The Biggest Mistake a U-Boat Made in WW2

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[00:00:08]At 3 minutes 10 on a September night in 1940, a single torpedo punched through the hull of a passenger liner 600 m from the nearest land. The explosion ripped upward through the steel deck directly beneath a cabin where dozens of children were sleeping.

[00:00:25]They were 5 years old, 8 years old, 13 years old. 90 kids sent across the Atlantic by their own government promised they'd be safe.

[00:00:37]Within 31 minutes, the ship was gone.

[00:00:41]This is the story of the SS city of Bernaris. The disaster so terrible it made Winston Churchill reverse a national policy overnight.

[00:00:51]A story of 90 children, a German submarine captain who never recovered from what he'd done, and six boys in a lifeboat who survived 8 days alone on the open Atlantic. And almost nobody talks about it.

[00:01:07]To understand why 90 children were put on a ship in the middle of a war zone, you have to understand what Britain looked like in the summer of 1940.

[00:01:17]France had fallen. The Luftvafa was bombing London every single night.

[00:01:23]Hitler's invasion barges were massing across the English Channel and parents across the country were being asked one impossible question. Do you send your child away across an ocean full of Ubot for the chance that they'll survive what's coming?

[00:01:40]The British government had an answer.

[00:01:42]They called it CORB, standing for the Children's Overseas Reception Board, a program to evacuate children to Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand.

[00:01:55]Thousands of families applied, over 200,000 of them. The demand was overwhelming.

[00:02:03]By September, Corb had successfully moved over 2600 children overseas.

[00:02:09]Not a single one had been harmed.

[00:02:12]So when the SS city of Bernaris departed Liverpool on September 13th, 1940, there was genuine optimism. The ship was modern, wellappointed, built just 4 years earlier by Barkley Curl in Glasgow. She'd be sailing in convoy OB213, 19 merchant vessels escorted by a Royal Navy destroyer and two sloops.

[00:02:36]90 Corb children were aboard along with 10 adult escorts, fair paying passengers, and over 200 crew.

[00:02:45]Destination, Montreal.

[00:02:49]The children were excited. Many of them had never seen the ocean. They explored the ship like it was a floating castle.

[00:02:57]They played deck games. They made friends across class lines that would have been unthinkable on land.

[00:03:04]One boy, Colin Ryder Richardson, wore a bright red life jacket his mother had specially modified before he left. She'd sewn extra padding into it and attached a whistle and a light. She told him to keep it close. He did.

[00:03:21]For 4 days, the convoy pushed west through rough Atlantic seas. The children got seasick. The escorts comforted them. Everything was going according to plan. Then came September 17th.

[00:03:35]At a point roughly 253 mi west southwest of Rockall, the Royal Navy escort HMS Winchel Sea and the sloops reached the limit of their designated range.

[00:03:47]Standard procedure said the convoy was now far enough from the European coast that yubot encounters were unlikely.

[00:03:55]The warships peeled off to escort an incoming convoy instead.

[00:04:00]Standard procedure was wrong.

[00:04:04]600 m from land in heavy seas with darkness falling, 19 merchant ships and over 400 souls on the city of Bernaris alone were now completely unprotected.

[00:04:15]And somebody was watching.

[00:04:19]Capitan lit Hinrich Bleot, commanding U48, one of the most successful German submarines of the war, had been tracking convoy OB213.

[00:04:31]He couldn't see the names of the ships.

[00:04:33]He couldn't know who was aboard. All he saw through his periscope were the dark silhouettes of merchant vessels, legitimate military targets under the rules of war. He selected the largest ship at the head of the convoy.

[00:04:47]At 1000 p.m., U48 fired. Two torpedoes, both missed.

[00:04:53]A third torpedo was launched at 10:01 p.m. 2 minutes later, it struck the city of Bonaris on the port side. The explosion was catastrophic. The torpedo hit at a point directly beneath the children's quarters. The blast tore open the ship's hall, and the sea came flooding in. The lights went out. In pitch darkness, in a ship already listing badly, children were thrown from their bunks into freezing water that was pouring down the corridors.

[00:05:24]It was September in the North Atlantic.

[00:05:26]The water temperature was barely above freezing. The adult escorts scrambled to reach the children. Some never made it, killed instantly or trapped by the flooding. Others fought through corridors kneede in water, carrying children on their backs toward the lifeboats.

[00:05:43]The Indian Alaskar crew of 168 men, many of them unfamiliar with these waters and this cold, worked to lower the boats in driving rain and heavy swells. It was chaos.

[00:05:57]Some lifeboats launched successfully.

[00:06:00]Others capsized in the violent seas the moment they hit the water, throwing everyone into the Atlantic. Some were never launched at all.

