The Lonely Sea. Alistair MacLean
All the survivors agree on this. Originally—in peacetime—the Arandora Star carried 250 first-class passengers, but later had superstructure alterations made to accommodate another 200 passengers. On the morning of the disaster there were close on 1,700 internees and guards aboard, in addition to the normal ship’s crew.
Ivor Duxberry was with his CO, Major Bethell, when the latter was told by the ship’s master—Captain E. W. Moulton—that he had protested most strongly about the danger of overcrowding, and demanded that his number of passengers be cut by half. The authorities had refused to listen to him. It is not known precisely who these authorities were, except that they were not Frederick Leyland & Co, the owners of the vessel, nor the Blue Star Line, its managers.
2. Some of the survivors state that there were not enough lifejackets. The truth of this statement is difficult to substantiate—obviously no person, other than the chief officer and those directly responsible to him, can know where every lifejacket is—but what seems beyond dispute is that if there were enough, they were not issued to all.
Many people drowned through the lack of these jackets. It may be, although it seems extremely unlikely, that scores of people forgot that they had these jackets: apart from that, many had none in the first place. Steward Crisp had no lifejacket, and neither had Corporal Duxberry, who says that, as far as he knows, not one member of the guard was issued with a lifejacket. Reports at the time speak of army officers handing over their lifejackets to internees, but these were isolated instances.
3. There were far too few lifeboats. There were about a dozen of these, old, worn out, and with a capacity of about sixty each, altogether a total capacity of less than half of the entire complement of the Arandora Star. Some of these had had oars, emergency provisions and plugs removed, to immobilize them against any escape attempt on the part of the internees. How those responsible for this monstrous action thought that any party of internees could steal a lifeboat with armed soldiers constantly on guard and sailors on lookout is difficult to understand: but it is downright impossible to understand how it could be thought possible to lower a boat safely in darkness with the liner racing at full speed through the rough Atlantic seas. It is hard to imagine any naval man being responsible for this action.
4. There appears to have been no lifeboat drill whatsoever. Neither Mr Crisp nor Mr Fulford had anything to say on this matter, very possibly and understandably because they wished to cast no reflection on their employers, one of the world’s most respected shipping companies—an admirable but unnecessary reticence because no blame attaches to the company. But neither Mr Zampi nor Mr Duxberry had any such hesitations, and the absence of drill is borne out in Mr Lafitte’s book The Internment of Aliens.
It would be easy, and perhaps proper, to call this criminal negligence, but, in fairness, it must be borne in mind that there were many confirmed Nazi merchant sailors and submariners on board who might have chosen the confusion of this drill as a cover to gain control of the ship.
5. The rafts, which might have saved most of those who could find no room in the lifeboats, were secured by wire. These wires could only be loosened by special implements which all too often were unobtainable, or their location unknown. Most of the rafts, immovably lashed in position, eventually went down with the Arandora Star.
6. All the above reasons—the overloading, shortage of lifejackets and lifeboats, the lack of drill and jammed rafts—undoubtedly contributed materially to the heavy loss of life. But, nevertheless, all of these taken together did not even begin to equal the lethal, murderous effect of one other item, the existence of which was not even admitted at the time: barbed wire.
The decks of the ship were unrecognizable, surrounded and festooned with impenetrable barbed-wire fencing which turned the Arandora Star into a floating concentration camp.
‘I had had a lot of experience with POW cages,’ Ivor Duxberry says, ‘but I have never seen barbed wire erected more expertly than this. It was impregnable—so closely woven that no space was big enough for a man to get his head through without damaging himself.
‘This barbed wire partitioned the decks—and cut off access to the lifeboats.’
It cut off access to the lifeboats. One single damning statement that holds the key to the tragedy of the Arandora Star—barbed wire cut off access to the lifeboats. Little wonder, indeed, that security clamped down on all mention of this: what magnificent propaganda material it would have made for the Axis!
It is difficult indeed to understand why the omniscient authorities of the time deemed this murderous wire necessary—did they expect, perhaps, to prevent some of the internees from escaping by diving overboard in mid-Atlantic and swimming for the nearest continent?—but it is not difficult to understand the attitude of Captain Moulton who protested with the utmost violence against the erection of this wire.
‘You are sending men to their deaths,’ he insisted, ‘men who have sailed with me for many years. If anything happens to the ship, that wire will obstruct passage to the boats and rafts. We shall be drowned like rats and the Arandora Star turned into a floating deathtrap.’
But the authorities knew better than the man who had spent a lifetime at sea. The barbed wire remained. And the Arandora Star became a floating deathtrap.
That, then, was the desperate situation that confronted all those who finally managed to struggle to the upper deck. But not all of those who survived the initial impact of the explosion or the lethal onrush of the invading waters reached the upper deck.
There were old men aboard, old men and sick men, and many of these never left their cabins—they had been asleep in their bunks when the torpedo struck, and many of them died there. Others were too weak to fight their way along flooded alleys, or took wrong turnings in the Stygian darkness of the great liner’s vast complex of passageways: Edward Crisp owes his life simply to the fact that he knew the internal geography of the ship like the back of his hand.
Others again did reach the upper decks, found their way to the nearest fore or aft lifeboat blocked by rolls of athwartships barbed wire, and went below again to find some passage which would bring them up to a lifeboat no further away than twenty yards from where they stood. But the press and confusion below decks was increasing steadily, the level of the water was rising, and many of those who went below were never seen again.
Major Bethell, OC of the guard, ordered his men to clear away the barbed wire in front of the lifeboats. (It appears that there was some method of loosening sections of the barbed barricade by operating a slipwire, but no instructions had been given in this.) The guard tore at the wire with rifles and bayonets—Ivor Duxberry has still the scars on his arms as the grim proof of his story—and the rush for the boats was on.
Unfortunately, because of the obstructing wire, trained members of the ship’s company were not able to reach all their boats’ positions—or at least not in time. Edward Crisp and Taffy Williams—the bosun’s mate—arrived at their station to find sixty Germans and Italians already sitting in a lifeboat, and had to order them out—no easy task when everyone was convinced that the Arandora Star was already foundering—before they could begin to lower the boat. Elsewhere, some of the internees tried to lower the boats themselves and within a few minutes, in Duxberry’s graphic phrase, half a dozen of them were hanging on one fall like turkeys outside a poulterer’s shop.
But some of the prisoners of war, as distinct from the internees, proved invaluable. One such was Captain Burfend, master of the Adolph Woermann, who marched a group of men—for the most part highly experienced seamen and confirmed Nazis—in a column of two on to the boatdeck, and lowered several lifeboats in perfect order. Nazis or not, their behaviour was all that could have been wished for at this moment of crisis. Especially was this true of Captain Burfend himself. When he had seen as many men as possible, regardless of race, into the lifeboats for which he had assumed temporary responsibility, he denied himself a place in any of these, stepped back and went down with the Arandora Star.
But though there were not enough lifeboats for all, this was not realized. Most of the intervening barbed wire was still in position, with men flinging