World War II
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 MS 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. She participated in the evacuation of Dunkirk late May early June, taking aboard 2,500 people. Later she carried as many as 6,000 people in one evacuation. In June to July, she secretly transported much of the UK's gold reserves (£40 million) from Greenock, Scotland, to Montreal, Canada, for safekeeping (Operation Fish). 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.[2] She sailed via Cape Town; India; Singapore to where she had carried 300 troops; and Sydney. The journey was a happy one, with so much music and laughter that the Batory was dubbed the "Singing Ship" and was the subject of a book of the same name.[3] In April 1942 British writer Roald Dahl boarded the Batory, bound for Halifax, Canada.
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. She came under attack several times from the ground and the air, but managed to escape serious damage.
Dubbed the "Lucky Ship" for her military career during World War II, she was a sister ship of the less fortunate MS Piłsudski, which sank in November 1939 off the east coast of Scotland.
