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The Belgian Merchant Navy at War · 1830–today

Sources and method

What follows comes from two sources, and where they disagree the disagreement is shown rather than smoothed away.

The crew lists

Every name, rank, nationality and fate comes from a post-war printed source on the Belgian merchant navy in the Second World War. That source marks the dead with a cross and the wounded with a G, and gives a nationality only where a man was not Belgian.

Those marks do not mean the same thing throughout. On the Carlier the mark records an escape to Gibraltar, on the Kabalo repatriation to the Congo, on the Alexandre Andre a man who stayed aboard for the whole war. On the Gandia each man's lifeboat is noted. Every ship therefore carries its own legend, and each is applied to its own ship alone.

The attacks

The crew lists rarely say who sank a ship. That information – the U-boat, her commander, the position, the convoy, the voyage and the cargo – comes from uboat.net. Each ship was matched on tonnage, date and the master's name, not on the ship's name alone. That is why their Anna (Swedish) and Sambre (British) were correctly rejected: they are different ships.

The photographs

Every photograph comes from Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain or under CC0. Most are from the museum collections of the MAS in Antwerp, several by the photographer Louis Claes. Each carries the photographer, the holding institution, the licence and a link to the file.

Each was checked against its ship, because several ships share a name. The photographs of the Escaut (1907), Hainaut (1948-1961), Ostende (1880-1919), Limbourg (1947) and Elisabethville (1950-1960) were therefore not used: those are earlier or later ships of the same name.

Those who are never named

270 people aboard are counted by the source but never named: Congolese, Arab and Senegalese crew, soldiers and repatriated passengers. 37 of them died. They do not appear in the name lists, but they are in the totals, so that the gap stays visible rather than disappearing.

Linking people

The source gives no dates of birth. A person is therefore linked only where the name is printed identically. Lauwereins Karel and Lauwereins Petrus accordingly remain two different men. 210 men appear on more than one ship.

Translation

Ranks are translated, but the original rank is kept in brackets beside it. The source is primary material and should stay readable as it was printed. Names of people and ships are never translated or normalised.

First World War

Not yet included. This database covers 1939–1945 only, for now.

Every source cited

Below is every source the data refers to, with the number of vessels it covers.