You aren’t qualified to crew a submarine, so the saying goes, until you can successfully carry three cups of coffee from the top of the conning tower, that armoured, peeking fin from which the captain ‘conducts’ the vessel, down to the bridge in the middle of a storm without spilling a drop. Well, wondered Christian Oldham, as for the fifth time her foot slipped on a ladder rung: what do I get for doing it in an ankle-length evening gown?1
The dress didn’t even belong to her. After weeks of showing up to parties on the docked submarine wearing the same wardrobe that she’d had room to pack before moving to Plymouth, Oldham and her best friend, Eve Lindsay, had swapped clothes. As the bombs fell and the rations diminished, here was a simple way to rekindle the embers of glamour and break the monotony of war’s grey rhythms.
The wardroom, somewhere in the belly of the vessel, was filled with the sound of tinkling glass, the crackle of a record player and that unique heat that hangs in the air when half a dozen human beings giggle and flirt in a confined space. In one corner, a submariner regaled his audience with the story of how, on a recent mission somewhere in the Mediterranean, he was playing cards when the order came down for everyone to be silent. The submarine was being hunted by one of Hitler’s U-boats, the captain had explained, and even the jagged sound of a shuffle could betray their position. In the thrumming stress of the moment, this submariner’s card-playing buddy had got to his feet and begun to scream. There was no time to stifle his cries, the man explained. Instead, he wound up a right hook, and knocked his crew mate out clean.2
Oldham and Lindsay shared a glance. If wars were movies (and this, ultimately, is how most of them end up, one way or another, these days), then every tagline could read: ‘Boys will be boys.’
After an hour or so, the women had had their fill of braggadocio. They bade their goodbyes, climbed the ladder into the cool Devonshire night and headed to the local Italian restaurant, where a hassled chef was doing his best to meet the demands of his customers with his dwindling larder supplies.
The German U-boat fleet, which at the time of the City of Benares’ journey consisted of a few dozen boats, was led and guided by Karl Doenitz, a U-boat ace of the First World War who, in the 1930s, was tasked by Hitler with developing new U-boat designs and tactics.
Doenitz, who for much of the war directed his crews via radio from his base on the west coast of France, was an aggressive commander. Every day that passed without news of an Allied sinking by a U-boat he considered to be a failure. His plan was simple: following the fall of France in the summer of 1940, Britain had been forced to rely on transatlantic shipments for all of her oil, most of her raw materials and much of her food and supplies. In total, a 3,000-strong merchant shipping fleet brought 68 million tons of imports to the country each year, of which 22 million tons was food. If the U-boats could block and sink these ships, Britain, an island unable to sustain its people without imports, would starve. In this way hunger, the blunt, persistent weapon of war, could be deployed against Germany’s enemy from a position of remove.
The belief that, if Britain’s supply lines were to be broken, national defeat would follow, was not limited to the Germans. After the First World War, the Admiral of the Fleet, John Jellicoe, had stated that the Allies had floated to victory on a wave of oil.* Prime Minister Winston Churchill described merchant shipping as ‘at once the stranglehold and the sole foundation of our war strategy’. This fundamental truth was acknowledged in a chart that took up almost the entirety of a wall in the Operations Room at the Admiralty, the navy’s London headquarters. This graph, which charted the number of ships that had been sunk at sea, showed, in the starkest terms imaginable, the stakes at play.
Its top quarter was divided by a thin red line that marked the narrow threshold between victory and defeat: if the rate of ship sinkings stayed below the line, the British people could survive on the amount of food and fuel that was making it through on the convoy ships unharmed. Britain was utterly reliant on imports. Ninety-five per cent of fuel came into the country from trading partners and colonies, while seventy per cent of the nation’s food supply was imported. If the graph exceeded the red line, whereby the Germans sank ships at a faster rate than the Allies could build them, the country could no longer continue to participate in the war.
