Athenia Torpedoed

Athenia

Torpedoed The U-Boat Attack That Ignited the Battle of the Atlantic

Francis M. Carroll

Naval Institute Press Annapolis, Maryland

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Contents

Preface

viii

Prologue

x

Acknowledgments

xi

1. The Hinge of Fate

1

2. In All Respects Ready for Sea

15

3. Surface Ship Sighted

28

4. Abandon Ship!

39

5. To the Lifeboats

52

6. Those in Peril on the Sea

64

7. On Dry Land

82

8. The City of Flint 99 9. Matters of State

113

10. The Germans

126

11. The Return Trip

141

12. Home Again, Safe from the Sea

153

Appendix

159

Notes

161

Bibliography

195

Index

209

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Preface

F

or those of my generation the shadow of the Second World War has never fully lifted. The war lives with us in subtle and improbable ways. I was a child during the war, living in the middle of the United States, and in a sense I was physically untouched by it. But the war left its imprint on me, my family, my childhood friends, and the people I came to know in adulthood and as colleagues. I was too young to remember the events of the 1930s and Pearl Harbor, but I do remember coming down to breakfast and being told it was D-day and not understanding what that meant. I remember being sent home early from school when President Franklin D. Roosevelt died. I do not actually remember V-E day or V-J day, but I remember “the boys” coming home, sort of one by one.

Particularly, I remember airplanes flying over our little town—a town then well out of the path of any airplanes in those days. But suddenly, literally out of the blue, preceded only by a roar of engines, a fighter plane or a bomber would fly low over the town and would return and crisscross above the streets; and everyone—all of us children, housewives in aprons, men in shirtsleeves—would rush out into the streets in great excitement and look up into the sky, and someone would say, oh, that was so-and-so’s boy, he grew up on 10th Street.

Even as children, the war took over our lives and we played war all the time.

Small hills became South Pacific beaches, front porches with railings became ships, and fuel-oil tanks on stilts and with pipes and ladders became submarines.

Equipped with packsacks, belts, and helmet liners from the new army surplus stores and inspired by the Saturday matinee films we saw ourselves in turn as Marines, submariners, bomber pilots, and commandos. We collected shoulder patches and insignias, as well as airplane identification cards. The American Legion drum and bugle corps practiced along the streets on summer evenings, making stirring march music part of the experience. Eventually we had teachers who were living heroes who fought at Guadalcanal, flew fighter planes, were held prisoner by the Japanese, or landed at Normandy. We became obsessed with the details and the minutia—our favorite airplane, aircraft carrier, or general.

Now the war has become less obvious, less overt, but present, just below the surface nonetheless: Friends and colleagues who had been refugees and displaced persons forced to emigrate, colleagues on antisubmarine patrol out of Northern

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Preface ix

Ireland, friends caught up in the holocaust, colleagues who had been bombed out in London, acquaintances torpedoed in the Atlantic. Almost everyone of my time period has a story about the war, was affected by the war, or is in close contact with someone who was. In that way, for people of my age, even as the actual soldiers and sailors themselves are going fast, the war is still very much with us.

As a historian also the war has been a major preoccupation for me. The Second World War was never my special area of research, but it was inescapable in most of the classes that I taught. The perspective was now different—what were the causes, who was responsible, when were the turning points, what were the key strategic decisions, who made the most irretrievable mistakes, why did the war end the way it did, what was the legacy of the war, what can be learned from the war to prevent a repetition? The micro of the favorite fighter plane gave way to the macro—the large picture, the command decisions, the causes and effects. But this too has its comfortable routine, its familiar “Time Marches On” litany—Ethiopia, Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Manchuria, China, Pearl Harbor! Numerous historians have attempted to answer the question of how the war started, and as a result quite a brilliant and insightful historical literature has been written. My own interest has increasingly focused on the question of where did the war start, and there is of course no real agreement about that matter either. I was, nevertheless, struck by the fact that the first shots fired in the Second World War for the English-speaking world—the beginning of the war in the West—involved the four countries in whose histories I have had a longtime interest: the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Ireland. The first shot was fired by a German submarine on 3 September 1939, which sunk a British passenger ship, the TSS Athenia, sailing from Glasgow, Belfast, and Liverpool to Quebec and Montreal. It was carrying passengers of British, Canadian, and U.S. citizenship, as well as a number of refugees from Europe; and after the ship was sunk the survivors were brought into Galway, in Ireland; Glasgow, in the United Kingdom; and Halifax, in Canada. Thus within eight or nine hours of war having been declared, all four countries, and their citizens, were physically involved in the war with Germany. It was surprising to me that despite the enormous historical literature that exists about the Second World War there is only one book in English, and that written over fifty years ago, about this tragic incident. I am now attempting to tell afresh, and with sources not previously available, the story of the sinking of the Athenia and the beginning of the Second World War in the West. It is also my attempt to deal with the shadow of the war as it extends into our own times.

