The Lonely Sea

In order to establish, among other things, just how widespread and uncontrollable this panic had been, survivors of the Arandora Star were recently interviewed and four of these finally selected as providing testimony as impeccable as we are ever likely to have. They were selected on the bases (a) that they represented different contingents—crew, guards and internees—aboard the ship and (b) that their independently volunteered statements were mutually corroborative to a very high degree indeed. Such insignificant discrepancies as existed were readily accounted for by the fact that they were in different parts of the ship and all left it by different means.

These four are: Mr Sidney (‘Nobby’) Fulford, ship’s barman, of 57 Northbrook Road, Southampton: Mr Edward (‘Ted’) Crisp of 210 High Road, North Weald, Essex, a veteran Blue Star Line steward who has been going to sea for 39 years: Mr Mario Zampi, the well-known Italian-born film producer of Wardour Street: and Mr Ivor Duxberry, a War Department employee, of 89 Johnson Road, Heston, Middlesex.

In view of the newspaper reports of the time, their answers to the question of the extent of the panic and pitched battles which are alleged to have taken place are singularly interesting.

‘I saw no signs of panic and no fighting whatsoever,’ Mr Fulford states flatly: and as sixty internees left the Arandora Star in the same boat as he, he should have had an excellent chance to observe anything of the kind. ‘There was confusion, of course, but only that.’

Mr Crisp said exactly the same.

Mr Zampi agreed. ‘These reports of panic and disorder among the internees were just not true. The only trouble I saw was between a British Army sergeant and his men: they had jumped into a lifeboat and shots were fired at them to make them leave.’

This statement by Mr Zampi, who must have suffered considerably on hearing the courage of his countrymen so frequently maligned in the days after the sinking, might well be suspected of being actuated by pique, nationalistic bias, or a very understandable desire to get a little of his own back, especially as it seems so grossly improbable.

In point of fact it is perfectly true, except that it was a corporal Mr Zampi saw and not a sergeant: and that corporal, by a remarkable coincidence, was the fourth witness, then Corporal Duxberry of the Welsh Regiment, the most informative of all the witnesses, whose phenomenal memory is matched only by the detailed accuracy of his recollections of these days.

‘Some of the guard,’ Ivor Duxberry says, ‘disregarded the order of “Prisoners of war and internees first into the boats”. Major Bethell—CO of the 109 POW unit—using a megaphone from the bridge, ordered them out. When they didn’t respond, he ordered me to fire a volley over their heads to show that he meant business.’ Duxberry fired as ordered, and the soldiers soon left.

Duxberry confirms that there was no general panic or fighting. He did, he says, see two Italians, a young man and an old, fighting for a position in a boat, a fight which quickly ended when a German internee knocked out the younger man with a ship’s dry scrubber and escorted the old man into the boat.

Apart from these minor incidents, there was no trouble at all of the kind described in the papers at the time. Why, then, these reports?

The obvious answer, of course, is that the citizens of an embattled nation tend to become afflicted with an irremediable chauvinism, a nationalistic myopia which only peace can cure, a temporary suspension of reasonable judgment where our side, our troops, become the good, the kindly, the brave, while those of the other, the enemy, become the bad, the wicked and the cowardly.

But, as so often, the obvious answer is the wrong one. Top newspapermen, such as covered these stories, are, as a class, less likely to be affected by such unthinking emotionalism than almost any other people. Hard-headed realists, cynics in the best sense of the word, they tend to regard with a very jaundiced eye indeed the flag-waving, drum-beating, nonsensically juvenile jingoism of the average nation at war. Their job is to get and evaluate facts.

It is more than likely that they did get and evaluate the facts, took a good look at them and hastily put them away, using instead the accounts of a few ill-informed survivors to put flesh on the bones of their stories and at the same time give a reasonable explanation for the dreadful loss of life. They did so because they had a very healthy fear of editors, of the censor and of the terms of imprisonment which might all too easily come the way of any man so foolish as to tell the truth in wartime, if that truth could be interpreted as a violation of security, as lowering morale or giving aid and encouragement to the enemy.

