The Shipwreck Hunter

by David L. Mearns

  Shark’s story is so incredibly tragic you might expect it to be better known, but among all the other tragic events of the war, it barely rates a single mention in the history books. All that is known for certain is that on the day she was sunk, the submarine made contact with a Japanese freighter west of Luzon Strait between the Philippines and Taiwan and radioed her intention to attack. That was the last message ever received from her. When submarines in enemy waters fail to surface or report in after a period of time, it can only mean one thing: that they’ve been sunk. Several weeks later, the US Navy obtained information about a Japanese freighter, the Arisan Maru, transporting some 1,800 American POWs and 100 civilians from Manila to Japan, that was sunk on 24 October near to Shark’s last position. The navy’s conclusion was that Shark had torpedoed the Arisan Maru and was then sunk herself. When all attempts to contact her by radio failed, the navy announced on 27 November – my mother’s nineteenth birthday – that the submarine was presumed to be lost.

  The lack of solid information about the loss of both the Shark and the Arisan Maru barely hides the gruesome truth of what almost certainly happened on 24 October 1944. According to the few Americans who survived and made it home to tell their stories, the conditions on board the Japanese freighter, with some 1,900 men crammed into the ship’s holds sardine-style without sufficient water, food or air, were so intolerable that the prisoners prayed for deliverance from their misery by a torpedo or a bomb. These ‘hell ships’ served as bait for the Japanese, for when they were attacked – the Shark duly obliging in this case – the Imperial Navy could count on the enemy submarine to surface and search the area for Allied survivors, whereupon they themselves were easy targets to be destroyed. So as the Shark moved in towards the cries of American voices calling for help, so did the Harukaze to take her revenge. The Shark must have endured a tremendous hammering as seventeen depth charges were dropped before heavy oil, clothes and other debris bubbling up to the surface told the Harukaze that the pesky submarine was destroyed.

  There is no telling what might have happened if Dewey, like his brother Art, had survived the war and been able to continue his relationship with my mother. Other than my father, Dewey was the only man she ever talked about from her youth, so his importance to her at the time was undeniable. For his part, Art was lucky enough to return home, attend and graduate university and fulfil his athletic promise as a professional golfer of some renown on the PGA tour. He went on to win fourteen PGA tournaments, including the 1959 Masters by birdying five of the last six holes in what is arguably the greatest ever final-round finish in a major. That year he won the Vardon Trophy and was named PGA Player of the Year, eclipsing even the great Arnold Palmer. Until he stopped playing golf many years later, Art Wall was the first name I’d look for on the regular PGA and senior tour leaderboards.

  I don’t come from a military family and all my relatives who did serve during World War II led normal civilian lives after the war ended. Nevertheless, it was a major event for all of them, during which they were thrust into remarkable and sometimes extraordinary situations the like of which they would never experience again. The war had the same impact on millions of people around the world, and this is what I find fascinating: how otherwise ordinary individuals found the courage and mental fortitude to deal with extraordinary and challenging moments. When deciding what shipwrecks are worth pursuing, I specifically look for such human stories hiding within the overall drama of the shipwreck itself. The stories are not always positive; indeed some, like the Lucona, demonstrate unconscionably murderous behaviour as you might expect in the case of ships being purposely sunk. The best ones, however, are those that are the most relatable and memorable, and that can certainly be said about the story of the first ship sunk in World War II, the passenger liner TSS Athenia.

  In late November 2006, I was contacted by a BBC production team who had the idea of making a shipwreck search the centrepiece of a week-long series of documentaries they wanted to broadcast the following summer. The series was about the natural and social history of the British coastline and was simply entitled Coast. By the end of 2006, Coast was already a very popular series shown on BBC2 averaging more than four million viewers an episode over its first two years, which in TV terms are terrific figures. The producers, however, wanted more. Their idea in a nutshell was to make a more entertaining, less sobering version of Coast for broadcast on BBC1 to pull in an even larger audience. They referred to it as ‘Coasf-light’. Their original plan was to have four half-hour episodes during a week in late July, culminating in a one-hour special on the Friday. The catch was that the special was to be a live broadcast and for that reason they needed me to find the shipwreck well in advance. It was a ballsy, even wild idea that was another leap beyond what I had pulled off with C4 on the Hood and Bismarck expedition in 2001. However, when they told me that their first choice for the shipwreck was the TSS Athenia, I wasted no time in telling them to count me in.