The effects of German U-boats were immediately seen in British kitchens as, in the first four months of the war, they sank 110 merchant ships. Fish became scarce and expensive. From 8th January 1940, butter, bacon and sugar could only be bought with coupons. Onions, which prior to the war were imported from Spain, France and the Channel Islands, vanished from greengrocers.3 Lemons and bananas, too, disappeared from shops. Farmers expanded their crops and, in doing so, extended the number of days per year the nation could feed itself without imports from 120 to 160 days.*4 It was not enough. If the U-boat grip tightened to fully stem the flow of merchant ships, Britain could not ‘make do and mend’, as the slogan went, indefinitely. The government would be forced to impose on the British people an eighteenth-century peasant-style vegetarian diet.5 After poverty and privation, surrender would soon follow.6 This was the battle within the battle, a contest known to commanders on both sides of the conflict as, simply, the tonnage war.
To enact his plan, on 1st August 1940, at Doenitz’s urging, the German naval high command authorised a total blockade of Britain, giving U-boat commanders the mandate to attack ships without warning or prior approval from superiors. Five years earlier Germany had signed a protocol barring this kind of unrestricted use of submarines as weapons of war, but the outbreak of war had, in Hitler’s view, nullified the agreement. International shipping law prohibited attacks on merchant ships, but Doenitz’s blunt battle orders that ‘fighting methods will never fail to be used merely because some international law forbids them’ made their commander’s position clear to every subordinate.
During the past few days, Kapitänleutnant Bleichrodt had unknowingly but steadily advanced on the British convoy. With a top speed of almost eighteen knots, U-48 could travel three knots quicker than the City of Benares, which, on this particular journey, was already travelling much more slowly than it might. Like a funeral procession forced to match the pace of its eldest member, every ship in a convoy could sail only as fast as the slowest member of the convoy.
After the naval escorts had turned away, some of the City of Benares’ crew members grew jittery, arguing that, considering its precious cargo, the ship should break away from the rest of the sluggish herd, and make its own way across the Atlantic Gap at a quicker pace. In fact, Admiral Mackinnon, the man in charge of the convoy–shepherd, as it were, to the convoy flock–intended to break up the formation at noon on 17th September. Poor weather had made his plan impossible to execute, however, so Mackinnon delayed the order for the ships to disperse by twelve hours, to midnight.
At 10:02 a.m. Central European Time on the 17th, shortly before Mackinnon had originally planned to break up the convoy, the Germans caught sight of one of the British ships. Moving slowly at around eight knots in a lazy zigzag pattern, U-48 moved ahead of the vessel, and picked out other ships in the convoy. Bleichrodt soon spotted the City of Benares, the largest ship in the convoy of nineteen, and, through his powerful binoculars, picked out the guns mounted on its decks. A sense of bewilderment spread through U-48’s crew. The liner was apparently unguarded.
‘It makes no sense,’ said Rolf Hilse, the U-boat’s nineteen-year-old wireless operator.7
For Bleichrodt, there was no doubt as to whether or not the City of Benares was a fair target: it was the convoy leader, its guns silhouetted on the fore and aft decks. It bore no red crosses, or Christmas-tree strings of lights to indicate its humanitarian cargo.
Not only did Bleichrodt consider the City of Benares a fair target, he also considered it a high-value one. To incentivise his U-boat captains to seek out those convoy ships whose destruction would cause the greatest gains in the tonnage war, Doenitz offered the Knight’s Cross to anyone who achieved a ‘high score’ by sinking 100,000 tons of Allied shipping. When the success of a U-boat commander was measured against these hard numbers, a sizeable ship like City of Benares represented a valuable prize, especially for a U-boat captain, who, a fortnight into his command, was eager to distinguish himself. Kapitänleutnant Bleichrodt set a west-south-westerly course. The U-boat pulled ahead of the City of Benares, and settled into a shadowing that would continue for the next nine hours.
