BEVERLY — Saul Gurman kept the sinking of the HMT Rohna during World War II a secret for decades. At the Cabot Thursday night, nine months after his death at 101, a documentary featuring the local war hero allowed him to share the story at length with family, friends and neighbors.
The film, “Rohna: Classified,” details the greatest loss of American servicemembers at sea from enemy attack in history, and the sinking’s coverup by the U.S. government.
As part of a convoy of American troops heading for the Chinese-Burma-India theater, the British transport vessel Rohna was gliding through the Mediterranean Sea when it was struck by a newly developed German radio-controlled missile on Nov. 26, 1943.
“The lights went out and we just remained there, and all of a sudden, a couple of flashlights came on…” Gurman, then about 90, recalled in the film. “What really shook me up is when they said every man for himself.”
The result: 1,138 men dead, including 1,015 Army troops.
Gurman was interviewed along with other survivors for the film by producer Michael Walsh, who answered questions about the project and the Rohna’s history at the Cabot Thursday night.
Walsh met the men at reunions for Rohna survivors held in the 2000s. They formed the Rohna Survivors Memorial Association in 1999, after news reports finally shared the story of the Rohna that they had been sworn to keep secret by the military.
“(The government would) not let the story out, or at least give more information,” Walsh said. “A lot of people died never knowing what happened to their sons, and that’s a real shame for that to happen.”
The War Department classified all documents relating to the Rohna indefinitely after the attack. Despite having a list of casualties, families of the dead were told their sons were missing in action for months after the sinking.
The government didn’t want the success of Hitler’s new secret weapon to reach Berlin’s ears, as the Ronha was the only ship in the convoy to be struck by the 21 German bombers that attacked.
But only 300 men were killed by a direct missile hit. The rest drowned due to improper conditions on the ship—an embarrassment for the U.S. if word of this got out.
The ship’s rickety lifeboats fell apart as they were deployed, and the lines holding up life rafts wouldn’t move because of rust that had been hidden with paint prior to troops boarding.
The military-issued lifebelts were more proper for troops launching onto beaches rather than men out at sea. Troops also hadn’t been properly trained on how to use them. When they inflated the belts around their waists, their top-heavy torsos would flip into the water and their legs flung in the air.
Some, like Gurman, thought to move the lifebelts up to their shoulders, allowing them to properly float until the American minesweeper USS Pioneer found them. Most didn’t, and drowned at the ocean’s surface.
Hundreds of bodies from the wreck were spotted by airmen in the weeks after. But the only bodies ever laid to rest were the roughly 100 that washed up on Italian and African shores.
The government did not formally acknowledged the tragedy until 2000.
“All of these men, who went through this, honored their country’s request not to speak of this terrible tragedy,” Darlene Berube, a survivor’s wife, said in the film. “But after the war was over, why didn’t their country honor them by bringing this story out?”
Many of the survivors still alive in the 21st century tried to make up for lost time in telling their stories. They gathered at reunions and spoke to newspapers, including Gurman, who, at age 99, shared his account of that night with The Salem News in 2022.
As he told the paper, the only time he panicked during the sinking was when he stepped into the ocean and resurfaced among twisting lines of rope.
“My only thought was, ‘OK, what is Eva (his girlfriend and future wife) going to think when I don’t come home?’” he said.
In his final years, for the first time in his life, Gurman was recognized for the courage he showed during and after the war. Like when the Red Sox welcomed him to Fenway Park to be cheered on by 39,000 fans the day after his 100th birthday.
“People talk about heroes, but heroes are ordinary men put into an extraordinary circumstance,” his son Bob Gurman said at Thursday’s screening. “It’s not because they didn’t experience fear, but they did what they had to do, in spite of the fear that they were dealing with.”
Walsh is currently looking for a distributor for the film. He has published two books of accounts from survivors, “Rohna Memories: Eyewitness to Tragedy” and “Rohna Memories II: Eyewitness to Tragedy.”
For more information on “Rohna: Classified,” visit https://www.rohnaclassified.com/.
Contact Caroline Enos at CEnos@northofboston.com.