  As stories go, Athenian’s ticked all the boxes that attract me to a shipwreck, and for this reason it was on my personal wish list long before I took the BBC’s call. It starts with a highly controversial sinking on the very first day of the war — 3 September 1939 — and ends with one of the most significant convictions for war crimes at the Nuremburg trials. It involves tragedy, with 112 people, mostly women and children, being killed, but also a daring and heroic high-seas rescue by six other ships that saved the lives of 1,306. And despite the fact that she was sunk by the first shots fired in World War II, the full story wasn’t revealed until the end of the war in 1945. Her sinking thus became one of the most guarded secrets of the German navy. The political ramifications of her sinking were so huge that if the truth had got out, the course of the war would likely have been very different, with the probability of an earlier defeat for Hitler and Nazi Germany. Few shipwrecks are as historically interesting and significant as Athenia.

  There was no question in my mind that Athenia was worth finding, but the next question — and this was what the BBC was hiring me to determine – was whether she could be found. My gut instinct, for several reasons, was that she definitely could. Firstly, knowing how many ships had been involved in the rescue, I was almost certain there would be at least one – and possibly multiple – reported position of where she had sunk. So I expected there to be a good starting point and a reasonably sized area in which to conduct the search. Secondly, the sinking was such a major incident that I expected there to be a large volume of primary source documents in the archives upon which I would base my analysis. Controversial events tend to generate lots of correspondence, reports and other documents, which is the lifeblood of my research. Thirdly, I already knew the general area where the ship had sunk, and there was nothing geologically complicated about the seabed there that worried me. The depth of the wreck might be an issue if we were unlucky, but the geology wasn’t. And finally, Athenia was a big ship: a 160-metre-long, 13,465-ton passenger liner, which made her wreck a large and distinctive target easily distinguishable with sonar.

  I needed to get started on the research straight away because the BBC producer, Jane Merkin, was typically in a rush and I was preparing to leave for Antarctica on 1 January. I had been successful in getting time on board the Royal Navy’s icebreaker HMS Endurance to attempt to locate Otto Nordenskjöld’s research vessel Antarctic, which sank in the Erebus and Terror Gulf in 1903, and was finalizing my travel arrangements. The Antarctic search was a sort of dry run to prove it was possible to find a wooden ship in Antarctic waters, which at the time was a necessary step in order to get backing for the shipwreck I really wanted to find: Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance (see Chapter VIII).

  Over the space of two weeks I found everything I needed on Athenia in just three visits to the Nayal Historical Branch in Portsmouth and the UK Public Record Office in Kew (now the National Archives) and delivered a six-page feasibility report with supporting documents to Jane. In short, although there were fewer rep
orted sinking positions than I had hoped, my opinion was that ‘there was a good starting point for the search and that the wreck could be found within the usual parameters and risks for wreck searches of this type’. My confidence stemmed from the careful action taken by Athenia’s chief radio officer, David Don, in communicating the SOS message and ship’s position (56° 42’ N 14° 05’ W) multiple times from almost the minute the ship was torpedoed and throughout the next three hours until he was instructed to abandon ship. The fact that all the ships steaming to this position were able to locate Athenia without difficulty is a further indication that the position he transmitted was reasonably accurate. To answer the BBC’s question I focused on navigational details in my research, but in the process I uncovered more than forty documents laying out the whole sordid story of how Oberleutnant zur See Fritz-Julius Lemp of U-30, in attacking and sinking an unarmed, unescorted transatlantic passenger liner carrying mostly North American women and children, made one of the biggest naval blunders of World War II.

