M/S "BATORY", Poland. Stamp issued as a souvenir sheet by the Polish Post in 2023

M/S BATORY
Stamp issued as a souvenir sheet by the Polish Post on 17.07.2023.

M/S Batory was built in 1934–1935 at the Cantieri Riuniti dell'Adriatico in Monfalcone, Italy, under an arrangement where part of the commission was paid in shipments of coal from Poland, and she was launched on 3 July 1935. She was a Polish ocean liner which was the flagship of Gdynia-America Line, named after Stefan Batory, the sixteenth-century King of Poland. She began regular service in May 1936 on the Gdynia — New York run, and by 1939 had carried over 3,000 passengers. Mobilized at the outbreak of World War II, she served as a troop ship and a hospital ship by the Allied Navy for the rest of the war. In 1940 she, along with Chrobry, transported allied troops during the Norwegian campaign. She was also one of the last ships to leave St Jean de Luz during the final evacuation of Polish troops from France. She was also used for secretly shipping many valuable Polish treasures to Canada for safekeeping. On 5 August 1940 she left Liverpool with convoy WS 2 (Winston's Specials) evacuating 477 children to Sydney, Australia, under the Children's Overseas Reception Board until the war was over. She sailed via Cape Town, India, Singapore to where she had carried 300 troops and Sydney. She was involved in the allied invasion of Oran, Algeria in 1942 (Operation Torch). That same year she took troops to India and later took part in the Allied invasion of Sicily and southern France (Operation Dragoon), where she was the flagship of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, Commander-in-Chief of the French Army. Returned to post-war Poland in 1946, she resumed civilian service after a refit, and after she was withdrawn from the North Atlantic route, refurbished at Hebburn for service in the tropics, and sailed in August 1951 from Gdynia and Southampton to Bombay and Karachi, via Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, and Suez. In 1957, she returned to the North Atlantic run. She continued in service until 1969, when she was decommissioned and became a floating hotel in Gdynia. However, after about a year, she was sold back to Polish Ocean Lines, and from there she was sold for scrap to Hong Kong. She left Gdynia on 31 March 1971 and arrived to the scrapyard on 26 May. The ship had been scrapped completely by 1972. 

Thanks to Daniel.