by Richard Snow
Gainard returned to the ship and told his indignant first mate, B. L. Jubb, and his alarmed steward, Joe Freer, that not only would they have to find accommodations for thirty passengers, but that some of those passengers would be college girls who had been squeezed out of the Athenia, which was then taking on stores just across the pier. Fortunately, Freer was a provident man and laid in so ample a supply of food that Gainard had to fight with his line’s agent to get the requisition filled.
The girls—four of them, it turned out—came aboard to have a look around. Gainard had hoped to discourage them, but they were not easily discouraged. He gave them coffee in the saloon, and “all the other officers found excuses to come in for coffee, too, while we were there.” Captain Gainard began to relax. “There was more laughter in the saloon that evening than the City of Flint had ever had before. These girls were absolutely irrepressible, nuts, but nice ones.”
In the days that followed, the crew laid planking over the steel plates of the shelter deck, put bunks on top of the new flooring, and strung lights above the bunks. The girls would sleep in the captain’s cabin.
The City of Flint sailed thirty-six hours after the Athenia. As the freighter made its way down the Clyde, Gainard said, “I got my first warning of what I was going to be in for.” One of the college girls began dashing from rail to rail to see the river traffic. Gainard called to her and warned that the deck of a freighter was no place to racket about heedlessly. She spotted the brand-new Queen Elizabeth falling majestically astern. As she ran to get a better look at it, she called over her shoulder, “Oh, Captain! Don’t be such an old fuzz bug!”
On the third night out the old fuzz bug was savoring his victory over his officers and several passengers in two straight rounds of a word game called Guggenheim when the radio operator handed him a message. He went to the bridge immediately, to be joined by Jubb, who already had men preparing the lifeboats. The radioman said his counterpart on the Athenia had tied down the key; Gainard swung the City of Flint toward the signal. Going at top speed—eleven and a half knots—he calculated he would arrive at about nine the next morning.
“I guess,” said the first mate, “we’ll have to take some of these passengers quite a long distance.”
Gainard nodded.
“We can build a lot of bunks on the shelter deck,” Jubb said, and left to get started. Gainard went down from time to time to check progress. “We didn’t build any single beds down there like you see in a steamship cabin or a railway sleeping car. The bunks were made in long sections, six or eight or ten people to sleep side by side. We built a board platform for the bunks, stretching canvas over the boards, stretching it taut so that only three or four boards were needed to support six or eight persons. Some places we had solid beds, other places the canvas stretched from one side to the other almost like a hammock.”
As word spread that they were on their way to help a torpedoed British ocean liner, passengers and crew alike turned out. “Everybody on the ship worked that night,” said Gainard.
A shorebound type named R. L. Jenkins, who had been below seasick since they’d left the Clyde, approached Gainard. “Captain, I’m a physician as well as a psychiatrist. What can I do to help?” Delighted to have a medical man aboard, Gainard asked him if he could set up a ship’s hospital. Dr. Jenkins said he could, and by morning he had. When the captain visited the galley, he found stacks of sandwiches under napkins, and soup and coffee on the boil. The college girls were up and about and would seem to stay so for days. Gainard posted them as messengers for the watch, relieving the seamen assigned this duty for other tasks, such as building the bunks. To finish that job, Gainard wrote, “We put up small lath boards between the bed sections, marking them off about twenty-four inches apart. Because these divisions were not too high we were able to spread one blanket so it would cover two people, sometimes three. We didn’t have enough blankets to assign one to each bunk.”
By dawn, they had built 255 bunks.
They saw the smoke of the Southern Cross at 8:40 and got up to the crowded yacht half an hour later, just as Gainard had estimated. Every crewman aboard the City of Flint volunteered to help ferry over the survivors—the lifeboats had been swung out for hours—and the captain chose the largest, on the theory that “there is something encouraging about a six-footer at an oar.”
First to come aboard was a girl whose eyes were glued shut with oil. The master of the City of Flint stepped forward to greet her with what he hoped was a brisk, reassuring formality: “Good morning. I’m Captain Gainard, and I’m glad to have you with us.”
