This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories,

and we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to

sports and from business to history and everything in between, including your story.

Send them to Our American Stories.com. They're some of our favorites. And this next story,

well, it's the story of Frank Breyer and the tragedy of the British transport ship, Rona, in 1943.

Despite being the largest loss of U.S. troops at sea due to enemy action in a single incident,

the full details of the attack weren't released until 1967.

Here's Professor of Political Science at Grove City College, Paul Kengor, to tell the rest of the story.

Any veteran of World War II can tell you stories.

But for Frank Breyer, his story, one he could never forget, was a terrible one.

It began the moment his ship, called the Rona, was sunk. When that ship went down on November 26,

1943, Frank's life changed forever. And very few people beyond the men tossed into the sea ever knew

what happened. The HMT Rona was an 8,600-ton British troop ship carrying mostly an American crew to the Far East Theater.

It went down the day after Thanksgiving, in the Mediterranean off the coast of North Africa, the victim of a German missile.

But it was not just any German missile.

This was, it seems, the first known successful hit of a vessel by a German rocket-boasted

radio-remote-controlled glider bomb, one of the first true missiles used in combat. It was, in effect, a guided missile, and the Nazis had achieved it first. And the results?

...were immediately destructive. According to the website that today serves as the official

online gathering spot for the Rona Survivors Association, more lives were lost on the Rona

than on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor. Over 1,000 boys, to be exact, lost their lives, and their

government kept the entire episode a secret out of fear of information being leaked about the

...