One Common Enemy Read online

  Wakefield Press

  One Common Enemy

  Jim McLoughlin was born in Liverpool in 1921. He joined the Royal Navy at 17, serving aboard the battleship HMS Valiant during the Norwegian and Mediterranean ­campaigns. In 1955 Jim emigrated to South Australia, where

  he and his wife Dorothy raised five children.

  David Gibb is a writer with an abiding interest in the literature of the Second World War, especially the personal experiences of veterans. He has worked extensively as a writer-producer

  in the electronic and print media, and has had short stories and poetry published. David lives in Adelaide and is married to Chris, with whom he has a son.

  Wakefield Press

  1 The Parade West

  Kent Town

  South Australia 5067

  www.wakefieldpress.com.au

  First published 2006

  This edition published 2012

  Copyright © Jim McLoughlin and David Gibb, 2006

  All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  Cover designed by Lahn Stafford Design

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication entry

  McLoughlin, Jim, 1921– .

  One common enemy [electronic resource]: the Laconia Incident: a survivor’s memoir.

  ISBN 978 1 74305 180 1 (ebook: epub).

  1. McLoughlin, Jim, 1921– .

  2. Laconia (Ship).

  3. U-156 (Submarine).

  4. World War, 1939–1945—Personal narratives.

  5. World War, 1939–1945—Search and rescue operations.

  6. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, German.

  7. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations—Submarine.

  I. Title.

  940.5451

  Front cover: Laconia survivors being rescued

  (Photograph: Horst Bredow, U-boot Archiv)

  Dedicated with an ocean of love to my wife Dorothy,

  who wisely prefers to live in the present.

  —J. M.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Prologue Many happy returns

  1 Down among the ships

  2 New mates and marmalade

  3 Valiant days

  4 Convoys, chaos and carnage

  5 Terror in the night

  6 Our grim struggle begins

  7 Drifting into madness

  8 Ruthless measures

  9 The pain of survival

  10 Freetown farewell

  11 The hard way home

  12 Adrift on land

  13 A sea change far away

  14 Postscript to a nightmare

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  The Naval Hymn

  Eternal Father, strong to save,

  Whose arm doth bind the restless wave,

  Who bidst the mighty ocean deep

  Its own appointed limits keep:

  O hear us when we cry to Thee

  For those in peril on the sea.

  Introduction

  I wanted to tell this story because people forget what war is, how terrible it is. They forget how many people are killed, how many families are wrecked. In particular, they forget that a great many who actually survive the terrors of war remain, in some way, prisoners of cruel memories for the rest of their days. I am one of those survivors who, to use a naval analogy, remains permanently anchored in a sea of memories. The passing of the years is supposed to blunt the memory and yet, where these events are concerned at least, I find the opposite to be the case. They have become sharper and ­consequently more painful.

  I am over 80 years old now, and much of what I relate here happened when I was in my late teens and early 20s. More than 60 busy years have gone by, yet there is never a day when I don’t think of these events. And rarely a night when I am not more than a little unsettled by them. I can’t forget what happened. These days I tend to forget some of the things I want to remember, yet remember a great many I’d rather forget. It’s difficult and I believe I’ll always struggle with it. Fortunately my strong faith has ­sustained me.

  The events and conversations I’ve recorded here are based on my personal recollections. Many other Laconia survivors remember the same chaotic experience in ways that are unique to them. Like me, however, they remain haunted by memories.

  Jim McLoughlin,

  Adelaide, South Australia

  Prologue – Many happy returns

  Another day dawns and I know it’s going to be like all the others. Nothing different. Nothing remarkable. I know that when it’s over it will simply slip away and blur into all the other dreadful days we’ve already endured. I’m too bone weary to even think about what will happen next. And besides, I already know. Today, more of us will die in this wretched lifeboat.

