Hi JGW,

I agree. It really is a griping story. It may have been relatively well known during the war though. At least the article mentions it being reported in the Daily News (I don’t know what city though) and other papers.

Sadly though the only two things really unusual about it is that the baby was born in the lifeboat and the owner of the ship paid for the baby’s tuition. Otherwise it is just like hundreds of other sinkings. It’s a side of the war that just didn’t get reported that well and didn’t get much in the way of books written about it. There was one movie that took place in a lifeboat that I remember seeing many years ago but it had the captain of the U-boat in the lifeboat with the survivors (I forget what happened to the U-boat that caused her captain to end up in the lifeboat) and as usual they made him the bad guy. They had him hiding a flask of water and not sharing it when everybody else was dying of thirst. If Hollywood made a movie about this sinking they would probably have the U-boat machine-gunning the lifeboat while the baby was being born.

I have read dozens of accounts of what it was like to end up in a lifeboat at sea after having your ship sunk and they are all pretty gripping. Lifeboats weren’t provisioned well enough for the number of people they would hold to survive very long and many who ended up in one died a horrible death in a very short time. There is something merchant seamen have known since day one called the rule of three’s. It goes something like this: You can only live for three weeks without food; you can only live for three days without water; you can only live for three minutes without air. Also consider that many times there were wounded people in the lifeboats too and sometimes the lifeboats were so full there wasn’t room inside for everybody and some had to hang on the sides from the water. Some lifeboats actually had ropes along the sides just for this purpose. Exposure to the elements was a killer too as there was little protection from the sun and almost no protection from the cold.

Frequently after about three days in a lifeboat some of the people in it started to die. Of course some lived much longer but it was usually a case of being able to get water from rain or being able to catch fish, turtles or birds and consume them blood and juices and all. Some also ended up in a lifeboat with fewer people than the boat was provisioned for and some found empty lifeboats or rafts along the way and were able to get the provisions they still had etc. There is no telling how many survived only because of the provisions and/or medical care given to them by the U-boat men after the sinking of their ship but it is probably a good number.

In the case of one lifeboat full of survivors from the Laconia that weren’t picked up when the rest were a survivor described what happened when they started dying of thirst. They got their one small ration of water at 6 pm each day and in the morning they routinely had to throw one or two dead bodies overboard. They were so short of water that eventually it occurred to them that giving those who were on the verge of dying anyway any water just to have them die later that night was unnecessarily endangering the rest and they just threw them overboard alive instead so that the rest could live. This account came from one of the survivors from that lifeboat that was on a History Channel special on the Laconia Incident aired on TV recently.

It is to the credit of the men that manned the merchant ships during that war that they knew a fate like this awaited them if they got caught but they went to sea anyway. Most that survived an ordeal like this also went right back to sea too. Some were torpedoed multiple times during the war.

Of course the same was true for the men that served at sea in the navies that also fought the war and the men that served in U-boats had it worse than most. As far as I can tell the little rubber rafts carried by U-boats had no provisions in them at all. That means they could only hope to survive around three days if they didn’t find water or get rescued. They certainly knew it too.

Regards,

Ken Dunn