  The passengers who had been able to book late passage on the Donaldson Atlantic Line’s Athenia would have breathed a huge sigh of relief as the ship pulled away from where they had boarded, whether it was Princes Dock in Glasgow, Belfast Lough in Northern Ireland or the River Mersey in Liverpool, believing they were making a safe escape from imminent war in Europe. Since late 1938, the prospect of widespread hostilities would have been a worrisome possibility to all as it became increasingly evident that the appeasement of Adolf Hitler by Neville Chamberlain and others had failed in thwarting Hitler’s European ambitions. When the unified armed forces of Germany marched virtually unopposed into Bohemia and Monrovia on 15 March 1939 to complete the conquest of Czechoslovakia, the threat of war moved one step closer to the doorstep of Western Europe. Finally, news that the Soviets had signed a nonaggression treaty with Germany on 23 August made the invasion of Poland a near certainty. In fact, Hitler had planned to invade Poland on 26 August but postponed it until 1st September after learning that Britain had signed its own treaty with Poland which promised to provide mutual military assistance in case of attack by a European country.

  As the crisis worsened, the rush to leave Britain in the final days of August grew to a flood. Most of those wishing to flee were Canadians and Americans, and women and children lucky enough to have relatives in North America where they could bide their time until the hostilities had ended. The problem, however, was finding a ship with empty berths available. In normal times there were several transatlantic passenger ships to choose from, depending on the class of travel one could afford, but these weren’t normal times. The Royal Navy was already on a war alert and the government moved quickly to requisition commercial passenger liners for conversion into troop transports and hospital ships. The removal of these liners from the transatlantic trade greatly exacerbated the problem, as scores of passengers holding existing reservations on ships including the California, Aurania and Britannic were told that their reservations were cancelled, sending them scrambling to find alternative vessels. One such alternative was the Athenia, and Donaldson’s were happy to accommodate the overload.

  As morning broke on 1 September over the River Clyde in Glasgow, where the captain and crew of Athenia were readying the ship for the arrival of their first passengers, 1.5 million German troops had already begun the invasion of Poland along its western border with Germany, while the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine were simultaneously bombing Polish forces on land and at sea. For those who had already taken the decision to leave Britain, the events in Poland that morning placed the urgency of Athenian’s voyage in sharp relief. Over the next two days, the ship was scheduled to embark passengers and 900 tons of general cargo, including bricks, curling rocks, textbooks and cars, in Glasgow, Belfast and Liverpool before getting under way to Montreal and Quebec City, Canada. Knowing the ship would be full beyond capacity, Donaldson’s made provisions for the increased number of passengers by building temporary berthing for 200 and taking on extra crew. By noon, the vessel was loaded and a pair of tugs were called to guide Athenia away from Princes Dock and down the Clyde. As she slowly moved past other ships being prepared for naval service, shipyard workers apparently taunted the passengers standing along the railings with shouts of ‘Cowards!’ and ‘What are ye running from?’

  The loading of the remaining passengers and cargo in Belfast and Liverpool took place without incident, and at 4.30 p.m. on Saturday 2 September, Athenia weighed anchor from Liverpool. Before the hour was out, with the ship still in the Mersey, a boat drill for the Belfast and Liverpool passengers was held; the Glasgow passengers had had their boat drill on Friday afternoon. All told, there were 1,418 people on board, made up of 316 crew and 1,102 passengers. Of the passengers, 469 were Canadians, 311 Americans, 172 British or Irish, and 150 European refugees of various nationalities. Fully three quarters of the passengers were women and children, which made the gibes of the Glasgow shipyard workers particularly offensive.

  Athenia’s master for this voyage, Captain James Cook, was a highly experienced officer who had made fourteen previous trips with Athenia and served in the Royal Navy as a lieutenant on destroyers and minesweepers until 1919. In Liverpool Cook had received secret instructions from Naval Control to steer a course well off the normal track he usually took, and to adopt a defensive zigzag pattern at night-time when submarines normally attacked. The advantage of zigzagging, as opposed to running in a straight line, was that the irregular course and speed changes made it harder for an attacking submarine to predict where the ship would be going next and thus where torpedoes should be aimed. Zigzagging was a standard tactic used by both merchant and naval warships.