  The boat is 30 feet long and painted grey. It’s really a very big rowing boat made of timber. A clinker hulled, open-whaler type of boat. A dirty sheet of yellow canvas is hanging motionless on an oar that the bosun erected as a makeshift mast. We’re drifting on a calm sea, going God knows where. And going there slowly.

  ‘What day is it?’ a weak voice croaks unexpectedly, without any real interest, as if there is no particular need to know. It’s a question asked for the sake of asking, an idle curiosity. I wonder what difference it could possibly make, knowing the date.

  ‘It’s October the second,’ someone answers after I’ve ­forgotten the question. But the words send a signal into my jellied brain, a faint pinprick of recognition.

  October the second. I know that date. I connect it to the year, 1942. Suddenly it makes sense.

  ‘It’s my birthday,’ I announce, surprised at my own discovery. Then I think to add: ‘My twenty-first birthday.’

  There is a long silence. Eventually the British nurse, who is sitting near me, says: ‘Well, that calls for a celebration.’ Her smile, as always, makes me feel better. It gives me hope.

  There is a strange stirring around me that I don’t immediately connect with the announcement of my birth­day. Then I see something being passed along from person to person, unsteady hand to unsteady hand. And then I’m holding it, looking at it rather stupidly. It’s an oblong ration tin. Sparkling in the bottom is an unbelievably precious and ­generous gift of two tantalising tablespoons of water. A double ration. Because I’m 21.

  I tilt the tin so the water runs into one corner, and fool myself into believing that I’ve been given even more than a double ration. I bring the tin to my lips and drink my birthday present, one jealously guarded sip after another, stretching out the moment, willing it not to end. But it does. The tin is empty. And that’s my party. Over before it even begins. No one sings Happy Birthday. No one suggests I’m a jolly good fellow. No one has the strength.

  I look around me. This is a very strange place to be spending my birthday, in a lifeboat somewhere in the Atlantic with a most peculiar bunch of party guests. They seem to have come in tattered fancy dress decorated with encrusted salt. Their lips are grotesquely swollen and split. Their faces are festooned with ugly strips of peeling skin.

  How odd that there are mostly old people at my birth­day party, and all uninvited come to think of it. More people should have been here today, but they’ve gone. Some left willingly. Others, I’m not so sure.

  The morning is already hot, and I know it will get hotter. The sea looks oily, slick and unfriendly. The only thing on it is this lifeboat, and as my mind fades in and out of reality I become convinced that the world I once knew was nothing more than a figment
of my imagination, that there has only ever been this boat and this place. We are deserted souls adrift on a deserted sea on a deserted planet. The loneliness is appalling. I’m now certain this dreadful isolation will be the death of me. If the sea isn’t the death of me first.

  Will I get to be 22? I can’t concentrate long enough to answer my own question. In a strange way I don’t care about my own suffering, but I worry greatly that my family will be tortured by grief when they hear of my fate. Perhaps they’ve been told already, told I’m dead when I’m not. Not yet, anyway. The thought of causing them anguish grinds away at my insides, doubling the dull ache of hunger.

  How did I come to be here? What twists and turns of fate brought me to this moment, to this unknown spot in the Atlantic, to this sad and desperate little boat?

  I know the answer to this only too well. I’m here because of Liverpool. Liverpool and the ships. It was always the magic of the ships pulling me to this point. I couldn’t have resisted even if I’d tried.

  1 – Down among the ships

  I was born on 2 October, 1921, in Walton, a grimy suburb just a few miles from the Liverpool docks. That’s where I fell in love with ships and grew up with my brother George and sisters Florence, Dorothy and Enid. I was the second eldest. Our mother and father, Lillian and Benjamin, were kind, hard-working people who brought us up well in difficult times, in a city hit hard by unemployment during the Great Depression of the early 1930s.

  We lived in a four-roomed terrace house in a dead-end street called Stepney Grove. It looked just like Coronation Street. A railway line ran past the back of our house and everything was forever covered in soot.