—Francis M. Carroll

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Prologue The waves of the sea are mighty, and rage horribly.

—Psalm 93:5

T

his is an account of a disaster at sea. It describes the sinking of the passenger liner Athenia, loaded with Americans, Canadians, and European refugees who hoped to get across the North Atlantic. As such, it is filled with drama, tragedy, pain, suffering, and triumph—death and survival, separation, and joyful reunion. It is a story of compassion. But of course it is also a history of war and politics. Indeed, a unique element of this story is that this is actually where the Second World War began. This is where Germany, having already invaded Poland in what was expected to be a limited war, first struck the Western Allies, Britain and France. This is the first blow, fired without warning. For Britain, the sinking of the Athenia was seen as both a violation of international law and an immediate reversion by Germany to the kind of total war it had been fighting in 1918, at the end of the Great War. The sinking of the Athenia pushed Britain to adopt convoys by the end of the week as the means of protecting shipping, and it served from the first to shape British public opinion toward the war. The impact of the Athenia reached further still. In Canada the sinking of the ship and the death of the innocent, young passenger, ten-year-old Margaret Hayworth, became issues around which much of the nation could rally in support of the decision of Parliament and Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s government to go to war. In the United States the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Congress were too wary to make the sinking of the Athenia the counterpart of the sinking of the Lusitania in the Great War. But the Athenia incident, together with other German actions, helped to expose Germany in the public mind as a serious threat to the United States, as well as to Europe, and provided the opportunity for President Roosevelt to open direct communication with Winston Churchill. The Athenia helped to change public opinion in the United States sufficiently to amend the existing Neutrality Laws to allow the country to sell munitions and supplies to Britain and France—a supportive first step to meeting the Nazi threat directly. So the sinking of the Athenia is a tale that deserves to be told, full of passion and meaning.

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16 Chapter 2

prepared to take on passengers and begin her perilous voyage. The Athenia was deemed in all respects ready for sea.3

The TSS Athenia was one of the main passenger ships of the Donaldson Atlantic Line, servicing primarily the transatlantic route between Britain and Canada.

The Athenia, together with her sister ship, the TSS Letitia, was built in Scotland in 1922–23 at the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, Ltd. yards at Govan, downriver from Glasgow on the Clyde. Fairfield was a huge shipyard, employing some seven thousand workers and with slip facilities to allow work on fifteen ships at once. The Athenia was 526.3 feet long (160.4 meters), with a 66.4-foot beam (20.2 meters), drew 38 feet of water (11.5 meters), and displaced 13,465 tons. She was powered by six steam turbines driving twin screws and was capable of cruising speeds in excess of fifteen knots. Her designation, TSS Athenia, identified her as a “Twin-Screw Ship.” The ship had watertight bulkheads throughout the vessel with watertight doors that could be sealed by controls on the bridge. This construction created a series of watertight vertical compartments throughout the ship. However, the open boiler rooms and engine rooms, that housed the huge machinery, formed a vulnerable space within the ship below the waterline. Distinguished for its engineering and steam technology, Fairfield had built many of the great Cunard liners. The keel for this ship was laid down in 1922 for Cunard, although the ship was purchased by Donaldson and completed with the help of a loan from the Commercial Bank of Scotland, and went into service in April 1923 at a cost of £1,250,000. She was built along the lines of a Cunard Class “A” vessel and was distinguished by a cruiser stern.