He had told the four college girls and the five other women aboard to be ready to bring female survivors aft, take off their clothes, get blankets around them and soup inside them, and show them to their bunks. As Kay Calloway (of Lexington, Kentucky, “one of our most efficient passengers”) started to do this, Gainard said to the dripping newcomer, “You look American. Where are you from?”
“I’m ashamed to tell you” was the surprising answer. Gainard said she didn’t have to be, that wherever she came from was not her fault.
“I am German,” she said.
“Well, that doesn’t make any difference,” Gainard assured her; there would be only Americans and their guests on his ship. “You can get dried and cleaned up and fall in with everybody else just the same as if you were born in the United States. There need not be talk of nationalities here. We’re very glad to have you.” Then, in happy inspiration, he added, “Won’t you help the other girls?”
The women washed her eyes clear of oil and gave her fresh clothes, and she was helping cheerfully and effectively long before the boats had finished plying between the Southern Cross and the City of Flint. It took seven hours to bring everyone aboard. At first Gainard’s paying passengers did most of the work helping get the survivors settled, but before long the rescued were pitching in, too.
One man asked Gainard if he could be excused for a few hours because his wife was “very nervous,” and he thought he should stay with her. Gainard said of course. The next Athenia passenger to come over the side told the captain what had made the wife nervous. The couple “had been in a lifeboat near the Southern Cross. Not far away another lifeboat overturned, with thirty children aboard, including their two children—both under ten years of age. The man jumped overboard and saved ten or twelve of the little ones, but did not find his own two.”
Gainard at once sent word to the man not to worry, that plenty of help was at hand, but by the end of the next day he and his wife were at work: “They were two of the best aides on the voyage, keeping busy every day, all day long.”
Most everyone was. Eating the first day was sandwiches and chaos, but by the second, mess rooms had been set up under the direction of Professors H. H. Plough and George Child of Amherst College. The passengers ate in strictly timed relays, seven and a half minutes a seating before bringing their plates to the college girls, who would wash them and set them out for the next brief shift. Mealtimes proved a good opportunity to get the new arrivals sorted out. When everyone was finally accounted for, it turned out the City of Flint had taken aboard 286 passengers. Gainard set course for Halifax.
Survivors of different nationalities tended to keep together, and soon their sections, rather than being numbered, bore signs that said POLISH CORRIDOR, SUDETENLAND, and the like. The sole Greek on board got to sleep under a placard that read ACROPOLIS. An Episcopalian minister, his wife, and a friend were in HEAVENLY REST. Gainard wrote, “We had a section for Austrians and another for the Canadians, marked ‘Montreal,’ ‘Quebec,’ or wherever they came from. The American Jews put up a sign reading ‘7th Avenue.’ Clerks and stenographers had their quarters marked ‘Madison Avenue,’ ‘Times Square,’ and ‘Fifth Avenue.’ . . . Then we had ‘Boyle’s 30 Acres’* and ‘The Bowery,’ the last a terrible place: all my male passengers and the officers who had been dispossessed of their rooms landed there sleeping on cargo—whiskey cases and bags of ce
ment.”
The wounded went in the hospital, but Margaret Hayworth, the ten-year-old with the cut forehead, did not look seriously injured to the captain, and he berthed her on the wheelhouse grating with her mother. An hour later, Gainard stopped by the wheelhouse and noticed that Margaret had kept one hand absolutely immobile since he’d last seen her. He called Dr. Jenkins, who found the child had a fever. One of the college girls kicked two women off the wheelhouse settee and put Margaret and her mother there. (Word would eventually come through that Margaret’s three-year-old sister, left at the rail on the Athenia, was safe aboard one of the British destroyers.)
Making his rounds, Captain Gainard gradually realized that three of his sailors were sharing a single pair of shoes, passing them along to whichever man had the watch. They had given the two other pairs to passengers.
