by Richard Snow
The men left the bridge and dropped down into the conning tower. Lemp took the U-30 to periscope depth and made for the ship with only one near-invisible pencil of mechanism above the surface. It showed him that his target—for surely it was a target now—still had no lights burning. Captain Lemp closed to one thousand yards, gave his orders, and fired the first four shots of the Atlantic war. Three shots, actually, for one torpedo jammed in its tube. Two of the others ran wide, but a third found its mark.
THE 13,500-TON, 526-FOOT-LONG DONALDSON Atlantic Line steamer Athenia had been built in Scotland in 1923, but her public spaces had a prewar feel to them, as if an Edwardian country house had floated out to sea. In the cabin-class lounge a grand piano stood beneath a domed glass ceiling supported by ornamental wrought ironwork; the baroque dining room had what the Donaldson brochure described as scagliola marble columns. None of this splendor was overly imposing. The Athenia was a friendly ship, and during her years in Atlantic service had come to be known for her informality. The famous tended to choose other vessels—Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo would not be found on the Athenia—but families felt welcome and comfortable in her salons and smoking rooms.
But those aboard the Athenia had no sense of ease as tugboats nudged her out into the Clyde from Glasgow on September 1. The government had made such firm guarantees to Poland that it could scarcely back down, and Hitler had never backed down yet. The British ultimatum would run out in hours, and a lot of people wanted to put an ocean between themselves and what was coming.
Yet they had fewer and fewer ways to do so. Ships had been taken out of service by the British Admiralty. The Queen Mary, for instance, was already drafted into a war that had not yet begun. The master of the Athenia, who bore the almost comically appropriate British captain’s name James Cook, was taking in two hundred extra passengers for this crossing. The ship’s gym had been turned into a dormitory, and hastily knocked-together bunks were being put in odd corners.
Captain Cook got his crowded ship away about noon; it would become more crowded still as it took on passengers at Belfast and Liverpool before heading out into the North Atlantic, bound for Montreal.
Everyone was feeling the weight of the hour. As the Athenia slid away down the Clyde, dockworkers stared at the passengers along the rail. “Cowards!” they shouted from their dun wilderness of gantries. “Cowards! Cowards!”
The Athenia left Liverpool with 1,102 passengers, among them 300 Americans and 150 European refugees, some of these last so poor, one passenger noticed, that they walked the decks with bare feet.
The morning of the third brought a lifeboat drill, the third since the Athenia had left Glasgow. At a little after eleven Captain Cook got word from his radioman and, like Captain Lemp, learned that Britain and Germany were at war. He called his officers together. A notice was posted outside the purser’s office, and the crew set about readying the lifeboats, checking that they were equipped with food and water and flares, and making fast the plugs that stoppered the holes drilled in the hulls to let rainwater and spray drain out.
All this unsettled the passengers, of course, but the day was mild—warm, even, in the lee of the superstructures; they were headed for a neutral port (Canada would not join the war for another five days); the sea looked benign. Families had been broken up in the press of events, mothers and children sharing cabins with other mothers and children, the husbands bunking elsewhere, but now they were, most of them, together on deck. Games started up. Some of the Americans had been able to book passage not only for themselves but for their cars, too, and they felt good about that. People had a drink, or a pot of tea, and watched the children scrambling about and felt better.
Captain Cook did not. He calculated that he still had some hours before he was beyond the likely reach of any German submarine, and they were long hours.
The light changed; the bridge was still bright but the lower decks hung in shadow. People began to think about dinner.
The torpedo struck at 7:39, entering No. 5 hold and detonating against the engine-room bulkhead. A dirty gray-white pillar of water, a half-solid chowder of pieces of pipe, decking, luggage, and people, came boiling up through No. 5 hatch and rose fifty feet above it. Passengers who had been sitting on the hatch cover enjoying the evening went up with it, and many dropped back into the hold to float, naked and flayed, in the water that was already deep in the hull.
