Then, with Johnny, Peter and Davey, I was sent to a military staging camp at Pietermaritzburg, in the hills to the west of Durban. It was absolutely wonderful there. The war hadn’t touched the area at all, so it felt like peacetime. The air was beautifully cool and fresh and there was plenty of food. It was heaven, even though we were sleeping in tents. It was just nice to feel the peace soaking into me, damping down my ragged nerves. Every morning the local farmers left gallons of fresh milk outside our tents, the sweetest milk I’d ever tasted.
We’d been in that invigorating camp for a couple of weeks when more draft chits came. I couldn’t believe it. We were being drafted back to England! The relief was almost overwhelming.
It’s over. I’m actually going home! You’re all right now, Jim.
It was the most fantastic feeling, the best news I’d had since I was drafted to Valiant back in 1939. My mates and I returned to the port at Durban in high spirits. We would be embarking on a ship berthed some distance away from the main quays. It was a passenger liner. I stared at it.
‘That looks bloody familiar, that ship,’ I told the others. ‘It’s a Cunard ship.’ Anyone who’d grown up in Liverpool would recognise those distinctive lines.
We walked along to look at the ship that was going to take us home. As I got closer I was stunned to see Laconia on the bow, still visible beneath its coarse coat of wartime grey.
‘Well, bloody hell!’
‘What’s up?’
‘I know this ship,’ I said. ‘My father was the first-class steward.’
Here was the most amazing omen, I figured. Someone was guiding me, surely. I was going home on my father’s last ship, a ship I’d been aboard and loved as a boy. She looked neglected, but beneath her sea stains and shabby paint I could see it was the same wonderful Laconia.
‘This is meant to be,’ I told the others. I was totally convinced of it. It was 28 August 1942, and I was going home.
5 – Terror in the night
Along with Lieutenant Tillie, the officer in charge of our draft, we joined a small Royal Navy contingent on Laconia. The once spic-and-span Cunard lady wasn’t quite the ship I remembered. The war had changed her like it had changed all of us. She appeared tired, overworked, unkempt and utterly functional. Gone were the garden lounges, potted palms and smoking lounges, replaced by the austere fittings of war. But underneath her ugly grey paint, she was the same ship I’d been on with my father. I’d forgotten much about her, so, along with my mates, I spent the first few hours aboard having a good look around.
‘I just saw a woman,’ Johnny reported in astonishment.
‘A woman! Bollocks, you’ve been at sea too bloody long.’
‘She was no ordinary woman, either. She was a nurse.’
‘We’ve joined a pleasure cruise by mistake,’ I suggested.
‘And there are kids here as well,’ Peter said. ‘Mothers with babies and all.’
‘That’s something different.’
Our navy contingent had been tossed into the sort of melting pot of humanity that only a war can conjure up. For a start there was Laconia’s crew. Then there were 1800 Italian prisoners-of-war and their Polish guards, a group of women and children from Palestine, some nursing sisters, and hundreds of army and air force personnel fresh from duty in Malta and the Middle East. There were 2700 people on board, all sailing for England. In peacetime Laconia only ever carried 2000 passengers at most, so it was going to be a very crowded voyage.
We were allocated quarters in the stern, on one of the lower decks, and assigned our on-board jobs. Unlike the army and air force types, who were taking passage home, we had to work. In the navy there’s no such thing as a free ride.
‘If we’ve joined a pleasure cruise,’ Peter grumbled, ‘the pleasure is going to be everyone else’s.’
‘Bloody typical, that is,’ we moaned.
Lieutenant Tillie assigned Johnny, Peter and I to augment one of the DEMS gun crews. DEMS stood for Defence Equipment Merchant Ships, and Laconia’s gun crew was responsible for manning the big six-inch gun bolted to the deck on the stern. We were pretty fed up with guns by then, but they were our orders and that was that.
After we’d settled ourselves in, I got to thinking about Fred Eyres, who had been Laconia’s pantry-man when I was a lad. I asked one of the crew if he was on board.
