‘Charmed’ Nerissa Ran Dead Out Of Luck

‘Charmed’ Nerissa Ran Dead Out Of Luck

By Dennis Foley
Citizen Staff Writer

The Ottawa Citizen
Tuesday April 30, 1991

Fifty years ago this week, telegraph messengers in Canada scrambled to their bicycles to deliver a batch of war telegrams.

They were next-of-kin messages, bad news from the Department of National Defence.

The messages were sent by mail to families in Ottawa and Hull, which had a disproportionately high number of sons on this casualty list.

The letter sent to Meyer Glatt at 428 Rideau St. stated:

“I deeply regret to inform you that your son C 96271 Sergeant Harold Glatt is Missing at Sea. Definite information is delayed pending a complete check by the (British) Admiralty, and you can be sure that further information will be immediately sent to you as soon as received here.

In the meantime, at the request of the Admiralty, you are asked to treat the information as confidential and for family use only.”

Because of wartime secrecy, it could take months for families to learn what had happened. This time, though, the news reports spelled out the bare bones of the disaster.

First came a radio report about a noted war correspondent reported missing at sea.

The following day, May 5, 1941, The Evening Citizen carried a short, front-page story of two Ottawa soldiers and an educational officer from Glebe Collegiate missing at sea. No mention was made of what happened to the ship or the fate of other passengers and crew.

The extent of the disaster leaped out from a headline stretching across the paper’s front page the next day: TOTAL OF 122 MISSING IN LOSS OF SHIP, OTTAWA AND HULL TOLL INCREASES TO 17.

Navy Minister Angus Macdonald had released news of the sinking in the House of Commons.

But there were few other details because of wartime restrictions on information. The name of the ship was never released, nor the final, higher, death-toll. Those facts, and others, were contained in secret records that weren’t declassified until 1986 and 1990.

A total of 84 Canadian servicemen and nine civilians were among the 207 passengers and crew lost when the British-owned SS Nerissa was torpedoed. Seventy-three of the servicemen were soldiers, the Canadian Army’s worst loss to that point in the war.

An army court of inquiry report, dated May 17, 1941, disclosed little. The two-paragraph document simply stated the Nerissa was sunk by enemy action near midnight off the northern coast of Ireland on April 30, 1941. Three officers and 32 military personnel of other ranks were saved; “13 officers and 60 ORs (other ranks) … perished.”

There was no mention of the 11 Canadian sailors who also went down with the ship, or the loss of non-Canadian military personnel, civilians and 83 crewmen.

The army’s cursory summation didn’t satisfy John Ponting of Nepean, who had lost a boyhood friend and army buddy in the Corps of Military Staff Clerks in the sinking.

At the time, Ponting was also a clerk in the Corps. He knew there had been considerable internal criticism about the Nerissa sailing without escort while carrying so many skilled people.

But as the ship was under British registry and orders, any official inquiry into the sinking would have to be conducted overseas.

Ponting doggedly pursued the sinking through Defence Department archives and other sources. He finally collected enough information to piece together what had happened that fateful night.

He learned the Nerissa had been a 5583-ton coastal cargo-passenger ship running between Halifax, New York and Bermuda before the war. With so many sinkings in the Atlantic, the small ship was defensively armed and pressed into war service.

As she criss-crossed the ocean, she managed to evade torpedoes, submarine attacks and bombs. After 39 successful, action-packed crossings, her crew regarded her as a charmed ship.

On April 21 she sailed from Halifax in a convoy but left the group to make a stopover in St. John’s, Nfld. She then continued on alone.

The trip across the North Atlantic was uneventful until 10:34 p.m. April 30. A torpedo struck the ship’s starboard side, causing a violent explosion that knocked out the lights and smashed two lifeboats.

The ship stopped dead, quickly listing to starboard. Orders were given to clear away the lifeboats and rafts.

Army personnel reached the boats first and began swinging them out. But the men weren’t trained to handle them and only two lifeboats were successfully launched.

A second and third torpedo struck the ship causing an ammunition locker to explode and throwing some passengers into the sea. A shock wave caused an overloaded lifeboat to capsize.

The small Nerissa began to sink almost immediately. Capt. George Watson, who had survived four previous sinkings in two wars went down with his ship.

Pte. J.H. Mara, one of five RCMP officers serving with the Provost Corps or military police, provided a graphic account of his experiences in a letter home that somehow reached Defence Department archives.

Mara was plopped into the sea, clinging to the stern of a lifeboat when its fall ropes were dropped.

“Eventually, the bow came down but the boat was swamped,” he wrote. “Some of the boys got out and swam for it, two of them being RCMP lads, and they found a raft.

