World War: Germans Against Germans

First contingents of British children arrived in Canada last week, shipped over to preserve them from Adolf Hitler’s total war. Contingents of German war prisoners also landed in Canada to be sent in boxcars to prison camps far from civilization. In mid-ocean one man “scuttled himself” by leaping from a porthole. Others on arrival struck a final blow for Germany by destroying the British gas masks which had been issued them.

More than gas masks were needed by 1,640 war prisoners, mostly German but including some middle-aged Italian merchants and businessmen interned when Italy declared war. They were loaded into the 15,501-ton Arandora Star and headed for Canada around the north end of Ireland, guarded by 200 British soldiers and a crew of 300. Early the second day out, without warning, a German torpedo took the Arandora Star full in the waist, blew such a hole in her that she sank in two minutes. Survivors told a hideous story of how the Germans fought and trampled the Italians, killed crew members and each other, fighting for places in the lifeboats. Only 572 prisoners were saved, taken back to Scotland. Captain E. W. Moulton and several of his officers went down on the bridge of their ship. Most of the crew and soldiers were picked up.

Calmly the British waited until the Germans had announced the sinking before telling that the Arandora Star was a prison ship—thereby preventing Nazi propagandists from claiming that the British had scuttled her deliberately. Afterwards the Germans, who ruthlessly attacked hospital ships at Dunkirk, had to content them selves with grumbling that the British should have marked the ship so that it would not be attacked. The British announced that the U-boat commander who struck the blow was Germany’s Scapa Flow hero, Lieut. Captain Günther Prien.