War History

Passenger list for Athenia’s voyage from Glasgow to Canada, Sept. 2, 1938

Meet the Character: Barbara Cass-Beggs, An Accomplished Life, Part 2

by Thomas Sanger • Meet the Character, SS Athenia, Thomas C. Sanger, War History • Leave a Comment

A little more than 24 hours after coming aboard the British passenger liner Athenia, Barbara Cass-Beggs came face to face with the war she hoped she would never see. Barbara, her husband David, and their 3-year-old daughter, Rosemary, were on their way to Canada where David would lecture in electrical engineering for a year at the University of Toronto. (See blog “Barbara Cass-Beggs, An Accomplished Life, Part 1,” Nov. 1, 2014.)

It had already been a difficult voyage, with both Barbara and David feeling the effects of sea-sickness. They had gone to bed early the evening of Sept. 3, 1939, when a torpedo from a German U-boat slammed into Athenia’s port side. The explosion crippled the engines and shut down the electrical system, plunging the ship into darkness.
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Liverpool’s Mersey River

Meet the Character: Barbara Cass-Beggs An Accomplished Life, Part 1

by Thomas Sanger • Meet the Character, Thomas C. Sanger, War History • Leave a Comment

Barbara Cass-Beggs expected to spend a year in Canada with her husband, David, and their 3-year-old daughter, Rosemary, when they boarded Athenia in Liverpool on the afternoon of Sept. 2, 1939. David had accepted a position for the coming academic year to lecture on electrical engineering at the University of Toronto, and Barbara saw it as an opportunity to test the waters of Canada’s egalitarian society. They planned to return home to Oxford, England, when the year ended, but World War 2 would change all that.

The threat of war seemed a long way off when Barbara and David initially planned to go to Canada. As tensions on the Continent mounted in the summer of 1939, they had second thoughts, but resolved to go anyway, in part to escape the rigid class distinctions of Great Britain.
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Photo of Joseph P. Kennedy

Cables Show Confused Picture of Athenia Torpedoing

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

Early Monday morning, Sept. 4, 1939, the American ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, was awakened by an assistant with the news that a British passenger ship carrying several hundred Americans from England to Canada had been torpedoed and was sinking in the North Atlantic. This tragedy is the central event of my forthcoming historical novel Without Warning.

Joe Kennedy was personally opposed to the war that England had declared against Germany less than 24 hours earlier. He knew President Franklin D. Roosevelt was sympathetic to the British cause, although Roosevelt had declared America would remain neutral in the European conflict. Read More

RMS Lusitania

Parallels Between the Sinking of the Lusitania and the Athenia

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

Seventy-five years ago this week, September 3, 1939, a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the British passenger liner Athenia in the opening hours of World War II. This tragic event is the common thread that links the nine people who are the subject of my prospective historical novel, Without Warning. Despite its historic significance as the first British ship sunk in the war, Athenia’s anniversary is likely to pass with little fanfare. Why is it that people generally are more familiar with the sinking of the Lusitania, a passenger ship sunk during World War I, than with Athenia? That is the question I want to explore with this blog. Read More

Axel Wenner-Gren, 1936

Was Athenia Rescuer Axel Wenner-Gren a Nazi Spy? Part 2

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

In the mid-1930s, the 58-year-old Swedish multimillionaire Axel Wenner-Gren was one of the wealthiest men in the world and oversaw a global business empire that included Electrolux vacuum cleaners, a Swedish arms company, and a Swedish aircraft manufacturer among others (see Blog, “Was Athenia’s Rescuer a Nazi Spy?” Aug. 1, 2014).

Well acquainted with the world’s elite businessmen, as well as politicians, celebrities, and royalty, he traveled in very exclusive circles. U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor hosted Wenner-Gren and his American-born wife, Marguerite, for a weekend at the White House in 1936. A few months later, Wenner-Gren met Hermann Gӧring, the number two man in the Nazi government. Wenner-Gren, who was educated in Germany, enjoyed business connections there that stretched back three decades, so it was not surprising that he might meet with Gӧring, particularly as both men had a keen interest in aviation. Nevertheless, within a few years Wenner-Gren’s German association would be seen by some in a more troubling light. Read More

photo of Axel Wenner-Gren

Axel Wenner-Gren: Was Athenia’s Rescuer a Nazi Spy?

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

Of all the persons associated with the sinking of the British passenger ship Athenia and the rescue of her passengers, no one is more enigmatic than the Swedish multimillionaire Axel Wenner-Gren. His yacht, Southern Cross, was the second ship to join the rescue operations the morning of September 4, 1939, and he saved 376 passengers.

When he answered Athenia’s distress call following the German U-boat attack, Wenner-Gren was one of the wealthiest men in the world, worth more than $100 million. He ran a business empire that spanned the globe. But he also was a very private man who preferred to shun the spotlight. As a result, rumors swirled about his relationship with Nazi Field Marshall Herman Gӧring, his business interests in Germany, and his motives for attempting to broker a peace accord between Germany and Great Britain.

Was Wenner-Gren a Nazi spy or simply a man out of his depth in the world of diplomacy? 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