HMT Dunera

History
United Kingdom
Builder:	Barclay Curle & Company, Glasgow
Launched:	10 May 1937
In service:	25 August 1937
Out of service:	1967
Homeport:	London
Fate:	scrapped 1967, Bilbao
General characteristics
Class and type:	Troopship, educational cruise ship
Tonnage:	11,161 GRT; 6 634 NRT; 3,819 tonnes deadweight (DWT)
Length:	516 ft 10 in (157.53 m)
Beam:	63 ft 3 in (19.28 m)
Draught:	23 ft 5 in (7.14 m)
Propulsion:	Two five cylinder 2SCSA Doxford-type opposed piston oil engines, 11,880 bhp, twin screws,
Speed:	16 knots
Capacity:	104 1st Class, 100 2nd Class & 164 3rd Class passengers or 1,157 troops.

HMT Dunera was a British passenger ship which gave her name to an infamous case of wartime maltreatment and injustice. After trials in 1937, she was handed over to the British-India Steam Navigation Company and served as a passenger liner and an educational cruise ship before seeing extensive service troopship throughout the Second World War.

Dunera carried New Zealand troops to Egypt in January 1940.

Through her next deployment Dunera was at the centre of one of the more notorious events of British maritime history. After the Britain declared war on Germany the government set up aliens tribunals to distinguish Nazi sympathisers from refugees who had fled from Nazism. As a result, 568 were classified as unreliable, 6,800 were left at liberty but subject to restrictions, and 65,000 were regarded as "friendly". However, after the fall of France, the loss of the Low Countries and Italy's declaration of war, Britain stood alone against the spread of fascism and anxieties became acute. In what Winston Churchill later regretted as "a deplorable and regrettable mistake," all Austrians and Germans, and many Italians, were suspected of being enemy agents, potentially helping to plan the invasion of Britain, and a decision was made to deport them. Canada agreed to take some of them and Australia others, though, "not since the middle of the nineteenth century had Australia received the unwanted of Britain transported across the world for the purposes of incarceration."

On 10 July 1940, 2,542 detainees, all classified as "enemy aliens," were embarked aboard Dunera at Liverpool. They included 200 Italian and 251 German prisoners of war, as well as several dozen Nazi sympathizers, along with 2,036 anti-Nazis, most of them Jewish refugees. Some had already been to sea but their ship, the Arandora Star, had been torpedoed with great loss of life. In addition to the passengers were 309 poorly trained British guards, mostly from the Pioneer Corps, as well as seven officers and the ship’s crew, creating a total complement of almost twice the Dunera’s capacity as a troop carrier of 1,600.

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