  My father was in the merchant marine. He worked for the famous Cunard & White Star Line, as a first-class steward on the Atlantic run to New York. He wasn’t around that much. He would come home about once every three or four weeks, stay for a few days, and then go to sea again. My mother, brother and three sisters were therefore the centre of my life. But it was my father and his work on the ships that influenced me most profoundly. It stirred me deep inside when he told me about his experiences at sea. Before he joined Cunard he had been with the Canadian Pacific Line for a time, and did a voyage to Sydney in 1931.

  ‘They’re building a huge bridge there,’ he told me. ‘It’s like a big coat-hanger.’

  ‘How can a bridge be like a coat-hanger, then?’ I was ­fascinated by the idea that a bridge in far off Australia could resemble something as mundane as a coat-hanger in a ­cupboard in Liverpool.

  ‘It’s the same shape as a coat-hanger, a beautiful arch stretching out from opposite sides of the harbour. We sailed right under it,’ he said. ‘It’s not finished yet, so there was a gap in the middle.’

  I hung on every word. I thought he had the most exciting job in the world.

  My father loved the Cunard liners, which he called ‘his’ ships. They had wonderfully evocative names like Franconia, Laconia, Aquatania and Berengaria, and carried people who lived, as he put it, ‘on the other side’. He didn’t mean the other side of the Atlantic either, rather the other side of ­prosperity from the one we were on.

  It was impossible to grow up in Liverpool without being acutely aware of the docks and ships. Liverpool was a city of ships back then, the second largest port in Britain after London. The docks were like a magnet forever tugging at me. I just wanted to muck about down there more than ­anything else. My parents couldn’t afford to buy us bikes, so I either walked or caught the tram, which cost one penny return. I can still remember the yellow ticket stub. The tram would take me down to Pier Head and the Landing Stage, a huge pontoon on the water, right in front of the famous Cunard Building. The liners used to come alongside it to disembark their passengers and I’d usually be there to watch the hustle. People who had been in New York only days ago would brush past me. It was absolutely marvellous.

  There were always lots of cargo ships down at the docks too, loading and unloading. The docks ran for seven miles along the Liverpool waterfront. Staggering to think of it now. Everything was big, noisy and dirty. It smelt of the sea and rope tar and burnt sugar. It was a dangerous place for a child to be, but I didn’t notice. To me it was an intoxicating kind of pandemonium, with cranes swinging huge cargo nets overhead, often bulging with bales of wool all the way from Australia. There were horse-drawn carts, lorries and tractor engines swarming all over the place and an elevated railway ran the length of the docks. Electric passenger trains rattled along it, bringing people down to the ships and the dockside factories. It was pretty rough, and risky too, but I couldn’t get enough of it. It was a fantastic place for a boy to be.

  One of the best things about the docks was that my mates and I could talk to the tough men who crewed the cargo ships. There were always blokes leaning over the railings, smoking cigarettes and watching the goings on below on the wharf. We’d call out to them and they’d reply in accents from all over the world.

  ‘Where you from, mister?’

  ‘South America.’

  ‘That’s a long way.’

  ‘Very long way.’

  ‘What’s your cargo?’

  ‘Sugar.’

  ‘Where you taking it?’

  ‘Maybe Canada, maybe Japan.’

  ‘You got anything to eat?’

  We would often try our luck asking for food because stooging around there all day made us awfully hungry. Occasionally they’d toss half a sandwich for us to fight over. Sometimes, though, those hard, haggard men would simply tell us to bugger off.

  On summer nights it would be light until nearly 10 o’clock. It must have worried my mother terribly when I’d come home well after dark.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she’d ask.

  ‘Down the docks.’

  ‘How many times have I told you not to go there?’

  Countless times, of course, but I couldn’t help it. Those ships were in my blood, like a strange virus sailing through me.

