The Athenia sailed out of Liverpool at 4 o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday, 2 September 1939. As she steamed slowly down the River Mersey, her passengers were gathered on deck enjoying the late summer sun, their backs to the dark clouds gathering in the east. War with Germany was then imminent, yet the Athenia sailed alone and unarmed. Twenty-four hours later she was sinking, her bottom cruelly ripped open by a German torpedo. The curtain had risen on the Battle of the Atlantic, and it would not fall again for six long, bloody years.
The 13,581-ton Athenia, built in 1923 and owned by the Donaldson Atlantic Line of Glasgow, was typical of the medium-sized cargo/passenger liners employed on the North Atlantic run in the days before air travel became available to all. Powered by six steam turbines driving twin screws, she had a service speed of 15 knots, giving her a passage time between Liverpool and Montreal of eight days in average weather. She could never hope to match the big liners in opulence or despatch, but for those on a limited budget and with time to spare she offered good value for money.
On the Athenia’s current voyage she had on board 500 Jewish refugees, 311 Americans and 469 Canadians, all anxious to quit Europe ahead of the threatened conflict. She also carried 72 British nationals, some of whom were escaping to more peaceful climes before the balloon went up. Jesse Bigelow, who was returning to Canada with her husband and two children, described the situation:
Our holidays were not over for another week but I talked my husband into getting an earlier booking on the Athenia. There were crowds of people with the same idea and it took hours of standing in line before we managed to get a small cabin on D-deck, down in the bowels of the ship. This turned out to be two berths on one side and two on the other but no room for trunks or baggage, which were left outside the door… I found out that they had to arrange for the accommodation of 200 passengers above the normal total. Temporary bunks were erected here and there and I believe the ship’s gymnasium became a dormitory.
Captain James Cook, commanding the Athenia, viewed the coming voyage as just another routine crossing. Prior to sailing, he had been warned of possible dangers en route, but nobody, not even the Admiralty, seriously considered the liner would be attacked. Available intelligence indicated that no German submarines had yet left port. In fact, unknown to the Admiralty, Rear Admiral Dönitz, C-in-C U-boats, had moved his headquarters from the Baltic to Wilhelmshaven and in August had ordered his U-boats to take up strategic positions in the North Sea and the Western Approaches. As the sun dropped towards the horizon and the Athenia closed the Bar light vessel to drop her pilot, Hitler already had a ring of steel around the British Isles.
One link in that ring was U-30, commanded by 26-year-old Oberleutnant zur See Fritz-Julius Lemp. U-30 was a 745-ton Type VIIA ocean-going submarine, built in 1936 under Hitler’s secret rearmament programme known as Plan Z but only now emerging for her maiden voyage. She was equipped with two 6-cylinder MAN diesels and two Brown Boveri electric motors, giving her speeds of 17 knots on the surface and 8 knots submerged, plus a range of 6,200 miles at 10 knots. Her armament consisted of five 21-inch torpedo tubes, four in the bows and one in the stern, with eleven torpedoes, an 88mm deck gun with 220 rounds, and a 20mm anti-aircraft cannon. U-30 had sharp teeth.
The Athenia rounded the north of Ireland in the early hours of the morning of Sunday, 3 September and set course to the northwest to pick up the Great Circle route to the Gulf of St Lawrence. Later that morning, while Captain Cook, accompanied by his senior officers, was carrying out his customary Sunday inspection of the accommodation and galleys, Second Radio Officer Donald McRae appeared with a telegram from the Admiralty. The message was brief and to the point: as from 11.00 a.m. that day Britain was at war with Germany. Pre-lunch gins and tonic were postponed, while Cook retired to his cabin to open the sealed orders he had been handed before sailing.
While Captain Cook studied his sealed orders, some 80 miles to the north-west Oberleutnant Lemp was decoding a message he had just received from Wilhelmshaven. It read:
1105/3/9/39
FROM NAVAL HIGH COMMAND STOP
TO COMMANDERS-IN-CHIEF AND COMMANDERS AFLOAT STOP GREAT BRITAIN AND FRANCE HAVE DECLARED WAR ON GERMANY STOP BATTLE STATIONS IMMEDIATE IN ACCORDANCE WITH BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE NAVY ALREADY PROMULGATED.
