The sinking of the Laconia

On the evening of 12 September 1942 the German submarine U-156, commanded by Korvettenkapitän Werner Hartenstein, torpedoed the British troopship Laconia in the central Atlantic. The ship was sailing alone northwards from Cape Town with some 2,700 people aboard: her crew, British servicemen, women and children, about a hundred Polish soldiers and nearly 1,800 Italian prisoners of war. When Hartenstein realised whom he had sunk, he began a rescue operation, which was joined by two other U-boats, an Italian submarine and French warships from West Africa. Four days later an American bomber attacked U-156 while she was crowded with survivors. Admiral Karl Dönitz responded with an order of 17 September forbidding U-boat crews to rescue survivors. This so-called Laconia Order became after the war one of the main charges against him at Nuremberg.

It is often said that the ship went down off the coast of West Africa. That is a simplification: the Laconia sank in the open ocean, roughly halfway between the coast of Liberia and Ascension Island, several hundred nautical miles from the nearest land, which was of enormous consequence for the fate of the survivors.

U-boats in the South Atlantic

In the summer of 1942, after withdrawing his boats from the coast of the United States, Dönitz sent some of his large Type IX U-boats south. The waters around Freetown in Sierra Leone, where convoys to Britain assembled, and the routes around the Cape of Good Hope were less well guarded than the North Atlantic. In August U-507 sank five ships off the coast of Brazil, which led to Brazil’s entry into the war. At the end of August the Eisbär group – four Type IXC boats with a submarine tanker – set off south to make a surprise attack on shipping off Cape Town. It included U-156, which had already shelled the refinery on Aruba in February 1942 and on her way south had also sunk a British freighter from convoy SL 119.

The Laconia and her passengers

The Laconia was a Cunard White Star liner of about 19,700 GRT, built by Swan Hunter at Wallsend and entering service at the beginning of 1922. In the 1920s and 1930s she sailed on the Liverpool–New York route and on cruises. In September 1939 the Royal Navy requisitioned her as an armed merchant cruiser, and from the autumn of 1941 she served as a troopship. She was armed, and so, by the practice of the time, she was a target that a submarine could attack without warning. She was commanded by Captain Rudolph Sharp, who two years earlier had been master of the Lancastria, sunk by German bombers off Saint-Nazaire.

On 1 September 1942 the Laconia left Cape Town for Britain by way of Freetown. According to tallies based on British records, there were aboard 463 crew, 286 British service personnel (including nurses), about 80–90 civilians, mostly women and children, 103 Polish soldiers and about 1,800 Italian prisoners (sources give from 1,793 to 1,809) captured in North Africa. In all, depending on the tally, between 2,725 and 2,741 people.

The Poles were serving as guards over the prisoners. According to Polish studies, they were a company of the officer cadet school of the 8th Infantry Division – one of the divisions of General Władysław Anders’s Polish Armed Forces in the USSR, evacuated to Iran in 1942. Most of them had been through Soviet prisons and labour camps and were now travelling the long way round, via Africa, to Britain. The Polish guards had not been issued with ammunition for their rifles.

The Italians travelled crammed into the holds in the lower part of the ship. According to survivors’ accounts, they were weakened, and during the last days of the voyage they were given only bread and water as a punishment for smoking in the holds and trying to steal food.

The sinking

On 12 September U-156 sighted a large ship sailing alone northwards, some 360 nautical miles north-east of Ascension Island. Hartenstein shadowed her until dark and then attacked on the surface. According to uboat.net, two torpedoes struck the Laconia shortly after 10 p.m. (German time). The first exploded near the holds in which the Italians were crammed, killing many of them at once. The ship took on a heavy list, which made it difficult to lower the boats on one side; in any case there would not have been enough boats and rafts for everyone. The radio operator sent the signal “SSS” (submarine attack) with the ship’s position, but there is nothing to suggest that anyone received it.

