I looked astern for the three lifeboats, but I could only see two of them. I didn’t know it then, but the third lifeboat, the middle one, had taken a direct hit from a bomb. It had been full of people. I would have to swim to the remaining lifeboats and they had already drifted hundreds of yards away from the stern.
Davey disappeared over the edge of the conning tower. I never saw him again. I half climbed, half fell down the ladder on the outside of the tower until I reached the deck. I stumbled to the edge, dived overboard and started swimming for my life again.
That was a dreadful swim. It was the hardest physical thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. I set my sights on one of the lifeboats in the distance and swam for it with a frantic energy I didn’t know I possessed. I was totally exhausted before I started out, and I didn’t think I could do it, but a desperate kind of strength emerged from somewhere. The swell was quite big and it was punishing me, thrusting me up and backwards the moment I felt I’d made a bit of progress. It was hard to keep a rhythm going, but I kept focusing on the lifeboat in the distance and thrashed away at the water with my arms and legs. This isn’t happening. I simply couldn’t grasp that I was in the water again, struggling to survive for the second time. It just didn’t seem real. My entire body was shrieking with pain and my left leg felt as if it belonged to someone else. I went on like that for more than half an hour.
When I finally reached the boat I’d been aiming for, I found a desperate crowd of other swimmers already there. They were clinging to the ropes that were looped along the gunwale. The boat was already hopelessly overcrowded. People were standing up, shoulder to shoulder. I couldn’t see how they would fit me in, but I couldn’t go anywhere else. I couldn’t swim another stroke.
But those already in the boat had different ideas. ‘Can’t get any more in here,’ they were yelling. ‘Too full.’
‘Pull me in!’ I begged.
Some of them were roughly pushing the people in the water away from the boat. A sailor who’d been part of our navy contingent on Laconia was peering over the edge, carefully surveying all the soggy bundles of humanity clinging to the side. His name was Gibson.
‘One of ours here!’ he suddenly called out. ‘One of ours here, I’m taking him in.’
Through a blur of exhaustion I realised he was looking at me when he said that, and then strong hands pulled me into the bow of the lifeboat. I was a dead weight after that swim, so utterly exhausted I couldn’t move a muscle. I just wanted to lie down and go to sleep, but I couldn’t because there was no room. So I stood. That boat was absolutely packed with what I can only describe as human wreckage. We were all filthy, covered in oil, soaking wet and shaking with fear.
We began to drift away from the poor souls still struggling in the water, leaving them to face certain death. As we huddled together in the lifeboat with no room to move, everything fell silent. There was an overpowering sense of disbelief and shock. Our situation seemed utterly hopeless.
Within minutes of me being pulled into the lifeboat, U-156 rumbled alongside. I was surprised that she was still on the surface, given the bombing attack by the Americans. Hartenstein was leaning over the rim of the conning tower.
‘Take up a course north-north-east. That is the direction of the coast of Africa. It is seven hundred miles away,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry but I cannot give you any food.’
No one said anything back to him. We were too shocked, too stunned. Seven hundred miles to the nearest land! It was just too much to absorb, totally crushing.
Then Hartenstein brought himself to attention and saluted us, a solitary figure in his conning tower, showing us the greatest possible respect.
‘I do not think you will make it,’ he called out. ‘But good luck to all of you.’
And that was my last glimpse of Commander Werner Hartenstein. U-156 pulled away and I didn’t see it dive. At that moment, Hartenstein’s U-boat seemed like an apparition to me, a dream. It just faded away.
Then there was just the lifeboat and our one common enemy, the sea. The sea, by its very nature, does not distinguish between friend and foe. It is forever the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men. I was about to discover what a cruel enemy it could be.
6 – Our grim struggle begins
At first, nothing happened. A terrible silence overcame us with only the sound of the Atlantic swell as a desolate background to our misery.
