On the evening of the 3rd of September 1939, a British passenger liner buffeted its way through the North Atlantic Ocean, carrying over 1,400 people, families, tourists, and refugees, homeward bound to North America.
Only hours earlier, they had left a city spiraling into panic.
Britain stood on the verge of declaring war on Germany.
At Liverpool, nearly all ships scheduled to leave British ports were held.
All except for one, the SS Athenia.
It seemed like a stroke of luck for the passengers who boarded the ship that day.
They’d cleared Hitler’s war path, and they believed themselves to be safely on the voyage home to their families in the US and Canada.
But it was a voyage Athenia would never finish because waiting beneath the waves was a terrifying, deadly threat.
The sinking of Athenia caused outrage not just among Britain and its allies, but within the Nazi leadership itself.
It sinking is a story of high drama, but one which would be completely overshadowed by the sheer scale of loss caused during the Second World War.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m your friend Mike Brady from Ocean Liner Designs, and this is the story of the first ship to be sunk by a hubot in World War II, the SS Athenia.
The Athenia story begins with the Anchor Donaldson line formed in 1916 with the merger of two shipping companies running services mainly between Britain and Canada.
In the 1920s, their biggest ship was the SS Athenia, built at the renowned Fairfield ship building and engineering company yard at govern in Glasgow.
Launched on 28th of January 1922 and completed a year later, Athenia was the modest workhorse of a passenger liner.
She measured a bit more than 13,000 gross registered tons and at 526 ft or 160 m from bow to Stern, she was no giant.
A sister ship, Leticia, followed soon afterwards, and the pair were exactly the kind of hardworking passenger vessels British shipping companies heavily invested in through the 1920s as they built up their fleets, which had been decimated by Germany’s Ubot in the First World War.
Together, the two sister ships became regulars at ports in Liverpool, Glasgow, Quebec, and Montreal in the summer months.
When the St.
Lawrence River froze over, their services shifted to Halifax and Nova Scotia instead.
The two sister ships weren’t flashy by any means.
They sported a simple white band on their black funnel to match the obsidian shade of their hull.
Photographs show simple light panled interiors with plush floral pattern sofas.
Comfortable, sure, but not like the big transatlantic liners on the New York, Liverpool, or Southampton run.
What the sisters lacked in glamour, though, they made up for in functionality.
Athenia could accommodate up to 516 cabinass passengers and approximately 1,000 in third class.
Her steam turbines drove twin screws, pushing the sturdy liner to respectable speeds at 15 knots.
In a nod towards modernity and the evershifting pace of hydrodnamic design, Athenia, meanwhile, boasted an elegant spoon-shaped cruiser stern, whose elongated form probably helped her crack that decent cruise speed.
In 1933, as migrant numbers declined, Athenia’s operators shifted from a focus on immigration services to the tourist trade, and the liner refitted to accommodate a different demographic of passengers.
314 in cabin, 310 in tourists, and 928 in third.
Her owners had also ensured she was up to safety standards, stocking her with 1,600 life jackets, 26 lifeboats capable of carrying over 1,800 passengers and 21 floats.
For a moderate-sized ocean liner like Athenia, this was actually a pretty good deal of safety equipment.
For the next 6 years, Athenia quietly underwent her business in the North Atlantic passenger trade.
And then in late August 1939, things changed forever when tensions in Europe began to boil over.
That month, Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, the Molotov Ribbentrob Pact.
It outlined the notion that the Soviet Union and Germany wouldn’t go to war with each other, and instead they’d carve up Eastern European countries like Poland between them.
Once Hitler shook metaphorical hands with Stalin, the pact was crystallized and the path was cleared for invasion.
It came very quickly on September 1st, 1939.
And as Athenia sat riding at her moorings in Glasgow, panic swept through the major cities and towns of Great Britain and Europe like a plague.
In the weeks to come, Britons would euthanize more than 700,000 household pets in a paranoid frenzy driven by memories of harsh food rationing from the first war some 25 years earlier.
Across European ports, Canadians and Americans scrambled to book ships that could get them home quickly at the last minute.
With war looming and Britain preparing to respond to Germany’s invasion, the British government swiftly began requisitioning passenger liners for their need of troop ships and armed merchant cruisers.
As many as nine transatlantic voyages were canled on September 1st alone, but there was still one scheduled to head off from Glasgow for Montreal with stops at Belfast and Liverpool SS Athenia.