“The remainder of us, 19 in all, stayed put, as the air-tight drums in the bow and stern kept us afloat. Had we had any more in the boat, it would not have held us.”

“We only had two of the ship’s crew with us, one a steward who went mad and died within an hour, the other the ship’s doc who did not say anything all night. In fact, I did not know he was with us until next morning.”

Mara wrote of how it rained during the night and how men in the boat baled with their hands to keep it afloat.

“After a few hours some of the men started to go and by the time we were picked up (after 8 ½ hours in the water) we (had) lost seven of the 19. Our feet got so stiff that we could hardly move and only managed to get two overboard, the rest were floating about in the boat …

“It was quite an experience but not as bad as it sounds as we knew we would be picked up the next day due to the fact there was an escort plane to meet the ship.

“All we had to do was keep moving and keep warm. The cries of the people in the water when the ship went down, was the worst. We could not do a thing …

“We were told they got the sub that did us in the next night. He deserved the worst fate possible…if he had let it go at one torpedo I think that most of the people would have been saved.”

That report was wrong. The German sub that hit the Nerissa was still in service at war’s end.

The sinking of the Nerissa was of singular interest to the Canadian army.

“This is believed to be the first occasion, either in this war or the last when Canadian soldiers have lost their lives by enemy action at sea while in transit (to England)” Major C.P. Stacey, later chief historian for the Defence Department, wrote in a report.

Stacey also noted the sinking had caused the largest loss of Canadian Army personnel to that date in the war.

It remained at war’s end the Canadian Army’s only loss of troops en route to England.

“It never should have happened,” said Ponting. “It was very poorly arranged.”

Nerissa A Canadian Tragedy

Nerissa A Canadian Tragedy

John Skuce

In wartime naval parlance, Nerissa was a “lucky ship.” By April 1941 she had successfully completed her 39th crossing of the North Atlantic. Not that there weren’t anxious moments. On her 39th crossing from Britain to Canada she encountered an eastern bound convoy at the precise moment a U-boat was making its attack. By bizarre chance one torpedo ran up her port side and another up her starboard side on their malevolent path of destruction. Later on the same day a U-boat surfaced and engaged her in a gun battle, which Nerissa ended by outrunning the German. Nerissa was a “lucky ship.”

Nerissa’s Glasgow builders had endowed her with a feature that in time would be her undoing, speed. Built as a combination freighter and passenger vessel for the Liverpool / St. John’s trade, she was endowed with a maximum speed of 17 knots and a comfortable cruising speed of 14 knots. In late 1939 the 5,583-ton Nerissa was modified to serve as an auxiliary transport with accommodations for 250 men and she was fitted with a 4″ naval gun and a Bofors gun for self-defense. Crews to man the defensive armament were drawn from the Maritime Regiment of the Royal Artillery. Due to her superior speed over the matronly 9-knot pace of escorted convoys, Nerissa was deemed capable of outrunning any dangers posed by enemy submarines and, therefore she would sail alone.

The 40th wartime crossing for Nerissa began on April 21, 1941 at the port of Halifax. The previous evening 145 Canadian servicemen along with R.A.F., R.N.A.F. personnel, Northern Electric technicians, members of the press and a number of British civilians had boarded in preparation for the early morning departure. On the morning of April 21 she weighed anchor and sailed from the Bedford Basin as a member of a Britain bound convoy. At 10:15 a.m. she acknowledged the escort’s signal, “God speed and God bless” and broke off from the convoy to make her solitary run. On April 23 she dropped anchor at St. John’s, Newfoundland, her Captain G. Watson received his Admiralty orders and she sailed for Britain on the evening tide.

For 7 days Nerissa ploughed her way eastward, the almost idyllic time broken only by daily lifeboat drill and the occasional “stand to” for the gun crews. On April 30 she entered the patrol area of Royal Navy Coastal Command aircraft whose duty was to ensure that lurking submarines were located, reported and dealt with.

As darkness descended a Hudson patrol aircraft flew over and signaled by Aldis lamp that the area was clear of U-boats. At 11:30 p.m. the first torpedo struck amidships. Immediately the auxiliary transport began to settle and the passengers calmly donned lifejackets and went to their assigned lifeboat stations as though taking part in a drill. Boats were filled and in the process of being lowered when catastrophe struck. A tremendous explosion ripped the foundering ship in two, splintering the partially lowered boats and sending a geyser of wreckage and water hundreds of feet into the air. The U-boat to ensure the completeness of its kill had fired an additional two torpedoes which struck and exploded simultaneously. Within 4 minutes of the first strike Nerissa was gone. In the brief interval between the first torpedo and oblivion, the ship’s telegrapher whose name history unfortunately does not record, was able to send an S.O.S. and the position of 10° 08′ W, 55° 57′ N.

