yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

The Sinking of the SS Athenia | WW2 Hell Under the Sea


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

NARRATOR: As the opening day of the Second World War fades, Lemp strains to identify the ship in front of him.

CHRISTIAN JENTZSCH: It's behaving, in his opinion, like an auxiliary cruiser because it's zig-zagging and it's blacked out. And he even imagines to have seen gun platforms.

NARRATOR: In Lemp's mind, that is enough proof this is some kind of armed enemy ship fair game to be attacked without warning. With torpedoes ready-- [non-english speech]

NARRATOR: --a little before 8:00 PM Lemp fires the first two U-boat torpedoes of World War II. A hydrophone operator monitors them by the sound of their propellers. One speeds towards the target. But there is a problem with the second. It should grow fainter but instead is getting louder. Fearing that it will circle back and strike them, Lemp orders the U-boat deeper. It is a scenario they train for, even in peacetime. The standard procedure is to dive below the depth that a torpedo would pass.

NARRATOR: It could be tight. U-30 is more than 210 feet long. And as the bow angles down, the stern goes up. They must get the whole U-boat out of danger. They have no way to visually monitor the threat. Their only source of information is what the hydrophone operator can hear. [propeller whirling] When the noise finally fades away, the torpedo no longer poses a threat. Relieved, Lemp surfaces to investigate. With darkness falling, he moves in for a closer look.

The first torpedo had struck the ship. But as Lemp surveys the crippled vessel, he realizes that something is wrong. They check the silhouette of the large ship against the Lloyd's Register of vessels. When he saw the scene of action, he realized that he was mistaken. It wasn't an auxiliary cruiser. It was a steamer with a lot of civilians in the water.

NARRATOR: An intercepted radio transmission confirms his fears. It identifies the ship as the passenger liner SS Athenia bound for Canada. Lemp has made a huge mistake. His orders were clear. Sink only warships, troop ships, and enemy merchant vessels. Hitler and the German government still hope for some kind of settlement agreement with Britain. And so they don't want to aggravate the British more than necessary.

NARRATOR: Now, on the very first day of the war, Lemp has sunk a passenger vessel without warning. Comparisons are immediately made to the sinking of RMS Lusitania by a U-boat in World War I, an act that helped end American neutrality and brought the United States into the war against imperial Germany-- the exact scenario Hitler hoped to avoid with his strict instructions. Now the sinking of Athenia sets off a new political firestorm. Many of the 1,103 passengers aboard are Canadians, Americans, or European refugees escaping the war. 118 civilians are dead. Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, vehemently deny German responsibility for the attack. The man responsible for Hitler's headache is 26-year-old [inaudible] Fritz-Julius Lemp.

CHRISTIAN JENTZSCH: He was born as a son of an army officer in China before the First World War. He entered the [inaudible] Marina in 1931. And he went to the newly created submarine arm in 1936.

NARRATOR: He was assigned command of his own Submarine U-30 in 1938. Lemp recognizes the potential fallout from his error. He makes no radio report of the sinking and continues his patrol. He has to keep it secret. And he decides to stick exactly to the submarine protocol for his future attacks.

More Articles

View All
This Plan to Save a Rare Albatross From Extinction Just Might Work | National Geographic
There’s a place called the Pyramid Tatara Khoikhoi, yeah, off the Chatham Islands. This one rock basically is the only place in the world where this exceptionally beautiful, extremely rare bird breeds. The entire global population of 5,000 something pairs…
Estimating limit numerically | Limits | Differential Calculus | Khan Academy
Consider the table with function values for ( f(x) = \frac{x^2}{1 - \cos x} ) at positive ( x ) values near zero. Notice that there is one missing value in the table; this is the missing one right here. Use a calculator to evaluate ( f(x) ) at ( x = 0.1 )…
Cutting shapes into equal parts | Math | 3rd grade | Khan Academy
Is each piece equal to one-fourth of the area of the pie? So we have a pie, and it has one, two, three, four pieces. So it does have four pieces. So is one of those pieces equal to one-fourth of the pie? Well, let’s talk about what we mean when we have a…
The Theme System Journal
Hello internet! If you didn’t already know, I’m a big fan of the yearly theme: a broad rainbow above your goals to help direct you on part of your journey through this life. And yes, I know exactly how that sounds. But if you’re intrigued and/or wondering…
Gyroscopic Precession
Hey everyone, it’s me, Derek from the channel Veritasium. I’ve been following this series by Destin on Smarter Every Day about helicopters, and gyroscopic precession is just one of those things that still blows my mind, as it did Destin. So, I’m here at t…
Finding zeros of polynomials (example 2) | Mathematics III | High School Math | Khan Academy
So I have the polynomial ( p(x) ) here, and ( p(x) ) is being expressed as a fourth degree polynomial times ( (3x - 8)^2 ). So this would actually give you some, this would give you ( 9x^2 ) and a bunch of other stuff, and then you multiply that times thi…