‘You mean Fred the pantry-man?’
‘That’d be him,’ I said.
‘Why do you want to see the pantry-man?’
‘He was a neighbour of mine in Liverpool.’
‘I’ll tell him you’re here.’
Fred soon appeared on deck and cast a puzzled eye over our group of sailors.
‘Do you remember me, Fred?’ I asked. He looked me up and down and eventually smiled.
‘You’re Benjamin’s boy, aren’t you?’
‘That’s right. It’s Jim.’
‘Well I’ll be … young Jim McLoughlin.’
We shook hands warmly. I was pleased to be in the company of someone who knew my family. He was in his 50s by then, an old man to me, but he seemed glad to see me. I told him about my time serving on Valiant, and we chatted about the war and going home. Then he said: ‘You can always come down to my station and have a meal, you know.’
‘I’d like that,’ I said.
‘You’ll eat better with the pantry-man than anywhere else on this ship.’
This was no idle promise. Eating on a ship’s mess deck was always a mad scramble, the food usually best forgotten. But the pantry-man, well, he had the food stores at his fingertips. So here was something to look forward to, a decent meal with someone who knew where I came from, someone who’d worked with my father on this very ship.
‘I’ll come and see you when I’ve got some free time,’ I promised.
‘Two decks below, forward on the starboard side.’
Laconia slipped out of Durban at the end of August, heading for Cape Town where she tied up for two days and we were given some shore leave. After our wonderful stay in the hills behind Durban, I had grown fond of life in South Africa. It seemed a place of plenty to me, untainted by war, and especially beautiful with its stunning landmark of Table Mountain forever at its back.
Laconia sailed from Cape Town on Friday 4 September and commenced its voyage north-west into the Atlantic. As the first few hours passed, I was filled with expectations of home. Then the old anxieties surfaced again, because we were not part of a convoy. Laconia was sailing alone in the Atlantic, which I knew was a dangerous place indeed. To make matters worse, the ship was belching a huge black stain of smoke from her funnel.
‘The U-boats’ll see that smoke before we even appear on the horizon,’ someone said. ‘We may as well broadcast our exact position.’
‘She’s zigzagging, though.’
‘What, and that’s supposed to shake off a U-boat?’
Bloody hell. Here we go again.
The passengers, it seemed, were blissfully ignorant of the danger, and it was probably just as well. We mentioned it to various members of Laconia’s crew, but they just shrugged.
‘Can’t do anything about it,’ they said. ‘She just smokes like that all the time. She’s an old ship. What do you expect us to do, stop and drop anchor?’
As if the thick black pall wasn’t enough of a giveaway, our gun crew had to conduct practice drills every day which meant blazing away at an imaginary target in the water. Our six-inch gun fired shell after shell into the sea, sending up great plumes of white water.
‘Here we are!’ the gun proclaimed. And in a very loud voice at that.
The familiar tight knot returned to my stomach, but I settled into the shipboard routine well enough. The days grew hot as we steamed north-west, and the nights passed without much happening. Our contingent didn’t mix with the other passengers at all. Because the ship was so crowded, we mainly just stayed in our stern quarters. Occasionally we’d chat to the crew or watch groups of Italian prisoners getting fresh air a
nd exercise with their Polish guards.
On the night of Saturday 12 September we were far out into the Atlantic, approximately north-east of Ascension Island and approaching the equator. It was a clear night. I hadn’t yet had my meal with Fred, so I decided to see him that evening. I was very hungry because I hadn’t eaten since lunchtime and back then I was a big lad, about 13 or 14 stone. I was looking forward to that meal, I really was. I didn’t tell my mates where I was going.
Remembering Fred’s directions, I went down a wooden staircase, past a lot of troops sitting around smoking and playing cards without a care in the world. I had just reached the bottom of a second staircase when there was a brain-numbing explosion as a torpedo struck the ship.
