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By Root 976 0

of freezing spray, and slipped and fell on the wet iron decks which canted faster and faster into the hungry sea with every passing second … ‘What’s happening? What’s happening?’ someone kept demanding in a high-pitched wailing cry, full of agonized bewilderment … We struggled with stiff reluctant ropes and the bulky gear of the boat in a kind of automatic frenzy … The boat was lowered somehow, and we scrambled down towards it. Some of us got there, some did not – misjudging the distance as they jumped. ‘Cast off!’ bawled someone when the boat seemed crowded; a cry echoed by several others, but answered at once by yells and screams above us – ‘No, no wait! Wait a second!’ A darker body hurtled through the darkness and hit the waves with a tremendous splash, reappearing to splash towards the boat and grab at her gunwale … A wave broke fully into the boat, drenching and swamping us completely; we gasped and spluttered with the icy shock … Someone immediately slipped the painter … Whether everyone who could be was in the boat, God knows; we were swirled away in an instant.

Even those fortunate enough to survive a sinking often faced terrible ordeals in open lifeboats, such as that suffered by survivors of the British coal-carrier Anglo-Saxon. The German auxiliary cruiser Widder sank the Anglo-Saxon 810 miles west of the Canaries on the night of 21 August 1940, then machine-gunned most of the survivors in the water. Only a tiny jolly-boat escaped, carrying Chief Officer C.B. Denny and six others. Taking stock at dawn, they found that the boat carried a small supply of water, some biscuits and a few tins of food. Several men had been hit by German fire. Pilcher, the radio officer, had a foot reduced to pulp. Penny, a middle-aged gunner, was nursing wounds in the hip and wrist.

For the first few days, sailing westwards, spirits in the boat were high. But by 26 August the men’s skin was burning, and they were suffering acutely from thirst. Pilcher’s foot was gangrenous – he apologised for the stench. Denny wrote in the log: ‘Trusting to make a landfall … with God’s will and British determination.’ Thereafter, however, their condition deteriorated rapidly. Pilcher died on the 27th. Denny broke down. Penny, weakened by his wounds, slipped overboard while at the helm one night. Two young seamen who disliked each other began squabbling. On their thirteenth day at sea, the rudder carried away. This proved the final straw for Denny, who said he proposed to end it all. Giving a signet ring to one of the others to pass to his mother, he and the Third Engineer dropped together into the sea, and eventually drifted away.

On the evening of 9 September, a ship’s cook named Morgan suddenly stood up and said, ‘I’ll go down the street for a drink.’ He stepped over the side, leaving behind just two young seamen. It fell to twenty-one-year-old Wilbert Widdicombe to write laconically in the log: ‘Cook goes mad; dies.’ Once during the days that followed, both young men jumped into the water. After an argument, however, they thought better of this, and clambered back inboard. Soon afterwards, a tropical rainstorm relieved them from thirst; they ate drifting seaweed, and some crabs attached to it. After surviving several spells of heavy weather and many quarrels, on 27 October they glimpsed a glittering beach. The two survivors staggered ashore on Eleuthera in the Bahamas, after a passage of 2,275 miles.

Following months of hospital treatment and convalescence, in February 1941 Widdicombe set off homewards – to die as a passenger on the cargo liner Siamese Prince, sunk by a U-Boat torpedo. His companion in adversity, nineteen-year-old Robert Tapscott, survived later service in the Canadian Army to give evidence at the post-war trial of the Widder’s captain for slaughtering survivors of the Anglo-Saxon and other ships, for which the German was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. The horrors suffered by Tapscott and his companions were repeated hundreds of times in the course of the war at sea, often ending without survivors to tell the tale.