An odyssey must begin somewhere and so it did for the crew of the Sylvan Arrow on May 20, 1942 when she was torpedoed by the U-155. The tanker was hit by one torpedo amidships which caused the main deck to
buckle and started the ship ablaze. The crew of 38 abandoned the ship, but the naval armed guards remained
onboard and manned the gun. This was to no avail as they could not see the U-boat and soon the fires caused them to jump overboard. The only death occurred when one of the armed guards drowned.

All the men were picked up by the USS Barney DD-149 and taken to Trinidad, there twenty six of them boarded the SS Robert E. Lee and returned to New Orleans. They were lucky as the Robert E. Lee would also be sunk by a U-boat in late July. The twelve crewmen who remained returned to the wreck three days later and made an attempt to salvage the ship. The ship however could not be saved and on May 26 while under tow she broke
up and sank.

The twelve men, now without a ship, boarded the Dutch passenger ship Crijnssen and began their trip to New
Orleans on June 7, but on June 11 she was torpedoed by the U-504. As they took to the boats for a second time courtesy of a German submarine, I wonder what their thoughts were. How could they be so unlucky on one hand as to have been sunk again, but on the other hand lucky enough to have survived again. Perhaps they even swapped stories with the ten Norwegians on board... who had been on another tanker, the Lise.

Their odyssey began on May 12 when the U-69 slammed a torpedo into the side of their ship. There followed a gun battle with the U-boat, but it was a lost cause and the crew abandoned the ship and the U-boat sent her to the bottom with a torpedo. Twelve men had been killed in the gun battle and the twenty one who had survived had been separated, seven on a raft, six, including the captain, in a gig and eight others in a lifeboat.

The lifeboat made land on May 15, but the plight of those still at sea was a little different. The captain in the gig found the seven on the raft, but after taking them all on board found the gig to be overloaded. Lots were drawn and five unlucky men returned to the raft. The two craft soon became separated. The men in the gig were spotted the next day and rescued by a Dutch whaler, but the men on the raft were nowhere to be found. A B-17 was dispatched to locate them, but failed to do so. However nineteen days later on May 31 the men on the raft were found by US aircraft and rescued by a Dutch cargo ship.

Ten of them, including the captain and the five from the raft, boarded the Crijnssen on June 7 and now with the twelve from the Sylvan Arrow were again adrift in lifeboats, this time they were joined by seventy others from the Crijnssen. In all ninety two were now awaiting rescue.

Forty three of them made land in their lifeboats, these included one from the Lise and seven from the Sylvan
Arrow. The remaining forty nine were picked up the same day by the SS Lebore, an American cargo ship. The
Lebore was now carrying survivors from three other ships and eight men who had survived two sinking's.
Surely the odds they would get home without further incident must have been pretty good, however the odds
were against them.

On June 14, three days after they were rescued, again, the Lebore became the victim of yet another U-boat, the U-172. The torpedo was fired without warning and hit the ship on the starboard side opening the hull to the sea. It would take two more torpedoes and a few rounds from the deck gun to finally sink her, but sink she did. She took an assistant engineer with her and left behind ninety three people in three lifeboats and two rafts.

The men from the Sylvan Arrow and the Lise had now survived three sinkings in less than one month and those from the Crijnssen, two in three days. They found themselves yet again awaiting rescue while adrift in open boats or just on rafts. About eighteen hours after the sinking twenty eight landed at St. Andrews Island, but the rest of them drifted around for three days. On June 16 an alert pilot spotted them in the water and radioed their position to shore. Soon USS Tattnall DD-125 and USS Erie PG-50 arrived on the scene and picked them all up. The men from the Sylvan Arrow were taken aboard the Tattnall and the men from the Lise were picked up by the Erie. The Erie then made her way to St. Andrews Island and rescued the remaining twenty eight men who had landed there. They were all landed at Cristobal, Panama on June 17.

From there they boarded other ships and returned home, without further disaster. Their odyssey finally at an end, unlucky on one hand, but no doubt, lucky to be alive. At least one of the Norwegians was onboard the Katy on Apr. 23, 1945 when the U-879 hit her with a torpedo. The ship made port under her own power and was repaired.

© 2007 Michael W. Pocock
MaritimeQuest.com