‘You are sending men to their deaths,’ he insisted, ‘men who have sailed with me for many years. If anything happens to the ship, that wire will obstruct passage to the boats and rafts. We shall be drowned like rats and the Arandora Star turned into a floating deathtrap.’
But the authorities knew better than the man who had spent a lifetime at sea. The barbed wire remained. And the Arandora Star became a floating deathtrap.
That, then, was the desperate situation that confronted all those who finally managed to struggle to the upper deck. But not all of those who survived the initial impact of the explosion or the lethal onrush of the invading waters reached the upper deck.
There were old men aboard, old men and sick men, and many of these never left their cabins—they had been asleep in their bunks when the torpedo struck, and many of them died there. Others were too weak to fight their way along flooded alleys, or took wrong turnings in the Stygian darkness of the great liner’s vast complex of passageways: Edward Crisp owes his life simply to the fact that he knew the internal geography of the ship like the back of his hand.
Others again did reach the upper decks, found their way to the nearest fore or aft lifeboat blocked by rolls of athwartships barbed wire, and went below again to find some passage which would bring them up to a lifeboat no further away than twenty yards from where they stood. But the press and confusion below decks was increasing steadily, the level of the water was rising, and many of those who went below were never seen again.
Major Bethell, OC of the guard, ordered his men to clear away the barbed wire in front of the lifeboats. (It appears that there was some method of loosening sections of the barbed barricade by operating a slipwire, but no instructions had been given in this.) The guard tore at the wire with rifles and bayonets—Ivor Duxberry has still the scars on his arms as the grim proof of his story—and the rush for the boats was on.
Unfortunately, because of the obstructing wire, trained members of the ship’s company were not able to reach all their boats’ positions—or at least not in time. Edward Crisp and Taffy Williams—the bosun’s mate—arrived at their station to find sixty Germans and Italians already sitting in a lifeboat, and had to order them out—no easy task when everyone was convinced that the Arandora Star was already foundering—before they could begin to lower the boat. Elsewhere, some of the internees tried to lower the boats themselves and within a few minutes, in Duxberry’s graphic phrase, half a dozen of them were hanging on one fall like turkeys outside a poulterer’s shop.
But some of the prisoners of war, as distinct from the internees, proved invaluable. One such was Captain Burfend, master of the Adolph Woermann, who marched a group of men—for the most part highly experienced seamen and confirmed Nazis—in a column of two on to the boatdeck, and lowered several lifeboats in perfect order. Nazis or not, their behaviour was all that could have been wished for at this moment of crisis. Especially was this true of Captain Burfend himself. When he had seen as many men as possible, regardless of race, into the lifeboats for which he had assumed temporary responsibility, he denied himself a place in any of these, stepped back and went down with the Arandora Star.
But though there were not enough lifeboats for all, this was not realized. Most of the intervening barbed wire was still in position, with men flinging themselves bodily upon it, trying to tear it apart with their bare hands, only to find within seconds that they were caught beyond any hope of escape. Others smashed a path through with fire hydrants, went back, incredibly, to collect their suitcases, and returned to find the lifeboats gone.
The survivors, of course, were those who were not caught in or trapped by the barbed wire. Mario Zampi, who had lowered a raft only to have it taken over by some of his fellow countrymen already in the water, dived over the side and all but broke his neck when his lifejacket struck the water. Fulford jumped from the boatdeck—a dive at which even an Olympic champion would have baulked—and struck the water far beneath with such force that large quantities of oil and salt water were forced into his stomach and lungs: he, too, was injured by his lifejacket. Edward Crisp, as said, managed to get away in a lifeboat, while Ivor Duxberry slithered down a rope and landed astride the upturned hull of a lifeboat.
