world war II

Joseph Goebbels, chief Nazi propagandist Photo credit: historycrunch.com.

A War of Words, Part 2

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

In our last blog (July 2, 2021) we began exploring the role social media might have played in spreading disinformation about how the passenger ship Athenia met her fate on the first day of World War II. If the Internet had been available to the Nazis they could have communicated directly with the large base of national socialist sympathizers that existed in Britain, Canada, and America at the start of the war.

The Nazis initially claimed that a floating mine, exploding boiler, or mistaken torpedo from a British submarine were most likely responsible for sinking Athenia. Though easily disproved, these bogus explanations would have sounded plausible to a sympathetic audience protected by algorithms that kept their newsfeeds free of the critical accounts of Western news outlets.

But less than a week after Athenia’s sinking, the Nazi’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, launched an all-out effort to put the blame on Britain’s new First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Goebbels had concocted a story that would have had irresistible appeal for Internet conspiracy theorists. He claimed that Churchill had planted a bomb on board Athenia, timed to explode when the ship would be well out to sea, causing it to sink, kill American passengers, and bring the United States into the war against Germany.

At the time, hardly anyone outside of Germany gave this story any credence. Goebbels embellished the story with subsequent details, but they were easily debunked. Had the Internet been available, he could have distributed his lies directly to a widespread sympathetic audience through like-minded influencers. Such circulation might have allowed the “alternate facts” to take root before authorities could respond with more plausible explanations.

To bolster his story, Goebbels claimed that shipping agents were told not to book German citizens on board for fear they would uncover Churchill’s ruse; that several rescue ships “mysteriously” appeared in the area even though Athenia never sent a distress signal; and that the ship was ultimately sunk by gunfire from British destroyers so that no evidence of Churchill’s scheme would survive. None of the claims were true, but the Internet could have allowed Goebbels to keep the Allies off balance by issuing a new claim as soon as the previous claim was debunked. With claims and counter-claims ricocheting around individuals’ newsfeeds, confusion and skepticism might have seriously undermined the Allies’ early war efforts.

Even without the Internet, the United States, which announced it would remain neutral, refrained from blaming Germany for sinking Athenia in the absence of irrefutable proof. It was a sign of the political strength wielded by isolationists and the German American Bund.

Indeed, the Nazi’s denial of responsibility for the attack on Athenia left the question unanswered until the Nuremberg trials in 1946, when Grand Admiral of the German Navy Karl Dӧnitz confirmed U-30 sank Athenia on the first day of the war.

Cody Ottinger

From Page to Screen, Part 3

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

I’m pausing our chronicle of the beginning of World War II to return to my periodic subject of bringing Athenia’s story to a wider audience. One of the principal reasons I wrote my novel, “Without Warning,” and started blogging four years ago was to make more people aware of this long-forgotten tragedy. Many who read the book encouraged me to make a film about it, and that has brought us to this point.

A documentary film about Athenia has a chance to reach more people, especially because the story is so compelling. The passengers aboard Athenia were ordinary people like you and me. But when faced with the possibility of dying on a sinking ship, they calmly helped each other into lifeboats to escape. You can’t help but be inspired by their selfless actions – stepping aside to let others board a lifeboat before them, diving into cold Atlantic waters to save loved ones, and even returning to the sinking ship to rescue one last person minutes before Athenia slipped beneath the sea.

To tell the story effectively requires compelling images to accompany the recollections of the nine survivors we interviewed. The images we need – historic photos, newsreel footage, filmed re-enactments, and animation – can be costly. That is why later this month we will launch a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to help secure images needed for “Athenia’s Last Voyage.”

It is a simple, straightforward way to raise the funds we need to keep our effort moving forward while we apply for filmmaking grants. The 30-day campaign will feature numerous videos with members of our production crew and some of the survivors featured in our documentary. Like many crowdfunding campaigns, ours will offer a variety of premiums for different levels of contributions. For example, donating a $50 or more will allow you to be listed in our film’s end credits.

Finally, the campaign will place our project in front of a broader public for the first time. It will be an opportunity to gauge the level of public interest in and enthusiasm for “Athenia’s Last Voyage,” and will tell us if we taking the right approach with our story.

If you are interested in helping us out with a donation, here is the link;
Athenia’s Last Voyage: Documentary

Liberty Ship construction stages Photo credit: Rare Historical Photos.

