Stephen Wynn, a retired police constable with 30 years service in Essex, began writing prior to his retirement. Her normal complement in troopship configuration was 2,180 including 330 crew; however, Captain Sharp had brought 2,653 men back from Norway, so he replied that he could take 3,000 "at a pinch". RMS Lancastria, Death Toll: 4,000-6,500. It is likely that the bodies of these men were recovered from the Bay of Biscay by French fishermen and brought back to their home ports to be interred. Wynn cites seven online sources (p. 181), namely the British Newspaper Archive, the Britain at War website, the British section of Ancestry.com, the Militarian Forum, the Forces War Records, the Wartime Memories Project, and the War Graves Records, which appear to have been mistakenly recorded as a .com website rather than .org. However, themovetowardswar went initially quite slowly. Estimates of total survivors were hard to quantify though. [25] As Lancastria began to capsize, some of those who were still on board managed to scramble onto the ship's underside. The French Government recently placed an exclusion zone around the wreck site. The Lancastria Tragedy: Sinking and Cover-Up, June 1940. Early on the morning of the 17th June 1940 three Royal Navy Reserve officers came aboard and asked her captain, Rudolph Sharp, how many people the Lancastria would be able to uplift. LANCASTRIA (June 17, 1940) The loss of the Lancastria was the fourth largest maritime disaster of the war. In his memoirs, Churchill stated that he had intended to release the news a few days later, but that events in France "crowded upon us so black and so quickly that I forgot to lift the ban". The RMS Lancastria was a British ocean liner, owned by the Cunard Line. [29] Capt WG Euston recommended several of his crew for awards, including Stanley Kingett for "making repeated journeys in a lifeboat to pick up exhausted men from the water while under machine-gun fire from enemy planes", and William Perrin for "keeping up continuous machine-gun fire in an attempt to prevent enemy planes machine-gunning men in the water. The 17th June 1940 saw one of the most horrific events of World War II and the single worst maritime disaster in British history. [45][46], After the war, the Lancastria Survivors Association was founded by Major Peter Petit, but this lapsed on his death in 1969. She made her maiden voyage, Glasgow-Qubec-Montreal on 19 June 1922. She sailed scheduled routes between Liverpool and New York until 1932, and was then used as a cruise ship in the Mediterranean Sea and Northern Europe. Approximately four thousand men, women, and children were buried beneath the waves. [3][4], The ship was launched in 1920 as Tyrrhenia by William Beardmore and Company of Dalmuir on the River Clyde for the Anchor Line, a subsidiary of Cunard. On 17 June 1940, whilst being used as part of Operation Aerial to evacuate civilian refugees and British military personnel from France, it was anchored about 5 miles from the coast of St Nazaire. All service personnel killed during the Second World War are recorded by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and where known that they lost their lives on the Lancastria. The loss of the LANCASTRIA was also the most . Fewer than 2,500 people survived. The ship was built by William Beardmore and Company of Dalmuir on the River Clyde and launched in 1920 as Royal Mail Steamship (RMS) Tyrrhenia for the Anchor Line, a subsidiary of the better-known Cunard Line. Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. About 4,000 men, women and children lost their lives when the Lancastria sank 20 minutes after it was bombed by the Germans near the French port of Saint-Nazaire on 17 June 1940. Seventy five years after the sinking of the Lancastria - Britain's worst maritime disaster in history - why is the tragedy largely forgotten?
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