Margaret Hayworth, a ten-year-old Canadian girl, was with her mother and three-year-old sister on the tourist deck. The explosion did not kill them, but part of the debris it blasted upward laid open Margaret’s forehead.
Many others than those on the hatch cover died immediately. Mrs. E. J. Wilkes, the wife of a New York physician, was sick and lying on her bed down in third class with her nine-year-old son, Daniel, keeping her company while Dr. Wilkes was off having his dinner. The explosion blew down the cabin wall. Daniel saw his mother crushed but managed to squirm clear of a tangle of broken things and grab hold of a chair, which, lifted by the rising water, floated him out into the passageway.
A Mrs. Fisher had sent her young son topside so recently that, at the concussion, she ran from her cabin in time to see the boy at the end of the corridor. Then the lights went out. She never saw him again.
The lights had failed all over the Athenia; the explosion had cut the oil lines that fed their generators. The ship was already settling by the stern and listing heavily to port. Watertight doors clanged down, trapping crewmen everywhere.
People panicked, pushing up black stairways from the black dining rooms. Chief Steward Rankin stood, back to the wall, holding aloft lit matches as the weeping, shouting crowd stumbled past him toward the promenade deck. Rankin saw one woman stop, back out of the throng, stand across the stairs from him and start lighting matches of her own. Guided by these two frail torches, the passengers made their way out into the dying daylight. When the last of them had passed, Nancy Bishop of Toronto waved out her match and said to Rankin, “Well, cheerio, I’m away to collect my lifejacket.” She would not survive the night.
The panic began to ebb once passengers started gathering at the lifeboat stations, although they saw distressing things. Amid all the hurry, one man sat in a deck chair, apparently studying his newspaper, but dead. A man in his underwear tried to claw his way into a boat until a bosun knocked him out and he lay on the deck while women and children stepped over him.
As the lifeboats filled, a sailor helped the wounded Margaret Hayworth into one, then handed in her mother. Her other daughter, the three-year-old, Jacqueline, was still on the deck. Mrs. Hayworth called to the sailor, and he passed over a child—but the wrong one. As the boat began to lower, Mrs. Hayworth had seconds to make a decision: jump off and go to the three-year-old, or stay with her injured child. She stayed.
As another boat pulled away from the tilting Athenia, its occupants saw a twelve-year-old girl weeping at the rail as she watched her mother and three brothers disappearing into the dusk.
Captain Cook had his radioman send out a distress signal and drew a response from the Knute Nelson, a Norwegian cargo ship less than fifty miles away: “The old man doesn’t believe you’ve been torpedoed—but he’s coming to your assistance anyway.” Then the captain asked about the emergency generator, and minutes later the auxiliary lights shone down on the decks, hard, dead white, and comforting.
A passenger named Barbara Bailey—thirty-four years old and, after considerable friction with her father, a London lawyer, on her way to Calgary to care for her brother’s children—was about to step into the last seat in her assigned boat when she heard a woman behind her starting to sob. She turned and said, “You go ahead.” The weeping woman held back. Bailey urged her on, saying it was all right: “Nobody loves me.” Taking her place in the boat, the woman said, “It’s not true nobody loves you—Jesus loves you.”
By nine o’clock all but four of the ship’s twenty-six lifeboats were away, some overloaded, some with only fifty people in
a craft designed to hold eighty-six. A few, hastily launched, were nearly swamped. Before long, the women in them would be bailing with their shoes.
Captain Cook helped load the last boat, worried that there might be a final frenzy among the remaining passengers. There was nothing of the sort. A couple of them refused to get in at all until they were assured that everyone else had gone.
Then Cook and his officers were alone on the bright, sloping deck. The Knute Nelson would be up about midnight. How long did the Athenia have to live? She lurched and settled farther as some of the officers took a final tour. In one of the dining rooms they saw plates of food still sitting on the tables—deeply appealing to them after the exertions of the evening, despite being surrounded by a bog of spilled soup and crushed glassware. They went back up and found the rest of the crew gathered at No. 3 hatch. The moon was out now, and they could see the lifeboats a half mile off, pale on the dark water. Someone had an inspiration: “Has Davy forgotten to lock his bar?” He had, and soon whiskey was being passed around.