[00:06:09]In 31 minutes, the city of Bernaris was gone, swallowed by the black ocean.

[00:06:17]Of the 90 Corb children aboard, 77 died that night.

[00:06:22]Some drowned in their cabins. Some were thrown into the water when lifeboats overturned. Some survived the initial sinking only to succumb to hypothermia in the hours that followed, waiting for rescue that wouldn't come until the next day.

[00:06:40]HMS Hurricane, the nearest warship, picked up the distress signal and raced through the night at full speed.

[00:06:49]She arrived nearly 24 hours later. Her crew pulled 105 survivors from the water and from scattered lifeboats.

[00:06:58]They were landed at Green, Scotland, but one lifeboat was missing. Lifeboat 12 had drifted far from the sinking site during the night. By the time HMS Hurricane arrived, it was miles away, invisible in the vast gray expanse of the Atlantic.

[00:07:15]Aboard were 46 people, 32 Indian Laskcar sailors, a handful of British crew, a Polish businessman named Bowden Nagorski, a Catholic priest, Father Rory O'Sullivan, a young woman named Mary Cornish, a concert pianist from London who had volunteered as a corb escort, and six boys ages 9 to 13.

[00:07:41]Kenneth Sparks, Fred Steels, Billy Short, Derek Kappell, Paul Shearing, Howard Clater.

[00:07:49]They had roughly three weeks of hard biscuits and canned food, one week of fresh water, no engine, no radio, and no idea if anyone was looking for them.

[00:08:02]Mary Cornish became the boy's guardian.

[00:08:06]She had no survival training. She had no maritime experience. She was a pianist.

[00:08:12]But for 8 days, she kept those six children alive. She rationed the food.

[00:08:17]She told them stories, endless stories to keep their minds off the cold and the thirst and the fear.

[00:08:24]She organized them. She kept them believing that rescue was coming.

[00:08:30]The Lascar crew were extraordinary.

[00:08:34]Despite being thousands of miles from home, freezing in waters they'd never trained for. They maintained the boat, rigged a makeshift sail, and kept order.

[00:08:44]Several of them would not survive the ordeal.

[00:08:50]Day after day passed, no ships, no aircraft, nothing but gray water in every direction.

[00:09:00]On day 8, September 25th, a Royal Air Force Sunderland flying boat piloted by an Australian named Bill Garing spotted something in the water far below. A tiny boat barely visible.

[00:09:15]Garing radioed the destroyer HMS Anthony.

[00:09:20]By September 26th, 45 of the 46 people in lifeboat 12 were pulled to safety.

[00:09:27]All six boys survived.

[00:09:31]When the news broke, Britain was furious.

[00:09:35]77 children dead, torpedoed in the middle of the Atlantic on a government sponsored evacuation ship. Winston Churchill canled the core program immediately.

[00:09:46]No more children would be sent overseas.

[00:09:48]The political cost was simply too high.

[00:09:52]Parents who had entrusted their kids to the government's care had been betrayed not by malice but by a catastrophic failure of protection.

[00:10:04]Mary Cornish was awarded the Order of the British Empire for keeping the six boys alive.

[00:10:11]Colin Ryder Richardson, the boy whose mother had modified his red jacket, was given the king's commendation for brave conduct in the merchant navy.

[00:10:21]He was 11 years old, the youngest person ever to receive it.

[00:10:27]And Hinrich Bleot, he was never the same.

[00:10:32]Reports from within the German submarine service indicate that when Bllecrot learned what his torpedo had actually hit, a ship full of children, it broke something inside him. On his very next patrol, he suffered a mental breakdown at sea and had to be relieved of command. He was reassigned to training duties and never fully returned to active combat command.

[00:10:55]After the war, the Allies charged Bleot with war crimes for the sinking.

[00:11:01]He maintained that the city of Bernaris carried no markings identifying it as an evacuation ship, that it was sailing in a military convoy, and that he had no possible way of knowing children were aboard.

[00:11:14]His defense was upheld. He was acquitted. He never apologized.

[00:11:24]The SS city of Bernarez sits today on the floor of the North Atlantic, 600 m from land in water too deep for casual exploration.

[00:11:35]There is no grand memorial, no blockbuster film, no annual ceremony that makes the evening news, but there were 90 children on that ship.

[00:11:46]77 of them never came home.

[00:11:49]They were 5 and 8 and 11 and 13. They had parents who loved them enough to send them away, hoping the ocean would be kinder than the bombs. It wasn't.

[00:12:03]And the six boys who did survive, Kenneth, Fred, Billy, Derek, Paul, and Howard, spent the rest of their lives carrying a story that most of the world has already forgotten.

[00:12:16]Maybe it's time we remembered.