Those few who managed to secure a spot on board undoubtedly counted their blessings.
They were the lucky ones who secured a spot on the ship and away from the path of destruction Hitler would soon forge through Poland and the rest of Europe.
Dark memories of the unrestricted submarine warfare of the First World War haunted merchant captains, their crews and passengers that autumn.
Memories of the Lucatania and the blockades.
Athenia was a ticket out of a very troubled corner of the globe for home.
Only the SS Athenia was on her own path to destruction.
Just hours after Germany had invaded Poland, Athenia quietly slipped from Liverpool.
at 4:30 p.
m.
on Saturday, September 2nd, 1939.
She steamed unescorted under the command of the capable Captain James Cook.
When they arrived at Liverpool, Cook had followed orders and gone ashore to visit the Admiral Ty for instruction.
Everybody was waiting for Britain’s declaration of war on baited breath.
It could come at any moment, and it would mark Athenia and any other ships like her that flew the British merchant en out.
He was given instructions to make a more northerly course than usual.
A course that if war should break out might keep Athenia safe and out of the busy sea lanes that the big transatlantic liners usually followed between Britain and the United States and Canada.
Naturally, it was thought the eubot commanders would be instead hungrily patrolling those waters from day one.
Cramed on board Cook’s ship were more than 1,400 passengers and crew.
200 or so more than what she could comfortably accommodate in peace time and at least 3/4 of those passengers were women and children.
Britain hadn’t yet formally entered the war when Athenia sailed.
So many on board believed the vast Atlantic Ocean gave them an added measure of safety.
Another element working in Athenia’s favor was the London Submarine Protocol, an agreement that 35 countries, including Germany, had signed back in 1936, which essentially forbade enemy ships to attack unarmed merchant vessels at sea without warning.
Instead, they would have to adhere to the cruiser rules, surfacing and ordering the ship to heave 2 in preparation for boarding.
A warship, whether surface vessel or submarine, the protocol stated, may not sink or render incapable of navigation a merchant vessel without having first placed passengers, crew, and ship’s papers in a place of safety.
Only a few hours into the voyage, passengers enjoyed the soft autumn sun on the ship’s upper decks.
Excited children wriggled in their mother’s arms while their fathers reclined in the deck chairs, cigarettes and pipes in hand, settling into what was supposed to be a relatively quick trip back to Canada.
But this was not the usual peaceime trip.
The mood was understandably tense.
At least most must have thought they were bound for home and had escaped the madness.
Meanwhile, Hitler ignored the British deadline to begin withdrawing soldiers from Poland.
At 11:15 a.
m.
the Sunday morning of 3rd of September 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced over the radio that Britain was officially at war with Germany.
His action shows convincingly that there is no chance of expecting that this man will ever give up his practice of using force to gain his will.
He can only be stopped by force.
We have done all that any country could do to establish peace.
And now that we have resolved to finish it, I know that you will all play your part with calmness and courage.
It was the declaration heard around the world.
Here, less than a quarter of a century after the so-called war to end all wars, it was happening again.
Britain was going to war with Germany and its allies.
Captain Cook pinned the notice on the ship’s announcement board.
In a matter of moments, shocked whispers scattered throughout the crowded liner.
Yet shock quickly gave way to a kind of detached relief.
Those on the Athenia had narrowly evaded the catastrophes that would soon unfold in Britain.
So they thought.
By nightfall on the 3rd, Athenia was around 60 nautical miles south of Rockhall, a tiny granite island that juts alarmingly up from the middle of the ocean about 280 mi or 450 km west of the Scottish Hebdes.
Around 7:30 p.
m.
, Captain Cook joined his first class passengers for dinner in the lavishly panled saloon, and he sat down for his meal.
The mood must not have been as jovial as a regular peacetime voyage.
But with drinks flowing and the wide open Atlantic ahead of them, passengers must have felt somewhat soothed.
But that night, so far off the coast of Scotland and supposedly in the safety of the open ocean, Athenia was not alone.
She was being watched by a 26-year-old German Capitan Obloit Nand Fritz Ulius LMP.
Through his periscope aboard the German submarine U30, he eyed the silhouette of the ship in the darkness.
Captain LMP was one of the youngest officers to command one of the Third Reich’s Yubot.
He’d been born in a German concession leased from China at Singtao.
His time with the Navy had proved him to be a cool levelheaded character.