Remaining on the surface, Lemp ordered U-30’s bow and stern tubes to be loaded and her deck gun to be made ready for action. Then, with extra lookouts posted, he settled down to await what this first day of the war would bring his way.
Captain Cook, meanwhile, in accordance with his sealed orders, had instructed his officers to clear away the Athenia’s twenty-six lifeboats and had commenced zigzagging around his mean course; purely precautionary measures, he assured them. Cook was not unduly worried that his ship might become a target for the new enemy, as under the Prize Rules of 1936, to which Germany was a signatory, attacks on passenger vessels were strictly prohibited. It then only remained for him to reassure his passengers that they were safe. With over a thousand nervous civilians on board, in the unlikely event of anything untoward happening, he had to avoid panic at all costs. Other than that, normal routine was followed: lunch was served, deck games were played, and apart from the frequent changes of course and the extra lookouts, 3 September 1939 was treated as just another routine Sunday at sea.
At sunset, which was about 1845, the Athenia was 50 miles south-east of Rockall, with nothing but the broad reaches of the North Atlantic ahead of her. The weather was fine, with only a light breeze, and the sea was calm, except for a long swell, but with the sun already down it was turning cold. Fifteen minutes later, with the night closing in around them, Captain Cook took one last sweep of the empty horizon with his binoculars and decided it was safe to resume a straight course. This being done, he went below to change for dinner.
Had he been aware that his ship was being stalked by a German submarine, Cook would not have left the bridge. Neither he, Chief Officer Barney Copeland, who had the watch on the bridge, nor any of the lookouts had seen the low silhouette of U-30, which had been keeping pace with the Athenia at a discreet distance for the past three hours. Before leaving Wihelmshaven, Fritz-Julius Lemp had been warned that British armed merchant cruisers were likely to be on patrol in the northern and western approaches to the British Isles, and now he believed he had found one. The obviously British liner was steaming fast and appeared to have several guns on deck. His suspicions were confirmed when, as darkness closed in, the ship showed no lights, not even dimmed navigation lights. Had she been a passenger vessel, then, in accordance with the Prize Rules, she should have been fully lit. There was no doubt in Lemp’s mind that she was anything but a British man-of-war – a legitimate target.
At about 1900 Lemp took U-30 down to periscope depth and manoeuvred into a suitable attacking position, with Athenia on his starboard bow. At 1940 he fired a spread of two torpedoes from his bow tubes, and in doing so raised the curtain on the Battle of the Atlantic.
One of Lemp’s torpedoes scored a direct hit in the liner’s engine room, exploding with a dull thump. The explosion destroyed the watertight bulkhead between the Athenia’s engine room and boiler room, allowing the sea to flood into both spaces. It also split open one of the oil feeder tanks, adding to the turmoil as fuel oil mingled with the inrushing sea. But it was in the third class and tourist class dining rooms, directly above the engine room, that the torpedo had its most destructive effect. Passengers enjoying their meal, with no thought of war in their minds, were killed by the blast as they ate. Those who survived rushed to escape but found there was no way out. Both staircases to the upper decks had been demolished. They were trapped by the rising water, and to add to the confusion, all the lights suddenly failed.
Lona Marie Attfield was returning to Canada after visiting relatives in Europe. She spoke of the chaos caused by Lemp’s torpedo to Life magazine in an interview published on 18 September 1939:
Sunday evening my mother and sister and I had finished our evening meal and had returned to our cabin when at approximately 7.15 p.m. our world was turned upside down by a horrific explosion. We were directed to don our life preservers and proceed to our lifeboat stations. This was nearly impossible as there was utter chaos everywhere with people going in all directions frightened beyond all imagination. Finally we made it to the lifeboat station only to find that the boat was painted fast to the davits. It looked nice but the davits didn’t work as advertised. I suddenly realized that it would be a long cold night without proper clothing so I made my way back to the cabin crawling down a broken ladder amidst people seemingly not knowing what to do next. Once in the cabin I gathered our coats and looked around to see if there was anything there that might come in handy if we had to spend the night in a lifeboat. I suddenly saw an apple on the dresser and thought one of us might get hungry during the night. I put it in my pocket and made my way back to the lifeboat station. By now the smell of smoke from the fires was everywhere.
