Statendam (III) Historical

The SS Statendam took eight years to build. Harland & Wolff laid her keel in 1921, but construction stopped and restarted multiple times — postwar financial difficulties, supply shortages, a government loan required to complete her. She launched in 1924 and was finished in April 1929, when Holland America finally had the ship they had been trying to build: 29,511 gross tons, the largest vessel in the Dutch merchant fleet, their finest interior yet, the flagship of the company until the Nieuw Amsterdam arrived nine years later.

Her maiden voyage was April 11, 1929. She carried passengers across the Atlantic through the Depression years, made winter cruises to the Caribbean from New York, and served without interruption for a decade. In November 1939 she made her last North Atlantic crossing and returned to Rotterdam, where she was laid up when the war made Atlantic service impossible.

In May 1940, during the German invasion of the Netherlands, the Statendam caught fire in Rotterdam harbor. She burned for days. In August 1940 — eleven years after her maiden voyage — she was scrapped.

Eight years to build. Eleven years to lose. The Statendam was the finest ship Holland America had built when she entered service. She was still that when she burned. Wars find their way to harbors, and the things in those harbors — the beautiful, difficult, carefully-built things — are not exempted.

— In the Wake editorial

I am writing this because my daughter has asked me to write down what I remember from May 1940. She is right that someone should, while there are still people who remember.

I was twenty-six years old and working at the dockyard in Rotterdam. I had seen the Statendam in the harbor many times. She was hard to miss — the largest ship in the harbor by some measure, and beautiful in the way that large, well-made things are beautiful when they are simply sitting in the water. I had never sailed on her. The fares were not what a dockworker spent his money on. But I knew what she was. Everyone in Rotterdam knew what she was.

When the invasion came she was moored and quiet. She had made her last crossing in November. I remember the fire starting on the eleventh — before the bombardment of the city, during the first days when the fighting was at the edges and Rotterdam itself did not yet know what was going to happen to it. The smoke was visible from where I was standing near the Wilhelminahaven. I watched it for a long time. There was nothing to do.

She burned for several days. By the time they declared her a total loss, there was much more to grieve in Rotterdam than a ship. But I have thought of her often in the years since, and the arithmetic of it still stays with me. Eight years to build and eleven to lose. She deserved better than that. Most things did, that spring.

— Jan W., Rotterdam, written 1982