Battle of the Atlantic, Part 4

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

When the United States established a Maritime Commission to oversee the modernization of its fleet of merchant ships during World War II, it did so with typical American gusto. By September, 1941, the country began turning out mass-produced freighters known as “Liberty Ships.”
The first ship was named the “S.S. Patrick Henry” and when she was launched by President Franklin Roosevelt, he recalled the Revolutionary War hero’s quote, “Give me liberty or give me death.” These ships, Roosevelt said, would bring liberty to Europe. His promise became the identity of the entire class of ships.
Eighteen shipyards in the U.S. began turning out Liberty Ships. Each ship was made up of some 250,000 standardized parts made in locations across the country. These parts were fabricated into 250-ton sections that were delivered to the shipyards and welded together to produce a serviceable vessel capable of carrying up to 10,000 tons of cargo at a top speed of 11 knots. Pre-fabrication and assembly-line techniques allowed the original 230-day construction schedule to be reduced to an average of 42 days. By 1943, the shipyards as a group were turning out three ships a day.
After Patrick Henry, the initial ships were named after the signers of the Declaration of Independence and other famous Americans. Later in the war, any group that could raise $2 million in war bonds could propose a name. Usually it was the name of a deceased person, but not always. The New York City USO Club (a club for military personnel) proved so adept at raising funds that two ships were named in honor of the organization: “S.S. Stage Door Canteen” and “S.S. USO.”
Liberty Ships were affectionately dubbed “ugly ducklings” by Time Magazine, but they were certainly not sitting ducks. Each ship was armed with a stern-mounted 4-inch deck gun and several anti-aircraft guns. The weapons were manned by U.S. Navy personnel, while members of the ship’s civilian 44-man crew were trained to replace injured servicemen if necessary.
In September, 1942, the “S.S. Stephen Hopkins” engaged in a one-on-one gun battle with the German commerce raider “Stier.” Although the Hopkins was badly damaged, she became the first American ship to sink a German surface warship.
By 1943, the United States was turning our more cargo ships than could be sunk by German U-boats, helping to keep up a steady delivery of wartime supplies and raw materials to the British Isles and the Soviet Union. The tide of the Battle of the Atlantic had turned in the Allies’ favor, fulfilling President Roosevelt’s prophecy.

Destroyer escorts as depicted in the movie "Greyhound."

Battle of the Atlantic, Part 2

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

“Greyhound,” the new World War II movie starring Tom Hanks, depicts a U.S. Navy destroyer’s harrowing effort to protect a convoy of ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean from North America to the British Isles. The voyage takes place in early 1942, shortly after the United States entered the war, and at a time when German U-boats held the upper hand in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Convoys were an attempt to counter the ever-present U-boat threat to Allied merchant shipping. The threat was greatest in the mid-Atlantic “black pit,” roughly 50,000 square miles that could not be protected because of the limited range of Allied land-based aircraft.

The convoy – a grouping of merchant ships in a disciplined formation protected by a squadron of warships – was successfully employed late in World War I. Initially, merchant sea captains had been reluctant to sail in tight formations, fearful of collisions in the foggy, storm-tossed North Atlantic. Convoys, they said, would present attractive targets for U-boats, and could sail only as fast as the slowest ship, thus prolonging exposure to attack.

But as U-boats sank an increasing number of merchant ships sailing alone in World War I, the wisdom of the convoy system became apparent. While it took three years of naval warfare before Britain instituted convoys in World War I, it took the British Admiralty less than a week following Athenia’s sinking to establish the convoy system in World War II.

A convoy might consist of from 45 to 60 merchant ships, arranged in nine to twelve columns, each ship maintaining 900 yards from the ship in front of it. Each of the columns was separated by 1,000 yards. The formations could be up to four miles wide and two miles long, with the most vulnerable ships – troop carriers and tankers – in the center. A convoy was protected by ten or more escort warships, depending on availability and convoy size. As depicted in “Greyhound,” these escorts were mostly small, fast and maneuverable: typically destroyers and corvettes, the latter being a smaller, British-designed ship tailored for escort duty.

The German tactic of the “wolf pack,” a gathering of up to a dozen or more U-boats, was developed to conduct coordinated attacks on convoy formations. Wolf packs proved effective through the first half of the war, but as “Greyhound” makes clear, these sea battles always carried some risks for U-boat captains.

By mid-1943, Allied advances in detecting, locating, and attacking U-boats turned the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic. In May of that year, U-boats sank 34 merchant ships, but at a cost of 34 U-boats, a one-to-one ratio that Germany could not sustain.