The survivors spent a harrowing night in the near freezing Atlantic and were first hand witnesses to the effects of shock and hypothermia as man after man slipped beneath the surface. At first light a British Blenheim appeared and circled the flotsam of the sunken transport and at 7:50 a.m. two British destroyers appeared on the scene, H.M.S. Veteran and H.M.S. Hunter. While Hunter circled the area Veteran proceeded to pick up survivors. The 84 men who had survived the sinking and the night in the frigid waters were sped the 200 miles to Londonderry, Ireland, where they were distributed among several hospitals to ensure immediate and maximum care.

“Lucky Nerissa” had gone to her nautical Valhalla taking with her 83 Canadian servicemen, virtually an entire graduating class of R.A.F. British Commonwealth Air Training Program pilots, 3 pilots of the Royal Norwegian Air Force, 11 American ferry pilots and 43 members of auxiliary organizations artillerymen, civilians and crew. Canadians should well remember Nerissa for she has the distinction of being the only transport carrying Canadian troops to be lost during Hitler’s war.

Sources:

R.C.M.P. Quarterly Vol. 9 No. 1 (July 1941)
D.N.D. Directorate of History: “The Sinking of S.S. Nerissa” J.L Saull
D.N.D. Directorate of History: “39” G.S. EDGERTON-Bird
D.N.D. Directorate of History: Report of Sinking of Nerissa H.C. Ledsham
Stacey, C.P. “Six War Years” Pg. 193-4
Commonwealth War Graves Commission

Note:

Postwar examination of Kreigsmarine documents and logs conclusively attributes the sinking of S.S. Nerissa to U-552 under the command of Erich Topp. Topp and U-552 claimed notoriety by torpedoing and sinking the American destroyer Reuben James on October 31,1941, over a month before the United States’ entry into the war. Erich Topp survived the war and is acknowledged as the third top scoring U-boat commander having sunk 34 Allied merchant ships with a gross displacement of 193,684 tons. Erich Topp was recalled from active service in 1943 to serve as an instructor and subsequently was given command of U-2513 in 1945, he surrendered his boat to the British at the conclusion of hostilities. His original command U-552 was reassigned to another commander and she continued her remarkable career which spanned 4 years and 5 months of active service. U-552 was scuttled by her crew on May 2, 1945 at Wilhelmshaven to avoid capture.

14 Newfoundlanders Carried To Watery Grave On The Troopship Nerissa

14 Newfoundlanders Carried To Watery Grave On The Troopship Nerissa

HERB WELLS

When the war clouds burst over Europe in September, 1939, with all their fury the call went out from Great Britain for experienced seamen to man her merchant ships. She particularly looked for seamen from Newfoundlanders as their seamanship both in the Merchant Navy and Royal Navy was held in high respect throughout the world. Great Britain was not found wanting for Newfoundlanders from every bay, village and town flocked to the colours in droves. They served on merchant ships which flew the Red Duster, the British Merchant Seaman Flag, better known to Newfoundlanders as the Red Ensign.

Over 7000 Newfoundlanders served under the Red Duster or on other ships which flew allied flags from their mastheads. Some of our seamen were at sea from the time when the opening salvos were fired until the enemy hauled down his colors nearly six years later after victory had slid from his grasp.

During the early stage of the war our merchant ships were poorly armed, in fact, many of them were armed with guns, which were used in the Boer War and the First World War.

However, several months after the war was in full fling the badly needed guns were flowing from the bomb scarred factories in the British Isles.

While cargoes were discharged in port, guns were installed; some were new, but of a very small calibre. However, as the war moved into its second year larger and more modern weapons were installed.

At last, the merchant navy found its teeth and the teeth were sharp. They bit deep as the U-boat skippers discovered when many of them drew blood from the U-boat marauders, which were prowling the stormed tossed and bitterly cold Atlantic.

This article is dedicated to those men who sailed in the ship SS Nerissa which marks the 48th anniversary of her torpedoing.

FAMILIAR SHIP

Let us roll back the calendar to the year 1926, when the ship Nerissa became a familiar ship in Newfoundland waters. The Nerissa was a passenger and cargo ship of 5583 tons. She was the final ship to be built for the old established Red Cross Line service between New York, Halifax and St. John’s. Her registered owners were New York Newfoundland Steamship Co. Ltd., the managers of which were C.T. Bowring Company Limited of Liverpool. The latter had opened this service in 1884. The first ship used being their brand new ship Miranda. Winter conditions could be arduous and to face up to the ice floes the Nerissa was given a specially built strengthened hull with an ice breaker type stem which from a point near the watering sloped back sharply to the keel.