As dusk bruised into night, the weather deteriorated. Thirty-mile-an-hour winds began to buffet the ships, pitching them at wild angles. As the waves grew, swilling the decks with phosphorescent sheets of foam, Admiral Mackinnon sent the order for the convoy ships to halt their zigzag courses, and instead slow and straighten in an effort to ride out the storm as comfortably as possible.8 At midnight on the 18th a parting in the clouds allowed the moon to momentarily light up the scene. Half a mile off the City of Benares’ bow, Suhren, U-48’s first watch officer, took a bearing through the rangefinder, a pair of binoculars with a graduated scale attached, on the bridge.9
With a sharp order for his crew members to remain absolutely still, Suhren estimated the distance to the ship, and its course and speed. From this information he was then able to calculate the angle at which the torpedo should be fired in order to strike its hull. On his command, the torpedo tubes were then flooded with seawater. Suhren waited for the red lights on the dashboard to extinguish and the white one to illuminate, signalling that the system was ready. Finally, Kapitänleutnant Bleichrodt broke the creaking hush with the order to fire.
The range of a German torpedo was considerable; one that missed its target had been known to travel fourteen kilometres before trailing off. But acoustic torpedoes, which could pick out and head towards the noise of a ship’s hull and propellers, were still two years away, so, without any homing device, the closer a U-boat could sidle to its intended victim the better. Not too close, however, as there was a risk that a U-boat could be damaged in the shock waves of an explosion; the official manual recommended a U-boat be no closer than 1,000 metres to its target when firing.
The crew of U-48 felt a slight jolt as the first two torpedoes, expelled by a blast of air, left the U-boat and streaked off through the water. The torpedoes were driven by an electric motor and propellers, designed so that the missile would not release any bubbles that might give away the U-boat’s position, a regular occurrence in the previous war.10
‘Torpedo running,’ reported Hilse, listening on U-48’s hydrophone.
As he listened on his headphones one of the U-boat’s trim tanks flooded to replace the weight of the departed torpedo and ensure the boat remained properly balanced. Hilse waited for the telltale thump of detonation. There was none. Two misses.
Premature or failed explosions were common with the German torpedoes used in the first two years of the war. Nevertheless, misses were costly. Each torpedo cost 50,000 Reichsmarks,* around $20,000. Then, when the U-boat returned to the French port of Lorient, Bleichrodt knew that he would have to fly pennants from the periscope. These were used to mark each successful ‘kill’, a signal of the crew’s success, issued to the crowds watching from the dockside. Every missed torpedo reduced the number of pennants that could be flown and increased the likelihood of embarrassment before the men even disembarked. Bleichrodt ordered a reload.
‘We’ll risk this one,’ he said. ‘No more.’
The third missile, fired at two minutes past midnight, flew through the water. From the U-boat’s conning tower, the captain watched. One minute and fifty-nine seconds passed, an eternity of waiting. Then Hilse pulled off his headphones.
‘It’s a hit,’ he called up to his captain.11
From the conning tower the gathered men watched the liner tilt.
In his cabin, having been shaken awake by the noise beneath his bunk, Colin pulled his red life jacket over his pink pyjamas, just like his mother had instructed him to. Then he failed to pull on his dressing gown over that. Next, he picked up his ship-issued life jacket and tried to zip that over the rest of the bulging outfit.
No, he chastised himself: I haven’t thought this through. Carrying the life jacket in one arm, and the dressing gown in the other, the boy headed to the assembly point where, a few hours earlier, he and the other passengers had practised lifeboat drill. The whispered rumour in the corridors was that the ship had been struck by another ship in the convoy–the careless mishap of a dozing navigator, perhaps. At a stairwell, someone told him to relax and return to his cabin. But Colin, who recognised the nail-polish-like smell of cordite from the air raids he had survived in London, pressed on.
Upstairs, in the assembly lounge, there was no sign of panic. The ship’s captain, Landles Nicoll, had arrived at the bridge two minutes after the explosion. Knowing how difficult it would be to launch lifeboats in a storm, Nicoll dispatched the ship’s chief officer, Joe Hetherington, to assess the damage before deciding what to do next.
