SS Marathon was launched as SS Bardic December 19th 1918 and completed on March 13th the following year at the Harland & Wolff Ltd. shipyard in Belfast. She changed hands and names several times, subsequently known as SS Hostilius, SS Horatius and SS Kumara until she was transferred from a British to a Greek flag in 1937.
While sailing in the mid-Atlantic in March 1941 she had the misfortune of running unescorted into the German battleship Scharnhorst that along with her sister ship Gneisenau was sailing the Atlantic on a commerce raiding mission known as Operation Berlin. The operation was one of several made by German warships during late 1940 and early 1941. Its main goal was for the battleships to overwhelm the escort of one of the convoys transporting supplies to the United Kingdom and then sink large numbers of merchant ships.
The British were expecting this given previous attacks, and assigned battleships of their own to escort convoys. This proved successful, with the German force having to abandon attacks several against convoys as they were under orders not to engage with enemy capital ships. By the end of the raid, the German battleships had roamed widely across the Atlantic, ranging from the waters off Greenland to the West African coast. The operation was considered successful by the German military and was the last victory achieved by German warships against merchant shipping in the North Atlantic, with the sortie made by the battleship Bismarck in May 1941 ending in defeat.
After the crew was taken prisoner, SS Marathon was sunk by gunfire from Scharnhorst's secondary armament. In the footage examples of both the 15cm SK C/28 in a single turret and 10.5cm SK C/33 dual-purpose guns in a twin mount can be seen firing. The former weapon was firing high explosive shells weighing 100 lbs and filled with around 8 lbs of explosive, for which the hapless Marathon's hull is no match.
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