Miracles on the Water by Tom Nagorski

Author:Tom Nagorski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History / Military / World War Ii, History / Europe / Great Britain, History / Military / Naval
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2015-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

THE LAST LIFEBOAT WAS FOUND just before seven.

By now William Forsyth had buried more than twenty people on the water, most of them children. They had left the City of Benares with thirty-two passengers; eight were still alive. All day Forsyth had prayed for an ever-shrinking group of boys in his boat; together with the German doctor, Martin Bum, and the screenwriter, Arthur Wimperis, he had struggled to keep these children alive. Now four boys in Forsyth’s boat clung to life by the thinnest of threads. None of them was conscious. Forsyth himself was fading.

Johnny Baker was lifted first when the Hurricane came; he was still bundled tightly in canvas sheeting. He had been sheltered this way, cocoonlike, almost since the Benares went down. The men who had found the sheets and enveloped Baker had probably saved the boy’s life, but by now the extroverted seven-year-old had gone mute and blank-faced.

Johnny Baker came to in the officer’s mess as sailors gently peeled away the canvas. The men carried him to a chair, and someone produced a glass of warm milk and a pair of blankets. Baker swallowed the milk, and within minutes he was asleep.

The other three boys—Terrence Holmes, ten; Derek Carr, ten; and Alan Capel, five—were carried directly to ship’s surgeon Peter Collinson’s triage rooms below deck. Collinson had managed to revive thirteen-year-old Rex Thorne, in a lukewarm bath. “That one’s a survivor,” Collinson told a fellow sailor. Now they had these three new boys, all unconscious. Little Alan Capel would be the youngest survivor brought on board the Hurricane.

The oldest survivor happened to come from the same boat. Arthur Wimperis, sixty-five, was carried to Hurricane’s deck after all the children had been secured. Wimperis was conscious, and he came aboard fairly bursting with admiration for the boys in his lifeboat and badly shaken by the deaths of so many of the other evacuee children. Arthur Wimperis had helped Forsyth “bury” more than a dozen of them on the water.

Finally William Forsyth himself was lifted by two Hurricane sailors. They found him “more dead than alive.”

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