The Nerissa was built in Glasgow and her passenger capacity was 163 first class passengers and 66 second class. In all she was an exceptionally well-equipped ship, yet she was built in a remarkable short time. Her owners needed her for the opening of the 1926 season and when they stressed this Nov. 3, 1925 – the day when the contract was signed – many thought that Hamilton’s would never achieve the deadline. However, the keel was laid within a week and the ship launched March 31. She ran preliminary trials May 27, 1926, and during further runs in loaded condition she did over 15 1/2 knots. On June 5 she was away on her maiden voyage to New York. She arrived in St. John’s June 12, 1926, and sailed June 16.

The Red Cross Line depended largely on the American tourist trade and this became increasingly affected by the trade depression. By 1927 it was decided that the service must be closed down and at the end of 1928 the Red Cross Line with its three ships, Nerissa, Rosalind, and Silvia, were sold to the Furness Withy Group. They then became part of the Bermuda & West Indies Steamship Co., with their funnels repainted in Furness Withy style, black with two red bands – one narrow and one wide. The Nerissa continued on the New York-Halifax-St. John’s run at least until 1931. She was then switched to warmer routes, still based in New York but running to Bermuda, also to the West Indies as far south as Trinidad and Demerara.

WARTIME ROLE

I now pick up the Nerissa in her wartime role as it applied to Newfoundland. Her first voyage with Newfoundland troops took place June 14, 1940. She was carrying 214 troops, 23 were Newfoundlanders who were being transported overseas as members of the Royal Air Force while 191 were known as the Fourth Royal Artillery Contingent. They were later to form the nucleus of the 59th Newfoundland Heavy Royal Artillery Regiment.

My brother, Sam, who sailed with the Royal Artillery portion of the group said he has forgotten most of the names of those who sailed with him. However, it was difficult to forget the great concerts organized by Max Littlejohn who was master of ceremonies for many of those during the voyage which lasted until July 6, 1940, when they arrived in England. Sam recalls Tom Fennessey who assisted Max by playing the piano and he says he could really knock out the old wartime songs of the first world conflict as well as many favorite local songs.

It might be noted that Littlejohn organized the First Royal Artillery concert on the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) London, August 14, 1940. He was master of ceremonies. He dubbed the program Calling From Britain to Newfoundland. Newfoundlanders from all branches of the services took part in the program. It brought a ray of hope and light into the homes of those young men from Britain’s oldest colony who were helping to defend Britain during her darkest hour.

The program, which Littlejohn first aired on the BBC, was the forerunner of Margot Davies’ weekly broadcast on the BBC. Not only did she use the same title for her program but the same format.

She is remembered by a plaque erected in her memory in Confederation Building from funds collected by Littlejohn.

FIRST MAN

John Finn was a member of the Artillery Contingent during that trip of the Nerissa. He became the first Royal Artillery man from Newfoundland to land in the Battle Zone in France in 1944. Finn was on loan to a Commando Unit when he along with others learned about the detailed plans of the D-Day invasion. He was the only Newfoundlander in the group. Finn could not be released to the 59th Royal Artillery Regiment because he became a classified body so in the small hours of June 6, 1944, D-Day, Finn landed in France with the 6th Airborne Division. He was in action in France on D-Day hours before the first allied assault troops went ashore on the blood stained Normandy Beaches.

Dave Duke of St. John’s made the voyage on her that year. However, it was much quieter than the ones he made later as a member of the Merchant Navy. He among others blazed a glorious chapter in Newfoundland’s Wartime Maritime History when he survived the torpedoing of the SS Kelet.

Bill Stone of St. John’s was also on her. He lost a brother Jim when HMS Stanley was torpedoed.

Bill Vicars also made a trip on her. He lost a brother when HMS Victory was bombed.

Wick Collins was aboard on that voyage. He later served as an officer with the 59th Royal Artillery Regiment.

Frank Wall of St. John’s was one of the RAF Contingent’s members. He became very well known after the war as a fighter for veteran’s rights.

However, another year 1941 in the last part of April she entered St. John’s Harbour after sailing from New York, and a day or so later she nosed her way out through the harbour. She made an attempt to dash across the U-boat infested waters of the North Atlantic. She was carrying a vital cargo of food, etc. for Great Britain. However, more important than that she was carrying some top notch American airplane pilots who were on a special assignment as America had not yet entered the war. I was able to obtain the names of those, however, it has never been disclosed to me what mission they were on.