Panic broke out on board. The prisoners escaped from the locked holds by breaking open the hatches and climbing up the ventilation shafts, and rushed for the boats into which women, children and passengers were being put. Survivors’ accounts – both British and Italian – say that the guards held them back by force: some prisoners were shot, others were killed with bayonets, and in the water some were not allowed into the boats. The scale of these events and the responsibility of the various groups remain unclear. Poles appear in some accounts, but historians consider it unlikely that they fired, since they had no ammunition. Captain Sharp went down with his ship. The Laconia sank a little over an hour after the attack.

When U-156 surfaced in order – as was the practice – to take the captain or senior officers prisoner, her crew heard cries in Italian from the water. Hartenstein realised that he had sunk a ship carrying prisoners from Germany’s ally, and that more than two thousand people were fighting for their lives in the water, among the sharks.

The rescue

Hartenstein began picking up survivors, and during the night, at about 1.25 a.m. on 13 September, he reported to headquarters: “Sunk by Hartenstein British Laconia […], unfortunately with 1,500 Italian prisoners. So far 90 picked up. Request orders.” Dönitz, then Commander of U-boats (Befehlshaber der U-Boote), sent the boats of the Eisbär group to the scene and informed the Naval High Command. According to some accounts Hitler was displeased and demanded that the operation off Cape Town must not be put at risk. In the end Grand Admiral Erich Raeder ordered the Eisbär group to continue south, and two other large U-boats went to the aid of U-156 – U-506 under Kapitänleutnant Erich Würdemann and U-507 under Korvettenkapitän Harro Schacht – together with the Italian submarine Comandante Cappellini under Capitano di Corvetta Marco Revedin. The Germans also asked the Vichy government to send warships from West Africa. The cruiser Gloire put out from Dakar, and the sloops Annamite and Dumont d’Urville from Conakry and Cotonou.

On the morning of 13 September Hartenstein broadcast an uncoded message in English to all ships: “If any ship will assist the ship-wrecked Laconia crew, I will not attack her providing I am not being attacked by ship or air forces. I picked up 193 men.” He gave his position. The British in Freetown received the message but regarded it as a possible ruse, and all that later reached the Americans was a terse report of the ship’s sinking – with no mention of the German rescue effort or of the French warships.

For two and a half days U-156 remained on the surface. Nearly 200 survivors, including women, were crowded on and below her deck, and she was towing four boats astern with about 200 more. A sheet bearing a red cross was draped over the deck gun. On 15 September U-506, U-507 and the Cappellini arrived; each took on hundreds of people, and Schacht reported that he had 491 people aboard U-507, including women and children. With boats in tow, the submarines set course for the agreed rendezvous with the French.

The Liberator attack

Late on the morning of 16 September an American B-24 Liberator bomber from the secret airfield on Ascension Island, piloted by Lieutenant James D. Harden, appeared over U-156. Hartenstein signalled to it that he was conducting a rescue operation, and one of the rescued British air force officers tried to convey the same by signal. Harden reported the situation to his base. The duty officer, Captain Robert C. Richardson III, gave the order: “Sink sub.” He later explained that he had known nothing of the openly announced rescue, that a warship had no right to use the Red Cross emblem, and that he feared for the secret airfield and for British ships heading into the area.

The Liberator made several attacks. The bombs fell among the boats being towed by U-156 and, according to survivors’ accounts, killed many of the shipwrecked; the submarine was lightly damaged. Hartenstein cut the boats loose, ordered the people on deck into the water and dived to save his boat. The British nurse Doris Hawkins, who went on to survive 27 days in a lifeboat, estimated that of the roughly fifty British civilians and wounded on board U-156 only a handful reached the boats. On 17 September the same Liberator attacked U-506, which had 151 survivors aboard, including women and children; the U-boat managed to dive and escaped undamaged. The bomber’s crew reported sinking the U-boat and were decorated. Neither the pilot nor the officer who gave the order was ever held to account. A later study of the law of naval warfare by the US Naval War College judged their conduct a prima facie war crime, since a vessel engaged in a rescue operation is not a lawful target at that time.