U-48’s torpedo had broken through the ship’s port side, tearing through the number five hold to explode directly beneath a row of bathrooms in the children’s quarters. Number four hold, Hetherington saw, had also sustained damage. More pressingly, the blast from the torpedo had blown through the watertight door leading to the engine room, turning the corridor into a gulley along which the freezing Atlantic water could flow to greet the ship’s burning steel pipes. Hetherington knew that the resulting steam explosions would, in effect, seize the ship’s heart. Water was already at ankle height and rising fast. Before Hetherington had made it back to the bridge to report his findings, the ship’s chief engineer had already radioed ahead to warn that the ocean was now tickling at his waist.
‘Lower the boats,’ Nicoll ordered. ‘Prepare to abandon ship.’
When the captain’s message sounded over the loudspeaker, there were murmurs of disbelief, even indignation, among the passengers who had congregated in the lounge. For those clutching coffees, or tumblers of spirits, it seemed too extreme a course of action. Still, as they filed out onto the cold deck, most passengers felt assured in their belief that there were numerous friendly ships in the vicinity to mount a rescue.
In fact, the opposite was true. In the event of a U-boat attack, convoy ships were instructed to press on, only stopping to aid a torpedoed ship if there was absolute certainty that the attacker had been eliminated or chased off. With no escort ships to hunt U-48, the convoy had panicked and dispersed, not wanting to be next in the U-boat’s sights. Fifteen minutes after the eel struck, the City of Benares was utterly alone.
With his ship-issued life jacket slung over one arm, Colin stepped onto the deck, as long as a field, and into a force eight gale. It had been a tempestuous day on the sea and, as the moon wheeled behind the night clouds, the rain had begun to sheet heavy onto the ship’s decks. The children, blinking the rain from their eyes, were quietly marshalled by their chaperones onto lifeboats, which began to lower from the stow nests in jerking movements via pulleys, worked by frantic sailors. As boats swayed and pounded against the hull below him, Colin heard the cry: ‘Women and children first.’
Immediately on hearing the explosion, Raskai, Colin’s Hungarian escort, had left the bar and made his way toward the most damaged parts of the ship to help survivors, before heading to his cabin to collect his charge. When he found the cabin empty, Raskai ran to the pair’s designated assembly point at Lifeboat Two. The man greeted the boy briskly, then Raskai clambered into the lifeboat to lift Colin aboard. Great cries of dismay went up from the other assembled adults, who mistakenly believed that the journalist was trying to save himself.
With Colin safely on a cross plank seat, Raskai clambered out of the lifeboat to help others, including the ship’s twenty-five-year-old nurse, Agnes Harris Wallace, who moments later sat heavily beside the boy.12 Finally, Angus MacDonald, the ship’s carpenter and assigned pilot of Lifeboat Two, gave the order to lower the vessel into the sea. After a lurching drop, the boat smacked the ocean, and immediately began to fill with water.
More than food and drinking water, the most valuable commodity on a lifeboat, in the short term at least, is composure. This, however, was in short supply. In the chaos of the scene, and before anyone could stop it, one of the boat’s oars drifted away. MacDonald shouted at the boat’s thirty-seven other occupants to begin bailing, using anything to hand or, if nothing could be found, their cupped palms. Colin, his arms still full of clothing, bobbed in his seat.
Christian Oldham was one of a clutch of Wrens, typically between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, who had joined the navy to fill slots left by the men called to sea. The navy, an institution resolutely against change for change’s sake, had, in its desperation to find workers, turned to young women. It advertised posts in the Wrens with the poster slogan: ‘Join the Wrens and free a man for the fleet’. Thousands signed up, out of a sense of duty. Then, Parliament passed a second National Service Act in December 1942 calling up all unmarried women and childless widows between the ages of twenty and thirty by law.13
Initially, the women were offered mundane roles as administrators, drivers and cooks. Despite widespread suspicion from members of the establishment (the Civil Service Union fought resentfully against the appointment of Wrens officers) as war progressed, and the Wrens proved their collective value, the women were given greater and more diverse responsibilities. Some became welders, others became carpenters. Some loaded torpedoes onto submarines, others plotted the progress of sea battles on maps hung in clandestine operations rooms.
