I’m currently working on a new book; the working title is The Laconia Incident. It is about a series of events that actually took place in 1942, concerned with the sinking of the HMT Laconia by the German U-boat U-156.
The HMT Laconia was a British troopship that started life in the 1920s as an ocean liner plying the passenger route between Liverpool and New York. On 12 September 1942, the Laconia was en route from Cape Town, South Africa, to Liverpool, when, just after 8:00 PM, the German submarine U-156 sent two torpedoes into her hull. She sank just over an hour later. Aboard the transport were 2,732 souls, including 1,800 Italian prisoners of war. About 1, 400 people went down with the ship, and most of these were Italian POWs, who had been locked up in the ship’s holds.
When U-156 surfaced to survey the battle damage, her commander, Werner Hartenstein, was horrified to hear survivors calling out for aid in Italian. He ordered his crew to begin rescuing his allies, but was moved to rescue the other survivors as well. Soon the U-boat was crowded to capacity, with another 200 survivors in tow in lifeboats. Hartenstein then called U-Boat Command for direction, and, surprisingly, Command sent other U-boats and Vichy French warships to participate in the rescue operation.
The story gets even more bizarre from there, when, despite every effort being made by the rescuers to identify their operation as such: a broadcast message in the clear, and a red cross banner rampant, U-156 is attacked from the air by a U.S. Army Air Force bomber.
In telling the story from the eyes of Harry Cotton, a British Ordinary Seaman, I am making every effort to conform to the actual timeline of the events that led up to, and followed behind, the Laconia sinking. This is a great story, and I hope to do it justice!
-Gene