SUPREME SACRIFICE

On April 30, 1941, while the Nerissa was nearing the British Isles, Skipper Erich Topp operating in U-boat 552 sighted the Nerissa and in no time he slammed a salvo of torpedoes into her hull breaking her back. She turned over and plunged beneath the waves, taking with her 207 souls including 11 American pilots. 14 Newfoundlanders paid the Supreme Sacrifice. They were: Frank Andrews, Port de Grave, C.B.; Thomas J. Aylward, Ron McEvoy, James Candow, Henry Snow, William Tiller and Albert Williams, of St. John’s. Edward Young, Quidi Vidi; Malcolm Bailey, Britannia, T.B.; Allister Carter, Greenspond, B.B.; Cecil Ford, Wesleyville, B.B.; Kenneth Thorne, Brownsdale, T.B.; James Wicks, Wesleyville, B.B. and William Langmead, Pouch Cove. Bradley Laite of St. John’s survived. However, he could recall very little other than he spent some 31 hours on top of an overturned lifeboat before being rescued. He recalls there were several survivors – at least one from the West Coast.

The Nerissa transported the 10th Naval Contingent overseas when she ran into a German wolf pack of U-boats. All members of the 10th Contingent were involved and are listed in my book Comrades in Arms, Volume 11.

HERB WELLS

The RB Weekender, March 5-11, 1989

In Search of the “Charmed” Nerissa

In Search of the “Charmed” Nerissa

DOUGLAS HOW

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I have this feeling that I can remember the day when a small ocean liner named Nerissa must have bewitched me or I wouldn’t be writing this 58 years later. I was a reporter in Halifax in wartime 1941. I spent a lot of time covering what a British admiral called “the most important seaport in the world,” and one day that April someone drew my attention to a ship in the harbor and said she went out into the perilous Atlantic on her own, i.e., no warships, no convoy. In fact I’d learn, a lot did, but I didn’t know that then.

I saw a lot of ships in those dark World War II days, a fair number of them far larger and more prepossessing than she was. Yet Nerissa is the only one whose name and identity I’ve remembered ever since. And the only one that would inspire me to spend months as I entered my 80s tracking down what happened to her. Why? I really don’t know why except that it must have done something to me to think of her hoping to escape both German submarines and giant surface raiders. Now I realize she has bewitched others too, still does, that she was said to have done it to her own crew, and that what happened to her is more dramatic and sad and fascinating than I could have guessed. And historic too, for it’s unique in the records of Canada’s war.

The Glasgow-built, Furness Withy-owned 5,583-ton Nerissa was 15 years old in 1941 and she’d been in and out of Halifax and St. John’s, Nfld., regularly in the coastal travel business. In July 1940, with Britain reeling and alone in frontline defiance of Nazi Germany, she was drafted into war service. Her new captain, big, handsome Gilbert Watson, 58, had just survived his fourth sinking in two wars and in the next eight months his Nerissa had so many narrow escapes in convoy and in battered Liverpool harbor that the Associated Press would report that her crew saw her as a “charmed ship.”

But when I saw her, I now realize, that crew faced recent orders that would test any charms to the limit. Britain’s situation was so desperate that in November ’40 Winston Churchill’s cabinet had ruled that the upper speed limit for ships sailing alone should be lowered from 15 knots to 12. Nerissa had just done it a second time, Liverpool-to-Halifax, and her only trouble came, ironically, when she ran into an east-bound convoy and survived several submarine attacks. Her charms or luck or good fortune had worked, again-at the very time the cabinet had had since January an Admiralty recommendation that the speed level of lone ships be raised back to 15 knots because so many were being sunk: But the change was delayed till June, and for Nerissa, at 14, that was no help at all.

What’s more, it’s a curious fact that even as passengers were boarding her in Halifax on April 20, German U-boat commander Erich Topp gathered his off-duty crew together during a patrol off Ireland to celebrate an almost sacred occasion. It was the 52nd birthday of Adolf Hitler, and for Germans there was magic in the Feuhrer’s name. The brilliant Topp himself was a firm believer in this man who’d restored German pride after defeat in 1918, had conquered Western Europe, driven the British home. Was winning the war he’d started.

Early next morning Nerissa sailed, went to St. John’s, then set off for Liverpool carrying valuable cargo and 306 people: crew, military and civilian passengers including 125 men in Canadian army and navy uniforms and one young couple named Lomas with three children. When told they’d travel alone, it had to shake even three soldiers who wanted so much to get to the most dangerous place in the world that, separately, they had stowed away. In all truth, the whole contingent was proof that the threadbare, isolationist, war-hating Canada of the recent past now was determined to fight this war to the end, whatever the end might be.