A captain of the New Hampshire National Guard organized a nightly patrol of the sleeping quarters; women formed two-hour watches and kept the toilets and showers clean around the clock. Every morning the passengers on the shelter deck would come topside and shake out their blankets while, under the direction of Helen Kemper, a California schoolteacher, their quarters were swept. “No ship was ever more clean or more orderly,” said Gainard. “We ran things Navy fashion. I would hold ‘Captain Inspection’ every day at ‘air-your-bedding time,’ walking through the ‘streets’ of the shelter-deck bunks, and later going with the Doctor on deck to see the people there.”
Dr. Jenkins didn’t like the look of Margaret Hayworth and moved her to a room near the hospital. When his patient’s temperature reached 105 and stayed there, the doctor said he had to perform a “spinal puncture.”
In the ship’s machine shop, Jubb and Freer made an instrument under Dr. Jenkins’s direction. He performed the operation, and Margaret’s temperature went down.
All the children on the ship were short of clothes. Jubb did what he could about this by sewing shoe tops out of pipe-covering canvas, with red and blue bunting shredded into laces. The college girls proved quick learners and joined in the cobbling. But “after running around on a Hog Island ship where you require boots if there’s a heavy dew,” Gainard said, “the youngsters’ feet got wet. The next day we took their shoes off them and cut up a hospital rubber sheet to make inner soles.”
Professor Child started a ship’s newspaper. George Cree, a baker from Albany, New York, took over the night shift at the ovens so the ship’s baker and second cook could get some sleep. The passengers staged a talent show one night, a limerick contest the next. Fellow passengers and crew provided the subjects, as in the tribute to Kay Calloway:
There is a young maiden named Kay
With a form that is light as a fey,
They sunk her in water
(They hadn’t of oughter)
But her presence makes us all gay.
Because people are people, one woman complained to the captain that she’d paid for first class on the Athenia and wasn’t getting anything like it. Gainard gravely explained that the shelter deck was the first-class section of the City of Flint and got one of his better sign painters to identify every entrance to it as first class. Amazingly, this expedient completely mollified the protester.
Margaret Hayworth had been better since her spinal tap. But five days into the voyage her condition worsened. She slept and cried and asked once, “Mummy, did it really happen?” In the early hours of September 9 she died.
Her mother begged the captain not to bury her child at sea. He consulted with the doctor and the first mate, and “we made an embalming solution so that the body could be prepared for burial on land. The body was wrapped in three-inch bandages of sheets and covered with powdered cinnamon, then again well sprinkled with clove and the shroud again wrapped in bandages which were then wet, and then dry bandage was wrapped around the shroud again. It was then placed in salt, secured in a box placed in the forecastle head, inaccessible to anyone but the Master and the Mate. On arrival at Halifax the body was taken to the undertaking home provided by the Donaldson Line, where no other attention was needed.” Gainard thought it best the passengers not be told.
The next day the U.S. Coast Guard cutters Bibb and Campbell took up company with the City of Flint. Gainard had not asked for the escort—the Southern Cross had alerted the Coast Guard—but he was glad to have it. “I was mighty proud of being an American when I looked at those sturdy vessels steaming along with us.”
The college girls were certainly excited to see them. They were now known throughout the ship as the Killer Dillers. (“Killer Diller was a slang phrase that had something to do with swing music,” Captain Gainard helplessly explained.) The cutters signaled asking if the City of Flint needed anything. Toothbrushes, was the heartfelt reply, and over they came, along with medical supplies and fresh vegetables. “The Killer Dillers were right on the job as welcoming committee, but the Coast Guard men carried on with their work. I won’t say that someone didn’t get to talk a little, or that perhaps some of the bright young officers of the Coast Guard didn’t get telephone numbers or addresses. I don’t see how they could have avoided it.”
Captain Gainard had never been master of a liner, but he knew how things were done on one. “Now on West Indies cruise ships, Fifth Avenue shops send famous models with dozens of costumes to parade in the salon, for afternoon style shows. We had the models, but the trunks of course were missing.”
