My great-grandfather should have been a very lucky man. Born in late 1898, he managed to just catch the tail end of the First World War. He was still in training with the RAF (at the time called the Royal Flying Corps) when the war ended. By the time the Second World War started he was 41, married and working in a reserved occupation, so he was unlikely to be conscripted... except he was in the RAF reserves, so he was called up anyway.
After WWI he had stayed with the RAF for a few years and trained as an engineer. He then left, got a civilian job and started a family. In the depression of the 1930s jobs were scarce and he found himself unemployed. The only work he could find was a paper round for the local newsagent, a job normally done by children, and he joined the RAF reserves to top up this meagre income. Once he was in full time work again, he decided to keep both the newspaper delivery job and the RAF reserve income to top up his salary and allow the family to take a summer holiday each year.
This decision backfired on him when war broke out in 1939. I'm not sure exactly when he was called up, but in 1941 he found himself in Liverpool boarding the SS Britannia, headed for India. It's believed he was going to teach recruits how to fix aeroplanes and it's likely that, had he reached his destination, he would have been quite safe. It wasn't meant to be, as the SS Britannia came under attack.
The ship left Liverpool as part of a convoy of ships travelling through the dangerous European waters, but by the time she reached Africa she was on her own. By 25 March 1941 she was 600 miles off the coast of Sierra Leone and spirits were high as they approached the equator. A ship was sighted nearby but it was flying a Japanese flag and wasn't seen as a threat because Japan had not yet entered the war. Suddenly, the ship was rocked by gunfire. The Japanese flag had disappeared and a German flag raised. They had been ambushed.
The German ship, Thor, had attacked their front and rear guns, killing and injuring a number of men. The Britannia tried to fire back and to outrun the Thor, but it was apparent this was not possible. The captain made the announcement to abandon ship and those on board began to lower the lifeboats. Some of the life boats had been damaged in the initial attack, so there were not enough spaces for everyone onboard. They did their best. One account describes 47 men in a 25 man lifeboat. Those that were in the water clung to pieces of debris or made rafts. Some expected to be taken prisoner by the German ship and they threw their identification into the sea, but the rescue and imprisonment didn't happen. Whilst still on board a distress message had been sent out by the Britannia to Sierra Leone. The Germans intercepted a message back that said a navy warship was on its way at speed. Because of this, they left the scene and expected the survivors to be picked up by the navy warship. Unfortunately, it never came.
Of the 492 people on board, 243 of them survived, but my great-grandfather was not one of them. Having read the harrowing reports of the survivors, I hope he died quickly at the beginning of the attack. Most of the survivors were picked up by a ship called Cabo de Hornos after five days and were taken to Tenerife. Shockingly, one of the lifeboats was at sea for 26 days and travelled all the way to Brazil. Two seamen on board realised that although Sierra Leone was much closer, the winds and tides meant that their chances of reaching Brazil were much higher. They put the survivors onboard on strict rations of one cracker spread with condensed milk per day. 38 of them survived the journey.
In my naivety, when I originally heard about the sinking, I assumed my relative had gone down with the ship or drowned quickly because he didn't reach a lifeboat. Having read the accounts I realise that many of those who died were actually in the lifeboats or on rafts, and their deaths were not pleasant. Some were already injured and died of their wounds. Some drank sea water. For others the cause of death was sharks, loss of hope or madness.
Nearly all the survivors describe the waters as shark-infested. I imagine they were drawn by the bodies from the initial attack, but they then found a steady source of food. Some men were dragged from the rafts after they dangled their legs in the water, but mostly the men jumped to their deaths. After several days of little food or water, exposed to the elements with their skin blistering from the sun and with nothing to see except the empty ocean, many men began to lose hope. Some of them went quietly to their deaths. One survivor describes a man getting to his feet, putting his coat on and calmly stepping off the side of the boat. Some said goodbye to their fellow travellers and explained that they had had enough. Others ranted and raved, frothed at the mouth, became wild and aggressive, but all seem to have ended the same way - by jumping into the sea. Even those that survived describe hallucinations and feelings of despair.
All of this makes for distressing reading, but I'm grateful to the survivors who had the courage to bear witness and record their stories. There is an excellent website called www.ssbritannia.org which has links to survivors' stories as well as news articles and information about the ship.
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