The Lonely Sea

by Alistair MacLean

  He returned to his cruiser, collected Eric, and together they made their way back to Bart’s barge. They unhitched his mooring ropes, dragged the barge along the canal, opened the gates of the Folly, creaky and stiff with long disuse, and towed the barge inside. Once they had it safely inside, they closed the gates and George, producing a hacksaw, thoughtfully sawed off the handle of the sluice trap, so that it could not be opened to admit water.

  While he was doing this, Eric was struggling with the sluice trap at the blind end. Together they raised it and immediately the water rushed out in a continuous jet. They then sawed that handle off, so that it could no longer be closed. In ten minutes the lock was empty, and the barge, with its unconscious crew, was high and dry and fast in the mud. Black Bart and his barge were there for some time to come.

  In the end, it was touch and go. The scheme had worked perfectly, but its author almost came to a sticky and premature end.

  George had underestimated Black Bart’s terrific powers of recuperation. All were awake early next morning and at seven o’clock, just as George was casting off Mary’s ropes, Black Bart, bloodshot and unshaven, covered from head to foot in mud, slime and grease, appeared over the top of Watman’s Folly like some savage prehistoric monster. Nor did the resemblance stop there. Black Bart was out for blood.

  George had no time to reach his own boat, which was just moving off. Cursing and raving like a madman, Black Bart leapt in tigerishly, his great fists swinging in blind anger. But his own speed and power robbed him of revenge. A tremendous blow caught George on the shoulder, spun him round like a top, and knocked him head first into the canal for the fourth time in thirty-six hours.

  George struggled wildly in the water, his arms windmilling frantically, spluttering, coughing, going under and resurfacing at regular intervals. But there was no real cause for worry. For a third time a slim vision in red, brown and white sliced down through the waters of the canal and towed the feebly struggling George towards the barge. Eric helped them aboard.

  Ten minutes had passed and still George had not recovered. With Black Bart safely half-a-mile behind, still cursing fearfully, George was in no hurry to recover. His head was pillowed on Mary’s lap; a very comfortable pillow he thought. Besides, he could hear his own cruiser purring alongside and he did not feel like meeting Eric’s accusing eye.

  He stirred, experimentally, and his eyebrows fluttered open. The redhead still sat motionless on the deck, oblivious of her soaking clothes, mechanically steering with one hand. She was whispering, ‘George, George, oh George’ in a manner highly pleasing to George’s ears: and her blue eyes, usually so hostile and snapping, were now misted over with an anxiety and a soft concern.

  But, he thought in a delicious drowsiness, I must remember to warn Eric about the medal. Mary must never know—well, at least not till later. For George really was the holder of nothing less than the George Medal. It had been given him for an amazing feat of personal survival when his fighter had crashed in the Mediterranean, eight miles off the Libyan coast. He had been wounded, dazed, weak from the loss of blood and he ought to have died. But George had reached land.

  And he had swum every foot of the way.

  The Arandora Star

  The Arandora Star had indeed fallen upon evil days. Less than a year had elapsed since the ending of her great days, the proud days when the fluttering of the Blue Star house flag at her masthead had signalled in a score of harbours all over the world the stately arrival of one of the elite of the British Mercantile Marine—a luxury cruise liner on her serene and regal way round the better ports of the seven seas.

  Less than a year had elapsed since she had taken aboard her last complement of financially select passengers, wrapped them in a silken cocoon of luxury and impeccable service and transported them painlessly north to the Norwegian fjords in search of the summer sun or south to bask in the warmth of the blue Caribbean skies. Deck games, soft music, cinema shows, dancing to the ship’s band, the tinkling of ice in tall frosted glasses, the unobtrusive but omnipresent white-jacketed stewards—there had been no lack of every last comfort and convenience which might in any way conduce to the perfect shipboard holiday atmosphere of relaxation and romance.

  Less than a year had elapsed, but now all that was gone. The change was great. The relaxation and romance were no more. Neither were the bands, the bars, the deck games, the dancing under the stars.