The hull was painted black and the upper decks were white, while the single funnel was black with a narrow white stripe, and she carried two large masts, which supported the radio antennas. In short she was a handsome, efficient, modernlooking ship. Ironically an earlier Athenia, built in 1904, was sunk by a German submarine, also off the northwest coast of Ireland, in 1917, with a loss of fifteen lives. The Athenia typically sailed 2,625 miles (4,224.5 kilometers) from Glasgow, Belfast, and Liverpool to Quebec City and Montreal and back on a twenty-fourday cycle.4 Transatlantic passenger liners were really floating hotels. The new Athenia, although originally intended mainly for the immigrant trade to Canada, was within that tradition. She was built to carry 516 cabin-class passengers and 1,000 third-class (immigrant) passengers. With a falling off of immigration and the growth of tourism by the late 1920s the ship was refitted in 1933 to carry 314 cabin-class passengers, 310 tourist-class, and 928 third-class. In 1939 the price of a roundtrip tourist-class ticket cost $225. A cabin-class ticket cost significantly more. Thus, the ship became essentially three hotels, with first-class luxury facil-

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In All Respects Ready for Sea 17

ities, economy tourist accommodations, and boarding house immigrant fare.

Not as well known or as glamorous as the large, fast Cunard White Star passenger liners sailing between Southampton and New York or some of the French and German ships, the Athenia was a comfortable vessel with numerous lounges, bars, smoking rooms, writing rooms, a library, and recreational facilities. There was a ladies’ hairdresser and manicurist, as well as a men’s barber. Both a doctor and a nurse staffed the ship’s hospital, and several of the clergymen on board were asked to hold denominational services on Sundays. Musicians would provide afternoon concerts and dinner music and would play for dances in the evening.

“Grand Concerts” were held in the evenings in which both passengers and members of the ship’s company entertained. Distinguished passengers in the cabin class would be invited to join the “Captain’s Table” at dinner. The meals generally were quite elegant and elaborate, with several courses and many choices. Even the tourist-class dinner menu would feature a choice of such items as prime ribs, sirloin of beef, roast leg of pork, or tenderloin of mutton for a main course. In the extravagant tradition of the transatlantic liners, the cream-colored cabinclass dining room was decorated in the Renaissance style, with marble columns, mirrored walls, and a domed ceiling. The Athenia was regarded as “a very happy ship,” and she was advertised, certainly for her cabin-class passengers, as having “all the comforts of a first class hotel.”5 The Donaldson Line was one of many small- and medium-sized steamship companies that operated both coastal and transoceanic service in the years before modern airline travel. Originally founded in 1855 by James Donaldson, a successful Glasgow cotton broker who had earlier helped to back Samuel Cunard, the company operated sailing packets from Scotland to South America. By 1878 the firm had established regular steamship service between Glasgow and Quebec and Montreal. In 1916 the company merged with the Anchor Line (partially owned

by Cunard) to form the Anchor-Donaldson Line, but in the 1930s the company was reorganized as the Donaldson Atlantic Line. The company also maintained a link with Cunard White Star, which helps to explain how so many of the stranded Cunard passengers were transferred to the Athenia in late August 1939. While holding only a small portion of the transatlantic passenger traffic in the 1930s— 2.8 to 4.89 percent compared with the Cunard White Star line, which held between 40.45 to 55.46 percent—the Athenia and the Letitia enjoyed something of a niche market sailing into Canadian ports and competing primarily with the Canadian Pacific Railway’s steamships. Nevertheless, the world economic depression of the 1930s, competition with government-subsidized steamships, and the crisis of the Second World War created financial problems for the company. After the war the company resumed service to Canada and into the Pacific, eventually extending routes into the Great Lakes in the 1950s. However, as the result of the rapid expansion of international airline travel and the costly development of container

