The Burning Tanker Adrift in the Atlantic
is chief officer of the San Demetrio, a British merchant navy tanker loaded with thousands of tons of aviation spirit. An experienced deck officer, he is one of those civilians without uniform on whom the survival of the United Kingdom depends: fuel, food and ammunition cross the Atlantic in convoys, the favourite targets of the German raiders.
On 5 November 1940, convoy HX-84, which left Halifax with 37 ships, is protected only by a single armed merchant cruiser, the Jervis Bay. The pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, infinitely more powerful, looms up. The Jervis Bay sacrifices itself to let the convoy scatter; it is sunk, but the majority of the cargo ships escape.
The San Demetrio takes several shells. The bridge is destroyed, the upper deck catches fire and a lookout is killed. With a cargo of petrol ready to explode, the order to abandon ship is given. Hawkins and 15 men cram into a lifeboat and pull away into the freezing night.
24 hours later, after drifting without rescue, the boat sights the silhouette of a ship in flames. Drawing nearer, the sailors recognise, stupefied, their own tanker, still afloat and still ablaze.
Adrift at sea before the burning San Demetrio, what should Hawkins attempt with his lifeboat?
Hawkins chose to make for the burning tanker, put out the fire and try to bring it back to port: at dawn on 7 November, the crew hoisted a makeshift sail, reached the tanker drifting a few miles to leeward and climbed back aboard. The men fought the fire for hours, managed to relight the main engine and put back to sea. Without compass, without charts and with a half-wrecked emergency steering gear, they sailed nearly a thousand miles. The San Demetrio made landfall on 13 November 1940 and saved the greater part of its petrol cargo. The feat became a media event: Hawkins received the OBE, the chief engineer the Lloyd's Medal for bravery at sea. The epic would inspire in 1943 the film San Demetrio London, a symbol of the anonymous courage of the merchant navy in the Battle of the Atlantic.
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Fegen and the Jervis Bay — convoy HX-84
Ramsay at Dover Castle — Dynamo
Ramsay — Dover, 14:23
HMS Courageous — Makeig-Jones after the Torpedoes
HMS Daring in the Pentland Firth
HMS Rawalpindi — Kennedy at 3:47 p.m.
HMS Sphinx at Kinnaird Head
Royal Oak — Prien in Scapa Flow
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The fate of the victors — Air Ministry, November 1940
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