By April 29, after an uneventful voyage, they’d reached the approaches to Ireland, and knew the possibility of attack was high. But now in daylight there was a protecting British Coastal Command plane overhead even as, somewhere below, Topp’s U552 prowled as one of five U-boats arrayed in a line looking for prey over a distance of 10 sea miles. His boat had been damaged and this would be a troubled day, with attacks from air and sea as it neared a convoy, swift dives, gingerly resurfacings. Then shortly before midnight Topp got a message telling him to prepare to withdraw to port if his boat needed repairs and had sufficient fuel. Yet on into the 30th he kept trying to find a convoy. Then in mid-afternoon came a blunt order, “Go to Nazaire,” i.e. to his base on the French coast. And he didn’t go.

Instead, late that night he recorded something quite different: “2340 (Berlin time, two hours later than Nerissa’s British time) shadow at 320 degrees, course easterly, approaches fast. Not dark enough for attack. Running parallel at full speed and approaching slowly. Shadow crisscrosses (zigzags) strongly, steamship, rather big. All torpedoes prepared.” Top had chanced upon Nerissa, was cautiously getting set to attack just when word spread that her Captain Watson had said she should now be through the danger area and have clear sailing to Liverpool. In fact, close to an hour passed after Topp saw that shadow. He saw a phosphorescent glow on the sea and decided 1,000 metres was as close as he should get, and that he should fire three torpedoes “because of unclear shooting position.”

Navy Sub-Lieut. H. C. Ledsham, a lookout on Nerissa’s bridge, “had no intimation an enemy was near.” In one cabin, Mounties turned soldier finished playing cards and John Mara laid his lifejacket aside and left for a washroom. In another cabin, artillery NCO Jack Cockrell had a smoke, stripped and had a shower. Though he hoped the danger was over, he hedged his bets, stretched out in underwear, trousers and sweater. Sgt. Frank Stojak and four others were singing and telling jokes. In the officers’ lounge Lt. Col. Gordon Smith was playing bridge. The Lomas family’s baby carriage was on the promenade deck, attached to the rail. In his steward’s white jacket, John Spencer was finishing serving drinks in the bar. Many years later he and the only other crew survivor research has found, both living in Corner Brook, Nfld., would have quite different memories of what they felt about their ship being charmed, being lucky, that night or ever. Says Russell Musseau, then 20, “we were a happy-go-lucky crew in a happy ship.

But Spencer, then 26, says he was nervous and apprehensive. Already torpedoed once, he had several life jackets hidden away in key places, just in case.

No one saw the first torpedo coming. Topp would say it “hit at stern” at 0027, his time. Nerissa’s Chief Officer Joe Gaffney would report the time as seven minutes later when “a violent explosion occurred below the water line on Nerissa’s starboard side directly below two lifeboats.” He ran for the bridge to get the captain’s orders even as the ship stopped dead, hissing, listing, lights out, alarm system useless, cabins in turmoil. In Sgt. Stojak’s words: “Imagine, peace and quiet, jokes and friendship one moment, then terror, horror.” He grabbed his life preserver and scrambled to the deck where the lifeboats and rafts were.

Gilbert Watson had rushed there to supervise his orders to abandon ship. Water was pouring in even as the torpedo explosion pitched John Mara against a steel washroom partition. Dazed, he made his way into a corridor where so many men were rushing past that he couldn’t get his lifejacket but did get to his lifeboat. In the bar, John Spencer saw glass flying everywhere and headed for his nearest lifejacket. Jack Cockrell found himself on a cabin floor, dazed, in running water, seized a haversack with emergency gear, a flashlight and a beloved mouth organ. He found the stairwell to the boat deck jammed and men trying to open a door. He and another soldier broke through it with a fireaxe and the rush was on. Yet at No. 3 lifeboat he found men standing around waiting for instructions.

In fact, the mood was so orderly, so calm that army RSM John Edwards borrowed a flashlight, got his life preserver in the lounge, money, a coat and a bottle of brandy in his cabin. When Col. Smith got to his cabin his roommate was still asleep. He woke him and got to the boat deck where he helped Captain Watson, calmly directing people into the two surviving starboard boats. Able Seaman Russell Musseau rushed to his own, No. 7, one of the two smaller boats at the stern, passed a baby carriage, saw no baby and when he got to his boat there was no one there. Joe Gaffney already had a loaded No. 1 in the water, and just then Jack Cockrell saw Sgt. Maj. Owen Bentley “give his lifejacket to a soldier, heard him say, ‘You haven’t been married long. You’d best put this on.'”