  The other precaution taken by Donaldson’s was to completely black out the ship by painting both sides of the glass in all the portholes and windows. The running lights would be dimmed in the evening, smoking on deck was prohibited, and officers would patrol the ship to ensure there was no visible light to attract submarines. Captain Cook had hoped he’d be well clear of danger if and when war was declared, but in the meantime he was taking every precaution possible. As Athenia steamed into the Atlantic at fifteen knots in the early hours of 3 September 1939, he might even have believed they were safely away and that nothing was on the horizon in front of them except the open expanse of the Atlantic all the way to the coast of Canada. In a matter of hours, that belief was suddenly and violently shattered.

  At the outbreak of war, the Kriegsmarine was no match for the strength of the Royal Navy in terms of the number and composition of warships in their respective fleets. As dictated by the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 18 June 1935, the total tonnage of the Kriegsmarine could not exceed 35 per cent of the total tonnage of the Royal Navy, while the ratio for submarines was limited to 45 per cent as long as the 35 per cent total tonnage ratio was maintained. Even though Hitler renounced this agreement in April 1939, Germany was unable to expand the Kriegsmarine because the rapid build-up of the German army and air force had consumed all available resources. Thus, despite being allowed seventy-two submarines under the 45 per cent ratio, there were only fifty-six commissioned boats available to the submarine force on 19 August 1939, when U-boat officers were secretly recalled to prepare for war on an urgent basis. Of these, forty-six were in an operational state, with eighteen of them designated to cover a sparse but wide network in the Atlantic west of England and the Iberian peninsula. The boat assigned to the sector north-west of Ireland was U-30, a Type VIIA submarine commanded by twenty-six-year-old Oberleutnant zur See Fritz-Julius Lemp.

  Hitler wanted the Atlantic U-boat screen in position well in advance to give Germany the advantage at sea if Britain declared war. It was expected to take the British several weeks to organize a convoy system, and in any case there would be plenty of single vessels already at sea for the U-boats to attack without fear of running into naval escorts. So as Athenia ploughed steadily into the Atlantic, seemingly leaving the prospect of war behind her, Lemp and U-30 were al
ready in their designated patrol area 250 miles out to sea. Lemp’s standing order was simply to await an urgent signal and be ready for immediate action. His boat carried ten torpedoes and had a surface speed of 16.5 knots, more than enough to match the speed of Athenia.

  The British response to Germany’s invasion of Poland was to issue an ultimatum for German forces to withdraw from Poland or face war. The deadline for a reply was timed at 11 a.m. on Sunday 3 September. As the hour was reached, and passed, without reply, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced war against Germany at 11.15. Chamberlain’s radio address to the nation was also broadcast to ships at sea, including Athenia, via coastal wireless stations. By noon, the fact that Britain and Germany were at war had spread throughout Athenia and a copy of Chamberlain’s speech was posted in the purser’s office. In U-30, the news of war had also reached Lemp, but specific orders were soon to follow. The first, at 12.56, ordered, ‘Commence hostilities against Britain forthwith’; this was followed by a second message at 14.00: ‘U-boat warfare against shipping is at present to be carried out in accordance with international rules.’

  The ‘international rules’, or German Prize Regulations, stemmed from the London Submarine Protocol of 1936, which basically stipulated that it was illegal for a submarine to attack a merchant vessel without having first stopped and searched the ship and ensured the safety of its passengers and crew. Under the same regulations, however, it was allowable for U-boats to attack without warning troopships, vessels carrying war materiel or those being escorted by enemy ships taking part in enemy actions. There was no question that the general directive of the Kriegsmarine was for U-boat commanders to strictly observe the Prize Regulations, a written copy of which was kept in every submarine, and the later message reminding the boats about the international rules was sent by Admiral Karl Dönitz himself, head of the Submarine Service for the Kriegsmarine. Georg Högel, U-30’s radio operator, remembered receiving this message and handing it to Lemp.