Dorothy and I live in Adelaide, where our home is often filled with the laughter and chatter of 10 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Our lounge room looks out onto a peaceful garden. It’s a marvellous place to sit and read and think. In my retirement I’ve spent many, many hours doing both.
While this has invited the terrible memories back in, little by little I’ve discovered much about the Laconia incident and gained a sense of my small part in the bigger picture. The repercussions of that dreadful sinking have rippled out far beyond my life.
My journey of discovery began quite by accident, in March 1994, when I noticed a letter to the editor in the Adelaide Advertiser written by Professor Peter H Liddle of the University of Leeds. At that time he was the keeper of an archive at the university, known as the Liddle Collection, dedicated to preserving the war experiences of British and British Commonwealth men and women. The professor was seeking personal accounts and documentation that could be added to what was already a substantial amount of material.
Thinking he might be interested in something relating to the Laconia tragedy, I sent Peter a copy of Doris Hawkins’ Atlantic Torpedo with a brief note explaining that I had been in the lifeboat with her. He wrote back promptly, explaining how he had been deeply moved and humbled by her account. Then he went on to make, and heavily underline, a request that took me completely by surprise:
… however, will you not please consider writing your own account unless it would be too painful. My University would be honoured to have such an account and I would appreciate the labour in time, thought and physical effort …
After a time I concluded that I couldn’t possibly add anything to what Doris had penned so many years ago. So I shot a note back to Peter telling him so. His response was swift, gently chastising and very determined:
You must not be allowed to escape so lightly!! I do not want, still less expect, a superb literary effort but I do think that you should try, in your own way to retell some of your memories. It is a way of ensuring that you leave a record of what you yourself went through—of your personal participation in so harrowing a collective experience. Come on now please—just do your best.
So I reluctantly set about writing my own account. I found it a struggle. Throughout my career as a police officer I had written countless reports of criminal incidents that were required to be factual, unemotional and brief, but this was something entirely different. It was torture reliving those dreadful events, but by the middle of 1995 I’d managed to put it down. It ran to 18 typed pages, which seemed totally inadequate, but I breathed a sigh of relief when it was done. Just after I finished it, Dorothy and I were booked to fly to Britain to see relatives, so I decided to deliver the pages personally to Peter in Leeds. He seemed enormously pleased to receive them and we had a wonderful meeting at the university, after which Dorothy and I stayed overnight with he and his wife.
My brief personal account therefore joined the Liddle Collection where, in some small way, it has become part of the history of World War Two. I was chuffed. Sometime later a couple I knew through my church, Nicholas and Eveleen Kerr, kindly interviewed me and expanded my initial account into a longer and more satisfying document.
At my age, modern technology like the internet can be bewildering and intimidating. However, such things are part of every day life for my children and grandchildren who, once they had read my personal account of the Laconia sinking, began to send me all manner of fascinating information readily available through this mysterious ‘world wide web’. Things I’ve long wondered about have been clarified.
For many years I had thought about Werner Hartenstein, about his kindness and courage. I harboured a vague idea of one day meeting him again and thanking him personally. However, with great sadness and regret, I learnt from an internet site devoted to the history of U-boats that he hadn’t survived the war. On 8 March 1943, just six months after the sinking of Laconia, U-156 was east of Barbados where it was detected by a US Catalina aircraft. Depth charges were dropped on the submarine, which was destroyed with the loss of all 52 of her crew. I wept for Hartenstein and his men because they were sailors just like me, who took me aboard their vessel when I was in dire straits and, in so doing, put themselves in harm’s way. Hartenstein had turned 35 just a few days before his death.
Then I learnt that, just seven days after sinking Laconia, Hartenstein attacked and sank another vessel, an armed merchant ship called Quebec City. Once again he showed compassion for the survivors at great risk to himself, this time bringing his submarine alongside a crowded lifeboat, which contained the captain of Quebec City. Hartenstein invited the merchant ship’s captain aboard U-156 so he could study nautical charts and plot an accurate course to the African coast. Telling the captain that the Americans had bombed him the previous week while helping Laconia survivors, he apologised for not being able to render further assistance. As he reluctantly set the lifeboat adrift, he called out to its occupants:
‘A good journey and a safe landing. We hope to meet you again in a better and more peaceful world.’
David C Jones, one of 21 people in that lifeboat who survived to reach the coast of Africa, not very far from where my own group of survivors made landfall, described this incident in his book The Enemy We Killed, My Friend. It proved to me beyond doubt that Werner Hartenstein was an extraordinarily honourable man who, at a time of massive conflict and inhumanity, had the courage to do what was morally right even though it might have been militarily unwise.
