D/S Ole Bull
Updated Sept. 7-2010

To Ole Bull on the "Ships starting with O" page.


Source: Lillesand Sjømannsforening.

Some Convoy Voyages:

For information on voyages made in between those mentioned here, as well as later voyages, please see the documents received from the National Archives of Norway and A. Hague's Voyage Record above.

As mentioned further up on this page, Ole Bull was taken over by Nortraship in Wilmington, NC on the day of delivery on May 14-1943. According to Page 1 of the archive documents, she left Wilmington for Charleston on May 23, and from there she later proceeded to Karachi, via various other ports.

In my "Warsailor Stories" section there's an entry from Fred Turner, who joined this ship at the end of Jan.-1944 (he also served on Solør, Britannia and Stirlingville). He says "We had a cargo of various supplies. The most guarded was 24 thousand cases of beer for American troops and the balance was clothing and military supplies. Again our convoy formed off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia (Convoy UGS 32 - ref. link in Voyage Record). After sailing through the Mediterranean Sea, we docked at Alexandria, Egypt, in March 1944". In fact, she's listed as bound for Alexandria in Convoy KMS 42, departing Gibraltar on Febr. 25. According to the archive document, she arrived Alexandria on March 5. This convoy will be added to an individual page in my Convoys section; in the meantime, the ships sailing in it are named on this page (Askeladden, Hjalmar Wessel, Norholm and Novasli are also listed). Fred continues: "We continued our voyage through the Suez Canal bound for a small port in Iran. We arrived there in June. Note that according to Page 1, Ole Bull had made a voyage from Alexandria and back to the U.S. in between, having left Alexandria on March 16, arriving New York on Apr. 14 (Convoy GUS 34), later sailing from Hampton Roads to Port Said in May - destination is given as Khorram Shahr (Convoy UGS 41 - see links in the table above). From Port Said, she continued to Bandar Abbas, where she arrived, via Suez and Aden, on June 14. After unloading our cargo, we returned to Norfolk, on August 9th, 1944". This fits in with the fact that Ole Bull is listed in Convoy GUS 46, which left Port Said on July 14-1944 and arrived Hampton Roads on Aug. 8. She was on a voyage from Khorram Shahr, and arrived Cape Henry on Aug. 8. Follow the link for further convoy details.

The rest of her 1944 voyages are shown on Page 1 and Page 2, with convoy info for some of them in the table above. Her 1945 voyages also start on the latter document, and as will be seen, she got to go home to Norway already in July-1945 - see also Page 3, which shows her voyages to July-1946.

POST WAR:

Sold in Oct.-1946 to the Norwegian government for Smedvik Tankrederi A/S (Peder Smedvig), Stavanger. Came under the Panamanian flag as South River in 1959 for Cia. Atlantica Pacifica S.A. (Panama R.P. & Baltimore, U.S.A. - also, Tidewater Commercial Co. Inc., Baltimore from 1965), then under Liberian flag as Kronos in 1965, Kronos Shipping Co. Ltd. (Dynamic Shipping Inc., New York). Sold to Japanese shipbreakers and broken up in 1967, having arrived Tsuneishi on March 24.

Related external links:
Liberty Ships - Unfortunately, the list no longer appears to be included at this site (unfortunate, because I have 100's of links to it from my Convoys section). If I remember correctly, that particular section was hosted by Peter Thompson, who has now moved to a different site, but I cannot find his list of Liberty Ships. I'll leave the link up for now until I can find out whether it's still available somewhere. I did find an identical page here, but as will be seen, the alphabetical links receive an error.

See also:
List of Liberty Ships - Includes info on the men and women for whom the ships were named (from Wikipedia). Sallie S. Cotton can be found on this page.

Back to Ole Bull on the "Ships starting with O" page.

Norway (H. Westfal Larsen) lost a steamship by this name to WW I, built in Newcastle 1901 for C. Mathiesen e.a., Bergen - managed by Westfal-Larsen from July-1911, 1835 (1640?) gt - struck a mine (laid by UC-19) and sank in the North Sea on Jan. 11-1917, voyage Hartlepool-Rouen with coal - no casualties.

The text on this page was compiled with the help of: "Nortraships flåte", J. R. Hegland, "Liberty Ships in Peacetime, and their Contribution to World Shipping History" I. G. Steward - 1992, and misc. (ref. My sources).