Although sporadic attacks on convoys would continue through the final two years of the war, the German navy’s U-boat commander, Admiral Karl Doenitz, acknowledged Germany had lost the Battle of the Atlantic that summer of 1943.

Nine Athenia survivors attended the commemorative Halifax luncheon. They are, from left, Heather Watts, Barbara Gunyon, Geoffrey Etherington, Margaret Desanti, Scott Calder, Cynthia Gustafson, Vivian Collver, Jacqueline Bullock, and Phillip Gunyon. Photo credit: Kay Sanger

An Athenia “Reunion”

by Thomas Sanger • Interviews • 1 Comment

On Sept. 3, 2019, nearly 60 people assembled for a luncheon in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the sinking of a British passenger ship on the first day of World War II. They came from four Canadian provinces and several American states, and ranged in age from pre-teens to a nonagenarian. They were survivors and descendants of survivors of a German U-boat attack that sank the TSS Athenia.

Eight decades have caused the Athenia tragedy to fade from our collective memory. Over the years, survivors and descendants have told their family stories to local audiences, given interviews to news media, published accounts of their experiences, and contributed to websites devoted to the war. Most of these activities have taken place in relative isolation.

Until last Sept. 3, no one had mounted a physical event to bring together the dwindling number of survivors. The 80th anniversary of the sinking motivated three Canadian survivors – Vivian Collver, Phillip Gunyon, and Heather Watts – to reach out to contacts they had gathered over the years, people with a family or professional connection to Athenia. When the email invitations to attend a commemorative luncheon at the Halifax Marriott Harbourfront Hotel, there were close to 75 names on the list.

The organizers expected perhaps 25 people would respond. In fact twice that many said they planned to come. As the grandson of a survivor and author of a historical novel based on the sinking, Without Warning, I was pleased to attend the luncheon. (Later that evening, I was honored to tell Athenia’s story with an illustrated lecture at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, a few blocks from the Marriott Harbourfront.)

The luncheon was the first organized a “reunion” for Athenia survivors, and as they began to gather in a beautiful hotel dining room overlooking Halifax Harbor, the atmosphere was electric. Most of them were meeting for the first time. It struck me that much of the energy in the room derived from the participants’ opportunity to associate with such a large gathering of people who shared their experiences, emotions, and the unseen scars the sinking visited upon their families. Despite their differing ages and backgrounds, they also shared a bond that acknowledged the courage and sacrifice of their forebears. Laughter and occasional tears punctuated the afternoon as guests exchanged stories and worked through their understanding of how those long-ago events had shaped their lives.

Six other survivors – Jacqueline Bullock, George (Scott) Calder, Margaret Desanti, Geoffrey Etherington, Barbara Gunyon, and Cynthia Gustafson – joined Vivian, Phil, and Heather in Halifax. All of the nine had been children traveling with parents when their ship was torpedoed. They credited their parents’ positive attitude throughout the ordeal for keeping them from understanding the dangers they were facing at the time.

For descendants it was a chance to confirm with survivors the details of family stories, to gain insights, and to commiserate over the emotional toll the sinking had on their parents or grandparents. Some luncheon guests revealed their parents never spoke to them about what they had endured, leaving them with questions that will never be answered.

The afternoon left me with a renewed understanding that history doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens to people. The impact of events radiate out like the ever widening ripples from a stone dropped in water. Even eighty years later, the ripples of Athenia’s sinking continue to affect those who survived it.

Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, Halifax, Nova Scotia Photo credit: Wikipedia

Athenia’s 80th Anniversary

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

At the start of World War II, the passenger ship Athenia was torpedoed by a German submarine and became the first British ship sunk by the Nazis in the war. While Athenia’s story has faded over the intervening decades, people intent on keeping her memory alive will assemble in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Sept. 3, 2019, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the sinking.

Athenia was bound for Canada with 1,418 souls aboard, when she was torpedoed by a German U-boat northwest of Ireland. One hundred twelve passengers and crew members died as a result of the attack that shocked the world on the first day of the war. By the end of the war, however, Athenia’s sinking had seemingly been lost in a tangle of Nazi denials and overrun by the scale of the war’s carnage.

Come Sept. 3, Athenia’s memory will be revived when nearly a dozen survivors and descendants of survivors meet in Halifax, the city that welcomed 236 passengers from the ship after they were picked up at sea by an American freighter 80 years ago.

The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, located on the city’s historic waterfront, will host an evening program devoted to the Athenia. I am honored to be the featured speaker and hope to share the dais with survivors telling their stories of survival. The program is open to the public and will begin at 6:30 p.m. The museum will remain open until 8 p.m.