Said it just before the first of two more torpedoes struck and split Nerissa in two. She was sinking rapidly when the ammunition locker blew up, took numerous lives, filed the air with debris; John Mara: “the whole middle portion of the ship exploded.” A soldier holding the after fall (rope) at the rear of Mara’s No. 3 lifeboat, was shocked into letting go, and suddenly it was hanging and passengers were being hurled into or near No. 1 just as it lurched heavily from a wave set off by the third torpedo. One was John Spencer and when he surfaced from numbing depth he found he was under a capsized No. 1. So did army lieutenants Ralph Pithart and Russell Paul but all three managed to get on and cling to the overturned boat, Pithart thanks to someone’s leg that he used to lift himself up. John Mara made it to the sea in the falling No. 3, only to find it filling with water and under siege by those around it. He stayed.

On the port side, disaster was more immediate. The navy’s Ledsham was helping get No. 2 boat launched even as two fellow junior officers helped Mr. and Mrs. Lomas get their three children into it. In seconds RSM Edwards saw all seven and the boat disappear in the second torpedo explosion. Amid this chaos, Captain Watson told Col. Smith to put a rope ladder over the side and go. Smith did, survived a plunge into the sea, an escape from under capsized No. 1 just in time to see Nerissa vanish. Watson remained to help people trying desperately to live. His parting words to Smith were, “the best of luck to you.” His own luck had run out. He many well have died from the third explosion, doing a captain’s duty.

Even as Nerissa vanished, one brave man fired a final flare and radio distress signals kept going out till the end. For she went down in four minutes, leaving multiple horror behind. Years later Jack Cockrell would write about clinging to No. 3 boat: “The things that happened next I’d rather forget, but have found it impossible: the agonizing screams and cries of men in the water, the fighting to get into a lifeboat that was full of water and in danger of capsizing.” Amid this, Col. Smith heard a man cry out for his wife until it was clear there would be no answer, ever. In No. 7 lifeboat, men had to work frantically to get clear of the sinking ship, only to discover a plug was out and water gushing in. Musseau stopped it with a thumb and when in the baling the plug was found he kept it in with his foot. And they kept saving others.

“Lifeboats are lowered, light signals are emitted,” the watching Topp recorded. “Radioman signals up to last second . A flare is shot while the ship is going down. Rears up, bow emerges high over water and sinks vertically.” Then there were dark, drenching hours for survivors and for those who survived not long enough. Joe Gaffney made it to a raft and took charge. Col. Smith got there while helping a wounded, dying man. It took Ledsham at least half an hour but he got there too: “The bow of the ship disappeared within five yards of my face and the sea was swarming with men.”

In U552, Topp “learned from radio signals the steamship is Nerissa,” got out a book that revealed her tonnage and that she could accommodate 229 passengers, and decided that explained “the high superstructure” and his own overestimation of how big she was. No one would ever know how many died in her cabins or in the corridors, how many capsized lifeboats in desperate efforts to lower them. No one would ever know whether all three Marconi men stayed together to get those distress signals away; it would only be known that none of them survived, and that the signals were crucial in saving those who did. Canadian war correspondent Sam Robertson was said to have reached the boat-deck rail, then left to get something, didn’t make it back. Joe Gaffney would say 33 got away in No. 7 boat, designed to hold 26, that others clung to two rafts and two capsized boats, and still others drifted in lifejackets hoping to be picked up. Some were sure they saw the submarine rise among them, and voices called out for help and others told them to stop for fear of what it could do to them. In fact, Topp had fled “place of alarm as soon as possible. Steamed away under full speed for an hour, then slowed to low speed.” To him, the rescue survivors hoped for could bring attack.

For hours there was dying. In No. 3 boat, with water coming in as fast as it could be baled out, the living got too weak to remove all who no longer did. “I think,” Cockrell would say, “most of us had a close mental relationship to death many times.” There were hours of drenching waves, despair, cold, then hope when a plane flew overhead. Cockrell used his flashlight to signal. He saw no reaction, but others said they saw an “O.K.” signal. When the flashlight failed he began playing his mouth organ to “cheer people up,” but “soon ran out of tunes and energy.” Then, even as they baled, men turned to prayer. Some found comfort in keeping in touch with others by flashlight. On the Gaffney raft, men pulled in others until they drifted away from where it was possible to rescue more. By then there were 19 or 20 aboard, without food, water or cigarettes and doubtful that the raft was maintaining its level in the water. It was upside down, couldn’t be guided or propelled. Water kept washing over it, over No. 3 boat and the men on capsized No. 1. There Pithart and Paul did their best to help an army sergeant who wanted to talk about his family, drifted off, came to and wanted to pray, then died and was washed into the sea. Of the 30-35 originally in No. 1, Pithart would say, about 16 got back on it after it capsized and half of those were not there in the end.

