RMS Lancastria

1940

Saint-Nazaire, four thousand dead, Churchill buried it Location: Bay of Biscay, off Saint-Nazaire, France · Coordinates: 47.15°N 2.27°W · Casualties: ~4,000-6,000 · Survivors: ~2,477 · Depth: 25 m · Cause: aerial attack — Bombed by a Luftwaffe Junkers Ju 88 at 15:50 on 17 June 1940 while loaded with British soldiers and civilians evacuated from Saint-Nazaire in Operation Aerial, the collapse of France. Four bombs struck; one entered a funnel and detonated in the engine room. She rolled over in twenty minutes. · Fate: war grave · protected · Type: troopship · former Cunard liner · Tonnage: 16,243 tons · Crew: 330 · Flag: United Kingdom · Launched: 1922 Cunard transatlantic liner, requisitioned as a troopship, evacuating British soldiers and civilians from Saint-Nazaire at the collapse of France. Bombed by a Luftwaffe Ju 88 at 15:50 on 17 June 1940; four bombs struck, one down a funnel into the engine room, and she sank in twenty minutes with thousands still aboard. Between 4,000 and 6,000 dead, the worst maritime disaster in British history. Churchill ordered the news suppressed; most Britons did not hear the story until the 1970s. The Vessel The RMS Lancastria was a Cunard Line transatlantic liner, 176 metres long, 16,243 gross tons, originally commissioned in 1922 as the Tyrrhenia for the Anchor Line's Canadian service and transferred to Cunard in 1924 under her new name. She was of moderate size compared to her Cunard fleetmates, designed for a service speed of 16 knots on twin screws, and was a passenger and cargo vessel rather than an express liner: tourist-class and cabin accommodations for 1,830 passengers on the Liverpool-Quebec route. She passed to Cunard-White Star Line on the 1934 merger and was assigned to the company's cruise-ship market, repositioned as a 1930s winter cruise vessel to the West Indies and the Mediterranean. She carried Cunard's economy-class passengers through the last years of the pre-war transatlantic trade. At her requisition by the British Admiralty on 1 September 1939 she was at sea inbound from New York; she diverted to Liverpool on 3 September 1939 and was refitted as a troop transport over the following three weeks at Canada Dock, Liverpool. Her wartime role between October 1939 and June 1940 was the movement of British Army and Royal Canadian Air Force personnel between Britain and France, Egypt, and Malta. She was one of some sixty British passenger liners requisitioned as troop transports for Operation Aerial, the emergency evacuation of remaining British military personnel and British civilians from French Atlantic ports after the collapse of France in May and June 1940. B The Disaster She took on water through the engine-room hit from the moment it struck. She listed to starboard within three minutes. Her port-side lifeboats could not be launched; her starboard-side lifeboats, swung out on a tilting deck, swamped as they reached the water. Between 4,000 and 6,000 people died in the Charpentier Roads between 15:48 and 16:12 on the evening of 17 June 1940. The figure is uncertain because the British government of 1940 could not produce, and has never produced, a complete manifest. Captain Sharp estimated 5,000 dead; the French port authorities estimated 4,000 to 6,000; the British War Cabinet briefing paper of 21 June 1940 used the figure 4,000. The memorial at Saint-Nazaire uses the figure 4,000. The commonly-cited modern figure is 4,000, though the Lancastria Association has lobbied for a figure closer to 6,000. This is the worst single-ship loss of life in British maritime history. It is more than the Titanic and the Lusitania combined. Winston Churchill, by that evening the Prime Minister for six weeks, was briefed on the sinking and ordered a D-notice on the press coverage. No British newspaper was to publish news of the Lancastria until "later news permits it". The specific reason Churchill gave to his War Cabinet on 18 June 1940 was that the country could not absorb another catastrophe on top of Dunkirk and the French collapse. The D-notice was never lifted. By the time British newspapers did begin, hesitantly, to carry the story in mid-July 1940, the