These are the facts, the true reasons for the great loss of life:

1. The ship was grossly overloaded. All the survivors agree on this. Originally—in peacetime—the Arandora Star carried 250 first-class passengers, but later had superstructure alterations made to accommodate another 200 passengers. On the morning of the disaster there were close on 1,700 internees and guards aboard, in addition to the normal ship’s crew.

Ivor Duxberry was with his CO, Major Bethell, when the latter was told by the ship’s master—Captain E. W. Moulton—that he had protested most strongly about the danger of overcrowding, and demanded that his number of passengers be cut by half. The authorities had refused to listen to him. It is not known precisely who these authorities were, except that they were not Frederick Leyland & Co, the owners of the vessel, nor the Blue Star Line, its managers.

2. Some of the survivors state that there were not enough lifejackets. The truth of this statement is difficult to substantiate—obviously no person, other than the chief officer and those directly responsible to him, can know where every lifejacket is—but what seems beyond dispute is that if there were enough, they were not issued to all.

Many people drowned through the lack of these jackets. It may be, although it seems extremely unlikely, that scores of people forgot that they had these jackets: apart from that, many had none in the first place. Steward Crisp had no lifejacket, and neither had Corporal Duxberry, who says that, as far as he knows, not one member of the guard was issued with a lifejacket. Reports at the time speak of army officers handing over their lifejackets to internees, but these were isolated instances.

3. There were far too few lifeboats. There were about a dozen of these, old, worn out, and with a capacity of about sixty each, altogether a total capacity of less than half of the entire complement of the Arandora Star. Some of these had had oars, emergency provisions and plugs removed, to immobilize them against any escape attempt on the part of the internees. How those responsible for this monstrous action thought that any party of internees could steal a lifeboat with armed soldiers constantly on guard and sailors on lookout is difficult to understand: but it is downright impossible to understand how it could be thought possible to lower a boat safely in darkness with the liner racing at full speed through the rough Atlantic seas. It is hard to imagine any naval man being responsible for this action.

4. There appears to have been no lifeboat drill whatsoever. Neither Mr Crisp nor Mr Fulford had anything to say on this matter, very possibly and understandably because they wished to cast no reflection on their employers, one of the world’s most respected shipping companies—an admirable but unnecessary reticence because no blame attaches to the company. But neither Mr Zampi nor Mr Duxberry had any such hesitations, and the absence of drill is borne out in Mr Lafitte’s book The Internment of Aliens.

It would be easy, and perhaps proper, to call this criminal negligence, but, in fairness, it must be borne in mind that there were many confirmed Nazi merchant sailors and submariners on board who might have chosen the confusion of this drill as a cover to gain control of the ship.

5. The rafts, which might have saved most of those who could find no room in the lifeboats, were secured by wire. These wires could only be loosened by special implements which all too often were unobtainable, or their location unknown. Most of the rafts, immovably lashed in position, eventually went down with the Arandora Star.

6. All the above reasons—the overloading, shortage of lifejackets and lifeboats, the lack of drill and jammed rafts—undoubtedly contributed materially to the heavy loss of life. But, nevertheless, all of these taken together did not even begin to equal the lethal, murderous effect of one other item, the existence of which was not even admitted at the time: barbed wire.

The decks of the ship were unrecognizable, surrounded and festooned with impenetrable barbed-wire fencing which turned the Arandora Star into a floating concentration camp.

‘I had had a lot of experience with POW cages,’ Ivor Duxberry says, ‘but I have never seen barbed wire erected more expertly than this. It was impregnable—so closely woven that no space was big enough for a man to get his head through without damaging himself.

‘This barbed wire partitioned the decks—and cut off access to the lifeboats.’

It cut off access to the lifeboats. One single damning statement that holds the key to the tragedy of the Arandora Star—barbed wire cut off access to the lifeboats. Little wonder, indeed, that security clamped down on all mention of this: what magnificent propaganda material it would have made for the Axis!