At dawn, Cockrell would say, “we seemed to be alone on a very large ocean except for the occasional body drifting with the current.” Of the estimated 21 men who’d seen Nerissa vanish from No. 3, only nine, he’d believe, were alive, and he was drifting into a torpor, “a sort of gentle fatigue. I didn’t feel the cold. I felt like putting my head down and sleeping.” But in the last of night’s darkness, another plane had flown overhead signalling encouragement, even as it guided to the scene two Royal Navy destroyers that had spent hours getting there in answer to Nerissa’s distress calls. While one, Hunter, prowled about seeking any U-boat, HMS Veteran closed in for rescue and came upon a graphic scene. Sailor Art Halford: “It was still dark and our first contact was the sight of little fairy-like lights dotting the black sea. As we closed, we saw they were attached to the lifejackets of men in the water.” And the men were all dead.

Veteran pressed on to the living. Didn’t stop or put down lifeboats for fear of attack. Moved as slowly as possible, as near as possible, put a scramble net down and urged survivors to climb aboard. Mara: “Never have I seen such a welcome sight.” He and others cheered wildly, but most were so cold and wasted they had to be helped aboard. In all, Halford would say, “we saved 85.” And amid great kindness took them to Northern Ireland, some 200 miles away. Saved roughly one in three of the 306 Nerissa had borne on the voyage when her luck and whatever charms she had ran out, taking more than 75% of crew and passengers with her.

She did make history that night: she took to their deaths 85 Canadian servicemen, the only ones to die as passengers in transit across the Atlantic in the six years of WW2, a remarkable fact considering the many ships that were sunk, the hundreds of thousands who did cross, and a major tribute to the navy and merchant sailors who got them there. She also left memories that bewitch people to this day. It’s striking, for one thing, that she met her fate through a confrontation of distinctions, for Topp became the third-ranking U-boat ace with 34 sinkings to his credit and surely Watson was a sort of ace too, as a multiple survivor of the things Topp did so well. Yet it’s also a striking comment on human priorities that there now is lots of information available about Topp, about Watson virtually none.

Moreover, it’s been an absorbing experience to have research expose a singular example of the capacity of tragedy to perpetuate itself. For years, scattered survivors and others have gathered information about Nerissa, notable Jack Cockrell. He remembers her sinking as the salient episode of his war, “far worse” than being wounded and sent home as an armored corps officer in Holland in 1944. Years ago he set out to write about it because he felt it should be done, gave up when he realized he didn’t have enough experience, then generously sent me what he’d accumulated. Ralph Pithart has sponged up and shared any information he can find. Clive Gilbert still seeks it because an uncle was in Nerissa’s crew almost by accident, and has never been heard of since. Mike Jackman has gathered sinkings information for years because, as a boy, he saw a U-boat sink two ships at iron-mining Bell Island, Nfld., and got fascinated.

Jack Ponting was so furious over the loss of a friend on the lone Nerissa that he dug up all the information he could find and exploded with anger in an Ottawa newspaper on the 50th anniversary of the sinking. Russel Musseau, twice sunk, was angry for years over Ottawa’s refusal to give merchant seamen veterans’ benefits. In Britain, research turned up an “association for victims of U-boats”, and the fact that there are cases where they get together with the Germans who sank them. On the west coast of Ireland, people still look after the graves of Nerissa victims whose bodies washed ashore.

Over it all there still linger the Associated Press story of the sinking that said the crew considered her a charmed ship-and haunting ifs about the night any charm was pressed too far. What if London had not delayed so long its decision to again make 15 knots the speed level for lone ships? What if it had not, for months, even kept it at 23, a policy a historian says losses made “an expensive mistake?” Gilbert Watson once said Nerissa “will get it sooner or later,” but what if the odds had not been raised when she sailed alone as part of such a mistake? Would Sgt. Maj. Owen Bentley have died, as he did, if he hadn’t given his lifejacket to a young, recently married soldier? What if duty or pride or tradition or courage had not kept those crucial distress calls going out, whether they involved one Marconi man or all three? What if Erich Topp had obeyed that order to return to base? But most haunting of all are things he, a post-war admiral, wrote in a 1984 book that told of his anguish over revelations about the Hitler he’d “blindly” followed: “Nothing,” he said, “can drag my generation from beneath the shadows that regime have spread over us.” There the ifs are endless.