Eighty years ago, today’s remaining survivors were children traveling with their parents when Athenia sailed into harm’s way. With most now in their mid to late 80s, the gathering presents a rare opportunity to preserve their eye-witness accounts for our documentary film. Our film crew will be on hand for several days to conduct one-on-one interviews with the survivors and descendants about their families’ encounter with history.

Athenia should not be forgotten, nor should the sacrifice of the men, women, and children who died that night in the North Atlantic when their ship was torpedoed. Our documentary is dedicated to preserving their memory and Athenia’s place in history.

Fritz-Julius Lemp, U-30 commander, confers with Karl Doenitz, chief of U-boat operations. Photo credit: Galway Advertiser

Why Don’t We Remember Athenia? Part 2

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

When Oberleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp torpedoed and sank the British passenger ship Athenia at the beginning of World War II, he did not break radio silence to report his attack to his superiors. His decision led Germany’s Nazi government to deny responsibility for the sinking, a position they maintained for the duration of the war. That denial is undoubtedly a factor contributing to Athenia’s relative obscurity in historical accounts of the war (see blog, Nov. 30, 2018). 

The war was not quite nine hours old on Sept. 3, 1939, when Lemp, in command of U-30, torpedoed what he believed was a legitimate wartime target – an armed merchant cruiser. When he came to the surface after nightfall to assess how fast the ship was sinking, he discovered he had attacked an unarmed passenger ship, exactly the type of target his operational orders told him to avoid.

Lemp left the scene without breaking radio silence because, he later said, he did not want to betray his position to the British. Whatever Lemp’s reason for not reporting his action, it caught the German government flat-footed the next morning when news of a U-boat attack on an unarmed passenger ship began to circulate. Nazi officials immediately checked with naval authorities and received assurances that no U-boats had reported any action in the vicinity of the incident, which was correct but misleading.  Some U-boats had not reported at all, including U-30.  

The Nazis were eager to deny responsibility for the sinking because it gave England a major propaganda tool to use against Germany. Far worse, however, was the possibility that the attack on Athenia had killed Americans, which might bring the United States into the war. Germany’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs wasted no time the morning of Sept. 4, 1939, in offering Americans an official German denial of any responsibility for sinking Athenia. To assure world opinion that Germany was abiding by international treaties, Chancellor Adolf Hitler issued an order to all naval units that same day, warning that no passenger ships were to be attacked under any circumstances.

When Athenia survivors began disembarking in Galway and Glasgow a day later, they made it clear they thought their ship had been torpedoed and several said they had seen the submarine. In response the German press speculated Athenia may have been mistakenly attacked by a British submarine or had struck a floating mine. Within days, however, the Nazi’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, published an account that Britain’s new First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had planted a bomb on board Athenia in order to sink the ship, kill American passengers, and bring the United States into the war against Germany. 

Britain vehemently denied the allegations and few outside of Germany believed the Nazi assertions. Even so, the United States, which announced it would be a neutral party in newly declared war, refrained from blaming Germany in the absence of irrefutable proof, a sign of the isolationists’ political strength in the U.S.

The Churchill story had been circulating for two weeks when Lemp returned to his base in Wilhelmshaven and reported to Karl Dӧnitz, Germany’s submarine fleet commander, that he sank Athenia. At Hitler’s direction, German officials continued to deny responsibility for Athenia’s sinking through the remainder of the war.

In next month’s blog: The truth is finally revealed.

Crew from H.M.S. Bulldog prepares to board U-110 Photo credit: Wikipedia

Lemp’s Fatal Mistake

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

The man who sank the unarmed British passenger ship Athenia on the first day of World War II, Kapitanleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp, had managed to become a “U-boat Ace” in the 20 months of the war since his tragic mistake. Lemp had been credited with 22 ships sunk or damaged and awarded the Knights Cross, Germany’s highest award for valor. But in May of 1941 the brash, young U-boat commander’s luck was about to run out.

Two days after the Enigma code books for June were taken off the German trawler München (see blog post for Aug. 6. 2018), Lemp, now in command of U-110, attacked a westbound convoy off Greenland in the middle of the day. He fired a fan of four torpedoes at a horizon filled with Allied ships. Two shots struck home, adding two ships to Lemp’s tally. His third torpedo missed, and the fourth failed to launch from its tube. As Lemp waited at periscope depth to reset his forth torpedo for another shot, he was discovered by a British corvette that crippled U-110 with a depth charge attack.

