Converted Merchant Ships
HMNZS[3] Monowai (F59) was a former Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) merchant vessel. At the outbreak of World War II she became an armed merchant cruiser of the Royal New Zealand Navy (RNZN).
She subsequently became HMS Monowai, a Landing Ship, Infantry and mostly operated as a troopship. In 1946 she returned to her old trade as a passenger ship.
Civilian career
Monowai In Milford Sound Feb 1933
SS Razmak was built at Greenock yard for P&O by Harland and Wolff, launched in 1924 and completed on 26 February 1925.[1] She was designed for service between Bombay and Aden and spent several years in the Mediterranean Sea. When demand on her original route dried up, she was offered for sale and transferred to the antipodes.
The Union Steam Ship Company, part of the P & O group, took her on in 1930 as their second SS Monowai and she ran a subsidized service from Wellington to Vancouver via several Pacific stops. From 24 November 1932 she ran mostly from Wellington to Sydney.
Conversion to armed merchant cruiser
Guns suitable for Monowai had been ordered and stored at the Devonport Naval Base in Auckland. Monowai was requisitioned by the Royal New Zealand Navy on 21 October 1939 and was prepared for mounting the guns. Then followed a period of indecision, and in February 1940 work on her was suspended for over four months. After construction was completed in August 1940, she was commissioned.
The Japanese submarine I-20 conducted an unsuccessful attack on her on 16 January 1942.[4]
Monowai was the first of two ships with this name to serve in the Royal New Zealand Navy. She was named after the New Zealand glacial lake Monowai. Monowai is a Māori word meaning “channel full of water”.
Conversion to LSI
As surplus, in 1943 she was transferred to Liverpool in the United Kingdom and handed over to the British Ministry of War Transport. Monowai went to Glasgow for conversion to an “Landing Ship, Infantry (Large)” or LSI(L). From June 1943 to February 1944 she was refitted with completely different armament, capacity for up to 1,800 fully equipped troops, and 20 Assault Landing Craft. She was used during the Normandy landings.
In the later period of the war she was used as a troopship transporting soldiers and after the end of the war in repatriation.
Post war[edit]
On 31 August 1946 she was returned to her owner. She resumed merchant service in January 1949 after extensive repair. In 1960 she was sold for breaking up in Hong Kong.
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This is after HMNZS Hawera was taken out of service and laid up after WW2, sat there for many years gradually being scrapped. Here she is on the left in 1952, bridge gone
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HMNZS Muritai (T05)
HMNZS Muritai Minesweeper Converted merchant boat 1940-1946 Training and cable-lifting ship
HMNZS Muritai, auxiliary minesweeper and anti-submarine patrol vessel, is the RNZN Ship Of The Week.
The 462 ton Muritai was a Wellington harbour ferry built for Eastbourne Borough Council in 1922-23, and from a brief scan of some manuscript items in the Borough archives I gather people had warm summer excursions memories of her, in that way people tend to feel about tugboats and ferries,
Muritai was commissioned as a minesweeper in 1940, operating out of Wellington, and was involved in a number of successful minesweeping operations with the local MS flotilla. There was an interruption in her war service in 1943 when she got entangled in the NZ Naval Board’s long search for a minelaying vessel, recounted in S.D. Waters’s New Zealand navy history.
In 1939, the NZ naval authorities had drawn up ambitious plans for extensive anti-invasion minefields to be laid around all its main ports and in some cases within harbours close to important military installations. Most crucial was Auckland for which 422 mines were ordered from Australia, with an agreement that the RAN would send HMAS Bungaree to lay them.
Demands for the services of the RAN’s sole minelayer extended however from the Dutch East Indies to New Caledonia and Noumea, and while the defensive fields into Auckland were finally laid, the experience convinced the RNZN that it needed its own vessel, both for minelaying and maintaining the fields.
A long and fruitless search for a suitable vessel, both within New Zealand and the United States followed, and in the end, with some misgivings, it was decided that the little former ferry HMNZS Muritai would have to be it.
In 1943 she was sent into the Devonport dockyard for the necessary work, but lay there for months with nothing done. The yard was at full stretch repairing US ships coming from the Pacific. In the end, Muritai was simply taken back and resumed duties as a port minesweeping and anti-submarine patrol vessel.
At the beginning of June 1944 HMNZS Muritai was assigned to Tamaki as a seagoing training ship.
She was released from service in 1946, and I’m afraid I can’t readily find trace of what happened to her since.
Again, I’m always impressed by the way the RNZN turns its ships out, and with fewer hulls in the water, how much they pack onto them. HMNZS Muritai here is a good case on both points. I don’t have a reference for her armament fit, but that looks like a TWIN gun installation on the bandstand up front, which would be very unusual for a ship of this size and type.
And finally, of course, she looks just a treat. HMNZS Muritai is the RNZN Ship Of The Week.
And below Muritai in another life
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HMNZS Matai (T01/T372) was a Marine Department lighthouse tender which was requisitioned by the Royal New Zealand Navy (RNZN) and converted into a minesweeper.
Operational history[edit]
Matai was the government’s lighthouse tender servicing the marine lights around New Zealand and offshore islands, and had been used for cable laying in the 1930s. She was named after the native mataī tree.
She was requisitioned on 3 March 1941 and handed over to a dockyard for conversion.
After commissioning on 1 April 1941, Matai took over as the flotilla leader of the 25th Minesweeping Flotilla from Muritai and the flotilla began clearing a German minefield in the Hauraki Gulf.