In September 2009, seventy years after the Athenia was torpedoed, 93-year-old survivor Barbara Wilson, interviewed by the Daily Telegraph, recalled:
I was sitting in the dining room with a young man and his father when the torpedo struck. Some people were knocked to the floor; everything was flying all over the place. I noticed there was a staircase in the distance and I thought I had better try to get to it. It was absolutely hideous because everything was flying all over the place: people, furniture, dishes, everything. Somehow I made my way up the staircase and got up on deck. I stumbled over one man, who was obviously dying. He was stretched out on his back and his eyes were rolling around in a way I had never seen in my life. I knew it must be the last moments for that poor man.
Chief Officer Barney Copeland, who had been relieved for dinner by the Third Officer, wrote in his report:
About 7.45 I was in the saloon when suddenly I felt a very heavy bump underneath on the port side. I immediately went on deck and, whilst going along one of the corridors, I felt another smaller bump. I am sure this second explosion took place in the space between No. 5 main hatches and the hatches of No. 5 hold. The reason I state this is because the beams which weigh about half a ton and the main hatches were blown off, yet the hatches on top of No. 5 hold, which were not nearly so firmly secured nor so heavy, were still in place. This space between the main hatches and the hatches to the hold had been utilized for passenger accommodation.
On arriving on deck, I was informed that we had been torpedoed on the port side. The ship took a list to port of about 6° and all the lights went out (I am sure of this time because I always inspected the ship before 8 o’clock, which was black-out time); the ‘Abandon Ship’ signal was also being sounded and all lifeboats were being cleared away ready for lowering. I looked over the port side and, at a distance of about half a mile on the port beam I could make out the fore end of a submarine. I could not see the conning tower or after end, as there was a cloud of black smoke practically surrounding her; neither could I see a gun. The submarine disappeared after about two minutes. I am convinced this black smoke came from the submarine because we had not been making any smoke nor was there any fog at the time. The torpedo struck the engineroom near the after bulkhead, which I think collapsed.
What Copeland had witnessed was Oberleutnant Lemp trying to extricate his submarine from an extremely fraught situation. One of the torpedoes fired from the bow tubes had jammed in the tube with its motor still running, and as the torpedo had a timer detonator, U-30 was in danger of being blown apart. Fortunately for Lemp and his crew, they succeeded in withdrawing the torpedo and deactivating its detonator.
The Athenia was still very much afloat, and Lemp now attempted to deliver the coup de grâce with another torpedo. This missed completely. By the time the miss became apparent, Lemp had consulted his ship recognition books, which identified his victim as either the Athenia or her sister ship Letitia, of the Donaldson Atlantic Line. Which of the two was revealed minutes later, when U-30’s wireless operator intercepted an SOS from the Athenia, sent in plain language, giving her name and position. At this stage, even the Germans were not thinking in terms of total war, and in torpedoing an unarmed transatlantic passenger liner Lemp realized he had committed a dreadful mistake, one which might have very serious international repercussions. He decided to slip away and maintain radio silence until the furore died down.
The sea being relatively calm and in spite of her 12° list, all twenty-six of the Athenia’s lifeboats were lowered without incident. Chief Officer Copeland supervised the evacuation:
After the boats were lowered, they were ordered to bear away from the ship. There was no panic at all on board and, as far as any observer could make out, we were carrying out the ordinary ‘Abandon Ship’ exercises.
Those of the crew who had been employed lowering the boats were then sent for a final search to see that no one was left on board.
Whilst this was going on, I got into the passenger space on the high side, between the No. 5 main hatches and those of No. 5 hold, as previously mentioned. On the low side there was a lot of water, and the bulkheads, woodwork, etc. in the vicinity were all blackened and splintered; and, though we carried no explosives on board, there was a very strong acrid smell, rather like fireworks, which made it very difficult to breathe. There were many bodies lying about there: they were all completely blackened – clothes, faces, everything. I made sure that they were all dead.