Commander Joe Baker-Cresswell, the man in charge of the convoy escorts, was surprised to see U-110 pop to the surface in front of his flagship, H.M.S. Bulldog. He ordered his destroyer ahead at full speed, intent on ramming the U-boat, but thought better of it when he realized the Germans were abandoning ship. At almost that same instant, Kapitanleutnant Lemp was telling his radio operator not to worry about destroying the boat’s Enigma machine and code books, and to get off the ship immediately because it was sinking.

But U-110 did not sink, at least not immediately. Sensing a unique opportunity, Baker-Cresswell brought Bulldog to a stop just near U-boat He put David Balme, a 20-year-old sub-lieutenant, in charge of a boarding party and sent them off in small boat with instructions to gather up any signal books he could find on the submarine.

When they were nearly alongside the U-boat, their small boat was swept up by a large swell and smashed onto U-110’s deck. The men scrambled out onto the U-boat and climbed to the top of the conning tower, where Balme was surprised to find the entry hatch closed tight. Why close a hatch if the boat was intended to sink, he wondered? He opened the hatch and had to holster his revolver to climb down the ladder, feeling totally exposed if any Germans were still aboard.

“This was a nasty moment,” Balme later wrote, “one looked down below and wondered how many Germans were there. I went down the ladder to the lower conning tower where there was a similar closed hatch. On opening this hatch I found the control room deserted! Hatches leading forward and aft were open and all lighting on.”

He could hear air escaping somewhere in the U-boat, but there was no hint of chlorine, a deadly gas that could be produced by the boat’s batteries being submerged in seawater. For young Balme, the discoveries were just beginning, as we will see in our next blog.

The German Enigma encryption device scrambled electrical impulses so that a different letter lit up than the letter on the key struck by the operator. Photo credit: Los Angeles Times

The Mystery of Enigma

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

During World War II, German armed forces communicated via the now famous Enigma cipher device. The machine, about the size of a typewriter, encrypted messages that could not be deciphered except by another Enigma device. Both machines had to be calibrated with the same three-letter code for the system to work.

The Germans were so confident of their encryption system that they believed their enemies were incapable of breaking the Enigma code. Here’s why.

Enigma had a keyboard resembling that of a typewriter. Above the keyboard, where a typewriter’s keys would move to strike a letter on paper, the Enigma had a “lightboard.” The lightboard had the same arrangement of letters as the keyboard, with each letter able to light up individually. Striking a key on the keyboard caused a different letter to light up on the lightboard. This was because the keyboard key sent an electric impulse through a series of scrambling elements inside the Enigma before it reached a letter on the lightboard.

Above the lightboard, where a typewriter would have a platen roller to receive a piece of paper, Enigma had three wheels mounted side-by-side on a spindle. Each wheel was nearly four inches in diameter and had twenty-six electrical contact points that corresponded to the letters of the alphabet. The internal wiring of the wheels differed, so that one wheel might receive an electrical impulse through its letter “H” and output the impulse through a different letter, say its “C.” Each wheel thus scrambled the signal to change the letter.

The first wheel advanced to its next letter every time a key was struck on the keyboard. At some point in its rotation, the first wheel caused the second wheel to advance to its next letter. Likewise, the second wheel had a tripping point that caused the third wheel to advance one letter. After the impulse passed through the three wheels, a “reflector” sent the impulse back through the wheels via a different route. The reflector function made Enigma self-reciprocal, so that a receiving machine set up identical to the sending machine could decrypt the message.

The Enigma operator had five wheels from which to choose the three to place on the spindle. The wheels were designated by Roman numerals and each day, the wheels and their order on the spindle was changed, as was the starting letter setting for each wheel.

To complicate matters even more, Enigma had an additional scrambling element called a plugboard, which was located below the keyboard and resembled a small telephone switchboard. The plugboard mirrored the keyboard, with the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, each with a plug receptacle below it. The operator could randomly pair two letters by plugging a cable into each letter’s receptacle. As many as ten pairs of letters might be connected for the day’s setting.

Before the electrical impulse from the keyboard reached the first wheel, it went through the plugboard, where it might be changed to a different letter. Likewise, after the impulse went through the wheels it returned through the plugboard, possibly changing letters again, before going to the lightboard to cause a letter to light up.

The operator sending the message copied down the letters from the lightboard and transmitted them via Morse code in four- or five-letter groups. The operator on the receiving end keyed the letter groups into an Enigma machine with identical settings and copied down the letters appearing on the lightboard to decrypt the message.

