US supply ship sunk by U-boat

The torpedo struck a little after four in the morning, when the watch below was asleep and the men on deck had grown used to the long, empty hours of the middle watch. There was no warning beyond a single lookout's shout, and then the whole forward part of the ship seemed to lift and fall back into the sea.

She had been sailing independently, having lost contact with her convoy in fog two days earlier, and so there was no escort near enough to give chase to the submarine or to pick the survivors out of the water quickly. That was the danger of the straggler in the summer of 1941: alone, low in the water with a heavy cargo, and a long way from any help.

"We got one boat away and a couple of rafts," the second officer remembered afterwards. "The old man stayed on the bridge until the water was up round his knees, counting heads as we went over the side. He was the last man off and he never made it to the boat."

For the better part of a day and a night the boat rode the swell under a grey, indifferent sky. The men shared out the water in careful mouthfuls and argued in low voices about which way land might lie. Some slept; most did not. It was the cold, more than the thirst, that they spoke of later.

They were found the following afternoon by a corvette working back along the convoy's track. The little warship came up out of a rain squall almost on top of them, and for a moment nobody in the boat could quite believe it was real. Of the crew of forty-two, thirty-one were brought aboard alive.

The loss was one of hundreds that year, a single grey pin on a chart already crowded with them. But for the men in the boat it was the whole of the war, reduced to a few square feet of planking and the question, hour after hour, of whether anyone would come.