Menace of the Seas

In the blackness before dawn, the Greek ship Chimara, 1,800 tons and packed with 548 passengers, slogged through windblown seas. She was close to shore, off the eastern tip of the Attica peninsula. Her journey from Salonika to Piraeus (Athens' port) was to end in a few hours. But some of her 87 crewmen were restive. They knew the menace of floaters; some had protested against night voyages in these waters, which had been heavily sown with mines during the war.

At 3:50 a.m., it happened. The Chimara, a onetime German hospital ship, shuddered and stopped as an explosion ripped away her port bow. Her engine-room belched clouds of steam and flames. Passengers lurched through dark corridors to the decks. Soon they were a tight-packed mass of cursing, fear-crazed people, fighting to get into the ship's eight lifeboats.

After 30 minutes of hellish panic, the Chimara rolled over, sank at once. Down with her went 200 or more, mostly women & children--and 40 Greek leftist guerrillas chained in her hold (their destination had been an exile camp in the Aegean Islands). Many who had quit the ship died in the sea. Hours later fewer than 200 survivors were accounted for. The dead and missing: more than 400.

Thus this week the peril of mines added to its toll of more than 6,300 lives taken since war's end. The toll would surely rise; there are still hundreds of thousands of live mines in unswept fields close to main shipping channels. The danger of floaters would remain for many years. Greece, Sardinia and Sicily were almost surrounded by minefields. Off the Channel coasts and The Netherlands and Denmark, near Eire and Iceland were thousands of mines. The U.S. coasts were believed to be swept clean.

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