They sat for a while and listened to the big American cars, torn loose from their lashings, banging back and forth in the hold below.
The radioman told the captain, “I’ve sent out this message to the Nelson: ‘We are now abandoning ship. Will screw down key contact and help you locate us.’ They’ve replied good luck.” A few rafts were still left. Cook glanced around the ship that had been his favorite command. “All right then,” he said, “I think that will do.”
Barbara Bailey had finally found a place in a lifeboat. She was close enough to the Athenia to see Captain Cook climbing down the side, his sextant case under one arm. “There he goes with the swag,” called out someone cheerily, and Bailey laughed. Not many in the boat joined her; it was shipping seawater, and a refugee woman in the bow began a keening chant that added to the eeriness of the night: the greasy shine of the water inches below the gunwale, sluggish with oil bled by the Athenia, the liner’s decks empty under the emergency lights, and, far off now, the lift and fall of red flares from the scattered boats.
Toward midnight they saw a brightening on the horizon, and a ship rose over the rim of the sea. The sailor in charge of the boat urged the passengers to row. Many refused and even tried to keep others from lifting their oars. The sailor, surprised and angry, shouted, “If you can’t row to save your own bloody necks, do it to save somebody else’s!” Barbara Bailey glumly realized this mutiny was her fault. When she’d spotted the lights of their rescuer, she had blurted out, “It’s the Bremen!” The German liner was in New York harbor when the Polish crisis broke, and the English newspapers had been full of speculation that she would make a dash for home. The refugees, almost all of them Jewish, had made the unarticulated, instantaneous decision that they would rather die out there than go back to Germany.
But the ship wasn’t the Bremen; it was the Knute Nelson. As she made her way toward the nearest boats, the Athenia’s emergency generators drank off the last of their gasoline, and the liner went dark.
Barbara Bailey’s boat came alongside the Norwegian freighter at about two thirty. The sea was mild by Atlantic standards, but it was still a demanding business to hoist people up a ship’s flank in the middle of the night. When Bailey’s turn came, she found her way blocked by the corpse of a woman. “That’s all right,” someone said, “you’ll have to step on it to get off.” “I won’t,” she insisted, but she did.
Now a coruscating, anomalous newcomer appeared on the scene, the yacht Southern Cross. She belonged to a man sometimes called “the Rockefeller of Sweden,” Alex Wenner-Gren, who had done sufficiently well with his Electrolux vacuum cleaner company to buy the yacht from Howard Hughes. He had been making for Bermuda, spurred by his American wife, who’d awakened from a nightmare in which she met a man holding a bleeding child and demanded they leave Europe immediately. The yacht joined the freighter in the rescue operations.
At four o’clock lifeboat 5A rowed up alongside the now-empty boats bumping at the Knute Nelson’s hull. The ship, carrying no cargo, rode high in the water, the blades of its propellers slowly turning just beneath the surface. Crewmen had thrown a line and the boat taken it in when word went around the freighter’s bridge that a lifeboat was sinking somewhere in the darkness beyond the bow. The captain ordered full ahead, and as the Nelson surged forward, 5A went under her stern. The propellers kicked the boat into the air, split it in two, and threw ninety people into the sea before threshing several of them back into the blades.
Dawn was coming up now, and by its light Daphne Sebag-Monteifiore, one of the rescued passengers on the Southern Cross, saw a young woman still sitting by herself in a lifeboat. As Sebag-Monteifiore watched, the woman stood up, cried out, “My baby!” and threw herself into the sea to drown.
Full dawn, a fine one, inspired a survivor to write “flushing vast battlements of cloud.” Beneath these battlements two newly arrived British destroyers picked up the last of the castaways, while a third patrolled for submarines. The captain of the Knute Nelson, with 430 people aboard his ship, dropped his plans to sail to Panama and headed for Galway. Barbara Bailey would be back with her difficult father in a couple of days. She found herself perfectly happy with the prospect.