The Wrens’ heroism often matched that of the men they had ‘freed’ for duty. In 1942, for example, Pamela McGeorge was asked to deliver an important dispatch from one side of Plymouth to the commander-in-chief at the other. She drove her motorcycle through the night while the Luftwaffe dropped bombs on the city. When a bomb landed close to the road, McGeorge was blown from her bike, its wheels mangled. Undeterred, McGeorge ran to Admiralty House with the letter in her hand. On arrival, she offered to immediately head out again with the response.
Oldham’s role, when she wasn’t visiting submarines, was that of a plotter at Western Approaches HQ, which, during the early months of the war, was stationed in Plymouth, on the south coast of England. It was here, in the Operations Room, that the convoy ships carrying supplies to Britain, and their escort protectors, were monitored and directed. In order to visualise the situation at sea, a huge map of the entire Atlantic Ocean covered one wall of the HQ. This map showed the position of any ship, convoy or reported U-boat. Information to adjust these positions arrived from various sources, but principally from a U-boat tracking room in a complex situated below the Admiralty building in central London. Here all U-boat sightings from ships and aerial reconnaissance as well as the bearings of U-boat wireless transmissions obtained by direction-finding technology were plotted, analysed and sent on to the Wrens in Western Approaches. If no new signal arrived, a ship would be moved according to its supposed speed by dead reckoning.
Plotting was a new role for the Wrens; the first four women plotters were employed at Dover in the summer of 1940.14 There was no training course available yet, and Oldham arrived without a clue as to how to execute her responsibilities. She learned on the job, by asking questions of the other women, carefully angled to hide her ignorance.
The Operations Room at Mount Wise in Plymouth was divided in half, one side given over to the navy, the other to the RAF. On her side, using coloured wax markers, Christian drew the routes of ships onto the maps. Tiny models indicating convoys, ships, U-boats and aircraft were shunted across the map according to the latest information, which was relayed via four Wrens who stood by the maps, attentively wearing headphones. The Wrens worked watches that lasted either from six in the evening through to nine in the morning, or nine in the morning through to six in the evening: a long day in which emotions fluctuated between deadening boredom or crisp anxiety, depending on the situation at sea.
As the war progressed the system evolved, and white submarine symbols were eventually used to represent the estimated position of U-boats, like ‘measles in the green-painted cork’, as one of Oldham’s colleagues, Mary Carlisle, later put it, replacing them with black submarines when the position of the U-boat was verified.15 Crimson ships, placed at an angle, represented those ships that had been struck by torpedo.
On a mezzanine floor at the back of the room, facing the wall map, sat the Royal Navy senior officers, who would direct the ships to avoid any U-boats that had been spotted. From their remote, detached vantage point, they could watch the nightly battles of the Atlantic unfold. It was a micro-drama of maps and tokens that carried mortal consequences.
Just after midnight on 18th September one of the plotters at Plymouth received a coded message from Lyness Shore station in Scotland. It came directly from Alistair Fairweather, the City of Benares’ first radio officer, a man of enviable unflappability, who tapped out the SOS message while drawing on a cigarette, as a scene of chaos played out around him.
Twenty-three minutes later, at 00:29, one of the Plymouth Wrens handed Admiral Martin Dunbar-Nasmith, the current commander-in-chief at the Office of Western Approaches, the decoded message:
‘Please send a ship to the City of Benares, or her lifeboats, and rescue the passengers.’
A token representing U-48 was added to the map on the wall, adjacent to the City of Benares, the two opposing markers alone in a sea of cork. The officers behind the glass began to consider their options.
Colin watched the adults on Lifeboat Two, which now had around forty people either on board or clinging to its sides, work levers at the stern in order to manually turn a propeller. Having lost its oars, this was the only way for the boat to flee the vicinity, where there was a risk it might be sucked under the waves when the liner finally sank. The oily scent of damaged machinery and cries for assistance hung in the air. Weighed down with water, but suspended by its emergency flotation device, Lifeboat Two sat steady in the water, while Colin watched as other vessels around him were tossed and flipped by the storm.
