A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (36 page)

When the
Gairsoppa
arrived at Freetown it is most unlikely that her crew went ashore – it was a notoriously unhealthy place, and even the British naval headquarters was located offshore in a converted passenger liner. The
Gairsoppa
anchored among fifty ships destined to form convoy SL 64 and her slower ‘sister' convoy, SLS 64. The ‘SL' designation meant Sierra Leone to Liverpool, though many of the ships were destined for the Clyde and Oban in western Scotland, a staging point for ships going round Scotland to ports in eastern England and the Thames Estuary – a dangerous route with frequent attacks in the North Sea, but less hazardous than attempting the English Channel from the west. The fact that this was the 64th SL convoy in only sixteen months since the war began shows the enormous tonnage of freight that was passing along this route. The convoy record in The National Archives for the 31 ships of SL 64 – including another British India ship, the
Gogra
, and two vessels managed by the Clan Line – shows the range of their cargoes: iron and iron ore in eight of the ships; tea in four; linseed oil in three; sugar in two; maize, cereal and grains; and steel, copper, manganese, rubber, cotton, benzine, aviation spirit, crude oil (in the one tanker), ground nuts, and copra, the flesh of coconuts from which oil was extracted. The list of goods could have been that of ships in peacetime, some unchanged since the days of the East India Company, but they were all considered war supplies – including tea, vital for the morale of people at home and in the armed forces and providing the main liquid intake for many in Britain at this period.

Two convoys ahead of SL 64, and still at sea on the date of its departure, was SL 62, a thirty-two-ship convoy that had left Freetown on 10 January and was also made up of many ships coming from India. Among the four ships of the Clan Line on this convoy was the SS
Clan Murdoch
, a 5,950-ton steamer built in 1919 – the same year as the
Gairsoppa
– and also carrying a consignment of pig iron. Like the
Gairsoppa
she had British officers and Indian seamen, also adding up to eighty-five men. Her second officer and gunnery officer was my grandfather, Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins, who was a similar age to Richard Ayres and had also spent his career working for the one company, joining his first Clan Line ship in 1925. Unlike the
Gairsoppa
, the
Clan Murdoch
had sailed extensively in the Atlantic in 1939–40, including previous convoys from Sierra Leone. She had been at Calcutta at the same time as the
Gairsoppa
in late October 1940, and both ships had set off on the same route some five weeks apart. I have my grandfather's logbook in front of me as I write, and it records the huge distances covered: Calcutta to Colombo in present-day Sri Lanka, 1,500 nautical miles; Colombo to Table Bay in South Africa, 4,867 miles; Table Bay to Freetown, 3,299 miles; and Freetown to the Clyde, the SL convoy route that the
Clan Murdoch
completed but the
Gairsoppa
did not, 4,325 miles, giving a total distance from Calcutta equal to more than half the circumference of the Earth.

SL 62 was to be the most dangerous convoy for the
Clan Murdoch
to date, with three ships sunk north-west of Ireland by FW-200 bombers: the Norwegian
Austvard
on 30 January 1941 – the day that SL 64 set off – with twenty-three men lost, the Belgian
Olympier
on the following day with eight lost, and on the same day the British SS
Rowanbank
, with no survivors among her twelve British and forty-nine Indian crew. On the day that the
Gairsoppa
was sunk, 17 February, the
Clan Murdoch
was attacked and damaged by aircraft off the Humber Estuary near the end of her voyage, with my grandfather's 12-pounder gun crew in action as the ship was bombed and strafed. Because I knew my grandfather well and spoke with him extensively about his war experiences, this connection gives a particular immediacy for me to the story of the
Gairsoppa
and the fate of her crew.

The ships that were to form SL 64 weighed anchor on the evening of 29 January and formed up just beyond Freetown harbour in seven columns four cables apart – about 740 metres – with the
Gairsoppa
the second ship down the second column from the left. Escort was provided by HMS
Arawa
, a former passenger liner of the Shaw, Savill & Albion company that had been converted into an ‘Armed Merchant Cruiser' with seven 6-inch guns. At this point in the war the escort for convoys out of Sierra Leone was woefully inadequate, with a ship such as
Arawa
only being able to provide limited defensive screening and unable to pursue and depth-charge U-boats in the way that smaller, more specialised vessels such as destroyers, frigates and corvettes could do. Air cover was also limited, with Blenheim aircraft of RAF Coastal Command only within range as the convoy approached Britain. Despite the huge importance of their cargoes, the men in convoys from East Africa in early 1941 had little chance of beating off
U-boat, air or surface attack, and they knew that their survival was therefore largely a matter of luck.