I was appalled at how crowded the lifeboat was. Many of us were standing shoulder to shoulder, so jam-packed that even with the sea swell rolling beneath us, there was no chance of falling over. Others were sitting crammed together on the thwarts, the bench-like seats that ran across the boat, while even more were lying down in the water that was slopping around the bilges. They didn’t seem to notice.
At first I didn’t give their welfare the slightest thought. I was too exhausted and frightened. Before night threw its black Atlantic blanket over us, my only concern was for me, and my feelings of loneliness and despair. Nothing else. The powerful force of self-preservation that had surged through me during the desperate leap from the U-boat and propelled me during the painful swim to the lifeboat was still very much with me.
At least I’m still alive, and I’ve got a boat under me again.
The rest of that dreadful afternoon and the first night in the lifeboat passed in a blur of shock and deeply draining fatigue. The sun went down and we were quickly chilled to the bone. The sea made an endless, depressing slap, slap, slap against the wooden hull. I slipped into a dreamlike world of distorted human shapes, muffled groans and half-heard snippets of conversation. If I slept at all it must have been on my feet because in the morning I was still standing.
With the first rays of morning sun a small, tentative buzz of life ran through the boat and people started to organise themselves. A handful set about organising others. In the meantime, everyone was squirming and elbowing a little more private space for themselves. For some reason we weren’t jammed so tightly together, so we could move about a little easier. I was still too shocked to consider why some empty spaces were suddenly there.
I wasn’t too pleased by the other survivors around me. They were mostly old people. That, at least, was how they appeared to me. A few were sailors around my age, but the majority were in their 40s. Some were a great deal older. I was just a kid compared to them, someone of little consequence. I felt even more lonely than I had before. I started to miss Davey and wondered what had become of him.
‘How many of us are here, do you think?’ someone asked.
‘Don’t know. Could be fifty or so.’
‘We should do a head count.’
There were 64 British men, two British women and two Polish officer cadets. Sixty-eight people crammed into one 30-foot boat. One of the women, a Scot whose name was Mary, was in a bad way, with skin peeling away from her face in long strips. The other was Doris Hawkins, a stout, robust nurse with a friendly, round face. It was an extraordinary collection of people, which included a number of civilians and various ranks of the three services. There was a lieutenant colonel of the British Army, a squadron leader, a pilot officer and a number of sergeants from the RAF, the Fleet Air Arm officer who had been on the submarine, and several of Laconia’s crew, including her bosun, chief petty officer, assistant purser, assistant engineer and electrician. Laconia’s surgeon, Doctor Geoffrey Purslow, was there too.
A mere handful of these people have stayed alive in my memory for more than 60 years. I can still see some of their faces and sometimes, in the dead of night, I hear their voices. But the majority have never been anything more than a blur to me, especially the older, more senior officers who kept together and had no reason to speak to an able seaman like me. And many others who perished so quickly, which has deeply troubled and haunted me ever since.
The sun hadn’t been up long when we heard an aircraft approaching. My stomach lurched. We waited with a mix of mounting fear and hope while a black speck emerged from the pink mo
rning sky and grew into a large four-engine aircraft. It was flying very low. When it banked steeply over us, we could see the American insignia on the fuselage and wings, and a relieved murmur ran through the lifeboat. A signal lamp winked at us from the aircraft but no one, not even the Fleet Air Arm Officer, could read it. We stirred into a bout of yelling, frantically waving our arms and odd bits of clothing above our heads. I privately allowed myself a small measure of hope and confidence. At that point I didn’t think about dying.
This is a good thing, Jim. They know where we are and they’ll send help. It shouldn’t be very long, maybe just a day or two for a ship to reach us.
After it had flown several low circles around us, the aircraft flew off, leaving us alone in the Atlantic swell. After it had gone, the officers took stock of our situation with a sense of urgency, and soon discovered that we had precious little at our disposal. There were a number of oars, a knife and a few other odd tools, a tin of putty-like white lead, a few bailing tins, a bucket, some odd bits of rope, a paltry number of life jackets and a compass. The compass was fixed in the stern near the tiller. There were no sails, but there were two blankets and a filthy little triangle of yellow canvas. There were no medical supplies.