Captain Erich Wurdermann, commander of U-506, also risked his boat in the chaotic effort to help Laconia survivors aboard. He responded to Hartenstein’s radio message, and was the first to reach U-156.
I also discovered what became of HMS Valiant. The damage caused by the Italian frogmen in Alexandria Harbour was repaired and she continued to serve with distinction. In 1943 she supported the Allied invasions of Sicily and Salerno and, when Italy surrendered, escorted the Italian fleet into Malta. In August 1944, she was badly damaged in a dry-dock accident in Ceylon, which resulted in her returning to England for extensive repairs that were not completed until after the war. She finished her days as a training ship, finally being sold for scrap in 1948. I felt this was a less than noble end for such a fine ship. However, her name lives on. Today, HMS Valiant is one of the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines.
Valiant’s young Air Defence Officer, Prince Philip of Greece, was mentioned in dispatches for his skilful coordination of the ship’s searchlights during our action against the Italians in the Battle of Matapan. Later he was awarded the Greek War Cross of Valour and, of course, went on to marry Britain’s Queen Elizabeth the Second, becoming Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.
The internet also informed me that the battleship that had so inspired me to join the Royal Navy, HMS Royal Oak, is still lying on the bottom of Scapa Flow where she was sunk in the first few weeks of the war. There has been much discussion in recent years about what to do with the wreck because oil is still seeping from her and causing serious environmental concerns. It is a sensitive issue because 800 sailors died inside her and she remains an official war grave.
A couple of years after meeting Peter Liddle in Leeds, Dorothy and I were in England once again. One day we went for a walk on Plymouth Hoe, to the very spot where I had proposed to her in 1944. We looked quietly at the cenotaph there that lists the names of Royal Navy personnel lost at sea in times of war. So many, many names. One of them was Mickey’s, and I became very emotional because I could still hear him pleading not to be thrown overboard.
Also during this trip we spent time trying to trace Doris. We went first to the address in Woking, Surrey, from her letter to me in 1944, but she wasn’t known there. We checked with the Medical Board and also Guy’s Hospital in London but there was no record of her to be found. I knew that she would have long retired from her profession of nursing, so I wasn’t entirely surprised. I came home resigned to the fact that I’d probably never know what happened to her.
However, in 2000 I came across a book called The Sinking of The Laconia by the late Reverend Frederick Grossmith, who had researched the sinking in immense detail. From this book I learnt that Doris Hawkins OBE had died in 1991 at the age of 80. I read this with a heavy heart. However, it appeared that her own book had achieved a great deal. In it, she had criticised the way lifeboats were equipped. She wrote that it ought to be compulsory for lifeboats to carry fishing nets and lines, as well as signalling rockets, flares, a device for the purification of sea water, concentrated fruit juice, tinned milk and a comprehensive medical kit, all secured in such a way that it would be impossible for them to be stolen or lost overboard if the boat capsized. Frederick Grossmith had found, through the Marine Safety Agency in Southhampton, that some of her suggestions became standard in lifeboats around the world. All food, water and equipment are now stowed in secure lockers, and fishing rods are compulsory. Amazingly, though, it’s still only an option for lifeboats to carry water purifying equipment. How different our dreadful voyage would have been if we’d been able to convert sea water into fresh!
Grossmith’s research also tied up some loose ends that had been nagging at me for years. The American aircraft that had bombed U-156 was a B-24 Liberator, which had flown to the area of the sinking from Ascension Island. The pilot was Lieutenant James Harden who, on discovering the U-boat on the surface towing lifeboats crowded with survivors, radioed back to Ascension asking what action he should take. He was ordered to sink the vessel.
I was also pleased to learn from Grossmith’s book that Fred Eyres, Laconia’s pantry-man, had survived. But I was shocked to read that 1782 of her passengers ultimately perished.
Grossmith had also interviewed my old shipmate Johnny Hennessey, who told of swimming for 24 hours before, most astonishing of all, being rescued by the crew of U-156. So Johnny had been on the crowded casing of the submarine with many other survivors while Davey Jones and I were down below. Johnny also spoke pleasantly with Hartenstein and, like me, had to swim for his life after the German commander ordered us all overboard when the B-24 attacked.
