The sinking of the Leopoldville

On Christmas Eve 1944, at 5.54 p.m., less than five nautical miles from Cherbourg, a torpedo fired by the German submarine U-486 struck the starboard side of the Belgian troopship Leopoldville. She was carrying more than 2,200 soldiers of the US 66th Infantry Division across the English Channel, rushed to the Continent during the crisis caused by the German offensive in the Ardennes. The ship took almost three hours to sink, within sight of a harbour full of Allied vessels. Even so, according to American figures, 763 soldiers died, and with members of the crew and British sailors the death toll came to around 800. It was one of the heaviest losses suffered by American infantry at sea in the whole war.

War chronologies speak of “more than 800 victims, mostly American soldiers”, which agrees with most studies, although the figures vary. The number most often given is 763 Americans killed (14 officers and 748 enlisted men according to the divisional history, plus one or several soldiers from other units), together with the ship’s captain, one Belgian and three Congolese members of the crew, and several Britons. German and some British tallies give a total of 819 dead. All these figures are approximate, as the embarkation records were kept in haste.

A ship from the Congo line

The Leopoldville (in French spelling Léopoldville) was a passenger liner of the Belgian shipping company Compagnie Maritime Belge. Built at the Cockerill yard in Hoboken near Antwerp and completed in 1929, she measured 11,509 GRT and was just under 146 metres long. She sailed on the route linking Antwerp with the Belgian Congo, to the port of Matadi. When Germany invaded Belgium in May 1940, the ship was on her way back from Africa. She never returned to the occupied country: by way of La Pallice and Matadi she reached New York, and from there Liverpool, where she was converted into a troopship. From then on, the Belgian merchant fleet that had escaped seizure worked for the Allies under the supervision of the government-in-exile in London.

Over four years the Leopoldville carried, according to the owners’ records, more than 120,000 soldiers. She took RAF recruits to Canada, carried Commonwealth troops between Freetown, Cape Town, Durban and Suez, brought troops to Algiers during the North African campaign and took part in Operation Husky in Sicily. After the Normandy landings she plied between the Solent and the French coast: from June to December 1944 she made 24 crossings, carrying more than 53,000 men. The voyage of 24 December was to be her twenty-fifth. She had been commanded since 1942 by Captain Charles Limbor. The crew numbered around 120–140, including some ninety-odd seamen from the Congo; the anti-aircraft guns were manned by a detachment of British naval gunners.

The haste of December 1944

The 66th Infantry Division (the “Black Panthers”) under Major General Herman Kramer had arrived in England at the end of November 1944 and was training in Dorset. It had not yet seen action. The outbreak of the Ardennes offensive on 16 December hastened its move: the high command needed every fresh division, and any unit released from secondary tasks could go to the front. Soldiers’ accounts and some of the literature say that the division was sailing “to the Ardennes”. According to the unit history and to the uboat.net website, however, its task was to relieve the 94th Infantry Division, which was containing the German garrisons in Brittany – at Lorient and Saint-Nazaire – so that the experienced 94th could move up to the front.

Embarkation at Southampton took place in a hurry on the morning of Christmas Eve. Soldiers were taken aboard in the order in which they arrived rather than by companies and battalions, so that elements of the 262nd and 264th Infantry Regiments were mixed up and split between two ships: the Leopoldville and the British Cheshire. Commanders often did not know where their men were. There were too few life jackets, and the lifeboat drill, according to survivors, was perfunctory. The ship put to sea at 9 a.m. in convoy WEP-3, escorted by the destroyers HMS Brilliant and HMS Anthony, the frigate HMS Hotham and the French frigate Croix de Lorraine.

U-486 in the Channel

After “Black May” 1943 the German U-boats lost the Battle of the Atlantic on the open ocean. The loss of their bases in western France in the summer of 1944 forced them to operate from Norway. Karl Dönitz did not, however, give up the submarine war. Boats fitted with snorkels – tubes that allowed them to charge their batteries and run their diesel engines while submerged – were sent into British coastal waters and the English Channel, where the shallow bottom, wrecks and strong currents hampered Allied sonar. Losses were high and successes few, but single boats could still deal painful blows.

U-486 was a Type VIIC boat, commissioned in March 1944. She was one of the few boats covered with an experimental coating of rubber tiles (“Alberich”) intended to absorb sonar pulses. She was commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Gerhard Meyer. On 26 November the boat left Egersund in Norway on her first patrol and, taking the long way round the British Isles, reached the western approaches to the Channel. On 18 December, south of the Eddystone lighthouse, she sank the freighter Silverlaurel. Six days later, on the evening of 24 December, near Cherbourg, she fired two torpedoes at convoy WEP-3.

Three hours within reach of the harbour

The torpedo struck the after part of the ship and exploded in No. 4 hold, which had been fitted out as troop quarters. According to American findings, the explosion and the water rushing into the flooded compartments killed some 300 men outright. The ship listed but did not sink quickly. Most of the soldiers did not know what was happening: announcements were made in Flemish and French, and Captain Limbor did not speak English. Many believed the ship would be towed into the harbour a few miles away and waited calmly on deck – according to survivors, some sang carols.

