The sinking of the Athenia

On the evening of 3 September 1939, at around 7.40 p.m., less than nine hours after Great Britain declared war on Germany, the German submarine U-30 torpedoed the British passenger liner SS Athenia in the Atlantic, some 60 nautical miles south of the islet of Rockall. The ship was sailing from Glasgow and Liverpool to Canada with more than 1,400 people on board, most of them civilians fleeing Europe and the war. She sank before noon the next day. Between 112 and 117 people died, including 28 citizens of the neutral United States. The commander of U-30, Oberleutnant zur See Fritz-Julius Lemp, attacked without warning, contrary to the orders the German submarines had received that same day. Throughout the war the authorities of the Third Reich denied that they had sunk the ship, and their propaganda blamed the British.

Popular chronologies call the Athenia a cruise ship, give the death toll as 112 and state that the Battle of the Atlantic began on that day. These statements need qualifying. The Athenia was not a cruise ship but a regular passenger liner running between Great Britain and Canada. The number of victims varies from source to source, as discussed below. And the name “Battle of the Atlantic” was coined only a year and a half later. The sinking of the Athenia is nevertheless generally regarded as its beginning.

The last voyage

The Athenia was a steamship of 13,465 gross register tons, built by the Fairfield yard at Govan near Glasgow and entering service in 1923. Together with her sister ship Letitia she was the largest vessel of the Scottish Donaldson Line, which in 1936 took the name Donaldson Atlantic Line. In summer she sailed from Glasgow and Liverpool to Quebec and Montreal, and in winter, when the St Lawrence froze, to Halifax. She had carried tens of thousands of emigrants to Canada.

On 1 September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland, the Athenia, under the command of Captain James Cook, sailed from Glasgow. She called at Belfast and at Liverpool, which she left on the afternoon of 2 September, unescorted, bound for Montreal. The threat of war had set off a rush on the shipping offices in Great Britain. The ship, which had special permission to take more people than usual, was carrying 1,102 or 1,103 passengers (the sources differ by one person) and 315 crew. According to various counts, the passengers included some 470 Canadians, more than 300 Americans, British and Irish travellers, and refugees from Central Europe, among them Poles and Jews from Germany and Austria (some sources even speak of several hundred Jewish refugees). There were tourists, students, families with children and people escaping Nazi persecution.

On the morning of Sunday 3 September the ship passed the north coast of Ireland and headed out into the open ocean. At 11.15 a.m. the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced on the radio that Great Britain was at war with Germany. Precautions were taken aboard the Athenia: according to some witnesses, by evening the ship was sailing blacked out.

The orders of 3 September

The Kriegsmarine entered the war with a small submarine fleet. Of the 57 U-boats at its disposal, only some could operate in the Atlantic, and Plan Z, which envisaged building several hundred, was only just getting under way. A dozen or so ocean-going U-boats had put to sea in the second half of August to take up positions west of the British Isles and at the entrances to the English Channel. U-30, a Type VIIA boat, had left Wilhelmshaven on 22 August.

On 3 September, once the British ultimatum had expired, the Naval High Command (OKM) signalled its ships to open hostilities against Great Britain immediately. The instructions for submarines required them to wage war on merchant shipping strictly in accordance with the German prize regulations, that is, according to the rules of maritime law that Germany had accepted when it acceded in 1936 to the London Protocol on submarine warfare. The protocol restated the provisions of the London Naval Treaty of 1930 and of the treaty of 1936: a submarine could stop and search a merchant ship, but could sink her only after ensuring the safety of her passengers and crew. Lifeboats on the open sea were not considered a place of safety unless land or another ship was close by. Warships, troop transports, armed merchant cruisers and ships sailing in convoy under naval escort or offering resistance could be attacked without warning.

On the same day the OKM ordered that French ships were not to be attacked. France too had declared war on Germany, with effect from 5 p.m., but Berlin was counting on it not taking any serious action and wished not to provoke it. Operations against France were to begin only if France opened fire first. This restriction remained in force for several weeks. The commander of the U-boat arm, Commodore Karl Dönitz, passed the orders on, and his instructions expressly forbade attacks on passenger ships.