Around thirty minutes after the torpedo hit, as the storm further intensified, a searchlight swept the waves. Someone cried ‘Rescue!’ and a tentative cheer went up. The light arced around the scene for a few moments, then clunked off again. It was not, as some survivors believed, another member of the convoy returning to collect survivors, but their attacker, U-48, performing a reconnaissance sweep. After striking the City of Benares, Kapitänleutnant Bleichrodt and members of his crew had watched the lifeboats fill with people, then drop into the water. After five minutes, U-48 had moved to target another ship, the 5,000-ton freighter Marina. Having sunk the Marina, and while the rest of the convoy scattered, the U-boat returned to the Benares, moving through the wreckage in order to check whether one of its remaining torpedoes was required to finish the ship.
Satisfied its work was done, U-48 left eastwards, away from the scene of the crime.
Was it, in fact, a war crime? Two years later a captured U-boatman, Corporal Solm, who claimed that he was aboard U-48 that night, was secretly recorded confiding to a cellmate about the sinking of the City of Benares.
‘We sank a children’s transport,’ said Solm.
‘You or Prien?’ His cellmate asked.
‘We did it.’
‘Were they drowned?’
‘Yes, all are dead.’16
In this boastful, inaccuracy-riddled telling, the command had come from Doenitz to specifically target the liner and its children. If true, the sinking of the City of Benares was indeed an indefensible, immoral act. But the account is contested. Years later, Hilse, U-48’s wireless operator, said it was eighteen months before he and Bleichrodt discovered that the liner had been carrying children.17 The two men had transferred together to a different U-boat. When Hilse heard the news, he took the message to Bleichrodt, who, Hilse claimed, responded with the exclamation: ‘Those poor children.’ The following year, Bleichrodt reportedly had a breakdown while at sea.
‘The deaths of the children played on his mind terribly,’ said Hilse. ‘He was a decent man… an officer and a gentleman who never had any time for the Nazis.’18
No victor would emerge from this battle of competing narratives. While Kapitänleutnant Bleichrodt was later charged with war crimes for attacking the ship, he was never convicted. Investigators dropped their case, unable to prove that those on U-48 knew there were children aboard the Benares.
With ice-bath seawater up to his knees, the waves frothing over the sides of the lifeboat, Colin found it difficult to talk. Solidly built, with a double layer of timber, Colin’s lifeboat was designed to withstand the muscular waves of the deep ocean. The horror waters of a mid-Atlantic storm were something else entirely. Out here the waves had been known to bend the iron stanchions that carried the guard rail around the deck of a ship into right-angled submission. Sailors would forlornly return to port with accounts of how their ship’s deck lockers, where fresh meat was stored to keep it cool, had been cleaved off, leaving only metallic deck scars where they had been once welded in place.19 During night storms, when it was so dark that, in the words of one coxswain, you’d struggle to ‘see a sixpence on a chimney sweep’s arse’,20 men would listen as the sea punched the glass clean from portholes. Escort sailors became fond of saying, with the weary wisdom of experience, that the Atlantic weather was a far more formidable opponent than any Nazi.
‘Keep hold of the boat,’ shouted the twenty-five-year-old carpenter, MacDonald. 21
In the black of night, there was no way to know when the next wave would hit, and so to brace against its wild energy.
Lifeboat Two had fared better than some of the other twelve semi-submerged vessels on the water, in which one survivor recalled seeing people float as if sitting atop the waves. MacDonald, a carpenter by trade and a merchant navy reservist by circumstance, knew that he had to keep his people both latched on and moving if they were to survive the twin threats of the sea and the cold. For some, the act of shaking with fear and grief was enough to generate some sustaining warmth. Others resorted to rocking the boat vigorously, in an effort to spill excess water over the sides, and to keep active.
Colin could only grip the gunwale, wearing the pair of gloves he’d found squirrelled away in a pocket of his red life jacket. Not for the first time that night, he thanked his insistent mother. He recalled an assurance she had given him the night before she left him at Liverpool: that if the ship was sunk, the Royal Navy would come for him. He noticed that he had lost his slippers.
As the night deepened, with the invincible faith of a child who has been properly loved, the boy repeated her words in his mind like a mantra:
‘They will come. They will come.’22