The convoy adopted ‘evasive steering', zig-zagging according to a diagram preserved in the convoy papers. The weather deteriorated from 9 February, with one ship's master reporting heavy weather from the northwest and gale force winds by the evening of the twelfth, when his vessel was ‘shipping very heavy seas'. That morning they intercepted a cypher message from convoy SLS 64 about 140 miles astern with the dread news that they were being attacked by the cruiser
Admiral Hipper
. In one of the worst convoy losses of the entire war, seven of the nineteen ships were sunk, two with all hands. In The National Archives I found unpublished interviews with officers who survived the attack giving harrowing accounts of the
Admiral Hipper
firing ‘broadsides' into the convoy, destroying or damaging more than half the ships as they attempted to disperse. At least three of the merchantmen returned fire with their 4-inch guns, one of them hitting the cruiser and causing a fire on the afterdeck; the master of another ship reported that a Norwegian ship, probably that same vessel, ‘fired 4 shots at the raider and was then herself hit and blown into three pieces, there being no survivors'.

One consequence of the severe weather besetting convoy SL 64 was that several of the ships lost lifeboats in heavy seas, something lamented by the convoy commodores – my grandfather's logbook shows that the
Clan Murdoch
lost two boats in SL 62 and two more in the North Sea towards the end of her voyage. The commodore of convoy SL 64, a retired rear-admiral in one of the merchant ships, wrote ‘This is not surprising if the boats are kept outboard in bad weather … they do not have the means of preventing the falls from unhooking if the boat is lifted by the least of a sea.' It was a conundrum for ship's masters; keeping lifeboats permanently swung out on their davits made them easier to lower if the ship were torpedoed, with many seamen by now having seen heavily laden ships sink within minutes – too little time to swing out the davits. On the other hand, to risk losing the lifeboats in heavy weather by keeping them swung out was to minimise the chances of survival, with the ‘Carley floats' that ships also carried being designed only for brief use before rescue, and only the lifeboats being provisioned for more than a few days at sea.

To his consternation, the commodore realised that some of the ships had not been adequately bunkered with coal for the voyage, a problem
revealed as the weather caused slow progress and greater consumption of fuel. On 13 February the Dutch
Simaloer
detached for Falal in Algeria, low on fuel; the next day it was the SS
Hartlebury
, diverting to the Azores, and then the
Gairsoppa
. The crews of these ships knew that they were heading into greater danger as it was ships travelling alone and ‘stragglers' from convoys that were the easiest prey for U-boats. The final mention of the
Gairsoppa
was in the report of the escort ship HMS
Arawa
: ‘S.S.
GAIRSOPPA
was detached for Galway also due to shortage of fuel. She was last seen at 1030/14, in position 45º15' N, 22º55'W.'

At 1800 hours on 16 February 1941 a ship later identifiable as the
Gairsoppa
was spotted by U-101, a Type VIIB U-boat commanded by 28-year-old Kapitänleutnant Ernst Mendersen. U-101 had left its base at Lorient in France on 23 January, been in action against a convoy in the north Atlantic – where it had been fired on and depth-charged by an escort destroyer – and was now returning home. As a Type VIIB, with a crew of four officers and forty-four to fifty-five ratings, U-101 had five torpedo tubes, four forward and one aft, as well as an 8.8 cm deck gun, a 2 cm rapid-fire anti-aircraft gun behind the conning tower and several MG 34 machine guns that could be taken out and mounted as necessary. Its normal complement of fourteen torpedoes was a mix of G7a and G7e, all 7 metres long with 280 kilograms of high explosive, the former steam-powered and the latter electric. Mendersen's log of the patrol was among U-boat records seized at the end of the war and preserved by the British Admiralty, providing a chilling first-hand account of the end of the
Gairsoppa
to set alongside that of the ship's second officer Richard Ayres.

