225733 L/Cpl. Joe Lant Royal Air Force from:Newcastle upon Tyne My late father Joe Lant served with the RAF and was on board the SS Anselm from Liverpool to Freetown. He remembered placing all his important possessions (camera, watch, photos of my mam etc) in a jacket on a coat hook near to hand. He was very aware of the U-Boat threat and had the jacket (and lifebelt) ready to grab and make for the deck should the worst happen. When the torpedo struck, the internal floor collapsed under him and for all that he tugged on the hook of the jacket, it failed to give (as they are wont) and he had to leave the jacket (and his possessions) to make for the deck.
He recalled little panic, although he did say that the ship sank very quickly (and almost perpendicularly). He did fear a “suction effect” as the ship went down but said it barely made a ripple. He did recall one of the ships in the convey manoeuvring towards the bow of the Anselm as she sank to retrieve some of the men who had to jump across. He recalled some falling short and coming to grief in the propellers.
He also recalled men throwing webbing down into the hold where the torpedo had entered in the hope that some men could scramble out. He told me about the bravery of the Padre who went down to minister to the dying, saying something along the lines of: “My love of God is greater than my fear of death”.
Dad floated in the water for a few hours. He recounted a few things to me:
there was a lot of debris in the water,
one man was floating on a door marked “Private” (which he thought hilarious) and a piece of piping floated to the surface near my dad and he joked with some of the other survivors that he’d “grabbed the conning tower” (of the U-Boat)
He was eventually rescued from the water by a corvette, wearing only one sock and underpants (“where I met a lad from South Shields”) and was transferred to a bigger vessel before being taken to Freetown.
For many years dad had a postcard from a post war event (an evening meal I think) in a London hotel for the “SS Anselm Survivors”. He told me that many of the RAF survivors went on to have very successful careers. My dad came home safely as he’d promised when he went to war and then married my mam, proudly wearing his RAF uniform.
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