The Second World War was a little less than nine hours old on Sept. 3, 1939, when a German submarine torpedoed and sank the unarmed British passenger ship Athenia. The incident not only was the opening shot of World War II’s longest continuous conflict – the Battle of the Atlantic – but also made Athenia the first British ship sunk by Germany in the war.
Seventy-nine years later very few people on either side of the Atlantic have ever heard of Athenia or know of the ship’s place in history. How such a singular moment could have faded from our collective memory is a question we will explore in my next four monthly blogs, beginning today.
The first of several factors helping to eclipse Athenia’s memory is the death toll: 112 men, women, and children died as a result of the U-boat attack. In 1915, during World War I, nearly 1,200 passengers and crew members died when the British liner Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat. With a death toll more than ten times greater than that of Athenia’s, the Lusitania sinking is seared into the history books of World War I.
Like the peacetime tragedy of the Titanic, who’s sinking had claimed more than 1,500 lives in 1912, human beings seem prone to remember these greater catastrophes. Fortunately for most of the people aboard Athenia, the death toll from her sinking failed to reach such a threshold.
While U-30 fired at least three torpedoes at Athenia that fateful Sunday evening, only one struck home. It proved to be a mortal blow, but the ship remained afloat for nearly fifteen hours, more than enough time for her crew to launch all twenty-six lifeboats.
The launching process was complicated by the fact that the ship began listing to her port side, making it more difficult to lower the boats on her starboard side where they scraped down the hull on the way to the water. During the hour and twenty minutes it took to launch the boats, Athenia’s portside tilt held at a manageable five to six degrees.
Also assisting in the launching conditions was the fact that the Atlantic Ocean was relatively calm for early September. The wind would rise steadily through the night and into the following day, but it was not a factor for the first several hours after Athenia was torpedoed. The ship’s lifeboats were launched by hand, a process that would have been complicated had the seas been higher, particularly as Athenia’s engines had been knocked out and the ship would have been at the mercy of the ocean’s swells.
In the end, all but two of the ship’s twenty-six lifeboats made it through the night without mishap. Rescue ships responded quickly to Athenia’s S-O-S, the first appearing on the scene about six hours after the torpedo strike.
All of these conditions, plus the crew’s training and flawless execution of their duties, meant that the sinking of Athenia was not nearly the tragedy it might have been, one important reason why the ship’s loss has faded into history’s shadows.
In our next blog: Germany denies responsibility for the sinking.
