58 pages • 1-hour read
Torpedoed: The True Story of the World War II Sinking of "The Children's Ship"
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Themes
The Human Cost of War
The sinking of the City of Benares is a story about the human cost of war, including the immense loss of civilian life that was a defining feature of World War II. The 90 children on board the Benares were put there to escape the indiscriminate violence of the Blitz, but the violence found them anyway. The crew of U-48 torpedoed the Benares without knowing whom they were killing, but in this they were no different from the bomber crews on both sides of the conflict who dropped bombs on cities packed with civilians, killing adults and children alike. The sinking of the City of Benares was far from the greatest single loss of civilian life in the war, but the high concentration of children on board made it a powerful symbol for the war’s enormous human cost.
Heiligman first delves into how World War II affected British citizens in September 1940, when the Germans began bombing London in relentless campaign that would last until May of the following year and become known in the English-language press as “the Blitz,” after the German word blitzkrieg, meaning “lightning war.” Suddenly, the war that had seemed far away became “real for the British people” (3). Innocent, unsuspecting children like Gussie Grimmond and her nine brothers and sisters lost their homes and all their belongings in the bombing. Children and adults, “ordinary citizens,” were killed and injured as bombs fell on “office buildings, schools, playgrounds, churches, and houses” (4). In the novel, Derek Bech has a “close-up view” of war as he watches British and German planes engage in dogfights right above his house in the countryside. Once, the nine-year-old rushes to the scene of a plane crash where a pilot has been decapitated trying to bail out, and adults hurry to obscure the scene from his view.
These “wartime children” were forced to grow up quickly. The CORB children, and some of the paying passengers like Colin Ryder Richardson, were going to live in another country, all on their own and far from their families. Older siblings were suddenly responsible for their younger brothers and sisters, and everyone was expected to be mature and well-behaved. Even before the City of Benares began to sink, these children were shaped by their experiences with war.
Heiligman notes that “people expect deaths, even civilian deaths” during war (253). These deaths are often reduced to statistics—even Heiligman herself frequently notes the numbers of the dead—and the substitution of numbers for unknown human lives can have an anaesthetizing effect. Much of Heiligman’s project in this book is to restore individual humanity to both those who died and those who survived, telling their stories and evoking their personalities to rescue them from the anonymity of the statistic. The book aims to remind readers that each death represents an entire “shattered” family. Even the commander of U-boat 48, which fired on the City of Benares and celebrated the sinking of the ship as a victory, experienced a mental breakdown when he learned he had caused the deaths of nearly 100 children. For those who survived, the tragedy remained a defining moment in their lives, as many maintained close relationships with other survivors and frequently discussed or wrote books about the ordeal. The Benares tragedy, like war in general, reshaped the lives of thousands, beginning with those who were affected directly, and radiating out to affect an ever-widening web.
The Illusion of Safety in Wartime
Torpedoed tells the story of the controversial attempt to evacuate British children during World War II and explores the illusory nature of safety during wartime. The parents who chose to include their children in the CORB program faced an agonizing decision. Under constant German bombardment, London was clearly no longer safe, and it seemed to many that the safest place for their children was far from England. However, in a war characterized by the first widespread use of submarines and airplanes capable of traversing the world’s oceans, no place was truly safe. A little more than year after the sinking of the City of Benares, the US entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor shattered the illusion that the US’s distance from the battlegrounds of Europe and Asia would protect it. For the CORB children, even to reach the imagined safety of North America meant facing dangers that might well have been greater than those at home.
The waters the children had to pass through on their way across the Atlantic were patrolled by German U-boats, and torpedo attacks were common. There was no way to eliminate this risk, so the British government tried to mitigate it as much as possible by having the ships carrying children travel in convoys. Parents had to weigh these risks and social pressures alongside the added complexity of breaking up their families. Even if their children were safe, it would mean an indefinite period of separation. No one knew how long the war would go on, and parents were faced with sending their children to other countries alone, possibly for years. It was a “heart-wrenching” decision for families, and none of them took it lightly.
The sinking of the City of Benares exposed the difficulty of calculating risk during wartime. Some CORB officials would say years later that they thought the evacuation program had been a mistake; “in retrospect, it seemed that [the children] might have been safer at home” (255-56). For the children in Lifeboat 12, this dilemma becomes a macabre game, as they debate whether they’d rather be bombed at home or torpedoed at sea, with the consensus shifting as the days drag on. Because of the random cruelty of war, risks cannot be accurately evaluated or compared. Children like Gussie Grimmond and her siblings, who lost their home in a bombing, were “clearly […] not safe in London” (9), but no one could have predicted the tragedy that all five of the Grimmond children would die at sea. Ultimately, the British government and the parents who decided to send their children away did what they thought was best, faced with impossible choices. The tragic outcome of the attempted evacuation speaks to the terrible unpredictability of war.
Heroism and Resilience in the Face of Danger
Torpedoed is a story of the heroism and resilience that ordinary people show in the face of danger. Over the course of the harrowing escape from the sinking ship, the terrifying stormy night at sea that followed, and the days that some passengers spent awaiting rescue, many individuals became undertook actions that Heiligman describes as heroic. Over and over, adults, children, crew, and passengers put themselves at risk to help others, saving lives even at the cost of their own.
The courage and sacrifice that war demands are apparent even before the children and other passengers board the City of Benares. Families had to make an immense sacrifice, sending their children around the world for an unspecified length of time, and the children had to face the unknown with courage. Many of the children, like Gussie Grimmond and Colin Ryder Richardson, impressed the adults aboard the ship with their maturity and resilience.
Once the torpedo struck, ordinary people became heroes all over the ship. Members of the crew, like “captain’s boy” Abdul Subhan, were “cheerful and positive during the crisis” (86), helping passengers to stay calm and evacuate as safely as possible. Passengers like BBC reporters Eric Davis and Laszlo Raskai put themselves at considerable risk to help launch life rafts and dive into the ocean after fallen children. In fact, Laszlo died while trying to rescue children. Many of the children aboard the City of Benares were also heroes. Some, like Bess Walder and Beth Cummings, helped their injured roommates out of their cabins, and others, like Colin Ryder Richardson and Jack Keeley, helped tend to injured passengers on their lifeboats or rafts and impressed everyone with their bravery and tenacity.
Perhaps no group of survivors was tested more than those aboard Lifeboat 12, which ended up stranded in the Atlantic Ocean for nine days. Throughout the ordeal on Lifeboat 12, Mary Cornish became one of the text’s central symbols of heroism and resilience. She dedicated herself completely to caring for the six CORB boys aboard the ship, telling them stories to keep their spirits up and seeing to their physical needs as best she could. By the time the lifeboat was finally rescued, Mary “was a wreck” who “could barely move” after days of sacrifice (248), but all of the boys survived thanks to her efforts.
The story of the sinking of the City of Benares is full of big and small heroic stories. Without each of these individual heroes and acts of heroism, no matter how small, many more would have died when the City of Benares went down.
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