The rations were pathetically meagre for 68 people: some Horlicks tablets, a small supply of chocolate, a few tins of Pemmican, which was a food spread that looked a bit like Vegemite, and several tins of biscuits that were as hard as a dog’s head. Most significantly, though, there were just 15 gallons of water in the boat’s water tank, not anywhere near enough for us all on a voyage of 700 miles in the heat of the tropics.
I was shocked and angry about this cruel shortage of life-sustaining food and water. The rations stowed aboard all ships’ lifeboats were always substantial, so I knew that our boat had been raided by pilferers, either people aboard Laconia or dock workers in Britain or some foreign port she had visited. Such behaviour was rife because wartime restrictions meant that food was often in short supply. Emergency provisions in lifeboats, it seemed, were fair game and we were faced with the deadly proof. We could live for a great many days without food, but there would be no hope whatsoever once the water was gone.
We were quickly galvanised into action by the officers, who had gathered in the stern.
‘We must set a course and get moving,’ they said. ‘It’s pointless hanging around hoping for rescue or a miracle. The German captain said north-north-east and seven hundred miles, so we’d better start rowing. Those who are physically able will have to take their turn at the oars.’
The responsibility for rowing fell mainly to the sailors, which was only natural, so we quickly got ourselves organised into shifts. I welcomed the chance to row because it would not only help take my mind off things, but also give me the chance to sit down at last. Someone made room for me on one of the thwarts, I gripped an oar and began to heave away.
I felt a bit better once I started rowing on that first day. It gave me a sense of purpose, because we couldn’t afford to drift aimlessly about. We had to get a move on. It was hard, muscle-wrenching work and although we were making slow progress, I didn’t say anything. I just kept rowing. In the stern, the chief petty officer sat at the tiller, eyes fixed on the compass, pointing us in the general direction of Africa.
There wasn’t much to say when the rowing started. Those of us at the oars were too busy concentrating on keeping our rhythm. We moved along smoothly while the sailors were all rowing on the same shift, but when a few army types and civilians took up the oars, it got a bit erratic. I tried to show them how to do it, coaching them in the same way our instructors had done at HMS Drake.
‘Grip the oars like this, no further apart than the width of your shoulders. Then it’s a smooth semi-circular motion. Dip the oar into the water, pull back strongly, lift it out, feather the blade, then dip it back in again. In, pull, out, feather, in, pull, out, feather, in …’ A few of them got the hang of it, but others were just plain hopeless.
During one of my stints at the oars a civilian chap sat facing me. He had black hair and was wearing a shirt and sports jacket, as if he’d just got dressed for a leisurely game of deck tennis on a cruise ship. There was something odd about the way he was sitting. The boat was pitching and rolling in the swell, yet he wasn’t hanging on to anything. He just sat there, lolling listlessly with his hands hanging between his knees.
‘I can’t row,’ he said to me.
It wasn’t an excuse or an apology, more a dull statement of fact. I couldn’t think of anything to say to him. I just kept the rhythm on my oar. In, pull, out, feather, in … But after a little while he spoke to me again.
‘It’s my hands,’ he said, and showed me his palms. He didn’t appear to have any. Instead he had two bloody, pulpy masses of raw meat attached to each wrist, with stringy lifeless fingers jutting out from them. I stared and felt my stomach turn over. In, pull, out, feather, in …
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘I went over the side of the ship on a rope. Slid all the way down to the water.’
At HMS Drake they had taught us how to put a rope between our legs and ease our way down, hand over hand. We got good at it with a bit of practice, but it was drummed into us that we should never, ever let the rope slide through our hands. Rope burn is cruel.
‘I can’t row,’ he said again.