The attack

On the afternoon of 3 September, at around 4.30 p.m., lookouts on U-30 sighted a large ship sailing alone near Rockall. The 26-year-old Fritz-Julius Lemp, who had commanded the boat since November 1938, shadowed her for about three hours. He concluded that he was looking at an armed merchant cruiser or a troopship, a target that could be attacked without warning. He later explained this by saying that the ship was zigzagging, blacked out and far from the usual routes. Earlier that day the boat had received a warning from headquarters about British armed merchantmen. Whether the Athenia really was zigzagging and blacked out while U-30 was shadowing her remains disputed: some survivors denied it, while others confirmed that the lights had been put out after dark. What is certain is that Lemp did not make sure what he was attacking, although the silhouette of a large single-funnelled passenger liner was well known.

At around 7.40 p.m. U-30 fired two torpedoes from periscope depth – three, according to some sources. One struck the ship on the port side, in the area of the engine room and the after hold. The second malfunctioned and, according to the crew’s account, nearly endangered the submarine itself. Some survivors later said that the U-boat had shelled the ship with its deck gun. Researchers into the incident believe that what they saw was more probably the explosion of the faulty torpedo near the boat. The blast destroyed the stairways to the passenger accommodation and the engine room. Most of the dead were in that part of the ship.

The Athenia began to settle by the stern but did not sink at once. The radio operator sent out an SOS with the ship’s position. The crew lowered the lifeboats, and the passengers waited all night for rescue on a rough sea. Lemp, who had surfaced to observe the results of the attack, quickly realised from listening to radio traffic that he had torpedoed a passenger ship. He gave no help to the survivors, did not report the attack to headquarters and sailed away. He ordered his crew to keep the whole affair secret.

Rescue

Several vessels answered the Athenia’s call. The first to arrive during the night were the Norwegian merchant ship Knute Nelson and the Swedish yacht Southern Cross, belonging to the industrialist Axel Wenner-Gren. Later came the American freighter City of Flint and the British destroyers HMS Electra, Escort and Fame. The commander of Electra directed the rescue, while Fame searched the area for the submarine.

The rescue, carried out in darkness and a heavy swell, cost further lives. One of the lifeboats, made fast at the stern of the Knute Nelson, was drawn under the ship’s turning propeller. Around fifty people in it were killed. Towards morning another lifeboat capsized under the stern of the Southern Cross, killing about ten people. Several were crushed while transferring from the lifeboats to the destroyers; others fell overboard or died of exposure and their injuries. Some 1,300 people survived. The Knute Nelson landed around 450 survivors at Galway in neutral Ireland, the destroyers took theirs to Greenock on the Clyde, and the City of Flint carried more than two hundred to Halifax. The Athenia sank stern first at around 10.40 a.m. on 4 September.

The death tolls given in the sources differ. The figure most often found is 112 dead, comprising 93 passengers and 19 crew, which is the figure adopted, among others, by German historians of the submarine war. Other sources, which also count those who died later of their injuries, give 117 victims (98 passengers and 19 crew). Among the dead were 54 Canadians and 28 Americans. Ten-year-old Margaret Hayworth from Hamilton, Ontario, who died of her injuries, became in Canada, then entering the war, a symbol of the conflict’s first victims, and her funeral drew large crowds.

Hitler bans attacks on passenger ships

News of the torpedoing of the Athenia reached London that same evening, 3 September. For some hours the Admiralty had once again had as its First Lord Winston Churchill, whom Chamberlain had appointed that day to his War Cabinet. The British concluded that from the first day Germany was waging unrestricted submarine warfare, the same kind that in 1915 had led to the sinking of the Lusitania and in 1917 had drawn the United States into the First World War.

In Berlin the news was received with consternation. The naval leadership did not know which boat could have made the attack, since Lemp was keeping silent, and at first genuinely believed that no U-boat had been in the area. Adolf Hitler was counting on reaching an accommodation with London and Paris once Poland had been quickly defeated, and above all wanted to avoid the impression that the sinking of a liner full of civilians, Americans among them, would make in the United States. On 4 September, on his orders, Dönitz instructed the submarines that until further notice passenger ships were not to be attacked, even those sailing in convoy, whatever their flag. The order to observe the prize regulations strictly was also repeated. U-boat commanders on the whole complied. Lemp too, in the following days, stopped freighters, allowed their crews to take to the boats and only then sank them.

