Rawley walked toward a lifeboat, one of twenty-four aboard the Queen Mary, each with a capacity of 145 people. It didn’t take a slide rule to figure out that, if worst came to worst, seven thousand soldiers would go into the drink. Twice daily abandon-ship drills were held only to give the troops something to do, Rawley believed. The lifeboats were elevated on davits and hung over the side of the Queen Mary. He leaned over the deck’s starboard rail and ran a hand along one’s keel.
The private had an open, guileless face, with broad cheekbones and a mouth that tended to drop open. Wind ruffled his sandy hair. He stared at the horizon. Before this journey, Rawley had never before seen an ocean. There was a lot of it, he concluded. All of it scary.
He didn’t like to dwell on disaster. Thinking about it only invited it to happen. He grinned at himself and pushed crazy ideas out of his head. He leaned over the rail, glancing forward. The ship’s curved hull hid the bow and formed its own vertical horizon, a pleasing sweep of steel.
That horizon suddenly buckled, as if it had been shaken out like a blanket. Rawley gripped the rail. “I saw the hull quiver, and for a second I thought it might have been the return of seasickness I suffered the first day. Or maybe the ship’s hull was somehow reflecting the Atlantic’s waves. I just kept staring at the ship’s side. A guy behind me was playing a ukulele. He didn’t miss a note. Funny, the things you remember. And then the second torpedo hit.”
Ambush is the preferred technique of all navies. There was speculation later that the U-boat knew of the Queen Mary’s route, that New York’s resident community of Axis spies had determined the ship’s course and the sub was lying in wait. But less than a dozen people knew the precise zigzag course the Queen Mary would take, and none of them was even remotely a suspect. In fact, the Queen Mary had sailed entirely by coincidence into U-414’s periscope crosshairs.
The submarine had been the northerly boat of a rüdeltaktik, or wolf pack, a tactic introduced in 1941, when the Kriegsmarine began losing many of its seasoned U-boat commanders. The wolf pack demanded fewer skills of its skippers. When a convoy was spotted, the sub tailed it and alerted shore-based HQ, which guided the pack to a convoy. Not until the pack had gathered were the torpedoes launched.
U-414’s commander would have identified Queen Mary on sight. So fast was the liner that he may have had just enough time to square away his sub and flood the tubes. He launched, in sequence, four torpedoes before the first struck the ship.
Private Rawley felt the second impact. The ship rose and fell, not enough to topple anyone, but the crowd was abruptly silent. The ukulele stopped. Troops ran to the rail to peer at the ship’s hull.
“I still couldn’t see anything wrong,” Rawley recalled. “But the ship began to slow. The soldiers around me started to yell and crowd me at the rail.”
Although the crews remained British and were paid by Cunard, after Pearl Harbor the Queen Mary had come under direct operational command of the United States in a reverse lend-lease arrangement. Consequently, a U.S. Navy board of inquiry conducted the first investigation. A principal focus was the reason the ship had sunk so quickly. The board concluded that due to unparalleled aiming or luck, the second torpedo coursed into the first torpedo’s blast hole, ripping through the additional steel plating that had been placed around the engine room. The Queen Mary was wounded to its core.
Water poured into the engine room and E deck and the ship began listing to starboard. “What did I do?” Rawley asked me. “Hell, I climbed up the rail and stepped into a lifeboat. Training or no training, I wasn’t about to be left behind. It took about sixty seconds for that boat to fill, and another two torpedoes hit the Queen Mary during that time.”
U-414 was a Type VIIC submarine with four tubes, carrying fourteen torpedoes. The Kapitänleutnant must have known this was his prize of the war. After the first round of four torpedoes, the U-boat turned several degrees starboard and launched four more. At 1,019 feet, the Queen Mary was one of the largest targets afloat. Six of the first eight found the ship.
With water roaring into it at midships, the Cunarder slowed quickly. By the time U-414 had loaded the third round of four torpedoes, the Queen Mary had slowed to five knots and was listing twenty degrees. The Kapitänleutnant could take his time closing in on the ship. Three torpedoes of the third launch tore into the open wound midships. The fourth hit but did not detonate. It didn’t matter.
“A hundred and forty-five capacity,” Rawley snorted. “What a laugh. Must have been two hundred on that lifeboat when they began lowering it. Frantic troops still on board the ship were beaten away from the packed lifeboat. And was I ever in for a rude surprise.”
I admit I was startled when Rawley held up his left hand. He laughed when my eyes widened. His fingers were only an inch long. They had been severed at the second knuckles. He said, “I was holding onto the goddamn cable when the lifeboat started down. It ran my hand right into the pulley, pinching the fingers all off. Still have my thumb, though.” He waved it. “At least I can still hitchhike.”
Rawley said he yowled and shook his hand as if it were on fire, splattering the nearby soldiers with blood. One fellow near the lifeboat’s bow calmly collected the private’s fingers in his cap and passed them to Rawley. He tossed them away in horror and supposed they became fish food. The private was in such pain he had no recollection of the boat reaching the water or the scramble to break out the oars. Beginning a slow roll, the Queen Mary loomed over Rawley’s boat, filling the sky. He remembers the massive hull coming for him, ready to crush him.
A soldier lost his grip on the liner’s rail and plummeted some hundred feet into Rawley’s boat, killing himself and another he landed on. Other lifeboats dangled from their cables, descending slowly to sea level. The cable on the end of one boat spun off its winch, dropping the boat’s bow and pitching soldiers into the water. Rawley’s boat made haphazard progress away from the liner as the oarsmen struggled with their strokes.
“Christ almighty, my hand hurt, but even so I remember the shouting from those above me, trapped on board. They were being pushed against the rail as a mob ran up from the lower decks. The railing broke in a couple places, and men were pushed off the deck, a stream of them, falling into the water. And I heard what sounded like a long scream, almost a siren, spooky as hell. I learned later it was air being forced up the Queen Mary’s ventilators as water flooded the lower decks.”
Rawley and the others on his lifeboat watched as the Queen Mary’s top deck and stacks tilted toward them. Thousands of troops ran madly about, searching for an escape. As the angle of the deck increased, they began sliding toward the starboard rail, then tumbling into the air and cartwheeling into the Atlantic. Smoke still poured from the three stacks.
The Queen Mary settled onto its side, troops cascading off all the while. The sea foamed with soldiers. Because of the ship’s sudden list, lifeboats on the port side could not be lowered. Only ten boats made it away from the doomed liner. Rawley’s boat had less than half a foot of freeboard, and waves were already cresting into the craft, so there was no turning back to rescue anyone. The lifeboat pulled away from the Queen Mary. A corpsman gave Rawley a shot of morphine.