The poor man had spent many hours in salt water mixed with oil. I couldn’t even imagine the agony he must have been in. With no medical supplies, Doctor Purslow wasn’t able to do anything for him. There was certainly nothing I could do, except pity him and silently admire the fact that he didn’t complain, not once. He wasn’t the only one suffering, though. Others in the boat were nursing all kinds of injuries, deep gashes on arms and legs, angry bruises, scraped and cruelly torn skin.
But the day wore on regardless. The rowers kept rowing. There was a bad leak somewhere, so those who couldn’t take a turn at the oars were kept busy bailing water out of the bilges. Laconia’s engineer and the bosun eventually found the leak when they removed two of the boat’s buoyancy tanks. Those two chaps were real old salts, veterans of improvisation after decades spent at sea in the merchant navy. They pulled fibres from one of the pieces of rope we had on board and mixed them with some white lead to create a glue-like mixture, which they then worked in between the troublesome timbers. From then on we didn’t have to bail nearly as often.
To get at the buoyancy tanks they had to remove the wooden doors that covered them. After they fixed the leak, the two old salts placed the doors across the bottom of the boat amidships, to form makeshift floorboards, which gave the nurse Doris Hawkins and Mary their own dry space in which to lie down. Then the engineer turned one of the remaining doors into a sign by fashioning the letters SOS Water onto it with white lead.
‘We’ll be needing that signal,’ he said optimistically. ‘They’ll be sending ships and aeroplanes out to us.’
By the middle of the first day I knew that we wouldn’t be able to keep rowing long enough to reach land. It was a forlorn hope. The heat was unbelievable. Without any shade, the sun had a searing double edge to it, burning us from above and then reflecting wildly off the waves to fry us from below. Our throats were parched, but the officers had decided we would have to wait until six o’clock before we could have our first ration of water.
We only stopped rowing and rested as the sun went down. Then the officers distributed our rations and they had no option but to be miserly in the extreme. We each received what amounted to about one tablespoon of water. It got passed along to us, hand-to-hand, in an oblong ration tin. After taking my shifts at the oars I was so thirsty that my tongue was sticking to the roof of my mouth. Our tongues had already begun to swell. When it came my turn to drink, I tilted the tin so that the precious water collected in the corner. I brought the tin to my parted lips but there was no relief. It felt as though the water soaked straight into the inside of my mouth, and was gone before I even had a c
hance to swallow it. Then a few of the hard biscuits were broken up into tiny pieces and passed around. I held my little piece in my mouth until it became soft enough to chew. I had great difficulty swallowing it, though. It got stuck at regular intervals on the way down. Others leant over the side and dipped their fragment of biscuit into the sea in an attempt to soften it. After that some chocolate and Horlicks tablets were distributed. I couldn’t eat the Horlicks. It was sticky from the heat and quite revolting.
By the time we’d finished our rations it was dark and the temperature plummeted. The sudden cold brought on a deep, pulsing pain in my leg where I’d been bitten. A few of us picked up the oars again to keep warm, and the night passed in a blur of aching muscles and horrible moans coming from various parts of the boat. My chin kept dropping to my chest as I rowed, but I still maintained the steady, hypnotic rower’s rhythm. In, pull, out, feather, in … I thought at one stage I heard a disturbance followed by a splash, then convinced myself I must have drifted off to sleep at the oars and dreamt it.
The next day was pretty much the same. And the day after that. The only difference was that the pain in our arms got worse, our tongues got larger and the sun grew hotter. I kept hearing strange scuffles and splashes during the night and each morning the boat was roomier.
On the third night, a few of us kept rowing again. Everyone else slumped into uneasy sleep. We heard the throb of diesel engines approaching and the familiar shape of a submarine loomed out of the darkness. It drew up right alongside and a group of officers shouted from the conning tower:
‘Italiano? Italiano?’
The noise of the submarine and the shouting stirred the people who had been asleep.
‘What the bloody hell’s going on?’
‘It’s another German U-boat.’
One Common Enemy Page 8