Like his fellow commanders, Lamp was instructed to follow the cruiser rules.
For the Criggs Marina, Germany’s Navy, following the cruiser rules wasn’t simply a matter of legality in the early stages of the war, but a political necessity.
Hitler wished to avoid provoking neutral nations, especially the United States, into joining Britain and France for the fight.
After all, it had been the German submarine attack on Lucatania which had so dramatically shifted public opinion against Germany in the last war.
Even so, the Yubot fleet, touted by Commander Carl Dernitz, as an elite volunteer force, had been deployed to strategically important sea lanes and busy coastlines to hunt for merchant traffic caught out by the sudden declaration of war.
They had been deployed like that three times in the last year in the wake of the Anelus, the annexation of Austria as tensions with Great Britain seieved.
But this time it was the real deal.
Now LMP had a British vessel in his sights, except that she had the obvious silhouette of a passenger steamer, but the ship Captain LMP saw through his periscope seemed to be behaving erratically.
Not at all like a regular merchant or passenger ship.
All the lights had been blacked out and it was zigzagging like an auxiliary cruiser.
Or so he said.
On closer inspection, Limp thought he saw deck guns shrouded under canvas.
He ordered his men to ready the torpedoes and fed the target information into the torpedo data computer.
It was about 7:40 p.
m.
when a young boy, Donald Wilcox, from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, lent against the ship’s railing, staring down at the white foam curling away from the prow.
For the last hour, he had cheerfully watched the last bits of sun flare across the horizon and enjoyed the wind rustling his hair.
But suddenly, the whole ship seemed to lurch.
Athenia’s bow jerked violently upwards, lifting several feet into the air before it came crashing back down again with a heavy roar.
Donald staggered backwards away from the railing.
At dinner, Captain Cook staggered up from his chair at the table and rushed for the bridge.
On U30, LMP had watched his hydrophone operator listening closely to the progress of the two torpedoes.
One, the operator said, was snaking its way towards the target, but the other seemed to be gaining speed and sound.
Terrified that the torpedo might circle back and strike its own yubot, LMP ordered U30 to plunge deeper into the ocean.
U30 wasn’t hit, but Athenia was.
One torpedo had found its mark on the port side aft, just level of the ship’s engine room, severing her oil lines.
Smoke and soot erupted in a racket of sound from the blast and the steamer’s turbines winded to a halt.
With steam on the dynamos dying out, the ship’s lights faded to a dull red before they blinked out for good.
Startled passengers who had only just been enjoying a fine dinner were plunged suddenly into darkness.
Worse still, they began to feel a strange shuddering beneath their feet.
Their ship was beginning to ride lower and lower in the water.
In the decks below, foamy seawater surged into the engine room and stokehold, churning through the corridors and the lower passageways.
Dazed passengers blindly scrambled up stairwells in the pitch black, lighting matches to help guide their way.
Captain Cook had arrived on the bridge and bellowed out for the watertight doors to be shut.
Meanwhile, the wirelessman was ordered to fire off an urgent distress call.
Athenia was not okay.
A cloud of smoke was pouring out of her port quarter, and the ship was listing hard over.
Clearly, she had been hit, but whether it was a torpedo or a shell wasn’t yet known.
Now, Cook and his 1400 passengers and crew had been thrust suddenly into a fight for survival hundreds of miles from a friendly shore.
There was only one thing for it, to uncover the boats and get them swung out.
The crew hastily bellowed instructions to the frantic passengers, ordering them towards the boat deck as the ship continued to settle to port.
Under Cook’s watchful eye, the boats were filled and slowly jerked over the side.
As ever, the list presented problems for the crew had to struggle with the big boats to get them swung out and away from the ship against the sharp angle as she plunged.
It started as an orderly affair, but the gravity of the situation began to sink in.
On the outer decks, women and children were first ushered into the lifeboats, but it soon seemed that space was limited.
Fearing their children wouldn’t be able to secure a spot on a boat, frantic parents began simply tossing their children into the boats like sacks of flour.
One couple wrapped their young child, Rosemary Casps, tightly in a blanket and tossed her into lifeboat 14.
For the poor girl, this was nothing short of terrifying.
She had been separated from her parents.
She had no way of knowing if she’d ever see them again.
Meanwhile, another distraught mother, Georgia Hayworth, held her two daughters firmly in her iron grip.
