RMS Lancastria was a British ocean liner requisitioned by the Government of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. She was sunk on 17 June 1940 during Operation Aerial. Having received an emergency order to evacuate British nationals and troops from France, the ship was loaded well in excess of its capacity of 1,300 passengers. Modern estimates suggest that between 4,000 and 7,000 people died during the sinking — the largest single-ship loss of life in British maritime history.
Career
The ship was launched in 1920 as Tyrrhenia by William Beardmore and Company of Dalmuir on the River Clyde for the Anchor Line, a subsidiary of Cunard. She was the sister ship of RMS , which Beardmore had built for the Anchor Line the previous year. Tyrrhenia was , long and could carry 2,200 passengers in three classes. She made her maiden voyage, Glasgow–Quebec City–Montreal, on 13 June 1922.
In 1924 she was refitted for two classes and renamed Lancastria after passengers complained that they could not pronounce Tyrrhenia (the proper pronunciation of which is , hence the crew's nickname of "Old Soup Tureen" for the ship).
She sailed scheduled routes between Liverpool and New York until 1932, and was then used as a cruise ship in the Mediterranean Sea and Northern Europe. On 10 October 1932 Lancastria rescued the crew of the Belgian cargo ship SS Scheldestad, which had been abandoned in a sinking condition in the Bay of Biscay. In 1934 the Catholic Boy Scouts of Ireland chartered Lancastria for a pilgrimage to Rome. In May 1936, she undertook a specially commissioned cruise to visit war memorials at Malta, Salonika, Gallipoli and Istanbul. The passengers on this voyage included Admiral of the Fleet Roger Keyes, Field Marshal William Birdwood and Commodore Edward Unwin.
At the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Lancastria was in the Bahamas. She was ordered to sail from Nassau to New York for refitting as she had been requisitioned as a troopship, becoming HMT Lancastria. Unnecessary fittings were removed, she was repainted in battleship grey, the portholes were blacked out, and a 4-inch gun was installed. She was first used to ferry men and supplies between Canada and the United Kingdom. In April 1940, she was one of twenty troopships in Operation Alphabet, the evacuation of troops from Norway, and was bombed on the return journey although she escaped damage. Shortly afterwards, Lancastria carried troops to consolidate the invasion of Iceland. Returning to Glasgow, the captain requested that surplus oil in her tanks be removed, but there was insufficient time before she was ordered to Liverpool for a refit. Crew members were either discharged or sent on leave.
Loss
Lancastria was sunk on 17 June 1940 off the French port of St. Nazaire while taking part in Operation Aerial, the evacuation of British nationals and troops from France, two weeks after the Dunkirk evacuation.
Outward voyage Within hours of berthing at Liverpool, Lancastria was urgently recalled to sea; loud-speaker announcements at the main railway station successfully recalled nearly all the crew members; she arrived in Plymouth on 15 June to await orders. She was originally sent to Quiberon Bay as part of Operation Aerial, which was the evacuation of the remainder of the British Expeditionary Force which had been cut off to the south of the German advance through France, amounting to some 124,000 men, mostly logistic support troops, from various ports in western France. Accompanying Lancastria was the 20,341-ton liner, . Finding that she was not required for the evacuation from Lorient, the captain of Lancastria, Rudolph Sharp, was sent on towards the port of St. Nazaire, where many more troops were waiting to be lifted, On the way, an air raid damaged Franconia, which returned to England for repairs, leaving Lancastria to continue alone. She arrived in the mouth of the Loire estuary late on 16 June. Because the port has to be accessed along a tidal channel, Lancastria anchored in the Charpentier Roads, some south-west of St. Nazaire, at 04:00 on 17 June, along with some thirty other merchant vessels of all sizes.
Embarkation Early in the morning, three RNVR officers came aboard to ask how many troops Lancastria could take. Her normal complement in troopship configuration was 2,180 including 330 crew; however, Captain Sharp had brought 2,653 men back from Norway, so he replied that he could take 3,000 "at a pinch". He was told that he should take as many as he possibly could "without regard to the limits of International Law". Troops were ferried out to Lancastria and the other larger ships by destroyers, tugs, fishing boats and other small craft, a round trip of three or four hours, sometimes being machine-gunned by German aircraft, although apparently without casualties. By the mid-afternoon of 17 June she had embarked an unknown number (estimates range from 4,000 up to 9,000) line-of-communication troops (including Pioneer and Royal Army Service Corps soldiers) and Royal Air Force personnel, together with several thousand civilian refugees, including embassy staff and employees of Fairey Aviation of Belgium with their families. People were crowded into whatever spaces were available including the large cargo holds. One Royal Engineers officer reported that he had been told by one of Lancastria's loading officers that over 7,200 people had come aboard. Captain Sharp estimated the number to be 5,500.