Even as the great liner foundered, there were hundreds still aboard. Most of these were trapped. Some were too terrified to jump. Others, like Captains Moulton and Burfend, elected to remain with the ship rather than abandon it before everyone else had been saved. Few of the regimental guard officers survived. When last seen, they were lined up, as one survivor put it, and chatting amiably like suburban passengers waiting in a morning bus queue. It is difficult to recognize either the wisdom or necessity of this quixotism and nonchalant acceptance of a fate which, until they themselves made the decision, had been by no means certain: but it is impossible not to admire their selfless gallantry.
At 7.30 a.m. the Arandora Star heeled over sharply until she was almost on her side in the water, the guard rails far below the surface of the sea, hesitated for a moment, then, momentarily shrouded in clouds of hissing steam, slid quietly beneath the surface of the Atlantic.
The waters in the immediate vicinity of the foundering liner were alive with people on rafts or clinging to planks or nonswimmers frantically churning the surface of the sea with the last of their rapidly failing strength. All saw what was coming, all struggled fearfully, desperately to avoid it, but for all but a few the effort had come too late, a meaningless tribute to the age-old instinct to survive. How many people were sucked down in the vortex of the plummeting Arandora Star will never be known: but no more, it is certain, than were dragged down, trapped by the impenetrable barrier of barbed wire, or still impaled on the savage hooks, helpless flies trapped in this monstrous spider’s web.
The Arandora Star was gone, but almost a thousand of its passengers, guards and crew—mainly Italians and Germans—still lived, scattered in groups or singly over several square miles of the Atlantic. That morning the Atlantic, mercifully, was calm and all but windless—but the sea was bitterly cold. Before long the number of swimmers and those supported only by planks and benches became pitifully fewer and fewer. Mario Zampi lost all but one of the six companions who originally clung to the same bench as he. Their pathetic cries of ‘Mother’, repeated over and over again in three or four languages, grew fainter and fainter and gradually faded away altogether as the numbing cold struck through the scanty clothing and pathetically limited defences of the old, the infirm and the gravely wounded, and stopped the beating of their hearts. And some there were, supported by their life jackets, who, by and by, just lay face down in the water, dead.
About noon, a Sunderland flying boat appeared and circled the area dropping all it had in the way of first-aid kits, emergency rations, chocolate and cigarettes, and then disappeared to guide the Canadian destroyer St Laurent to the scene.
All of the survivors are unanimous in their unstinted praise of the magnificently selfless work performed by the crew of that ship: operating from the St Laurent’s boats while the destroyer itself kept constantly on the move to avoid submarines, they scoured the area for hours until they collapsed unconscious over their oars, having driven themselves far beyond the limits of exhaustion.
In all, the crew of the St Laurent picked up and took to safety over eight hundred survivors, an astonishing feat almost without parallel in the lifesaving annals of the sea, almost enough to make one forget, if even only for a moment, the barbed wire and the thousand men who died.
Almost, but not quite.
Rawalpindi
Even with the two brand new untried battle cruisers under his command, even although he was leading them on this, their first sortie against the enemy and the cold, dark hostility of the winter north Atlantic, Vice-Admiral Marschall was as unworried as any fleet commander can ever hope to be in wartime. Wilhelmshaven was dropping south behind him into the early gathering dusk of a November afternoon and the low flat shores of Jede Bay were already
vanishing into nothingness, but Marschall never spared them a glance. He was busy, far too busy for any of this nonsense of sentimental farewells, and, besides, he knew he didn’t have to bother. Barring accidents, it would only be a matter of brief time before he saw these shores again.
And there would be no accidents. Of that the Squadron Commander, Marschall, was convinced. One of Germany’s best and most experienced naval officers, Vice-Admiral Marschall was fully aware that in wartime the element of risk could never be fully eliminated, that chance must always play its part. But the risk was negligible: not only was he the gambler who had been dealt all the best cards in the pack—he was playing against a blindfolded opponent.
Already, in these first few months of war, the German Naval Intelligence Service, with the intensive preparations of years behind them, was operating at maximum efficiency. Its agents were scattered all over Britain and the neutral countries of Western Europe—and these agents were the best there were. The accuracy and completeness of the information obtained was matched only by the speed with which this information was transmitted to Berlin.
