Alistair MacLean - The Lonely Sea

The survivors, of course, were those who were not caught in or trapped by the barbed wire. Mario Zampi, who had lowered a raft only to have it taken over by some of his fellow countrymen already in the water, dived over the side and all but broke his neck when his lifejacket struck the water. Fulford jumped from the boatdeck—a dive at which even an Olympic champion would have baulked—and struck the water far beneath with such force that large quantities of oil and salt water were forced into his stomach and lungs: he, too, was injured by his lifejacket. Edward Crisp, as said, managed to get away in a lifeboat, while Ivor Duxberry slithered down a rope and landed astride the upturned hull of a lifeboat.

Even as the great liner foundered, there were hundreds still aboard. Most of these were trapped. Some were too terrified to jump. Others, like Captains Moulton and Burfend, elected to remain with the ship rather than abandon it before everyone else had been saved. Few of the regimental guard officers survived. When last seen, they were lined up, as one survivor put it, and chatting amiably like suburban passengers waiting in a morning bus queue. It is difficult to recognize either the wisdom or necessity of this quixotism and nonchalant acceptance of a fate which, until they themselves made the decision, had been by no means certain: but it is impossible not to admire their selfless gallantry.

At 7.30 a.m. the Arandora Star heeled over sharply until she was almost on her side in the water, the guard rails far below the surface of the sea, hesitated for a moment, then, momentarily shrouded in clouds of hissing steam, slid quietly beneath the surface of the Atlantic.

The waters in the immediate vicinity of the foundering liner were alive with people on rafts or clinging to planks or nonswimmers frantically churning the surface of the sea with the last of their rapidly failing strength. All saw what was coming, all struggled fearfully, desperately to avoid it, but for all but a few the effort had come too late, a meaningless tribute to the age-old instinct to survive. How many people were sucked down in the vortex of the plummeting Arandora Star will never be known: but no more, it is certain, than were dragged down, trapped by the impenetrable barrier of barbed wire, or still impaled on the savage hooks, helpless flies trapped in this monstrous spider’s web.

The Arandora Star was gone, but almost a thousand of its passengers, guards and crew—mainly Italians and Germans—still lived, scattered in groups or singly over several square miles of the Atlantic. That morning the Atlantic, mercifully, was calm and all but windless—but the sea was bitterly cold. Before long the number of swimmers and those supported only by planks and benches became pitifully fewer and fewer. Mario Zampi lost all but one of the six companions who originally clung to the same bench as he. Their pathetic cries of ‘Mother’, repeated over and over again in three or four languages, grew fainter and fainter and gradually faded away altogether as the numbing cold struck through the scanty clothing and pathetically limited defences of the old, the infirm and the gravely wounded, and stopped the beating of their hearts. And some there were, supported by their life jackets, who, by and by, just lay face down in the water, dead.

About noon, a Sunderland flying boat appeared and circled the area dropping all it had in the way of first-aid kits, emergency rations, chocolate and cigarettes, and then disappeared to guide the Canadian destroyer St Laurent to the scene.

All of the survivors are unanimous in their unstinted praise of the magnificently selfless work performed by the crew of that ship: operating from the St Laurent ’s boats while the destroyer itself kept constantly on the move to avoid submarines, they scoured the area for hours until they collapsed unconscious over their oars, having driven themselves far beyond the limits of exhaustion.

In all, the crew of the St Laurent picked up and took to safety over eight hundred survivors, an astonishing feat almost without parallel in the lifesaving annals of the sea, almost enough to make one forget, if even only for a moment, the barbed wire and the thousand men who died.

Almost, but not quite.

Even with the two brand new untried battle cruisers under his command, even although he was leading them on this, their first sortie against the enemy and the cold, dark hostility of the winter north Atlantic, Vice-Admiral Marschall was as unworried as any fleet commander can ever hope to be in wartime. Wilhelmshaven was dropping south behind him into the early gathering dusk of a November afternoon and the low flat shores of Jede Bay were already vanishing into nothingness, but Marschall never spared them a glance. He was busy, far too busy for any of this nonsense of sentimental farewells, and, besides, he knew he didn’t have to bother. Barring accidents, it would only be a matter of brief time before he saw these shores again.

And there would be no accidents. Of that the Squadron Commander, Marschall, was convinced. One of Germany’s best and most experienced naval officers, Vice-Admiral Marschall was fully aware that in wartime the element of risk could never be fully eliminated, that chance must always play its part. But the risk was negligible: not only was he the gambler who had been dealt all the best cards in the pack—he was playing against a blindfolded opponent.

Already, in these first few months of war, the German Naval Intelligence Service, with the intensive preparations of years behind them, was operating at maximum efficiency. Its agents were scattered all over Britain and the neutral countries of Western Europe—and these agents were the best there were. The accuracy and completeness of the information obtained was matched only by the speed with which this information was transmitted to Berlin.

German Naval HQ knew the position, speed, course and destination of almost every convoy leaving or approaching Britain. They knew the position of every British capital ship—and they knew that on that day, 21 November, 1939, every British capital ship was either in harbour or in far distant waters: that the Nelson and the Rodney were in the Clyde, the Hood and the French battlecruiser Dunkerque were in Plymouth, a cruiser squadron was fuelling and victualling in Rosyth, and that the only other ship they might have had to fear, the aircraft carrier Furious was in Nova Scotia with the battleship Repulse. They knew, too, that after the torpedoing of the Royal Oak in Scapa Flow by Leutnant-Kapitän Günther Prien’s U-boat, the British Navy had precipitately abandoned that far northern base, and retreated to the Clyde and Forth, maintaining only a small secret base in Loch Ewe, a northwesterly Scottish fjord. At least it was secret as far as the British public and most of the Royal Navy were concerned: the Germans knew all about it.

There was, of course, no guarantee that these ships would remain where they were. Again, the Germans were unworried. Their experts had completely broken the British naval codes at that time, with the results that British naval redisposition orders were known to the Germans almost as quickly as they were to the captains of the ships concerned.

Not that Marschall had any intention of engaging any large British ships in any case. His superior, Admiral Raeder, had been adamant on this point. This was only a shakedown cruise which might pay the added dividends of dislocating our shipping and drawing off our patrols.

There was the further possibility that news of the departure of the squadron might be transmitted to London by espionage agents, but, in view of past achievements of the British Intelligence Service, that was highly unlikely. At the time, our Intelligence Service was untrained, cumbersome, and almost wholly ineffectual—the Deutschland, for instance, after her first Atlantic foray, had been back in the Baltic for over a month before we knew anything about it. And, it must be confessed, our sketchy air patrols over the North Sea were, at the time, not much better than our Intelligence Service.