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18 Chapter 2

ships and container terminals, in 1967 the ships of the Donaldson Line were sold and the company closed down.6 The officers on the Athenia were all Scots and were well-experienced sailors. The ship was commanded by Captain James Cook, who was making his fifteenth trip on the ship as skipper. Cook was from Glasgow, was married and had one son, and had grown up in family that was prominent in the world of professional yachting crews. His father was Captain John Cook, skipper of the Joel and the steam yacht Doris; his uncle, Captain James Cook, ran the steam yacht Phalassa. Captain Cook went to sea himself as a boy of sixteen, working on the boats of Prentice Service & Henderson and Thomas Dunlop. During the Great War he joined the Royal Navy and served as a lieutenant on destroyers and minesweepers until 1919. After the war he joined the Donaldson line, commanding the Gracia and the Salacia. He was appointed captain of the Athenia in April 1938. Captain Cook was a cautious man, well into his middle age, and well aware of his responsibilities for the ship and the lives of those on it. While at sea he stayed close to the navigation bridge, often taking his meals and sleeping in the small chartroom just off the wheelhouse. He was described as a typical sea captain with “steel-blue eyes and very regular, weather-beaten features”—one of the company’s best captains and the “personification of reliability.” Captain Cook was particularly anxious about the dangers presented by the outbreak of war and the possibility of an attack from German forces. He did think that by getting under way well before the declaration of war the Athenia should be out of the danger zone by late afternoon on 3 September.7 The chief officer was Barnet Mackenzie Copland. He had served on the Athenia even longer than Cook, this being his twenty-first trip. Copland came from Dundee, was thirty-two years old, and was unmarried. He had gone to high school in Stepps, near Glasgow, and to the Royal Technical College in Glasgow, but he went to sea when he was fifteen and was a seasoned sailor. An energetic young Scot with a bright smile, Chief Officer Copland served as Captain Cook’s right-hand man. John Emery, from Ayr, was the first officer. He was a tall bachelor engaged to marry a former passenger, a young Canadian. The second officer was K. G. Crockett, a Glasgow man. The third officer was Colin Porteous, also from Glasgow, a young officer of only twenty-eight years who was to have a long career with the Donaldson Line. Emmery, Crockett, and Porteous all joined the ship in 1938. The size of the ship’s crew varied with the season and the number of passengers; it ranged from as few as 150 to as many as 285. The deck crew remained at about 63 men and the engine crew at about 29, but the cabin crew serving the hotel function of the ship was varied to meet the current need. When the Athenia sailed in September of 1939 with a large number of 1,102 passengers, the cabin crew numbered 220, making a total of 316 in the ship’s company.8 Given the Glasgow origins of the Donaldson Company, the building of the Athenia on

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In All Respects Ready for Sea 19

the Clyde, and the Scottish links of most of the crew, it was not surprising that Glasgow took special pride and interest in the ship. Early on Friday morning members of the crew who had been on leave returned to board the ship, along with some 41 new cabin crew members hired to help with the additional number of passengers. They could begin making beds and putting out linens and generally making the ship’s accommodations ready for the arriving passengers. As the morning passed a number of local Glasgow wives came down to the dock in an attempt to persuade their husbands in the crew not to go to sea in circumstances where Britain was likely to go to war with Germany. Feelings were quite mixed as to what might happen, whether Britain would actually go to war, whether the ship would be out of harm’s way by the time war broke out, whether Germany would abide by the rules governing submarine warfare. Although members of the crew did make fatalistic remarks, even to the passengers from time to time, very few were convinced to leave the ship that Friday morning.

Ticket-holding passengers and numerous hopefuls had been arriving in Glasgow for several days, filling all of the city’s hotels and guesthouses. Holidays were cut short and family visits were ended abruptly. There were desperate attempts at booking offices and travel agencies all over the United Kingdom to make alternative arrangements, and the Athenia was one of the alternatives. All of these people, particularly students, tourists, and expatriates, wanted to return to the United States or Canada before the European crisis boiled over into genuine hostilities; and of course in the early hours of that very morning, 1 September, Germany had invaded Poland, thus setting in motion events leading to the Second World War. Passengers began joining the ship just before 11:00 a.m. People had been in Glasgow for several days in anticipation of getting on the Athenia, but the overnight trains from other parts of England and Scotland brought additional numbers. Something of a crisis developed during the morning as taxis in the city were commandeered to facilitate the movement of mothers and children being evacuated from urban centers that were thought to be probable targets for German bombers in the event that war broke out. People had to get to the Princes Dock as best they could. Rev. William Allan, who was returning to Canada because of his wife’s illness, had hired a car to take him to Glasgow from rural Scotland, where he had been visiting his eighty-six-year-old mother, and was able to pick up his son Andrew and Judith Evelyn at the station. One bus arrived at the ship loaded with European refugees. Many of these were Jewish, some from Poland and some from Germany. A number wore traditional peasant costumes—such as long skirts and headscarves—and carried their worldly goods in wicker baskets, blanket rolls, and bundles. Some were even barefoot.

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