There had been numerous replies to the Athenia’s SOS, and while Chief Officer Copeland was occupied with the boats, Captain Cook was in the wireless room and in touch with no fewer than six ships. A truly international rescue effort was already under way, with the British destroyers Electra, Escort and Fame, the Norwegian motor vessel Knute Nelson, the Swedish motor yacht Southern Cross and the American cargo ship City of Flint all racing in to help. The nearest, the Knute Nelson, was only 40 miles away when, at 11 o’clock that night, the Athenia was finally abandoned to her fate, and Captain Cook, the radio officers and all those involved with launching the lifeboats left the ship.
The 5,749-ton Knute Nelson, commanded by Captain Carl Anderssen, reached the Athenia at about 0200 on the morning of the 4th and immediately began to take on board survivors from the lifeboats. The other ships arrived soon afterwards, and with HMS Fame screening for U-boats, the rescue operation continued throughout the night and into the next morning. It was fortunate that the weather held fair, although the swell was heavy, but despite this and the darkness, 1,103 passengers and 315 crew were saved. In all, 93 passengers and 19 crew were lost from the Athenia, most of them in three unfortunate accidents that happened during the night. The Knute Nelson had taken on board 449 and was manoeuvring to pick up others when, unseen by Captain Anderssen in the darkness, one of the crowded lifeboats got under his stern and was cut to pieces by the Norwegian ship’s propeller. Fifty-three passengers, all women, and three seamen died. Later, just as dawn was breaking, a similar accident happened as the Southern Cross was taking a lifeboat alongside. The boat capsized after being trapped under the yacht’s stern, and another ten people died. Three other passengers also lost their lives when transferring from the lifeboats to the destroyers. One woman who would also have died was saved by the prompt action of Chief Officer Barney Copeland. He explains:
On arrival aboard HMS Electra and on going through the list of survivors in my boat, I discovered that one woman was missing. Earlier in the day, she had fallen down a ladder and was suffering from concussion, and I personally had taken her to the Sick Bay unconscious. Whilst we were clearing the boats away, the Nurse had come to me and said she was unable to get this woman out by herself, so I had sent two men to help her – which they apparently failed to do so. I immediately went to the Captain of the destroyer and informed him that there was a woman on board in the Athenia’s Sick Bay and asked to be put aboard at once. I was given a boat and we put off to the Athenia and went on board with the Bo’sun and one AB. The time was now about 10.30. The Bo’sun and the AB immediately went to the Sick Bay. The door was burst open and the woman was found inside still unconscious. I think the doctor had given her morphia, as her lip had been rather badly damaged and had had to be stitched up. Whilst on board, I looked down No. 5 hatch and noticed the bulkheads were in a dangerous condition and would not hold out much longer, so we immediately got back into the boat and returned to HMS Electra with the woman.
As soon as I got back on board, the Athenia sank. The time was now about 11 a.m. Ship’s Time.
By the time the last survivor had been taken on board the destroyers, U-30 had escaped to the west, well out of range of reprisal. By all accounts, Fritz-Julius Lemp should have then set the air waves on fire with jubilant reports of his conquest; he had, after all, sunk a large British ship, possibly, it could be claimed, an armed merchant cruiser. But he now knew that with his first torpedo he had sunk an unarmed passenger liner, almost certainly with heavy loss of life. On the first day of the war he had contravened the Prize Rules. Aware that there were bound to be repercussions in Berlin and around the world, Lemp decided to keep radio silence.
A week later, still having had no communication with Wilhelmshaven, U-30 was 200 miles west of Ireland when she came across the 4,425-ton Glasgow-registered steamer Blairlogie blithely making her way unescorted from Portland, Maine to the UK with a cargo of scrap iron and steel. The unarmed British ship was stopped with a fusillade of 88mm shells, three of which scored direct hits on board. Then, in compliance with the Prize Rules, Lemp allowed the Blairlogie’s crew to take to the boats, before sinking her with a torpedo. When they were clear, he went alongside the boats, handed over a bottle of gin and some cigarettes and wished the survivors bon voyage to the nearest shore. To idealists, this was how war should be fought.
