The Rohna Disaster: America's Worst Maritime Loss That the U.S. Government Suppressed for 25 Years

The Heinkel He 293 was a German development that Allied scientists would not publicly acknowledge until it had been sinking ships for over a year: the world's first operational anti-ship guided missile. Radio-controlled, dropped from aircraft, steered to the target by an operator in the launching aircraft tracking a flare in the missile's tail, it was effective against ships that could not easily maneuver and had limited anti-aircraft capabilities.

On the afternoon of November 26, 1943, the troop transport HMT Rohna was sailing in convoy off the coast of Algeria, east of Oran, carrying 2,193 men — primarily American soldiers of the 853rd Engineer Aviation Battalion and 322nd Fighter Control Squadron, bound for India and the China-Burma-India theater.

The Attack

A formation of approximately 25 German He-111 and Do 217 aircraft appeared over the convoy at approximately 4:00 p.m. In the unfolding attack, one German pilot released an He 293 guided missile. The operator in the aircraft guided it through its final approach using the radio controller. It struck the Rohna on the port side, penetrated below the waterline, and exploded in the engine room.

The ship sank in approximately 50 minutes. The speed and violence of the sinking made an orderly evacuation impossible. Life rafts were deployed but many sank under the weight of too many men. Survivors hung in 60-degree Mediterranean water while rescue ships attempted to maneuver alongside.

When the rescue operations were complete, 1,015 American soldiers were dead — along with 120 members of the ship\'s Indian and British crew. Another 28 men died later of their wounds. The total American death toll of 1,015 made the Rohna disaster the second-largest loss of American troops at sea in a single action in the entire war, following Pearl Harbor.

The Suppression

The U.S. government classified all information about the Rohna within hours of receiving the initial reports. Survivors were ordered not to discuss what had happened. Newspapers were not permitted to report on it. Families received only the standard casualty notification, with no explanation of circumstances.

The reason was not primarily to protect the families from grief, nor even standard wartime operational security. The reason was the guided missile. The Allies did not want Germany — or Japan — to know how effective the He 293 had been, fearing that success would accelerate the deployment of similar weapons across the fleet. They also did not want Germany to know that the Allies now knew Germany had a functional guided anti-ship missile, which would have compromised intelligence sources.

The suppression was extraordinarily effective. The sinking of the Rohna remained officially classified or otherwise unpublicized until 1967 — twenty-four years after it happened. Veterans of the Rohna came home and were told, explicitly or implicitly, not to speak of it. Many of them did not, for decades, understand quite why.

The first nationally published account did not appear until 1993. A comprehensive commemoration ceremony was not held until 1998, in Washington DC, when the surviving veterans of the Rohna were in their seventies.

The guided missile that sank the Rohna was a direct technological ancestor of the guided missiles that define modern naval warfare. The men who died in the water off Algeria in November 1943 died in the first major successful use of a weapon type that would reshape the following century of warfare. Their country did not acknowledge what had killed them for a quarter century.