At 13:50, during an air-raid, the nearby , a 20,000-ton Orient Liner, was hit on the bridge by a German bomb. Lancastria was free to depart and the captain of the British destroyer advised her to do so; but, without a destroyer escort as defence against a possible submarine attack, Sharp decided to wait for Oronsay before leaving.
Sinking
A fresh air raid began at 15:50 by Junkers Ju 88 bomber aircraft from Kampfgeschwader 30. Lancastria was hit by three or possibly four bombs. A number of survivors reported that one bomb had gone down the ship's single funnel, which is most likely. The testimony of an engineering officer, Frank Brogden, who was in the engine room at the time contradicts this. Brogden's account states that one bomb landed close to the funnel and entered No. 4 hold. Two other bombs landed in No. 2 and No. 3 holds while a fourth landed close to the port side of the ship, rupturing the fuel oil tanks, As the ship began to list to starboard, orders were given for the men on deck to move to the port side in an effort to counteract it, but this caused a list to port which could not be corrected. The ship was equipped with sixteen lifeboats and 2,500 life jackets; but many of the boats could not be launched because they had been damaged in the bombing or because of the angle of the hull. The first boat away was filled with women and children but it capsized on landing in the water and a second had to be lowered for them. A third boat had its bottom stove in by landing too fast. A large number of men who jumped over the side were killed by hitting the side of the hull or had their necks broken by their life jackets on impact with the water. As Lancastria began to capsize, some of those who were still on board managed to scramble onto the ship's underside. According to some accounts, these were heard to be singing "Roll Out the Barrel" and "There'll Always Be an England". The ship sank at 16:12, within twenty minutes of being hit, which gave little time for other vessels to respond. Many of those in the water drowned because there were insufficient life jackets, or died from hypothermia, or were choked by fuel oil. According to Jonathan Fenby in his book The Sinking of the Lancastria, the German aircraft strafed survivors in the water.
Survivors were taken aboard other British and Allied evacuation vessels, the trawler rescuing 900. Captain W. G. Euston recommended several of his crew for awards, including Stanley Kingett for "making repeated journeys in a lifeboat to pick up exhausted men from the water while under machine-gun fire from enemy planes", and William Perrin for "keeping up continuous machine-gun fire in an attempt to prevent enemy planes machine-gunning men in the water." Rudolph Sharp survived the sinking and went on to command the , losing his life on 12 September 1942 in the Laconia incident off West Africa.
Estimated casualties There were 2,477 survivors, of whom about 100 were still alive in 2011. Many families of the dead knew only that they died with the British Expeditionary Force; the incident accounted for roughly a third of the force's total losses in France. She sank around south of Chémoulin Point in the Charpentier roads, around from St. Nazaire. The Lancastria Association names 1,738 people known to have been killed. List of those found and buried ashore, or reported to be on board at the time of the sinking and presumed lost in the action It is widely accepted that the death toll was no less than 3,500, of which at least 1,000 were civilian refugees. In 2005, Fenby wrote that estimates of the death toll vary from fewer than people although it is also estimated that as many as 7,000 people perished, the largest loss of life in British maritime history. It is sometimes considered the second worst loss of life at sea, although with the estimates of the worst shipwrecks like the Goya also being 7,000, it is unknown which is worse.
Availability of information The immense loss of life was such that the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, immediately suppressed news of the disaster through the D-Notice system, telling his staff that "The newspapers have got quite enough disaster for today at least". In his memoirs, Churchill stated that he had intended to release the news a few days later, but that events in France "crowded upon us so black and so quickly that I forgot to lift the ban".
The sinking was announced that evening during the English-language Nazi propaganda radio programme Germany Calling by its presenter William Joyce, better known as "Lord Haw-Haw"; however his claims were notoriously unreliable and had little public credence. The story was finally broken in the United States by the Press Association on 25 July, in The New York Times, and the next day in Britain by The Scotsman, more than five weeks after the sinking. Other British newspapers then covered the story, including the Daily Herald (also on 26 July), which carried the story on its front page, and Sunday Express on 4 August; the latter included a photograph of the capsized ship with her upturned hull lined with men under the headline "Last Moments of the Greatest Sea Tragedy of All Time". All the photographs of the sinking were taken by Frank Clements, a volunteer storeman aboard HMS Highlander, who was exempt from the regulations prohibiting the use of cameras by service personnel.
However, there were earlier reports of the sinking and the scale of the disaster from survivors in local British newspapers. Mr H. J. Cooper is quoted in the Chelmsford Chronicle on 28 June: "I am afraid thousands died, but tell the world they sang 'Roll out the Barrel' as they died." Private Ronald Herbert Yorke (Sherwood Foresters) is quoted in the Ripley and Heanor News on 5 July: "Hundreds of my pals were imprisoned below. They had no chance because the ship went down in 15 minutes. Those who got away were machine-gunned in the water".