The lie about the Athenia

As early as 4 September the German authorities officially denied that a German vessel had sunk the Athenia, and propaganda put forward versions involving a British mine or an outrage staged by the British themselves. The propaganda ministry of Joseph Goebbels developed the thesis that the ship had been sunk on Churchill’s orders in order to stir up public opinion in neutral countries and draw America into the war. On 16 September, at the request of the Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, assured the American naval attaché that the reports of all the boats had established beyond any doubt that the Athenia had not been sunk by a German U-boat. In reality not all the boats had yet returned to port, and those at sea were keeping radio silence.

U-30 put into Wilhelmshaven on 27 September. Lemp reported to Dönitz that it was he who had torpedoed the Athenia, and he was summoned to Berlin. The naval command decided that he had acted in good faith, so he was not court-martialled. Hitler, however, ordered that the affair be kept entirely secret. The page for 3 September was removed from U-30’s war diary and replaced with a new one placing the boat much further from where the ship sank, and the mention of the Athenia disappeared from Dönitz’s diary. The crew were sworn to silence. At the end of October 1939 the party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, published an article headlined “Churchill sank the Athenia”, and the German Foreign Office issued a pamphlet in several languages advancing the same thesis.

The propaganda did not convince the Americans. In a Gallup poll taken in the autumn of 1939 some 60 per cent of respondents blamed Germany and only 9 per cent the British. The United States ambassador in London, Joseph P. Kennedy, sent his 22-year-old son, John F. Kennedy, to Glasgow to look after the American survivors. Even so, the sinking of the Athenia did not have the impact in the United States that the Lusitania had had in 1915. On the evening of 3 September President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced in a fireside chat that the country would remain neutral, and on 5 September he proclaimed the arms embargo laid down in the Neutrality Act.

The truth came out only after the war. One of U-30’s crew, Adolf Schmidt, who had become a British prisoner, made a statement after the war that he had seen the ship sinking and had been made to swear silence. In January 1946 a statement by Dönitz was read before the International Military Tribunal, in which he admitted that the Athenia had been torpedoed by U-30 and that the affair had been covered up, including by falsifying the boat’s log. The Athenia case was one of the counts against Raeder. Lemp himself was no longer alive: he had been killed on 9 May 1941, when the British captured his boat U-110 together with its Enigma cipher machine and secret documents.

Significance: the beginning of the Battle of the Atlantic

The sinking of the Athenia was an accident, not a deliberate opening of unrestricted submarine warfare. In the first weeks of the war Germany genuinely did try to observe the prize rules in the Atlantic. But the British, who remembered the First World War, decided from the outset that they had to defend themselves as if those rules did not exist. The introduction of convoys was speeded up: the first left British ports on 7 September, and on 16 September the first convoy to Great Britain sailed from Halifax in Canada. Merchant ships began to be armed, which in turn gave Germany an argument for attacking them without warning. The first weeks of the war also showed that Hitler directed the navy’s operations with politics in mind: he wanted to avoid provoking France and the United States and to keep open the road to an accommodation with London.

These restrictions soon melted away. By the end of September Germany had permitted attacks without warning on ships that used their radio after being stopped or sailed without lights, and had lifted the protection from French shipping, and on 17 October 1939 it authorised submarines to attack without warning all ships identified as hostile. In August 1940 Hitler proclaimed a total blockade of the British Isles. From then on German submarines in practice waged unrestricted war on shipping, and the British did the same in the waters where they operated. The Nuremberg tribunal did not convict Dönitz of violating the London Protocol, because it found that the British Admiralty and the US Navy in the Pacific had done the same.

The name “Battle of the Atlantic” was introduced by Churchill in March 1941, when British shipping losses began to threaten the country’s supplies. Historians have nevertheless accepted that the struggle for the sea lanes between America and Great Britain lasted without a break from 3 September 1939 until Germany’s surrender in May 1945, and they regard the torpedoing of the Athenia as its first act. It was the longest campaign of the Second World War. On its outcome depended whether Great Britain would survive and whether the United States could ship to Europe the army that landed in France in 1944. The first ship sunk by a U-boat in this war was carrying refugees, women and children. It foreshadowed what the war at sea would be in the years to come.