  Greater even was the change in the ship itself. The hull, upper-works and funnel that had once so gaily reflected their colours in the millpond waters of fjords and Mediterranean ports were now covered in a dull coat of neutral grey. The public rooms had been stripped of their expensive furnishings, panelling and draperies, cabins and staterooms altered and fitted with crude metal bunks to accommodate twice—and in some cases four times—as many passengers as formerly.

  But the greatest change of all was in the nature of the passengers, and the purpose of their voyage. Where once there had been a few hundred affluent Britons, there were now no fewer than 1,600 far from affluent German and Italian internees and prisoners of war: and they were going not in search of the sun, but to internment camps in Canada for the duration of the war.

  These internees, composed mostly of British-resident civilians and captured German seamen, were the lucky ones. They were leaving the bleak austerity of blacked-out and rationed England for the comfort and comparative plenty of North America. True, they were going to be locked up and guarded for months or even years, and it was going to be a dull and boring war for them: but at least they would be well clad, well fed—and above all safe.

  Or they would have been. Unfortunately, both for the Germans and their Italian allies, soon after 6.00 a.m. on 2 July, 1940, on their second day out from Liverpool and some way off the west coast of Ireland, the Arandora Star slowly swam into view, and framed herself on the crossed hairs of the periscope sights of a German U-boat’s captain.

  The torpedo struck the Arandora Star fair and square amidships, erupting in a roar of sound and a towering wall of white water that cascaded down on the superstructure and upper decks, blasting its way through the unarmoured ship’s side clear into the engine room. Deep inside the ship, transverse watertight bulkheads buckled and split under the impact, and the hundreds of tons of water, rushing in through the great jagged rent torn in the ship’s side, flooded fore and aft with frightening speed as if goaded by some animistic savagery and bent on engulfing and drowning trapped men before they could fight their way clear and up to freedom.

  Many of the crew died in these first few moments before they had recovered from the sheer physical shock of the explosion, their first intimation of the direction in which danger lay being a tidal wave of seething white and oil-streaked water bearing down upon them even as their numbed minds registered the certain knowledge that the one and only brief moment in which they could have rushed for safety was gone forever.

  From the already flooded depths of the ship some few did manage to claw their way up iron ladders and companionways to the safety of the upper deck, to join the hundreds already there: but they had no sooner arrived than it was swiftly borne in upon them that this safety was an illusion, that their chances of being able to get clear away of the already sinking liner were indeed remote.

  In the reports of the tragedy which appeared in the British press on Thursday, 4 July and Friday, 5 July, there was a remarkable degree of unanimity with regard to what constituted the reasons for the subsequent appalling loss of life. Not reasons, rather, but one single all-encompassing reason: the unbelievable cowardliness and selfishness of the Germans and the Italians who, grouping themselves on an ugly nationalistic basis, fought desperately for precedence in the boats, with the inevitable result that the speed and orderliness which the rapid loading and lowering of the lifeboats demanded were utterly impossible.

  The press reports of the time leave one in no doubt as to that. ‘Casualties due to panic’: ‘Passengers fight to reach boats’: ‘Fi
ghts among aliens’ and similar uncompromising captions headlined articles which spoke freely of disgraceful panic, of the wild rushes and cowardice of the Germans—‘great hulking brutes kicking and punching every person who got in their way’—who fought to get into the boats, of the sickening scramble of the Italians who thought of nothing but their own skins, of scores of people being forced overboard, of British soldiers and sailors losing invaluable time, and often their own lives, in separating the madly fighting, screaming aliens.

  One report even had the Italians so crazy with fear that they fought not the Germans but among themselves; thirty of them, it was alleged, battling furiously for the privilege of sliding down a single rope.