From a newspaper article I read about Mary, the lovely, gentle woman who died in such a dignified way in our lifeboat. She was in fact Lady Grizel Wolfe-Murray, daughter of the Earl of Glasgow. I now believe that she kept her true identify from us to avoid preferential treatment.
In 2000, I met a former merchant seaman, Captain John Fisher, in Adelaide. When I mentioned that I was a Laconia survivor, he told me he knew someone living in Tasmania who also survived the sinking and endured a lifeboat voyage to Africa. This turned out to be Tony Large, a retired doctor who served in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. Incredibly, just a few months before Laconia was torpedoed, Tony had also managed to survive the sinking of HMS Cornwall. After Laconia went down, he found himself in one of the lifeboats that was eventually rounded up by Hartenstein and towed behind U-156. Cast adrift after the American bombing attack, his boat set course for West Africa with 51 men aboard. After a harrowing voyage that lasted an agonising 40 days, Tony was one of just four survivors.
Tony and I exchanged letters, through which I learnt that he had written a book about his experience. He then put me in touch with Ron Croxton, another survivor living in England who, I quickly realised, was the young RAF chap who had been lying in the bow with Doris and me when I first sighted the African coast. He had also been badly traumatised when he realised that people were being forced overboard. The anguish of that voyage had never left him. Interestingly, he had remained in contact with Doris until two or three years before her death in 1991. When he last saw her she was living in a nursing home and in good spirits, although by then confined to a wheelchair. Ron was also able to tell me that one of the Dutchmen who had so gently looked after us in his home when we were in Grand Bassa was J C Gourdsward.
Miraculously, Ron had been in contact with Harold Gibson, also still living in England. Harold had been a member of our Royal Navy contingent aboard Laconia. Indeed, it was Harold who had cried out ‘One of ours here!’ before hauling me aboard the lifeboat after my exhausting swim from U-156. Harold and I exchanged pleasant letters and telephone calls in which we talked of our ordeal. He recalled pulling people into the lifeboat before the voyage began but had no recollection of saving me specifically.
He also put me onto a video documentary about the Laconia sinking and our survival. I obtained a copy from the producer, Nigel Turner, in London. Harold, Ron and Tony were interviewed, clearly still deeply emotional about those long-ago events. Harold, in particular, spoke of suspecting people were put over the side in a desperate bid to save water for those who appeared stronger. I was comforted by the fact that I wasn’t alone in not being able to forget those terrible things so long after the event.
In viewing the documentary, I saw for the first time James Harden, the B-24 pilot who bombed U-156. His pain was obvious as he related his role in the whole affair and I think it is terribly sad that he has had to live his life knowing that, by doing his duty, he added to our misery. Like all of us who went through this experience, he remains a prisoner of dreadful memories.
The waves from the sinking of Laconia eventually reached the Nuremberg War Trials. As a result of Harden’s attack on U-156, Admiral Karl Donitz issued what has since become known as the Laconia Order. The highly respected commander-in-chief of German U-boats instructed that:
- No attempt of any kind must be made to rescue members of ships sunk and this includes picking up persons in the water, putting them in lifeboats, righting capsized lifeboats and handing over food and water. Rescue runs counter to the most primitive demands of warfare for the destruction of enemy ships and crews.
- Orders to bring in captains and chief engineers of enemy ships remain in force.
- Shipwrecked people will only be rescued if their information is important for the submarine.
- Be hard. Remember the enemy has no regard for women and children when he bombs German cities.
At Nuremberg, Donitz’s defence counsel pointed out that navies of the Allied nations had also conducted their operations at sea under similar codes of unrestricted warfare. This did not sway the court, which sentenced Donitz to 10 years imprisonment, in part because of his uncompromising wording of the Laconia Order.
I often reflect on the appalling losses at sea suffered by both sides during World War Two. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives. Aside from the professional naval personnel, many of those lost were women and children, prisoners of war, the sick and injured, and the civilian crews of merchant supply ships.
It was insanity on a scale that still chills me to the core. Germany’s submariners faced daunting odds. At Nuremberg, Donitz revealed that every man in his submarine fleet knew that he would very likely take part in only two patrols before losing his life. The Admiral stated that more than 650 U-boats were sunk and, out of the 40,000 men in the submarine force, 30,000 did not return. Hartenstein and the crew of U-156 were lost on their fifth patrol.
So that’s the story of my small part in all that madness at sea long ago. I don’t know why I survived while countless others didn’t. Some might say it was just the luck of the draw, something to be put down to fate and the apparent random nature of life. As a man of faith, however, I believe otherwise.