German Naval HQ knew the position, speed, course and destination of almost every convoy leaving or approaching Britain. They knew the position of every British capital ship—and they knew that on that day, 21 November, 1939, every British capital ship was either in harbour or in far distant waters: that the Nelson and the Rodney were in the Clyde, the Hood and the French battlecruiser Dunkerque were in Plymouth, a cruiser squadron was fuelling and victualling in Rosyth, and that the only other ship they might have had to fear, the aircraft carrier Furious was in Nova Scotia with the battleship Repulse. They knew, too, that after the torpedoing of the Royal Oak in Scapa Flow by Leutnant-Kapitän Günther Prien’s U-boat, the British Navy had precipitately abandoned that far northern base, and retreated to the Clyde and Forth, maintaining only a small secret base in Loch Ewe, a northwesterly Scottish fjord. At least it was secret as far as the British public and most of the Royal Navy were concerned: the Germans knew all about it.
There was, of course, no guarantee that these ships would remain where they were. Again, the Germans were unworried. Their experts had completely broken the British naval codes at that time, with the results that British naval redisposition orders were known to the Germans almost as quickly as they were to the captains of the ships concerned.
Not that Marschall had any intention of engaging any large British ships in any case. His superior, Admiral Raeder, had been adamant on this point. This was only a shakedown cruise which might pay the added dividends of dislocating our shipping and drawing off our patrols.
There was the further possibility that news of the departure of the squadron might be transmitted to London by espionage agents, but, in view of past achievements of the British Intelligence Service, that was highly unlikely. At the time, our Intelligence Service was untrained, cumbersome, and almost wholly ineffectual—the Deutschland, for instance, after her first Atlantic foray, had been back in the Baltic for over a month before we knew anything about it. And, it must be confessed, our sketchy air patrols over the North Sea were, at the time, not much better than our Intelligence Service.
Vice-Admiral Marschall, therefore, felt justifiably light of heart as his two battle cruisers, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau cleared Jede Bay and sailed out into the cold, wind-swept darkness of the North Sea. A bitter night, a bad night, but Marschall welcomed it, for over and above all the cards he held in his hand, the darkness of the long northern winter nights, the forecasted bad weather and visibility reducing rain-squalls and fog were further powerful allies, that made for safety. Marschall reckoned that it would take him exactly forty-eight hours to reach the Iceland-Orkney line of the British contraband control.
The British Northern Patrols were in position, thinly stretched out over nearly a thousand miles of sea. Cruisers were the backbone of this patrol, but mostly superannuated ships of the old C and D classes. Only four ships could be reckoned as really effective fighting units: the Norfolk and the Suffolk, the same two ships as were to report the historic breakthrough of the Bismarck into the Atlantic in May 1941, were in exactly the same position as they were on that memorable day—the Denmark Strait—the Glasgow was just to the north-east of the Shetlands, with the Newcastle stiffening the line between the Faroes and Iceland. Of these, only the Newcastle was anywhere near the coming scene of action, but even she was too far away.
Holding much of the line in between these cruisers were the armed merchant ships. For contraband control—the stopping and searching of ships carrying proscribed cargoes—these ships were ideal in the high wild latitudes of the Atlantic. Big ex-passenger ships, able to remain at sea for long periods in bad weather, they were stripped of all their luxury fittings, and fitted with guns sufficient to deal with any cargo ship. But only with cargo ships—they were never intended to cope with anything else: it is significant that the very first move of the Admiralty when they finally learnt of the breakthrough of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, was to withdraw all the armed merchant ships off the northern patrol. But the order came too late, tragically but inevitably, for one of these ships; for it was not until the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau turned their great guns on the Rawalpindi that the Admiralty knew that these two ships, then the most powerful in the German Navy, were loose in the Atlantic.
