One Survivor’s Story
A Survivor’s Story
By Thomas Sanger
The threat of war was not a major consideration for my grandmother, Rhoda Thomas, when she visited relatives and friends in her native England during the summer of 1939. Although German Chancellor Adolf Hitler was making territorial demands on Poland, few people thought the situation would lead to war.
But on August 24th a news bulletin from Moscow cast a pall over all of Great Britain. Germany and Russia announced they signed a non-aggression pact in which they agreed not to go to war with each other or to aid an enemy of the other country. The announcement seemed to make war a more realistic possibility.
That evening the radio carried news that the U.S. Embassy was warning all American citizens in Britain to leave for home immediately due to the threat of war. Rhoda arranged passage on the liner Athenia, leaving from Liverpool Saturday, Sept. 2. Her plans to travel to Liverpool had to be changed twice due to the evacuation of school children from large cities and troop mobilizations.
Friday morning, Sept. 1, the German army began invading Poland. War now seemed unavoidable. Rhoda caught an express train to Liverpool, arriving Friday evening. The next morning while waiting to board Athenia, she sent a cable to her family in Rochester, NY, saying she would arrive in Montreal, Canada, Sept. 10.
Shortly before noon Sept. 2, she boarded the ship and discovered there would be many more passengers than usual. Rhoda was assigned to a cabin with three other women she didn’t know. She stayed on deck most of the rest of the day before retiring to spend a restless night, recalling how she had left her friends and relatives so hurriedly, and thinking how close they were to war.
The next day, Sunday, Sept. 3, a dining room steward told Rhoda at lunch that England had just declared war on Germany. Passengers talked about the danger posed by German submarines, but almost everyone believed the ship would be out of the danger zone before anything could possibly happen.
That evening after dinner, Rhoda went up on deck with her heavy coat to get a breath of fresh air before retiring. Seated with a friend on the starboard side of the ship, she watched the stars winking on in the twilight sky.
“All at once, there was a terrific explosion. Something struck [the] port side of the ship and she seemed to keel over on her side and the water came over the deck. The lights went out all over the inside of the ship and a dense cloud of gas-filled smoke seemed everywhere. I was thrown down and as I picked myself up and turned around, I saw out on the water about a half a mile away, a long-shaped dark object with black smoke around it, and in a flash I knew what had happened.”
Athenia had been torpedoed by a German U-boat 250 miles northwest of Ireland. It had taken the war less than nine hours to find my grandmother and the 1,417 other passengers and crew aboard the ship.
With the cries of women and children all around her, Rhoda stood on the deck, knowing the ship was doomed and thinking of her home and family in Rochester, NY, wondering if she would ever see them again. “Yet I didn’t seem to be afraid and felt quite calm,” she later recalled, expressing an equanimity felt by many other passengers. After helping one distressed woman into a lifeboat, my 54-year-old grandmother managed to climb some 20 feet down a rope ladder and drop off the end into a lifeboat riding on the ocean’s six-foot swells. The night was cold, the boat leaked, and a drizzling rain added to the survivors’ discomforts. Although she had to stand in the crowded boat, Rhoda was grateful she had worn a warm coat on deck before the torpedo attack.
“There were those in the boat that only had a thin dress on and some only night clothes. I took the bottom part of my coat and wrapped it around a poor shivering woman who stood by me crying,” she wrote. She tried to comfort the woman and kept repeating the 23rd Psalm. “By this time, I was standing ankle deep in oil and water.”
Someone handed Rhoda a sleeping baby dressed in only a shirt and diapers and asked her to keep the infant warm under her coat. She lost track of the time, became very tired, and felt the baby weighing heavily in her arms. Finally, a young woman sitting on the other side of the boat agreed to take the baby under her coat.
They drifted for several hours while the people at the oars worked to keep Athenia’s emergency lights in sight, and passengers bailed out the water that constantly found its way into the boat. At last they saw the lights of a rescue ship, a Norwegian freighter, approaching in the distance. Rhoda watched several other boats near the freighter as the rowers in her lifeboat tried to get closer.
“We tried hard to pull toward that ship, but it seemed we could not get any nearer no matter how hard we worked. The boys [at the oars] were getting exhausted.” A few hundred yards from their goal, Rhoda saw the large ship suddenly move forward, catching one of the lifeboats in its propeller, shattering the boat and throwing all its occupants into the water.
“It was awful; they were crying for help and struggling for their lives, and little children were screaming.” The sailor in charge of Rhoda’s lifeboat said they couldn’t help because their boat was so overloaded that the people in the water would just pull them over. All they could do was row away from the disaster. “I seemed to go all to pieces then; the sight of those poor people in the water completely unnerved me.”
Sitting in the lifeboat in the middle of the ocean and in the dark of night, Rhoda felt she and her fellow passengers were about to give up hope, when a bright light found them in the early morning darkness of Monday, Sept. 4. The light belonged to the luxury yacht Southern Cross, the second rescue ship to reach the scene of the attack. Sailors from the yacht threw lines to the passengers and pulled them up out of the lifeboat one by one.
“By that time I was half fainting, but I heard a voice saying, ‘You are safe on a private yacht,’” Rhoda later remembered. “When they laid me down, I could see people all around me and knew then that they had already rescued a good number. There, too, I saw the baby I had held under my coat. It wasn’t long before a frantic mother claimed it. She had been taken off on another lifeboat.”
My grandmother and the other Athenia passengers had been rescued by the Swedish industrialist millionaire Axel Wenner-Gren. In all, Wenner-Gren rescued 376 survivors aboard the sleek white yacht that had once belonged to the American millionaire Howard Hughes.
Later that morning, all the survivors aboard Southern Cross were given the choice of returning to Scotland on a British destroyer or continuing their journey onward aboard the American freighter, City of Flint. Rhoda chose to board the small freighter, which carried 236 survivors to the nearest North American landfall – Halifax, Nova Scotia.
City of Flint arrived in Halifax on Sept. 13, ten days after Athenia had been torpedoed. The Athenia survivors were taken by train overnight to Montreal, where Rhoda was reunited with my grandfather, Frank Thomas, who had been flown to Montreal by a local Rochester newspaper. They flew home on the newspaper’s company plane, which allowed the paper to have an exclusive story with an Athenia survivor in the next day’s edition.
Nothing in Rhoda’s life would ever again compare to the drama of surviving the attack on Athenia. Following the war, she pursued a claim against the German government for the possessions she lost when Athenia sank. The proceedings dragged on for many years and in the end, neither she nor Frank received any compensation for her losses.
Rhoda and Frank moved from Rochester to Southern California in the mid-1950s, following Frank’s retirement. Rhoda died there in 1957 at age 72