Lemp’s next encounter came three days later, when the 5,200-ton Belfast steamer Fanad Head, on her way from Montreal to Belfast with a cargo of grain, came over the horizon. Again, Lemp adhered strictly to the book, first stopping her with a shot across the bows, then standing back while her crew abandoned ship. He then put a scuttling party of three men aboard the Fanad Head and towed her lifeboats clear. However, in his efforts to comply with the rules, the young Oberleutnant lost sight of the fact that his victim had sent out a distress message before she was abandoned. This had been received by the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal which, accompanied by several destroyers, was on anti-submarine patrol 200 miles to the north-east. The carrier immediately launched three Blackburn Skua fighter/bombers, which swooped on U-30 while she was lying stopped on the surface near the Fanad Head. Luckily for the U-boat, the Skuas were so close to the water when they dropped their bombs that two of them were hit and brought down by their own shrapnel. Lemp dived in a hurry, leaving his three-man prize crew still aboard the Fanad Head, along with another man who had been stranded on the submarine’s casings when she dived.
When the only remaining Skua had gone, Lemp re-surfaced and went alongside the Fanad Head to pick up his prize crew and the other man, who had swum to the ship. He then backed away, and from a distance of about 500yds sank the abandoned ship with a single torpedo. While he was thus engaged, six Swordfish torpedo bombers from the Ark Royal arrived overhead. Lemp crash-dived, but not soon enough to escape the blast of depth bombs dropped by the Swordfish. Two British destroyers then arrived on the scene, and for the next three hours U-30 was subjected to a severe depth charging. She finally limped away with serious damage to her hull and set course for Wilhelmshaven. U-30’s first war patrol would warrant no military band playing on the quay when she returned, and no medals would be handed out.
Lemp continued to maintain radio silence on the return passage, and the first Berlin heard about the sinking of the Athenia was from BBC news broadcasts. When it became known that twenty-eight US citizens had been lost on the liner, the German High Command feared that the Athenia would become the Lusitania of the Second World War, with all the adverse publicity that involved. Anxious to avoid repercussions in America, Berlin denied all knowledge of the sinking, declaring that no German submarine had been within 75 miles of the position given. The German Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, even claimed that the British had sunk the liner themselves in order to bring America into the war. This was, of course, pure fantasy, but there were those, especially in the United States, who listened to Goebbels and wondered.
When U-30 reached Wilhelmshaven on 27 September she was met by Admiral Dönitz, to whom Lemp admitted he had sunk the Athenia. He was sworn to silence, and U-30’s log was doctored to expunge all reference to the incident. It was not until the War Crimes Trials held in Nuremberg in 1946 that the truth came out. By then, Fritz-Julius Lemp was beyond all retribution.
On 9 May 1941, Lemp, then commanding U-110, was involved in an attack on the westbound convoy OB 318. Operating on the surface, he had sunk two British merchantmen and had his sights on a third, when the corvette HMS Aubretia came racing in, intent on ramming. Lemp crash-dived, but Aubretia’s depth charges so damaged U-110 that she was unable to escape. Caught in the Asdic beams of the destroyers Broadway and Bulldog, the U-boat was summarily blown to the surface, and her crew set scuttling charges and abandoned her. They were in the water awaiting rescue, when Lemp realized that the charges had not gone off and U-110 was still afloat and in danger of being captured. He was last seen swimming back towards the U-boat, but was not seen again; it is believed he must have drowned.
With U-110 abandoned but still very much afloat, Commander Joe Baker-Cresswell in HMS Bulldog put a prize crew on board. The submarine was taken in tow, and her Enigma machine and code books, which were found to be intact, were removed. U-110 sank before reaching port, but her capture was kept a close secret for more than twenty years after the war ended. As far as the Germans were concerned, U-110 had been sunk in battle and her coding equipment had gone down with her. In fact, the Enigma machine and code books had been sent to Bletchley Park and were largely responsible for the cracking of the German U-boat code, with the resultant saving of many ships and lives.
It could be said that in abandoning U-110 Fritz-Julius Lemp had paid in full the debt he incurred by sinking the Athenia.