It is difficult indeed to understand why the omniscient authorities of the time deemed this murderous wire necessary—did they expect, perhaps, to prevent some of the internees from escaping by diving overboard in mid-Atlantic and swimming for the nearest continent?—but it is not difficult to understand the attitude of Captain Moulton who protested with the utmost violence against the erection of this wire.

‘You are sending men to their deaths,’ he insisted, ‘men who have sailed with me for many years. If anything happens to the ship, that wire will obstruct passage to the boats and rafts. We shall be drowned like rats and the Arandora Star turned into a floating deathtrap.’

But the authorities knew better than the man who had spent a lifetime at sea. The barbed wire remained. And the Arandora Star became a floating deathtrap.

That, then, was the desperate situation that confronted all those who finally managed to struggle to the upper deck. But not all of those who survived the initial impact of the explosion or the lethal onrush of the invading waters reached the upper deck.

There were old men aboard, old men and sick men, and many of these never left their cabins—they had been asleep in their bunks when the torpedo struck, and many of them died there. Others were too weak to fight their way along flooded alleys, or took wrong turnings in the Stygian darkness of the great liner’s vast complex of passageways: Edward Crisp owes his life simply to the fact that he knew the internal geography of the ship like the back of his hand.

Others again did reach the upper decks, found their way to the nearest fore or aft lifeboat blocked by rolls of athwartships barbed wire, and went below again to find some passage which would bring them up to a lifeboat no further away than twenty yards from where they stood. But the press and confusion below decks was increasing steadily, the level of the water was rising, and many of those who went below were never seen again.

Major Bethell, OC of the guard, ordered his men to clear away the barbed wire in front of the lifeboats. (It appears that there was some method of loosening sections of the barbed barricade by operating a slipwire, but no instructions had been given in this.) The guard tore at the wire with rifles and bayonets—Ivor Duxberry has still the scars on his arms as the grim proof of his story—and the rush for the boats was on.

Unfortunately, because of the obstructing wire, trained members of the ship’s company were not able to reach all their boats’ positions—or at least not in time. Edward Crisp and Taffy Williams—the bosun’s mate—arrived at their station to find sixty Germans and Italians already sitting in a lifeboat, and had to order them out—no easy task when everyone was convinced that the Arandora Star was already foundering—before they could begin to lower the boat. Elsewhere, some of the internees tried to lower the boats themselves and within a few minutes, in Duxberry’s graphic phrase, half a dozen of them were hanging on one fall like turkeys outside a poulterer’s shop.

But some of the prisoners of war, as distinct from the internees, proved invaluable. One such was Captain Burfend, master of the Adolph Woermann, who marched a group of men—for the most part highly experienced seamen and confirmed Nazis—in a column of two on to the boatdeck, and lowered several lifeboats in perfect order. Nazis or not, their behaviour was all that could have been wished for at this moment of crisis. Especially was this true of Captain Burfend himself. When he had seen as many men as possible, regardless of race, into the lifeboats for which he had assumed temporary responsibility, he denied himself a place in any of these, stepped back and went down with the Arandora Star.

But though there were not enough lifeboats for all, this was not realized. Most of the intervening barbed wire was still in position, with men flinging themselves bodily upon it, trying to tear it apart with their bare hands, only to find within seconds that they were caught beyond any hope of escape. Others smashed a path through with fire hydrants, went back, incredibly, to collect their suitcases, and returned to find the lifeboats gone.

The survivors, of course, were those who were not caught in or trapped by the barbed wire. Mario Zampi, who had lowered a raft only to have it taken over by some of his fellow countrymen already in the water, dived over the side and all but broke his neck when his lifejacket struck the water. Fulford jumped from the boatdeck—a dive at which even an Olympic champion would have baulked—and struck the water far beneath with such force that large quantities of oil and salt water were forced into his stomach and lungs: he, too, was injured by his lifejacket. Edward Crisp, as said, managed to get away in a lifeboat, while Ivor Duxberry slithered down a rope and landed astride the upturned hull of a lifeboat.