At around 6.25 p.m. the captain ordered the crew to abandon ship. Some of the Belgian and Congolese seamen left in the lifeboats. Many American survivors recalled bitterly that the crew had left them without a clear order to evacuate and with no one to man the boats; this is stressed, among others, by Allan Andrade, author of the book Leopoldville: A Tragedy Too Long Secret. Judgements on the crew’s conduct remain disputed, however. Some studies point out that the ship’s loudspeakers had stopped working, that the captain went round the decks giving orders, and that he himself went down with the ship, as did four members of the crew. The order to the soldiers should also have come from their own officers, and they – scattered around the ship after the chaotic embarkation – had no control over their units.

The destroyer HMS Brilliant came alongside the sinking ship. In the heavy sea the two hulls kept closing and then drawing apart by several metres. Soldiers jumped onto the destroyer’s deck from a height of a dozen metres or more, breaking limbs on the torpedo tubes and other fittings; some fell between the hulls and were crushed to death. British sailors spread hammocks on the deck to cushion the falls. At around 7.20 p.m., with roughly 500 rescued men aboard, Brilliant left for Cherbourg. Some 1,200 men were still on the Leopoldville.

Christmas Eve in Cherbourg

The gravest charges concern the rescue operation. Cherbourg, liberated in June, was then one of the US Army’s main supply ports. Hundreds of vessels lay in the harbour, but – as researchers later established – most had their boilers shut down, and many crews were spending Christmas Eve ashore. The escort ships, busy hunting the U-boat and rescuing men, did not answer light signals from the shore. Brilliant could not contact the American station in Cherbourg directly, because the two sides used different frequencies and codes; the message went via Portsmouth and came back to France by telephone. According to Andrade and later documentary makers, almost an hour passed before the harbour realised that the ship was sinking, and the staffs were working with reduced manning that evening.

The Leopoldville sank stern first between 8.20 and 8.40 p.m. (accounts give different times). Hundreds of men found themselves in water only a few degrees above freezing. The tugs and small craft that eventually came out of the harbour – among them the American patrol craft PC-1225 – picked up many survivors, but also many bodies. American sailors recalled years later that by the time they reached the scene most of the men in the water were already dead from the cold (hypothermia). According to American figures, about 515 soldiers went down with the ship, and 248 died of their injuries, drowned or froze in the water. More than 1,400 survived. The survivors of the 66th Division spent Christmas in Cherbourg, many of them in hospital.

A long silence

News of the disaster did not reach the newspapers. In December 1944, in the middle of the Ardennes crisis, the Allied command did not want to announce a German submarine success or to reveal how many men had died right next to a harbour through negligence. According to families’ accounts, they first received notices that their relatives were “missing in action” and later of their deaths, with no explanation of the circumstances. The survivors, by their own account, were ordered not to talk about the sinking, and their letters were censored. A British document of 1946 reportedly stated that the affair “does not reflect great credit on us”.

Sources differ on how long the secret was kept. Some documents were declassified at the end of the 1950s, but – as uboat.net notes – nobody informed the families. Other studies say that the full documentation was released only in the mid-1990s. The wider public learned of the disaster after 1984, when the American writer Clive Cussler announced that he had found the wreck (the French replied that its position had long been marked on charts). Further publicity came with Andrade’s book and a documentary film of 1998.

Place in the war

The sinking of the Leopoldville did not change the course of the fighting. The 66th Division, despite losing more than 760 men from two regiments, took over from the 94th Division the sector around the German fortresses of Lorient and Saint-Nazaire and kept them encircled until their surrender on 8 May 1945; the 94th went to the front. In those same days the Americans were going over to the counter-offensive in the Ardennes, and the fate of the Ardennes offensive was decided by divisions already on the Continent and by supplies coming in through Cherbourg and Antwerp. The disaster showed, however, that even in the last winter of the war, when the U-boats had long been defeated as a strategic force, a single snorkel-equipped boat could inflict heavy losses on the busiest Allied route – and that haste, the language barrier and the slackness of a holiday evening could turn a single torpedo hit into a tragedy.

Two days later, on 26 December, U-486 sank the British frigate HMS Capel and badly damaged HMS Affleck. In January 1945 she returned to Norway; on 12 April 1945, on her second patrol, she was sunk by the British submarine HMS Tapir. The whole crew died, Gerhard Meyer with them. The wreck of U-486 was found in 2013 by a Norwegian oil company off the coast of western Norway. The wreck of the Leopoldville lies on the floor of the Channel a few miles from Cherbourg and is visited by divers.

For decades the memory of the victims was kept alive mainly by the survivors and their families. In 1997 a memorial to the 66th Infantry Division, dedicated to those lost on the Leopoldville, was unveiled at Fort Benning, Georgia. Plaques and memorials were also put up in places including Weymouth in England and Titusville in Florida, and in 2007 the state of Massachusetts made 24 December a day of remembrance for the disaster. In May 2025 a memorial to the victims was unveiled in Cherbourg, on the quay the ship never reached.