Hi AskHistorians,
My French-Mauritian grandfather never spoke much about his time fighting in WWII. He mentioned the trauma of it and that he did not want to speak of it. Much of his life is a mystery, but the war is a mystery in particular.
With the help of his children, he made some cassette-tape recordings in his old age to record some family history and talk about his life, and he does briefly mention the war. They are a treasure for me to have.
He was 18 in 1939 when he enlisted (but with what forces, I have no idea, despite looking). On D-day in 1945, he worked in the office of the British Ministry of War Transport in Diego Suarez, but was so shaken and traumatised that he said he was "incompetent". The time in between is largely a mystery.
He does tell one story of during the war, of 'hell ships', but this story only adds to my questions. Here is the transcript:
"One of the thing that I saw during the war, that for some reason still sat in my mind, was a 'hell ship'. The Germans used to get old ships, fill them up with Jews from all over the place, go out to sea, open up what they call the 'sea cork', and just let the whole blooming thing, ship and passengers, go down with her. We intercepted one of those things in the middle of the ocean just before they started opening of the sea corks. It makes you wonder how people can do things like this."
He did love to tell stories, but there is a sincerity to this one, I think. I wonder if perhaps he didn't literally see this first-hand: when he said 'I saw', he might have really meant 'I came across', and by 'we' he might have meant the Allied Forces. I have read about the Japanese 'hell ships' online, many of which were sunk, but by the Allied Forces, as I understand, who refused to let the Japanese use POWs as shields. Is my grand-père's story just a half-true story, muddled and mixed up after being passed around the barracks in the evening? Or is there possibly more to it? Are there documented cases of the Allied Forces stopping the intentional scuttling of old boats to drown POWs or Jewish prisoners?
I am very interested in what some more knowledgeable people might have to say. It's a subject that I know very little about. Thank you all kindly.
[Edited for clarity and readability]
Could he have come across one of the tramp steamers that were smuggling people into Palestine circa 1947. For example the SS Exodus formerly the SS President Warfield that was intercepted by the British. They were pretty rundown and unseaworthy, the Exodus for example was built to carry 600 but had 4500 people on board.
The other incident that comes to mind is that of The Struma that fled to turkey carrying refugees en route for Palestine . After being refused landing papers the ship languished in port for ten weeks with a broken engine. eventually was towed out to sea by the Turkish authorities were it fell prey to the alerted Germans and torpedoed with all hands. There was one survivor https://www.thoughtco.com/jewish-refugees-ship-struma-1779679
Your grand-père seemed to have gone through many things! I am very much interested by his stories. Did he sign in for the French Army in 1939? Was he living in Mauritania at the beginning of the war ? About this particular story, I have to say that I have never heard about such ships among the German Kriegsmarine. Jewish were mostly killed in camps or by Einsatzgruppen. The only ships full of Jewish and POW coming to my mind are the Cap Arcona, the Thielbeck and the Athen (see the Lübeck tragedy, 3rd May 1945). They were transporting prisonners from the concentration camp of Neuengamme in order to "evacuate" them to Sweden and to exchange them (both Jewish and POW). Unfortunately, the Royal Air Force bombed them (they thought they were transporting troops), killing all the prisonners inside... The Cap Arcona loss is 5 times more than the Titanic's. It is also said that those who survived the sinking were then shot in the water or on the beach by SS troops. It could be related to the story of your grand-père. But the Lübeck tragedy, first thought as a brilliant attack by the RAF, was not "discovered" by the pilots before the 1970s. Could it be that your grand-père learned about the presence of Jewish and POW inside these ships after the war ?