The headlong week had tapped deep veins of resources in the Killer Dillers. Jubb had apparently always been resourceful—ship-handler, shoe- and scalpel-maker, carpenter, embalmer—and now he sat with the girls, sewing dresses out of signal flags and mess jackets and the sheets of burlap used to separate cargoes. They held their fashion show around No. 4 hatch while the officers on the Bibb and the Campbell watched through their binoculars with all the attention they would be giving to periscopes in the years ahead, and the City of Flint stolidly pounded westward, the sole merchantman in the first American convoy of the war.
They made Halifax on the thirteenth. Captain Gainard had a very different experience coming into port there than he had approaching Hamburg half a year earlier. “Good morning, Pilot,” he said. “Our speed is 11 knots and we are a turbine ship. This ship holds her headway quite a while.”
“Thank you, Captain. Full speed ahead, if you please. They are prepared for you at the dock. You have no papers for Halifax, of course, but that will be attended to easily. It’s a nice day we are having, and you don’t look so bad yourself.”
There was no delay disembarking the passengers, and a great deal of food awaited them on the pier. Thanks to Steward Freer, the meal was an amenity rather than a necessity.
The City of Flint cast off at six that evening and headed for New York with six Athenia survivors and twenty of the original paying passengers, all of them disoriented by the sudden mute enormousness of the ship. Gainard reached New York on a Saturday and sailed on Monday for Baltimore, then to Norfolk, where he found waiting a letter that “said ‘thanks’ in a language sailors of every nation understood.”
UNITED STATES MARITIME COMMISSION
Washington
Dear Captain Gainard,
We wish to inform you that the Maritime Commission has directed me to instruct you to provide a special dinner for the crew of the S.S. CITY OF FLINT. . . . This dinner is to be given in recognition of the excellent service and co-operation of the crew in providing for the comfort of the survivors of the S.S. ATHENIA.
As the crew will be paid off at Norfolk, the dinner should be arranged at that port, and it is suggested that you make the necessary arrangements for the dinner through Southgate Nelson Corporation, Managing Agent. We are notifying that company to cooperate with you in this regard.
It was a fine dinner. There was plenty of liquor, but nobody got drunk, and this gave Gainard one final reason to be proud of his men before they dispersed. “The dinner over, the crew was paid off—and a new crew signed on. Some of the men left the ship, others ca
me to take their places. Cargo carrying must go on. That’s the job of a vessel like The City of Flint.”
The memory of this particular crew would stay with him, though. Of the passengers, too: “Oh, I never think of that crowd of girls that I don’t remember something they did or said that makes me laugh.”
And so a little world dissolved, its energies and improvisations, its goodwill and incessant toilet-scrubbing, its forced intimacies and all the soup and coffee and sandwiches and First Officer Jubb’s rubber shoes and Dr. Jenkins’s homemade medical instruments. Along with his passengers, Captain Gainard had been given a peek into the future—a glimpse of how his nation would handle the war that was coming its way.
But history wasn’t through with him yet.
Prison Ship
The difficulties of keeping out of the war, 1939–40
Whatever exhilaration Captain Lemp might have felt about hitting his quarry didn’t last long. Minutes after the torpedo struck, the U-30’s radioman picked up the target’s distress signals, wrote down what they were saying, and handed the piece of paper to Lemp: “Athenia torpedoed 56.42 north, 14.05 west.” He had attacked a British passenger ship. “What a mess!” he said.
Well, there was nothing for it now, except to get out of the area, which the U-30 did. Lemp weighed the idea of radioing a report and decided against it.
The news was all over the Western world by the next morning, when the German high command issued its first statement about the Athenia: “There were no German submarines in the area at that time. It is likely a British submarine fired the torpedo as a propaganda measure to influence U.S. neutrality.” And so the myth was maintained, with a dispiriting number of people believing it right up until the Nuremberg trials finally put the canard to rest.
Germany had accused England of the crime even before the final tally of its victims. One hundred and twelve people died that night: nineteen of the crew; ninety-three passengers, sixty-nine of them women, sixteen children. Twenty-eight Americans had perished.