This book is based on true events. The children and adults are based on real people.
However, this is a work of fiction. While I have included survivors’ memories and some of their remembered dialogue, I have created imaginary scenes and personalities. I have conflated incidents, and had to leave many people out of the story.
The facts remain the same. There were ninety seavacuees travelling on the City of Benares, accompanied by ten volunteer escorts. There were ninety-one fee-paying passengers at the other end of the ship, among them ten children. On September 17, 1940, at 10:03 pm, when the ship was 650 nautical miles west of Ireland, torpedoes were fired from a German U-boat, U-48. The first missed. The second hit the SS City of Benares during a force 10 storm. A third hit the SS Marina.
Commander Bleichrodt of U-48 later stated that he had no idea that children were aboard the ship. He assumed that given the large escort, the ship was of great military importance. The SS City of Benares took thirty-one minutes to sink after being struck by the torpedo.
Almost all of the Benares’ lifeboats flipped over on launch, due either to faulty mechanisms or because of the violence of the storm. Most of the 406 passengers and crew were thrown into the ocean. Captain Nicoll went down with the ship.
The HMS Winchelsea, the lead escort, had left the Benares convoy twenty-four hours before the attack. It was assumed that the Benares was in safe water, so the Winchelsea left to escort an inbound ship carrying much-needed supplies from Halifax to England. The Winchelsea was more than two hundred miles away when the Benares was hit.
HMS Hurricane H06, was three hundred miles away. At approximately 11:00 pm on Tuesday, September 17, the Hurricane received a message to proceed with “utmost dispatch to position 56.43 N 21.15 W, where survivors are reported in boats.” It took eighteen hours for the destroyer to get to the disaster site, travelling through the storm, pushing the ship’s engines to their limits to get there as soon as possible. They arrived at the site of the disaster at 1:00 pm on Wednesday, September 18.
Fifty-one of the original group of ninety-one fee-paying passengers died, including three children. Of the forty-nine British crewmen and convoy staff who set sail on September 13, twenty-three died. One hundred and one of the original one hundred and sixty-six lascars died.
The greatest percentage of the death toll was paid by the seavacuee children: seventy-seven of the ninety CORB children died. Six of their ten volunteer escorts died.
The lifeboat from the SS Marina that set sail to Ireland after leaving lifeboat 12 reached an island off the coast on Wednesday September 25. The sailors were weak, but alive.
The plane that spotted lifeboat 12 on September 25 was a flying boat belonging to the Sunderland Division 10 Squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force. Pilot W.H Garing was patrolling for U-boats on the way home from escorting an inbound convoy to Britain. The lifeboat was so small in the vastness of the ocean that they easily could have been missed it—had it not been for Ken Sparks waving his shirt.