The French warships and the toll

On 17 September the Gloire and the Annamite met U-506 and U-507 and took the survivors off them; both commanders, contrary to their orders from headquarters, had not put the British and Poles back into the boats. The Gloire spent another day gathering people from boats scattered across the ocean, and on 20 September the Dumont d’Urville took over the Italians from the Cappellini. The Italian submarine and U-507 each kept two British officers as prisoners. Two boats whose occupants did not wait for the French but set off towards Africa went through an ordeal: in one, 16 of the 68 people aboard reached the coast of Liberia after 27 days; in the other, four of 52 were still alive after 40 days.

According to uboat.net, of the roughly 2,740 people on the Laconia, 1,083 survived, including about 415 Italians. Some 1,660 people died: the captain and 97 crew members, 133 passengers, 33 Polish soldiers and 1,394 prisoners. Other tallies speak of about 1,600–1,750 dead, while some accounts give about a thousand Italians killed. Paradoxically, most of the dead were soldiers of a country allied to Germany.

The French took the British and Polish survivors – among them about 70 Polish soldiers – via Dakar to Casablanca, and from there to an internment camp in Morocco. They were freed only by the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942.

The Laconia Order

On 17 September, after the reports of the air attack, Dönitz issued to all U-boat commanders the order known as Triton Null, and after the war as the Laconia Order. It forbade any attempt to rescue survivors: picking people out of the water, righting capsized boats, or handing out food and water. “Rescue runs counter to the most primitive demands of warfare for the destruction of enemy ships and crews,” it read. Captains and chief engineers were still to be taken prisoner. The order ended with the words: “Be harsh. Bear in mind that the enemy has no regard for women and children in his bombing attacks on German cities.” Dönitz reprimanded Hartenstein for having trusted in a tacit ceasefire and putting his boat at risk.

The order did not command the killing of survivors, but its wording was vague enough for the prosecution after the war to present it as encouraging it. Until then U-boat commanders, though they rarely took survivors aboard, had often given them water, food or a course to the nearest land; from now on they were to refrain from doing so, and the ban was given a propaganda justification.

Place in the war

The Laconia affair took place at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, when Dönitz had more boats than ever and was extending his operations to ever more distant waters. The Eisbär group, in which another boat took the place of U-156, sank many ships off South Africa in October. U-156 herself did not return from her next patrol: on 8 March 1943 she was sunk east of Barbados by an American Catalina flying boat, with the loss of her entire crew, Hartenstein among them.

The Laconia Order remained in force until the end of the war. Before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg the British prosecution made it one of the principal pieces of evidence against Dönitz. The defence, led by Otto Kranzbühler, however, pointed to the Liberator’s attack on submarines carrying survivors and obtained a written statement from Admiral Chester Nimitz that the US Navy had waged unrestricted submarine warfare in the Pacific from the first day of the war with Japan. The tribunal found that it had not been proved beyond doubt that Dönitz deliberately ordered the killing of survivors, and that his orders, “undoubtedly ambiguous”, deserved “the strongest censure”. It also found a breach of the London Protocol of 1936 on the rules of submarine warfare but – in view of British and American practice – did not take it into account in assessing his sentence. Dönitz, found guilty of crimes against peace and war crimes, was sentenced on 1 October 1946 to ten years’ imprisonment.

On the Allied side the affair long remained hushed up. The attack on submarines carrying survivors under the Red Cross emblem was never explained by the American command, and Winston Churchill merely ordered that no more than 500 prisoners were to be carried on any one troopship. For historians the Laconia became an example of how, in total war, the remnants of the old customs of the sea gave way to the ruthless logic of combat – and the order issued after the Liberator’s attack weighed on the fate of the shipwrecked for two and a half years of the war at sea.