Devon Family Saved by a U-Boat (Part 2)

PART TWO…

TWO FILMS THAT BROUGHT BACK FEARFUL MEMORIES.
‘TITANIC’ AND ‘THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE’

June STONEMAN is now Mrs. June RADMORE, a working wife who lives in a quiet semi in Plympton, Plymouth.

She is thirty-seven and quite honestly she doesn’t know how much of her great wartime adventure she remembers – and how much she has picked up from the stories her mum and dad have told.

“There are some things I remember vividly,” she said, “but it is patchy, like clips from a film.”

TERRIBLE
“I’ve still got an ancient blanket from the ‘Laconia’ with a hole in the middle. My neck went through the hole while we were in the lifeboat and I wore it as a sort of coverall.”

“I’ve got a little bible given to me by a missionary girl when we finally came ashore.”

“My mum and dad have told the story so often to relatives and friends over the years that a great deal of what I think I remember must have come from what they said.”

“I remember the actual sinking best and my father grabbing me from my bunk and carrying me from our cabin to the lifeboat.”

“That was pretty terrible, with people screaming and the water pouring down the ladders against us.”

“If that torpedo had struck five minutes after it did I wouldn’t be here today. Mum and dad would have been at a big dance in the ship’s dining room, far away from where I was and they would never have got back to me.”

“I don’t remember much about the time in the lifeboat. Perhaps that’s just as well. Mum says I slept most of the time.”

“And actually aboard the German submarine all I can remember was the bar of chocolate given to me by the sailor.”

“Funnily enough, I remember feeling thirsty in the middle of the night and the sailor went and got me a glass of water.”

But some things do bring back memories for June.

“I went to see the film of the ‘Titanic’ and the scenes when the liner went down really frightened me because it all came flooding back.”

ENGULFED
“My husband asked me if I wanted to leave, but I thought it was so stupid and I watched it. But the scenes of the water rushing into the ship and people being engulfed were so bad that I had to look away.”

“More recently, we went to watch the film ‘The Poseidon Adventure’, although my husband wasn’t too keen.”

“It was the same thing all over again. When the ship turned turtle I remembered things all over again.”

“It was really scary.”

“I THINK THE GERMANS MISSED THEIR
OWN KIDS AND WERE SPOILING OURS”

The young German submariners, dressed like latter-day pirates, were not gentle in their handling of the survivors.

Their commander’s orders were brusque: “Get the women and children on board. All of them. Don’t listen to refusals and do it quickly.”

Mrs. STONEMAN was still dressed in the black cocktail dress she had been wearing in preparation for a ball aboard the liner.

By now it was caked with salt and her stockings were “more holes than stockings”.

LISTLESS
Little June was wearing the flower-patterned pyjamas that she had on, tucked up in her bunk and drifting off to sleep, when the torpedo struck.

Like all the children, she was listless and uninterested in what had been happening for several days.

Even the emergencies of the submarine didn’t arouse her from her torpor.

“When the submarine appeared I was terrified,” said Mrs. STONEMAN. “I had heard all about Germans and about U-boats. I honestly thought that they were savage and cruel and that we were all going to be gunned down.”

“I saw the submarine’s officers looking down at us and talking to some of the men further up the lifeboat.”

“Then they started to lift out the women and children. They just hoisted them up from man to man and one by one they disappeared down into the submarine.”

“I think I was screaming that I didn’t want to go – but they took me and June anyway.”

“One minute we were all sitting there. The next we were being hoisted up. Then we were going down ladders.”

“I was gripping June tightly all the time and I didn’t really notice the captain standing up in the conning tower.”

“We were passed through a hole in the outside below the tower and we just kept going down.”

“The first thing I noticed was the smell and the noise. It was the smell of oil and machinery and the noise of the generators.”

“We were passed from one party of sailors to another and I was convinced that something awful was going to happen to us.”

“We ended up in the torpedo room, surrounded by Germans and those long, thin torpedoes. I couldn’t help thinking that it was one of them that had landed us all in this trouble.”

“The captain was a young blonde man with a little beard and he seemed to be worried most of the time.”

“And I noticed one man, in civilian clothes, who, we were told later, was a Nazi Party official.”