  Those innocent days on the docks with my tight-knit gang of mates were wonderfully happy. When we weren’t hanging around in the shadows of ships we’d be fighting with some other gang, throwing stones and getting into harmless mischief. It was just boisterous boyhood fun. One of our favourite tricks was to annoy the local shopkeepers by throwing stones at the goods they had on display in front of their stores. The most inviting target was always stacked boxes of Woodbine cigarettes. Urging each other on, we’d lob stones from the other side of the street until the stack went sprawling over the footpath. Then we’d hide and watch as the angry shop owner came running out.

  Sometimes we’d go into a biscuit shop to ask our favourite question.

  ‘Got any broken biscuits, mister?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well why don’t you mend ’em then?’

  With that we’d run out of the shop laughing hysterically. We were the funniest people we knew.

  Mum had a pretty good idea of what was going on, as mothers do, and occasionally she’d give me a stern reminder of exactly how far I could go.

  ‘Don’t you ever do anything that will bring a policeman to my door,’ she warned.

  But those pranks were only a minor distraction. Ships were what really mattered to me. Two in particular left a lasting impression on me, and helped shape my desire to go to sea. The first was Cunard’s Laconia, my father’s last ship before he came home from the sea forever. I treasured the thought that he worked and lived aboard this beautiful ­passenger liner for weeks at a time. She was an elegant ship and when I think of her now it is still with strong feelings of nostalgia.

  Laconia was built in Scotland, at Wallsend-on-Tyne, in 1922, the year after I was born. She was 624 feet long, displaced nearly 20,000 tons, and steamed at 17 knots. She could accommodate 2000 passengers, which was only 500 fewer than the Titanic, which had been more than twice Laconia’s tonnage. Liverpool was her home port, so she mainly worked the Liverpool to New York route, although she also made a number of voyages from Hamburg
to New York.

  Because she was considered a ship of great luxury, Laconia was also in demand as a cruise ship, especially during the mid-1930s when the world had begun to crawl out from beneath the Depression. She cruised often to the West Indies and Madeira. Apart from her reputation as a fine cruise ship, she also claimed her place in nautical history by being the first passenger liner to circumnavigate the globe with the aid of a brand new invention called a gyrocompass. That was an astonishing achievement back then.

  Laconia was built for the pleasure of those prepared to pay for comfort. When Dad took me aboard I was over­awed by the luxury I saw. It was a far cry from the way we all lived in Liverpool. There were glassed-in garden lounges with potted palms and exotic cane furniture, a verandah cafe, a library and writing room, a fashionable salon, a huge first-class dining room with marble pillars and, most oddly of all, a first-class smoking room which was a full-size replica of an old English inn, complete with its own massive open fireplace. Those luxuries stuck in my mind, but I can’t say I took much notice of the lifeboats.

  Even after my father left the sea for good in 1935 he still retained a strong connection to his last ship. One of our neighbours, a chap called Fred Eyres, was her chief pantry-man. When he and my father got together, their conversation was always about Laconia.

  The other ship that inspired me was HMS Royal Oak, one of the Royal Navy’s great Royal Sovereign Class battleships. A truly massive ship it was. Utterly huge. When I was 16, in the summer of 1938, Royal Oak paid a goodwill visit to Liverpool. I suspect now that the real aim was to recruit naive young chaps like me because Hitler was making loud noises over in Germany at that time.

  The day Royal Oak was opened to the public in Liverpool is still vivid in my mind. It seems impossible that it was more than 65 years ago. She was tied up at Gladstone Dock on a glorious summer’s day, which was rare in Liverpool. A navy band was playing. Thousands of people were queuing and clamouring to get aboard her. Royal Navy sailors in crisp white uniforms were showing people around, pointing out the features of the ship, including the 15-inch guns on her foredeck. I was mesmerised. She was a magnificent ship, but dark and somehow sinister, built for war at sea. She had a beam of almost 90 feet and a vast superstructure that towered over her. It took a crew of 1200 men to sail her.