The 17,000-ton Rawalpindi, in peacetime a crack P & O liner plying between Britain and the Far East, was one of the first Merchant Navy vessels to be converted to an armed merchant ship. Her gay pre-war colours were gone, lost under a drab coat of battleship grey. The lavishly furnished interior had been gutted, a main control gunnery room constructed and deck fittings removed to make way for ammunition lockers and her hastily installed armament—eight old 6-inch guns, four ranged along either side. But there had been no time, no opportunity to make any alteration to her unarmoured sides and decks, and the strengthening of these was largely impossible anyway: in terms of the penetrating power of modern armour-piercing shells, the hull of the Rawalpindi might as well have been made of paper.
The crew of the Rawalpindi knew this, but just accepted it, with the mental equivalent of a philosophic shrug, as just another of the hazards of the sea. Among the 280 officers and men aboard, there was not one to whom the sea and all its dangers were unknown, for in terms of experience if not in actual age—but more often than not in age as well—it was a crew of old men. Apart from fiftyodd officers and men who had served with the Rawalpindi as a regular passenger liner, the entire crew was composed of RNVR men of the Merchant Navy. RNVR—civilians with the bare essentials of naval training—reservists, and pensioners who had come back to the sea after having already completed twenty-two years in the Navy. There was not one active service officer or rating aboard the Rawalpindi, but there was a tremendous fund of knowledge and experience, more than any regular Naval ship could ever hope to boast. The crew knew the sea and its dangers, and accepted them. They knew too the very sharp limitations of their ship and accepted these also. And when, in latitude 63° 40′ North, II° 29′ West, at 3 o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday, 23 November, they saw the lean sleek shape of the Scharnhorst looming through the ice-cold rain-squalls of the bleak sub-Arctic waters, they knew that this was indeed the end, but they accepted that also.
On the bridge, Captain Edward Coverley Kennedy, called back to the colours after seventeen long years in the unwanted wilderness of civilian life, had seen the danger and recognized its implications even before any of his men. He wrongly identified the ship as the Deutschland, but the mistake was one of academic importance only: he rightly identified it as a German pocket battleship or battle-cruiser, 26,000-ton leviathans with 13-inch armour-plate and nine 11-inch and twelve 5.9 guns capable of delivering a 8,000-pound broadside in reply to his own puny 400—and his light 100-pound shells could never hope to penetrate that massive armour anyway.
Even as she emerged from the rain-squalls the Scharnhorst’s big signalling lamp was stu
ttering out the command to ‘Heave-to’. The sensible thing, the wise and politic thing—for which there couldn’t possibly have been any reproach—would have been to do as the Scharnhorst ordered. But with Kennedy, as with most of the great British naval captains down the centuries, prudence in the face of the enemy was a quality that he had never learned, and certainly never inherited. He knew he could neither fight nor outrun the Scharnhorst, but there were sheltering icebergs and fogbanks nearby and, while there remained even one chance in a thousand he was determined to take it. He ordered the wheel to be put hard over and smoke floats to be dropped to cover their withdrawal.
The Rawalpindi was still heeling over on her turn when the Scharnhorst again ordered her to ‘Heave-to’. This time the message was reinforced with an 11-inch shell that crashed into the sea just ahead, sending a tall, slender column of white-streaked water towering far into the rain-filled darkening sky, twice the height of the tip of the Rawalpindi’s main mast. Kennedy acknowledged the weight of the warning by turning even further away from the enemy and dropping more smoke floats.
And then, for a moment, he thought salvation had come. Far off on the starboard bow, a long dark ship, white water piled high at its bow, emerged out of rain-squall, arrowing in towards the scene. One of their own Northern Patrol cruisers, Kennedy thought jubilantly, almost certainly the Newcastle, and he ordered course altered towards this haven. Almost at once the bitter truth struck him, but it was too late now. The new arrival represented not safety but the certain end of everything: it was the Gneisenau, sister ship to the Scharnhorst.
The Lonely Sea Page 4