Search for sunken ship off Donegal that holds a grim place in Second World War history
Shipwreck hunter wants to locate the passenger vessel sunk by a U-boat in the first hours of the war
AT 11.15am on Sunday September 3, 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made his famous radio speech announcing Britain was at war with Germany. The Second World War had begun.
At the time, a liner named the Athenia was carrying over 1,000 passengers from Britain to Canada, including several hundred Jews escaping Nazi persecution.
At the time of Chamberlain’s speech, the Athenia was 200 miles north of Inishtrahull Island, off Co. Donegal. Unknown to the crew or passengers, Nazi U-boats were cruising off the Irish coast, hoping to launch the first attack of the new war.
At around 4.40pm, the Athenia was spotted by the crew of the German U-boat U-30. Its commander, Oberleutnant FritzJulius Lemp, would later claim that he spotted a dark ship moving in a zigzag pattern far from the shipping lanes and assumed it was either a navy troop transporter or an armed merchant cruiser.
At 7.40pm that evening, after three hours of silent pursuit, the U-boat crew could see that the Athenia was now between Rockall and Tory Island.
Lemp ordered two torpedoes to be fired. One exploded on the Athenia’s port side, in her engine room, causing a devastating power failure. The ship listed and began slowly to sink.
Several ships, including the destroyer HMS Electra, responded to the Athenia’s distress signal. There was panic on board as some of the lifeboats were slow to launch. Most got away but 117 people died. They were the first casualties of the Second World War II, some of them children who were escaping with their families from the looming war.
The Norwegian cargo ship MS Knute Nelson, and the US cargo ship City of Flint, rescued survivors from the Athenia, which was still afloat.
Under orders from her owners to bring the survivors into a neutral port, the Knute Nelson steered south for Galway because Ireland had declared its neutrality the
‘A tremendous cheer went up’
previous day. The Knute Nelson radioed to the harbourmaster, Captain T Tierney, that they were making for Galway with 430 survivors. The next morning, the Athenia finally sank, 14 hours after it was struck.
Captain Tierney informed all the local authorities to be prepared for a massive disaster. A committee was formed on Monday evening, including Galway mayor Joseph F Costello and the Catholic bishop of Galway, Dr Michael Browne.
The mayor’s wife also organised a committee of 38 women to lead the volunteers, including the Girl Guides, who would be essential in looking after the refugees.
The cabinet met in Dublin late on Monday and made £500 available to the mayor for food, clothing and medical care for the survivors.
The Preparatory College at Taylor’s Hill, Coláiste Éinde, was to be used to house refugees, as well as
Galway Grammar School. The Irish Red Cross also started a subscription to raise money to help them.
Shortly before midnight on Monday, a pilot boat captained by Senan Meskell went out from Black Head on the north coast of Clare to pilot the Knute Nelson to meet a
Galway tender ship, Cathair Na Gaillimhe, which was waiting to transport the survivors from the Norwegian freighter to Galway city.
‘As we went alongside the Knute Nelson a tremendous cheer went up from the survivors who lined
the decks’, wrote the Connacht Tribune correspondent, Seán Kenny, who was aboard the Cathair Na Gaillimhe.
When it loaded all the survivors, it sailed into Galway at about noon, and hundreds of people lined the quay to welcome the survivors.
Eventually, the passengers were taken by bus to the Royal Hotel and to other hotels and homes.
A crisis was looming for Germany, and many international newspapers reported the sinking of the Athenia in joint headlines with the declaration of war.
Germany had hoped to keep America and Canada out of the war but, of those who died, 54 were Canadian and 28 American. When the U-boat captain realised he had struck a civilian ship, he told his men to keep it a secret and didn’t enter it in the submarine logs.
The German propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, quickly spun a story that the British had sunk the ship in a false flag operation to lure America into the war.
It wasn’t until 1946, a year after the war, that the new democratic government of Germany accepted that it was a German U-boat that had sunk the Athenia.
Because it sank 14 hours after passengers were rescued, nobody knew where the Athenia went down and its location remained a mystery for over 70 years.
In 2017, one of the world’s most renowned shipwreck hunters, David Mearns, used publicly available sea bed scans, typically used by geologists and oil companies, to identify what he believes is the remains of the Athenia at a depth of 650ft on Rockall Bank.
He said the images show the hull of the ship split where one of the two torpedoes hit.
He also believes the images are consistent with a 500ft-long, 12,500 ton passenger liner and its location matches the logbooks of the vessels that came to the rescue.
Mr Mearns, who has found over two dozen wrecks for insurers and television companies, writes about finding the Athenia in his book The Shipwreck Hunter. He told the Irish Daily Mail that he is now fundraising to send a submersible down to the wreck site, the only way of proving it is the Athenia.
‘I’m 99% confident the wreck has been discovered, but we haven’t had the opportunity to confirm the discovery visually, which is what you need to remove the last 1% of doubt, although there is no doubt in my mind,’ he said.
His plan is to launch the submersible from the Irish coast so no ship would have to follow behind it – a world first for identifying a wreck.
‘I have ideas to make the visual confirmation totally remotely using the latest autonomous technology that would leave the shores of Ireland, unmanned, travel out to the wreck site, deploy a survey AUV [Autonomous Underwater Vehicle] to map and film the wreck and beam the results back to us on shore.
‘It would set a record of sorts for remote wreck reconnaissance from land,’ he said. He added that Titanic director, James Cameron, who has a passion for sending submersibles to shipwrecks, probably will not fund the Athenia expedition.
‘Cameron is still interested in wrecks but the Athenia is too shallow to appeal to him.
‘It would be great if we could find someone, or a company from Ireland, that would sponsor the expedition.’
Mr Mearns said this was the first time he had found a wreck from his own living room using publicly accessible data.
‘The research behind the moment I discovered Athenia is interesting because it is unlike any other shipwreck search I’ve made, and really a story about the democratisation of the sea bed.’
The breakthrough came from studying maps of the sea bed topography, known as bathymetric surveys.
‘It’s a complicated story so for the full answer you’ll need to read that chapter in my book, but the short synopsis was that I was able to align my research on where the ship probably went down with publicly available bathymetric data that provided images I interpreted to match the dimensions of Athenia and the damage she suffered.’
He said it is unlikely that any company will try to salvage objects from the ship.
‘Salvage would not be illegal, but likely frowned upon though, because of the history of the ship and in respect of those who died within her and during the rescue attempts.’
The Athenia’s legal owner is now a luxury cruise ship company.
‘As Athenia was owned by a subsidiary of Cunard-White Star, then by succession the wreck would be owned by the Carnival Cruise line company, which later acquired Cunard,’ he explained.
However, he believes small objects might be recovered from the ship as museum pieces.
‘Very limited recovery, say, of the ship’s bell to be placed into a museum, would be about the only salvage that would be publicly acceptable.’
He does not wanting to disturb the final resting place of dozens of people who died on the Athenia passengers who thought they were escaping Hitler, only to become the war’s very first victims.
‘Salvage would be frowned upon’