Wenner-Gren had 380 survivors drinking hot soup on the no-longer-immaculate decks of his yacht. He had no way to support such a crowd. The destroyers transferred some of them and started for Glasgow. That still left over 200. An American freighter had just showed up. Maybe it could take them.
And so the drab old City of Flint became not only the vessel that saved America’s first victims of the war, but went on to show a nation that wanted nothing to do with this European quarrel just how complicated keeping out of it was going to be.
Captain Gainard’s Killer Dillers
An American freighter comes to the rescue, 1939
Joe Gainard would not have been sitting on a hatch cover in a war zone. Born in Massachusetts—he would call his memoir Yankee Skipper—he had been at sea for most of his fifty years, and he remembered the lessons he’d learned in the Great War. One was “you must not cross a hatch” because an explosion in a ship’s hold will probably throw it, and you, into the air. When the troopship President Lincoln had been torpedoed in 1918, Gainard was “particularly interested in the discipline aboard the sinking vessel. With lifeboat crews hurrying to their stations, not a single man that I saw was tempted to take a shortcut across a hatch.”*
Gainard had been in the navy then. Now he was with the merchant marine, master of the City of Flint. She was a Hog Islander, one of the freighters assembled in the Pennsylvania yards designed to help build “a bridge of ships” to Europe when America had entered the Great War. The squared-off, slab-sided Hog Islanders were famous the world over for their ugliness, but twenty years of peacetime work had shown them to be tough and dependable. The level of luxury they offered is suggested by the fact that the City of Flint had accommodations for exactly six passengers.
Gainard took command of her in March 1939. “There’s no way to start on a ship as good as trying the coffee,” he wrote, and he found the coffee on the City of Flint very much to his liking.
His first voyage took him to Hamburg. Before he even dropped anchor, he got a taste of the climate there. When the City of Flint stopped to pick up the pilot, the captain greeted him “in the traditional manner of the sea” as the man came on the bridge: “Good morning, Pilot. My name is Gainard. Glad to have you aboard. The ship is stopped. The wheel is amidships. We’re bound for Hamburg.”
The pilot said only, “Full speed ahead.”
Gainard turned to his third mate. “Mr. McAllister, this is the pilot, who apparently has no name. He is ready to go full speed ahead.”
In the wheelhouse the pilot became more communicative. “You Americans are fools,” he told Gainard. “You are in the hands of international Jews and you don’t know it. But we Germans know it.”
Gainard asked, “Did you come aboard as a pilot
or a political speaker?”
They steamed along in silence for an hour before the pilot found something more to say. “You Americans think we are starving in Germany, but we have more and better food than you.”
A little later Gainard took McAllister aside. “When the coffee comes up, I want only two cups—one for you and one for me.”
When the steward arrived in the wheelhouse, the pilot said, “I’ll have a cup of coffee, Captain.”
“I don’t think so,” said Gainard, and politely explained that he couldn’t face the humiliating possibility of serving his guest coffee inferior to what he was accustomed to. The pilot had to steer them into Hamburg warmed only by his zeal.
“I made two voyages to Germany,” Gainard wrote, “and that was the only official who acted that way. Everybody else was friendly.” But he didn’t forget the conversation.
August found the City of Flint in Glasgow getting ready to sail for home with a cargo of wool and whiskey when the captain was told to call the Maritime Commission offices in London. It was a Sunday, nobody was there, so he phoned the American embassy, then wished he hadn’t. Eddie Moore, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy’s secretary, was “too agreeable, too glad to hear from me, and too cordial.” Soon Gainard learned the reason for his effusiveness: “Well, the Maritime Commission has given us permission to send thirty passengers home on your boat.”
Gainard protested vehemently. For days anxious people had been begging him to take them aboard, and he’d turned them down: the City of Flint had no room for passengers. But Moore put the screws to him. “Joe has promised!” (And Joe was, after all, a Massachusetts man.) “Are you going to let Joe down?”