ss athenia attack

photo of Barnet Copland

Meet the Character: Barnet Mackenzie Copland, A Modest Hero, Part 2

by Thomas Sanger • Thomas C. Sanger • Leave a Comment

For nearly 15 hours after she was torpedoed by a German U-boat, the British passenger liner Athenia struggled to stay afloat. They proved to be the most fateful hours in the life of Barnet Mackenzie Copland, the ship’s chief officer (See blog “A Modest Hero, Part 1.” Sept. 15, 2014.)

Copland made a quick assessment of the damage to the ship immediately after the torpedo strike and believed Athenia would stay afloat long enough to launch all the lifeboats. Once all the boats had gone, Copland descended into the ship’s dark, dangerous passageways to make a more thorough evaluation of Athenia’s condition and concluded that she could not be saved. Two hours after all the passengers had left, Copland was among the last of the crew to abandon ship. He took over a dangerously overloaded lifeboat and saw it safely through the night, in spite of rising seas, to be rescued at dawn by a Royal Navy destroyer. Read More

Barnet Mackenzie Copland

Meet the Character: Barnet Mackenzie Copland, A Modest Hero, Part 1

by Thomas Sanger • Meet the Character, SS Athenia, Without Warning Book • 1 Comment

One of the most widely recognized heroes of the attack on Athenia was the ship’s Chief Officer Barnet Copland, a 32-year-old merchant mariner who had spent more than half his life at sea. Copland was born in 1907 and grew up in Stepps, a northeastern suburb of Glasgow, Scotland. His father, Peter, was a railway clerk and his mother, Elizabeth Mackenzie Copland, was a housewife already raising two older children. While Peter eventually became a station agent for the London, Midland and Scottish (LMS) Railway service, young “Barney” was more interested in the sea. Glasgow, a major port and shipbuilding center, must have been a powerful attraction. After leaving Glasgow’s Royal Technical College at age 15, he went to sea as an apprentice with the Donaldson Line, one of the city’s oldest merchant shipping companies. Copland proved to be capable and a quick study. By the age of 19 he had secured his Masters and Mates certificate as a second mate.

Fond of the outdoors, he often enjoyed walks in the rugged Scottish Highlands, which helped him maintain an athletic build on his 5’9” frame. By all accounts, Copland was Read More

Gustav Anderson affidavit

The Curious Case of SS Athenia Passenger Gustav Anderson

by Thomas Sanger • SS Athenia, War History • Leave a Comment

Thirty Americans died when the British passenger liner Athenia was torpedoed on Sept. 3, 1939. Charges and counter-charges flew back and forth between England and Germany regarding responsibility for the sinking. The British said a German U-boat had attacked the defenseless ship without warning. Germany denied responsibility and accused Winston Churchill, Great Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, of planting a bomb on board the ship to kill Americans and bring the United States into the war.

While the German claim sounded preposterous, the U.S. had declared its neutrality and the strength of popular isolationist sentiment made American officials hesitant to jump to conclusions. In an effort to sort out the cause of the sinking, the U.S. State Department asked surviving American passengers to submit their observations in the form of affidavits explaining exactly what they saw. Read More

Nazi Denials of the U-30 Attack on the SS Athenia

by Thomas Sanger • SS Athenia, War History • Leave a Comment

In 1946, as prosecutors prepared for the war crimes trials at Nuremberg following World War II, they discovered discrepancies in the war diary (logbook) of U-30, the German submarine whose combat patrol zone was closest to the location where the British passenger ship Athenia had been torpedoed on the first day of the war. The first two pages were a different quality paper than the rest of the book. On these pages, the months were recorded in Arabic numerals, while Roman numerals were used for the months in the rest of the book. Also, the signature of the boat’s commander, Oberleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp, was an obvious forgery. The new pages showed U-30 nearly 100 miles from the spot where Athenia was attacked on Sept. 3, 1939. The alteration was part of an elaborate, if clumsy, subterfuge started within 24 hours of Athenia’s sinking to convince the world that Germany wasn’t at fault. Read More

torpedo tube

The U-30 Attack on Athenia: A Question of Torpedoes

by Thomas Sanger • SS Athenia, War History, Without Warning Book • Leave a Comment

We will never know exactly why the commander of U-30, Oberleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp, decided to attack an unarmed British passenger ship on the first day of World War II — the central event in my book, Without Warning. Lemp’s motivation, however, isn’t the only element of this event that is shrouded in mystery. In keeping with the “fog of war” that tends to cloud witness perceptions, descriptions of U-30’s attack on Athenia come in many versions and in varying degrees of detail. This presented a challenge for me to write a vivid and credible description of the attack. Read More

Athenia Torpedoed book cover

SS Athenia Torpedoed: When Eyewitness Accounts Collide

by Thomas Sanger • SS Athenia, War History, Without Warning Book • Leave a Comment

I am sure every major historic event since the advent of printing and mass communications has been accompanied by a record of conflicting eyewitness accounts. People see and hear things differently, their perceptions often being colored by the rush of events, past experiences, or prejudices. So it’s not surprising that the sinking of the British passenger ship Athenia with more than 1,400 people on board — the events depicted in my novel Without Warning — resulted in conflicting descriptions of what happened. Read More