorates a further 275 casualties who died when
Transylvania sank, but whose graves are unknown. Amongst those killed was the
cricketer Major
Richard Worsley. The wreck of
Transylvania was discovered by the Italian on 7 October 2011 off the coast of the island of
Bergeggi at an approximate depth of . ==Notes==