The number of possible configurations totaled 3 X 10 with 114 zeros behind it. Small wonder, then, that the Germans considered their communications to be unbreakable.

Nevertheless, the Enigma code was broken. It was an effort that involved spies, cryptographers, mathematicians, and daring-do on the high seas, as we will see in succeeding blogs.

Signature of Gustav "Gus" Anderson appears on sworn document claiming Athenia carried munitions when it was attacked. Photo credit: U.S. National Archives

The Curious Case of Gustav Anderson

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

The presumed discovery of the British passenger ship Athenia’s wreck site holds the potential to resolve a brief controversy that flared in the wake of the ship’s sinking on Sept. 4, 1939. As noted in an earlier blog, Germany denied that one of its submarines had torpedoed Athenia the evening of Sept. 3, the same day Britain entered World War II.

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.

The affidavits provided many dramatic and vivid accounts of the explosion that shook Athenia. Most of the American passengers did not see a submarine, but a dozen or more declared they saw its silhouette and a few even said the U-boat fired its deck gun at the ship. One passenger, however, had a perspective different from all the rest and it captured headlines for several days in American, British and German newspapers.

The testimony came from Gustav Anderson, who lived in Evanston, IL, and operated a tour agency. Anderson had taken tours to Europe every summer for many years and had sailed so often aboard Athenia that he was well known to the ship’s officers and several members of the crew.

Under questioning by three members of Congress, Anderson swore under oath that he had spoken to Athenia Chief Officer Barnet Copland, who said the ship was carrying guns and ammunition for Canadian coastal defenses in its holds and added that the ship would be outfitted as an armed merchant cruiser for her return sailing. The fact that Athenia’s decks had been “stiffened” so that she could be converted to an armed cruiser, Anderson said, was common knowledge among the passengers. He also claimed Athenia was ultimately sunk by gunfire from the British destroyers that arrived shortly before sunrise, Sept. 4, to assist rescue operations. Regardless of who was responsible for sinking Athenia, Anderson’s assertions that the ship had been carrying munitions meant that it would have been a legitimate wartime target.

The British government reacted immediately to Anderson’s testimony, categorically denying each of his assertions. Chief Officer Copland filed a sworn statement that, while he was acquainted with Gustav Anderson, he had never spoken to him about the subject of guns being carried in the ship’s hold, and that in fact the ship had carried no munitions whatsoever.

After the story of Anderson’s testimony gained wide circulation in the press beginning in late October 1939, several Athenia survivors came forward to dispute his assertions. In a letter to the New York Times, passenger Cathleen Schurr said she had spent a great deal of time with Anderson aboard the rescue ships Southern Cross and City of Flint, and in all that time she never heard him say anything about there being guns aboard Athenia.

Other passengers offered similar observations in sworn statements, noting Anderson never mentioned the presence of guns even when they specifically discussed the reasons why their ship might have been attacked. None of the passengers heard naval guns firing before Athenia finally sank late in the morning of Sept. 4. They also said they never heard any mention of Athenia’s decks being stiffened, disputing Anderson’s claim that this was “common knowledge” among passengers.

Even City of Flint’s captain, Joseph Gainard, raised questions about Anderson’s veracity. According to Captain Gainard, Anderson claimed he saw the torpedo approaching Athenia and was very anxious to radio a story to the press when he came on board Sept. 4. But a month later, Anderson said in his affidavit that he was in the dining saloon when the torpedo struck.

As City of Flint made its way to Halifax, Nova Scotia, with 236 survivors crowded on board, Gainard blocked Anderson’s efforts to radio his “eye-witness” account of the Athenia disaster to a New York newspaper. The captain gave priority to messages between survivors aboard ship and their loved ones in Glasgow and Galway.

The question remained why Anderson concocted such blatantly false accounts of events? One answer might have to do with his personality. Many persons who knew him or traveled with him described the man as someone who loved being in the spotlight. His exaggerations could be seen as innocent attempts at self-aggrandizement or even as efforts to publicize his travel business.

But his sensational charges may not have been so innocent. Anderson reportedly enjoyed good connections with key German government officials. On board City of Flint he told Captain Gainard that he had done a great deal of espionage work for Idaho Republican Sen. William Borah, an avowed isolationist, although he did not explain the nature of the work. By raising questions about the circumstances under which Athenia was attacked, Anderson’s statements gave cover to the isolationists who wanted the United States to remain neutral, even though Americans lives had been lost. Ultimately America stayed out of the conflict for two more years until the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.