“He didn’t like what the captain was doing at all. I think he would have liked to see us all thrown over the side.”

As U-507 lay motionless about 350 miles north of the Ascension Islands, her gun draped with the Red Cross flag, high-level political manoeuvring was going on between the German naval authorities and the Vichy French government in Casablanca.

HORRIFIED
The Germans had been horrified to find that 1,800 P.O.W.’s had been aboard the ‘Laconia’.
Now, under pressure from their Italian allies, they were making desperate efforts to save as many of them as possible.
All submarines in the pack were ordered to locate and round up the scattered lifeboats and take aboard any Italians.
They were also told to “do what you can” for the Allied survivors.
Over a wide area of ocean the U-boats were doing just that. Between four submarines a total of about twenty lifeboats had been rounded up, including the STONEMANS’.
Each submarine attached lines to the boats and began to tow them to the predestined central point. There they were to be picked up by the ‘Gloire’ of the Vichy French Navy, which was steaming from Casablanca to meet them.

As he watched his wife and daughter being taken aboard U-507, George STONEMAN was having mixed feelings.

He remembers “We had no choice in the matter and we had already been given food and water by the Germans so I was sure that they meant us no further harm.”

“But I admit I felt terrible when I saw the German sailors lowering my wife and daughter inside the hull.”

“After they had gone, the submarine took us in tow and we began to move off. We all just waited to see what would happen. Certainly the situation could not get any worse.”

Inside U-507 Mrs. STONEMAN wasn’t feeling any happier about her rescuers. She said: “Each group was put in the charge of one sailor and he tried to speak to us and show us where to go,” she said. “It was terrible cramped and we had to walk about with a permanent stoop. One of the sailors gave June a bar of chocolate and she looked at it, and then looked at me, wondering what to do. She hadn’t seen such a thing for years. The sailor was smiling and nodding and saying something in German, but we couldn’t understand a word.”

SMILED
“June finally ate the chocolate and I don’t think I’ve seen a happier look on the face of a child.”

“The sailor took her on his knee while she ate the chocolate and drank a glass of milk.”

“This wasn’t anything like the stories I had been told about Germans.”

“We finally went with one sailor to his quarters and there was a cubby hole with a bunk and a bit of floor.”

“He pointed to the bunk and waved that we should sleep there. He indicated that he would lay down on the floor.”

“I still didn’t trust them, but the bunk looked so comfortable after five days trying to sleep in the bottom of a packed lifeboat, that I decided we must sleep on it.”

“June and I cuddled up on the bunk and listened to the noise of the engines as the U-boat started to move.”

“In the middle of the night I woke up and saw that June was talking to the German. He was trying to understand what she was saying.”

“And would you believe, she was trying to tell him she was thirsty and wanted a glass of water.”

“I made him understand. He smiled, went off and came back with the water. Just like any Dad getting up in the middle of the night.”

“When we awoke in the morning we got a big breakfast of semolina and some of the sailors took off their heavy socks and gave them to the children. There was quite a festive atmosphere aboard the boat.”

“I think it was because most of the Germans had been away from home for so long and many of them were ordinary family men. They missed their own kids and they were spoiling ours.”

“One sailor - the one whose bunk we used – showed us a picture of his wife and children and looked at it quite longingly.”

“I think it was probably at that point that I lost my fear of Germans. All the bad things I had been told about them went right out of the window.”

“We were looking at somebody just like us, a man who gave up his bed and his precious chocolate for a strange child and her mother. It was really amazing.”

“It is something I have never forgotten. And no matter what happened afterwards during the war, I will never forget the crew of that submarine and how kind they were.”

While U-507 was towing their lifeboat to the central point with the women and children aboard, her sister ship, U-156 – the one which had fired the fatal torpedo – was thirty miles north with four lifeboats in tow.
She also had a Red Cross draped across her gun.

BOMBER
Just after dawn, an American bomber attacked her, scoring no direct hits, but sinking two of the lifeboats and killing about twenty survivors.

Immediately, the captain radioed the other U-boats, telling them of the attack. He also informed his headquarters, and within minutes a huge international row was brewing.
But for the survivors, their few hours of safety and comfort were over. The U-boats had no choice but to dive for safety and leave their charges to fend for themselves.

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