Her youngest, 10-year-old Margaret, had been heavily struck on the head by shrapnel when the torpedo exploded, and she bleeded profusely, while her eldest, Jacqueline, clung to her mother’s skirts, ducking away from the elbows and knees of passengers, hoping to secure a spot on the boat.
Amongst the skirmish, Jacqueline was forced apart from her mother and into a different lifeboat.
A day she remembered years on as the worst day of her life.
Back on the submarine, Captain LMP watched on, perplexed.
He had surfaced G30 to get a better glimpse at the target.
Through his binoculars now in the freshening night air, he saw the lifeboats swinging violently on their dabbits as blackened figures were ushered in.
He was frustrated, though.
It had been some time, and the big ship was really taking its time going down.
He ordered a third torpedo to be readied and fired, but apparently it failed.
Then he ordered the boat’s deck gun readied to finish off the job, and he consulted the Lloyd’s register of vessels.
Limp compared one shape to the silhouette of the ship before him.
Athenia was her name.
She was marked out as a passenger ship.
With dawning dread, and as the vessel’s distressed call crackled over the wireless, he realized he’d made a terrible mistake.
He had not struck an auxiliary cruiser, as he’d confidently assumed.
Instead, he attacked a liner that now had hundreds of distressed women and children scampering for the lifeboats.
It was a stark, direct violation of the London submarine protocol, and worst of all, orders from the top of the German Navy.
“What a mess!” he muttered to nobody in particular.
Knowing his mistake would send his furer into a seething rage, LMP did not report the sinking or the attack to high command, and he didn’t stop to assist.
Instead, he turned you 30 about and slinkedked off into the night.
Aboard Athenia, the flooding had been stemmed by the watertight bulkheads and the doors.
She was sinking mercifully slowly.
It gave her crew time to swing out and lower all 26 boats from the davits.
For the next hour, the crew worked like lions to get the boats away.
It wasn’t easy going against the list.
A couple of the boats had dropped stories into the sea, ejecting their occupants violently.
Meanwhile, the launched boats drifted helplessly on the dark Atlantic swell, which sent the boats relentlessly up and down, up and down.
The survivors huddled together, but the seasickness became unbearable for many.
Some heaved over the side, but others still emptied their stomachs on the backs of their fellow passengers.
In lifeboat 14, one survivor, Michael McShane, was one of only five men actually capable of rowing against the chop.
Nearly 80 people were crammed into that boat, many of them injured, some too weak to move, and all of them depended on McShane and the others to keep the boat from capsizing.
But with so few actually able to pull an ore, McShane and the four other men could barely make any headway.
Their backs strained against the force of their oars as they struggled to keep the bow pointed into the waves.
But then another problem presented itself.
The boat’s plugs were missing.
The lifeboats had holes that remained unplugged so they didn’t fill with rainwater during normal operation.
But in the haste of the evacuation, nobody had thought to put the bloody things back in.
Before long, the bottom of the lifeboat filled with a foul, odious mixture of seaater and fuel oil, sloshing about the survivor’s legs.
They began frantically bailing out what they could with hats, buckets, and anything else that came to hand.
Hours crept by, and the drizzling rains, icy winds, and sharp ocean spray.
And just when help felt like it would never come, at 2:00 a.
m.
, the flood lights approaching ship cut through the Merc.
It was a Norwegian freighter, the Canute Nelson.
McShane and the other men furiously rode against the waves, but they simply didn’t have enough energy left to reach salvation.
They drifted helplessly and waved in hope.
Mcute Nelson was a special kind of ship.
She was an early pioneering diesel engine motor vessel.
She had responded to the urgent calls for help and made speed for the scene.
Made all the easier because she was empty of cargo.
Soon enough, the scattered boats spotted her lights and hove into view while the Norwegian crew threw rope ladders over the side and rigged canvas chairs.
Athenia’s number five lifeboat came alongside the Norwegian freighter.
and it was secured a stern of number 12 boat.
But barely 15 ft away, the tanker’s exposed propeller spun sharply in the water above the surface.
Because New Nelson was empty, she rode higher in the water and it exposed the top of her propeller’s blades.
Once all the passengers from number 12 lifeboat had been transferred aboard, the empty craft was cut loose and immediately swallowed by the sea.
Then it was boat 5’s turn.
But suddenly and without warning, the boat swung a stern and it was swept straight into the thrashing bronze propeller.