  In order to establish, among other things, just how widespread and uncontrollable this panic had been, survivors of the Arandora Star were recently interviewed and four of these finally selected as providing testimony as impeccable as we are ever likely to have. They were selected on the bases (a) that they represented different contingents—crew, guards and internees—aboard the ship and (b) that their independently volunteered statements were mutually corroborative to a very high degree indeed. Such insignificant discrepancies as existed were readily accounted for by the fact that they were in different parts of the ship and all left it by different means.

  These four are: Mr Sidney (‘Nobby’) Fulford, ship’s barman, of 57 Northbrook Road, Southampton: Mr Edward (‘Ted’) Crisp of 210 High Road, North Weald, Essex, a veteran Blue Star Line steward who has been going to sea for 39 years: Mr Mario Zampi, the well-known Italian-born film producer of Wardour Street: and Mr Ivor Duxberry, a War Department employee, of 89 Johnson Road, Heston, Middlesex.

  In view of the newspaper reports of the time, their answers to the question of the extent of the panic and pitched battles which are alleged to have taken place are singularly interesting.

  ‘I saw no signs of panic and no fighting whatsoever,’ Mr Fulford states flatly: and as sixty internees left the Arandora Star in the same boat as he, he should have had an excellent chance to observe anything of the kind. ‘There was confusion, of course, but only that.’

  Mr Crisp said exactly the same.

  Mr Zampi agreed. ‘These reports of panic and disorder among the internees were just not true. The only trouble I saw was between a British Army sergeant and his men: they had jumped into a lifeboat and shots were fired at them to make them leave.’

  This statement by Mr Zampi, who must have suffered considerably on hearing the courage of his countrymen so frequently maligned in the days after the sinking, might well be suspected of being actuated by pique, nationalistic bias, or a very understandable desire to get a little of his own back, especially as it seems so grossly improbable.

  In point of fact it is perfectly true, except that it was a corporal Mr Zampi saw and not a sergeant: and that corporal, by a remarkable coincidence, was the fourth witness, then Corporal Duxberry of the Welsh Regiment, the most informative of all the witnesses, whose phenomenal memory is matched only by the detailed accuracy of his recollections of these days.

  ‘Some of the guard,’ Ivor Duxberry says, ‘disregarded the order of “Prisoners of war and internees first into the boats”. Major Bethell—CO of the 109 POW unit—using a megaphone from the bridge, ordered them out. When they didn’t respond, he ordered me to fire a volley over their heads to show that he meant business.’ Duxberry fired as ordered, and the soldiers soon left.

  Duxberry confirms that there was no general panic or fighting. He did, he says, see two Italians, a young man and an old, fighting for a position in a boat, a fight which quickly ended when a German internee knocked out the younger man with a ship’s dry scrubber and escorted the old man into the boat.

  Apart from these minor incidents, there was no trouble at all of the kind described in the papers at the time. Why, then, these reports?

  The obvious answer, of course, is that the citizens of an embattled nation tend to become afflicted with an irremediable chauvinism, a nationalistic myopia which only peace can cure, a temporary suspension of reasonable judgment where our side, our troops, become the good, the kindly, the brave, while those of the other, the enemy, become the bad, the wicked and the cowardly.

  But, as so often, the obvious answer is the wrong one. Top newspapermen, such as covered these stories, are, as a class, less likely to be affected by such unthinking emotionalism than almost any other people. Hard-headed realists, cynics in the best sense of the word, they tend to regard with a very jaundiced eye indeed the flag-waving, drum-beating, nonsensically juvenile jingoism of the average nation at war. Their job is to get and evaluate facts.

  It is more than likely that they did get and evaluate the facts, took a good look at them and hastily put them away, using instead the accounts of a few ill-informed survivors to put flesh on the bones of their stories and at the same time give a reasonable explanation for the dreadful loss of life. They did so because they had a very healthy fear of editors, of the censor and of the terms of imprisonment which might all too easily come the way of any man so foolish as to tell the truth in wartime, if that truth could be interpreted as a violation of security, as lowering morale or giving aid and encouragement to the enemy.

  These are the facts, the true reasons for the great loss of life:

  1. The ship was grossly overloaded. 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 o
f 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.