Even as the great liner foundered, there were hundreds still aboard. Most of these were trapped. Some were too terrified to jump. Others, like Captains Moulton and Burfend, elected to remain with the ship rather than abandon it before everyone else had been saved. Few of the regimental guard officers survived. When last seen, they were lined up, as one survivor put it, and chatting amiably like suburban passengers waiting in a morning bus queue. It is difficult to recognize either the wisdom or necessity of this quixotism and nonchalant acceptance of a fate which, until they themselves made the decision, had been by no means certain: but it is impossible not to admire their selfless gallantry.

At 7.30 a.m. the Arandora Star heeled over sharply until she was almost on her side in the water, the guard rails far below the surface of the sea, hesitated for a moment, then, momentarily shrouded in clouds of hissing steam, slid quietly beneath the surface of the Atlantic.

The waters in the immediate vicinity of the foundering liner were alive with people on rafts or clinging to planks or nonswimmers frantically churning the surface of the sea with the last of their rapidly failing strength. All saw what was coming, all struggled fearfully, desperately to avoid it, but for all but a few the effort had come too late, a meaningless tribute to the age-old instinct to survive. How many people were sucked down in the vortex of the plummeting Arandora Star will never be known: but no more, it is certain, than were dragged down, trapped by the impenetrable barrier of barbed wire, or still impaled on the savage hooks, helpless flies trapped in this monstrous spider’s web.

The Arandora Star was gone, but almost a thousand of its passengers, guards and crew—mainly Italians and Germans—still lived, scattered in groups or singly over several square miles of the Atlantic. That morning the Atlantic, mercifully, was calm and all but windless—but the sea was bitterly cold. Before long the number of swimmers and those supported only by planks and benches became pitifully fewer and fewer. Mario Zampi lost all but one of the six companions who originally clung to the same bench as he. Their pathetic cries of ‘Mother’, repeated over and over again in three or four languages, grew fainter and fainter and gradually faded away altogether as the numbing cold struck through the scanty clothing and pathetically limited defences of the old, the infirm and the gravely wounded, and stopped the beating of their hearts. And some there were, supported by their life jackets, who, by and by, just lay face down in the water, dead.

About noon, a Sunderland flying boat appeared and circled the area dropping all it had in the way of first-aid kits, emergency rations, chocolate and cigarettes, and then disappeared to guide the Canadian destroyer St Laurent to the scene.

All of the survivors are unanimous in their unstinted praise of the magnificently selfless work performed by the crew of that ship: operating from the St Laurent’s boats while the destroyer itself kept constantly on the move to avoid submarines, they scoured the area for hours until they collapsed unconscious over their oars, having driven themselves far beyond the limits of exhaustion.

In all, the crew of the St Laurent picked up and took to safety over eight hundred survivors, an astonishing feat almost without parallel in the lifesaving annals of the sea, almost enough to make one forget, if even only for a moment, the barbed wire and the thousand men who died.

Almost, but not quite.

Rawalpindi

Even with the two brand new untried battle cruisers under his command, even although he was leading them on this, their first sortie against the enemy and the cold, dark hostility of the winter north Atlantic, Vice-Admiral Marschall was as unworried as any fleet commander can ever hope to be in wartime. Wilhelmshaven was dropping south behind him into the early gathering dusk of a November afternoon and the low flat shores of Jede Bay were already vanishing into nothingness, but Marschall never spared them a glance. He was busy, far too busy for any of this nonsense of sentimental farewells, and, besides, he knew he didn’t have to bother. Barring accidents, it would only be a matter of brief time before he saw these shores again.

And there would be no accidents. Of that the Squadron Commander, Marschall, was convinced. One of Germany’s best and most experienced naval officers, Vice-Admiral Marschall was fully aware that in wartime the element of risk could never be fully eliminated, that chance must always play its part. But the risk was negligible: not only was he the gambler who had been dealt all the best cards in the pack—he was playing against a blindfolded opponent.