Two days earlier U-101 had torpedoed the 4,517-ton SS
Belcrest
, a straggler from a north Atlantic convoy that broke in two with the force of the explosion and sank in fifty seconds with no survivors. Now they sighted another
dampfer
, a steamer, ‘making smoke', with Mendersen describing it as having two masts and one funnel – later adding that it was ‘high fore and aft', features clearly visible in the one surviving photograph of the
Gairsoppa
. He recorded the location using the German naval grid system, in which the ocean was divided into quadrants 6.5 miles across – in this case quadrant 2667 BE, the centre of which was at 49º 33'N, 16º 25' W. He ordered the U-boat to follow on the surface at three-quarters speed, about 14–16 knots, and
then after dark at ‘emergency speed', enough to have gained rapidly on the ship in calm conditions, but with heavy seas coming at them from the north-west it took several hours to get into position.

The normal procedure was for U-boats to attack at night and on the surface, with the boat only being submerged during daylight when there was the risk of being seen, and Mendersen's log shows that U-101 was on the surface throughout its attack on the
Gairsoppa
. At 2228 hours at a range of 1,200 metres he fired two electrically propelled torpedoes at the ship, setting the torpedo running depth at three metres and using the
Vorhaltrechner
electro-mechanical deflection calculator to generate attack co-ordinates. The torpedoes missed, having ‘gone wrong in the rough seas'. He tried again at 2322 with a single torpedo, also to no avail. As Ayres did not mention this, it seems clear that the watch-keeping crew on the
Gairsoppa
were unaware of these attacks, with the U-boat and the tracks of the torpedoes being invisible in the dark.

At eight minutes past midnight he was in position again, in a quadrant now centred on 49º 51' N, 14º 55' W, some 240 miles from the nearest landfall in south-west Ireland. Using a steam-propelled G7a torpedo this time, he reduced the running depth to two metres and aimed towards the bridge of the ship, now at point-blank range. This time the torpedo struck, detonating below the bridge and causing a fire in the forward hold. At 0020, having turned round with the stern of the submarine now facing the ship, he fired a torpedo from the aft tube as a ‘coup de grâce' but missed, again blaming the sea conditions. It was of little consequence: ‘The steamer was burning brightly and the stern was sticking high out of the water, so it can safely be assumed that it sank in the rough seas.'

In his entry for the torpedo strike, Mendersen wrote ‘
dass nach Detonation viale Teschenlampen, inabesondere auf Bootedeck und Seitendeck'
– ‘after the detonation, there were flashlights, especially on the boat deck and side deck'. What he did not record was that the U-boat raked the ship with machine gun fire, with Ayres' account – quoted in full at the end of this chapter – suggesting that it was aimed precisely at this area where the lights were seen, where the men were trying to release the lifeboats. As the
Gairsoppa
was armed, it would have been within Mendersen's rights to attempt to neutralise any ability by the crew to fire back, but he would have known that he was targeting merchant seamen. There is no indication that he attempted
to approach the lifeboats once the ship had sunk – to take the senior surviving officer prisoner, as sometimes happened, or to offer assistance. In the next log entry at 0130 he was well away to the east having ‘resumed patrol', heading back to Lorient. It was to be the last active patrol for U-101, which became a training vessel and was one of few U-boats of this date to survive the war in the Atlantic.

What Mendersen did not know, and was unknown to anyone in convoy SL 64 except the
Gairsoppa
's crew and perhaps the commodore, was that he had sent to the bottom one of the richest cargoes of bullion ever to be transported at sea – and that his account of the sinking and its location would provide the clues that would lead to the discovery of the wreck just over seventy years later.

For a sailor, seeing a ship being hit and going down in minutes was an unnerving experience, something that I can attest to from my grandfather – at home on leave and for a long time after the war he could only sleep fully clothed with his shoes on, having spent so long not knowing whether a torpedo might strike in the night. For those on board a sinking ship the shock can scarcely be imagined – on the
Gairsoppa
, men not on watch who had been trying to sleep were in the freezing water only minutes later, their ears ringing from the detonation of the torpedo, bodies of shipmates in the sea around them and the ship rearing up and beginning to plummet, the shrieking sound of rushing water, shifting cargo and imploding compartments in a sinking ship being described by those who heard it as a death rattle. Seeing the image of the ship sitting upright on the seafloor when it was revealed by sonar in 2011 was mesmerising, thinking of the speed of transition between the ship on the surface and the pitch darkness and stillness nearly three miles below, a place so far beyond normal human experience that it is almost inconceivable. The wreck seemed to preserve the shock and terror of those final moments, but also a vivid picture of the ship only a few minutes before that, requiring little imagination to bring back to life.