The noise was crushing. I felt like I’d been punched in the head by a powerful fist of sound. It turned my head to putty. Then it wrapped around me, lifted me off my feet and hurled me backwards into a steel bulkhead, leaving me gasping and crumpled on the deck. The lights went out and there was an eerie silence that lasted for perhaps a few seconds. Then pandemonium erupted. People were screaming and crying out. I was on my hands and knees, trying to get up, but there was a rush of bodies all around me. Everyone was pushing and shoving and trampling and cursing in the blackness, trying to reach the staircase I’d just come down. I had to get back up that staircase.
I got to my feet and even though I was dazed and shocked, I could tell that the deck was sloping to starboard, mere seconds after the torpedo had hit. She was going down already. I made for the staircase.
But then came another huge, rumbling explosion, this time further along the ship toward the bow. Laconia shuddered beneath my feet. A new wave of terror swelled and rushed through the blackness. The confined space of the stairwell was awash with people screaming for their lives, calling out names, swearing. It was chilling.
I got up that first staircase very quickly and made for the second. Even in the darkness I knew where it would be. But when I arrived, swept along by the desperate, seething humanity around me, the staircase had gone. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness and I could make out vague shapes and people around me, looking up at a dim square where the staircase had been. I started feeling around for the Jacob’s ladder that I’d seen when I first came aboard.
On many ships, there was often a Jacob’s ladder shackled to the rim of the stairwell and hanging behind the permanent stairs, just simple wooden rungs between two pieces of wire. They weren’t easy things to climb at the best of times because the wires tended to twist around on themselves. But in the darkness and surrounded by jostling, screaming people, it would be doubly difficult. It had to be climbed from the side, with one of the wires between the legs. That way it stayed straight.
I was fit and strong and knew I could climb it. The alternative was being trapped below. I groped frantically in front of me and found it within seconds. Other people were swarming around, grappling with the awkward ladder, trying to work out how to climb it. I just went straight up, like a monkey on a vine. It was no time for saying: ‘No, please, after you.’ People started following me up, clutching at my legs as I went, but some of them fell back into the darkness below, all the time screaming and yelling. It was hard to pull myself clear of all the clawing hands.
I emerged from the stairwell on the starboard side of the ship, the low side, and it was absolute bloody mayhem. Big unrestrained objects were sliding and tumbling down the deck. Some of them were screaming people. Human shapes were stumbling about as if they were walking around the side of a steep hill, because the deck was already at a pretty sharp angle. The bow was down as well, so I struggled to stay upright. People were crawling to get up higher. Panic-stricken voices were yelling into the night. There were no deck lights at all so it was a maelstrom of noise and frantic shapes rushing and stumbling.
Amid all the chaos I noticed strange, sharp little explosions that didn’t belong on a ship, like fireworks going off. It was small arms fire ricocheting off Laconia’s superstructure. The Italian prisoners had found their way onto the deck and their Polish guards were trying to keep them under control. It was a totally unexpected danger. I had to get somewhere safer, if there was such a place.
I started to think a bit more clearly, and focussed on mustering at my station. That says plenty about my training, I think. My ship was sinking, but I didn’t think of getting to a lifeboat. Instead, I groped toward the stern and eventually got to our six-inch gun. It was a little quieter back there, and Johnny and Peter had already arrived. We agreed it was pointless manning the gun. There was nothing to fire at. The U-boat that had blasted our ship would be long gone. The stern was rising as Laconia went down further at the bow. There was absolutely nothing we could do.
‘Bugger the gun,’ Peter said. ‘I’m going back to get me photographs.’
‘Your what?’
‘Me dirty photographs. I can’t just leave ’em, I’m going back below.’ Johnny and I looked at him in total disbelief as he started to move off.
‘You’re bloody mad, come here!’ I yelled, grabbing him. But he shook me off as he headed below to find his photographs. I couldn’t believe it. I was convinced he was going off to a watery grave. It was by far the craziest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do.