Already, in these first few months of war, the German Naval Intelligence Service, with the intensive preparations of years behind them, was operating at maximum efficiency. Its agents were scattered all over Britain and the neutral countries of Western Europe—and these agents were the best there were. The accuracy and completeness of the information obtained was matched only by the speed with which this information was transmitted to Berlin.

German Naval HQ knew the position, speed, course and destination of almost every convoy leaving or approaching Britain. They knew the position of every British capital ship—and they knew that on that day, 21 November, 1939, every British capital ship was either in harbour or in far distant waters: that the Nelson and the Rodney were in the Clyde, the Hood and the French battlecruiser Dunkerque were in Plymouth, a cruiser squadron was fuelling and victualling in Rosyth, and that the only other ship they might have had to fear, the aircraft carrier Furious was in Nova Scotia with the battleship Repulse. They knew, too, that after the torpedoing of the Royal Oak in Scapa Flow by Leutnant-Kapitän Günther Prien’s U-boat, the British Navy had precipitately abandoned that far northern base, and retreated to the Clyde and Forth, maintaining only a small secret base in Loch Ewe, a northwesterly Scottish fjord. At least it was secret as far as the British public and most of the Royal Navy were concerned: the Germans knew all about it.

There was, of course, no guarantee that these ships would remain where they were. Again, the Germans were unworried. Their experts had completely broken the British naval codes at that time, with the results that British naval redisposition orders were known to the Germans almost as quickly as they were to the captains of the ships concerned.

Not that Marschall had any intention of engaging any large British ships in any case. His superior, Admiral Raeder, had been adamant on this point. This was only a shakedown cruise which might pay the added dividends of dislocating our shipping and drawing off our patrols.

There was the further possibility that news of the departure of the squadron might be transmitted to London by espionage agents, but, in view of past achievements of the British Intelligence Service, that was highly unlikely. At the time, our Intelligence Service was untrained, cumbersome, and almost wholly ineffectual—the Deutschland, for instance, after her first Atlantic foray, had been back in the Baltic for over a month before we knew anything about it. And, it must be confessed, our sketchy air patrols over the North Sea were, at the time, not much better than our Intelligence Service.

Vice-Admiral Marschall, therefore, felt justifiably light of heart as his two battle cruisers, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau cleared Jede Bay and sailed out into the cold, wind-swept darkness of the North Sea. A bitter night, a bad night, but Marschall welcomed it, for over and above all the cards he held in his hand, the darkness of the long northern winter nights, the forecasted bad weather and visibility reducing rain-squalls and fog were further powerful allies, that made for safety. Marschall reckoned that it would take him exactly forty-eight hours to reach the Iceland-Orkney line of the British contraband control.

The British Northern Patrols were in position, thinly stretched out over nearly a thousand miles of sea. Cruisers were the backbone of this patrol, but mostly superannuated ships of the old C and D classes. Only four ships could be reckoned as really effective fighting units: the Norfolk and the Suffolk, the same two ships as were to report the historic breakthrough of the Bismarck into the Atlantic in May 1941, were in exactly the same position as they were on that memorable day—the Denmark Strait—the Glasgow was just to the north-east of the Shetlands, with the Newcastle stiffening the line between the Faroes and Iceland. Of these, only the Newcastle was anywhere near the coming scene of action, but even she was too far away.

Holding much of the line in between these cruisers were the armed merchant ships. For contraband control—the stopping and searching of ships carrying proscribed cargoes—these ships were ideal in the high wild latitudes of the Atlantic. Big ex-passenger ships, able to remain at sea for long periods in bad weather, they were stripped of all their luxury fittings, and fitted with guns sufficient to deal with any cargo ship. But only with cargo ships—they were never intended to cope with anything else: it is significant that the very first move of the Admiralty when they finally learnt of the breakthrough of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, was to withdraw all the armed merchant ships off the northern patrol. But the order came too late, tragically but inevitably, for one of these ships; for it was not until the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau turned their great guns on the Rawalpindi that the Admiralty knew that these two ships, then the most powerful in the German Navy, were loose in the Atlantic.