World War: Epic of the Jervis Bay

A relentless, silent hunt of vast proportions was afoot last week. The field was the gale-blasted barrens of the North Atlantic Ocean. The hunters were patient, powerful units of the Royal Navy, equipped with aircraft which soared ceaselessly like gulls of vengeance far up the shores of Greenland and Iceland, high over the crinkled fjords of farthest Norway. They hunted a killer—the German surface raider, probably the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer or Lützow, which last fortnight fell upon a big British convoy in Lat. 52°N., Long. 32°W., halfway between Newfoundland and Eire (TIME, Nov. 18).

While R. N. hunted, survivors of the disaster reached port with considerable deflation for the German Admiralty’s claim of “86,000 tons completely destroyed,” and another epic of blazing courage in British seamen. Survivors told it:

The convoy of 38 ships was strung out in line on a calm sea. The sun was just setting, gloriously. The raider appeared from the north. At about eight miles’ distance (14,000 yd.) it started hurling 11-inch shells, the first of which fell just short of the 16,698-ton Rangitiki, largest member of the convoy and first to signal the alarm.

Without an instant’s hesitation, out of the line of defenseless freighters and straight for the death-laden steel-clad swerved the 14,164-ton armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay, a hardy old packet of the Aberdeen & Commonwealth Line which used to take freight and poor emigrants from Britain out to Australia. She had just six 6-inch guns and no armor plate over her ribs. Her commander was an Irish admiral’s middle-aged son named Edward Stephen Fogarty Fegan. He had promised his men that if ever they met the enemy they would face him and close in.

The Jervis Bay closed in, laying a smoke screen as she went, behind which the rest of the convoy scattered into the gathering dusk.

It was sacrificial suicide. Captain Fegan and all his men—most of them boys just out of training school—well knew it. It was also Duty. The raider’s heavy shells crashed around them and Captain Fegan bawled for more steam, to get his ship within 10,000 yards so that what guns he had might penetrate the enemy’s armor.

As soon as the enemy raider had the range, she sent her metal over in salvos. One of the first carried away most of the Jervis Bay’s main bridge and part of Captain Fegan’s right arm. Bawling for more speed from his engines, more fire from his guns, he clambered to the after bridge. Another salvo wrecked the Jervis Bay’s steering gear. She steamed straight ahead.

A stoker passing cordite up to one of the Britisher’s for’ard guns was puzzled by sudden silence above him. He went aloft to see what was the trouble. He found “. . . most of the men dead. . . . About 20 men were being attended to by the doctor. A shell came over and I guess it finished them.” The third salvo had carried away another forward gun. Another powder monkey (in peacetime a London cabby) later recalled how after half an hour, “my gun was hit directly. . . . There was a terrible sound and the gun and its whole crew were blown completely off the ship.”

With his forward guns out of action, his steering gear gone, Captain Feganhad a hard time maneuvering to use his after guns. But with the wind he managed it, and with his ship in flames, his shredded arm dangling, he set out, when his after bridge was shot out from under him, for what was left of his main bridge.

The Jervis Bay was settling fast by the bow. But only just before the hot muzzle of his last active gun hissed in the sea did Captain Fegan give the order to abandon ship. Sixty-eight men (out of 250) reached the one lifeboat and two rafts that remained floatable. Captain Fegan was not among them.

The raider hurled shrapnel for a while, to destroy as many survivors as possible, perhaps fearing a death-rattle torpedo attack and perhaps also to prevent being identified. Scarcely one man was not hit, but their heavy sea gear stopped most of the splinters. Darkness probably saved them. Presently the raider turned off, began vainly hunting other victims with angry starshells. The valiant Jervis Bay had held him up for better than an hour.

Three of the men on the rafts died of their wounds. Their comrades buried them in the sea. After five hours a ship throbbed near through the night. They signaled it with torches. It was a Swedish freighter, one of the convoy coming back. “They did so well for us,” explained Sven Olander, “I did not want to leave them there.”

Captain Olander landed his survivors at a Canadian port. Meantime, into British ports crept 24 of the original convoy of 38, including the Rangitiki and Cornish City, whose radio messages, followed by silence, had marked them as surely lost. Then eight more slowpokes showed up. At the last came the wallowing, battered tanker San Demetrio, whose crew had abandoned her once, then reboarded her, put out a blaze, brought her home. The total loss out of 38 was but four ships, of not much more than 30,000 tons.