Johnny and I knew the lifeboats would be chaotic and that we’d have a better chance if we just went over the high side. That was the port side. In our training they had always said to us: ‘Never go over the low side when a ship’s going down. Always go over the high side. That way, if she rolls over, you won’t be trapped underneath.’ That seemed like wise advice, so we set off along the deck on the high side. There were people flying around everywhere in the darkness. The turmoil was getting worse as everyone realised she was sinking steadily. Then, in the blink of an eye, Johnny disappeared. One moment he was there beside me, the next he had vanished.
I looked over the port-side railing at the water a long, long way down. The stern was incredibly high. Terror gripped me in a deep, ice-cold dread.
There’s no bloody way I’m going down there.
In a split second I decided to ignore the navy’s good advice, and slid down the sloping deck to the starboard side where the water was much closer. I found a rope trailing over the side. Someone had obviously gone over before me. That was good enough for me. I took off my boots and lowered myself hand over hand into the sea. I had to get as far away as possible from the doomed ship because as soon as she went down, the boilers would explode and the concussion would spread through the water like a battering ram. It could kill me. And when she sank there would be a massive circular eddy of water that would suck everything down with it. I swam for my life.
Oddly, I’ve never been able to remember whether the water was warm or cold when I first got into it. It simply didn’t register. I could taste oil and there was debris knocking into me, but I kept swimming because I didn’t have a lot of time. There were people flaying about, lunging at one another, desperately trying to hold on to anything and anyone. I didn’t want frantic hands grabbing on to me and dragging me under, so I kept swimming strongly away from the ship. Fairly soon I came to a lifeboat. It was crowded, but I hauled myself in anyway. I was shocked to find myself knee-deep in water. Someone had forgotten to put the drainage bungs in before it was launched. The people in the boat weren’t saying or doing anything while the water poured in. It was useless.
No bloody future in this. She’ll go to the bottom before Laconia.
I got back into the water and looked over at Laconia. She was still too close for comfort, and her massive propellers were visible as her stern heaved further out of the water. They were turning slowly but the ship was strangely quiet. All the noise and commotion was coming from the water around her as people grappled with their own unthinkable situation. I turned and swam further away from the ship and finally came across a raft. When I first went on board Laconia in Durban, I’d noticed a number of wooden rafts lashed to the deck, obviously for just this kind of ca
tastrophe. They weren’t very big, just a few square feet really, nothing more. I joined a lot of other people clinging to loops of rope along each side of the raft. Everyone was covered in oil. Lieutenant Tillie was near me. He seemed to be badly injured.
Eventually I lost my grip and the raft drifted out of reach. I hadn’t eaten anything since lunchtime, so the strength was draining from my arms. A short time later I came across another raft that was much less crowded, so I hung on to that and watched Laconia go down. It was terrifying and dreadfully painful to see such a wonderful ship in her death throes. She had been like a figurehead to me, a great source of pride during the carefree days of my boyhood in Liverpool. I was so mesmerised that I forgot my own predicament. I couldn’t draw my eyes away because there is a terrible, grim fascination about a sinking ship. The need to watch it is inexplicably compelling.
Laconia’s stern rose higher and her bow slid into the Atlantic at a steep angle, still listing heavily to starboard, the sea swallowing her emergency lights one by one. Then suddenly she heaved up almost to the vertical, before continuing her shocking plunge. I dragged myself onto the wooden raft to protect myself from the imminent explosion, leaving just my legs exposed in the water. As she dived, the boiling cacophony of hissing bubbles and groaning metal was incredible. There was a deep, evil guttural rumbling, then, when she had vanished, a huge booming blast as the boilers exploded below the surface. I felt the concussion through the timber of the raft as it swept by my legs like an invisible wave under the water.
It was weird. One moment the massive bulk of Laconia floundered mortally wounded beside us in the water and then, within seconds, there was nothing except debris and people floating about. Despite the shapes and ghostly reflections of hundreds of other people around me, I suddenly felt fearfully lost. The loneliness was devastating. I didn’t have a bloody clue what to do next.
One Common Enemy Page 6