A British war ship, named after the Cossack people of Russia and Ukraine, once arrived in Edinburgh's Leith Port with almost 300 freed prisoners of war.
HMS Cossack arrived at Leith Port on February 17, 1940, with 299 British prisoners who they had just liberated from a German supply ship, Altmark.
The Altmark was sailing home and skirting along the Norwegian coastline when she was sighted by an RAF squadron, who alerted the naval headquarters at Rosyth.
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Fortunately a British Flotilla was nearby and HMS Cossack made its way toward the Altmark, where after a brief battle that claimed four German fatalities they quickly boarded the ship and liberated their countrymen.
The ship then made its way home toward the UK and Leith’s Imperial Dock, where she had been sent for repairs and gun trials just months before, and large crowds and the world’s media were waiting for them.
HMS Cossack and its crew were quickly vaunted as heroes and instantly elevated to international fame as the ship made headlines across the world.
A new reel taken from archives shows the ship arriving in Leith with the prisoners waving to thousands of Edinburgh locals cheering and welcoming their war heroes home.
The prisoners are then seeing boarding a waiting bus, as police offers stand nearby.
The ship left Leith on February 23 and was back in Norwegian waters within days and hunted for German ships in the North Atlantic.
Within a year in May 1941 HMS Cossack was sent on her final missions, chasing German battleships, like Bismarck.
The Bismarck hit HMS Cossack in one exchange and sheared off her antenna but she survived the day.
Sadly, come October of that year the ship would sail for the last time, in a convoy from Gibraltar to the UK, when she was struck by a single torpedo from a German submarine.
HMS Cossack was taken by tow in tug from Gibraltar but the two slipped and the Cossack sank into the depths of the Atlantic, with the loss of her crew of 159.
