Lost at Sea on the Brink of the Second World War

The S.S. Robin Moor an American merchant ship is pictured on May 6 1941 when she set out on a voyage from New York City...
The S.S. Robin Moor, an American merchant ship, is pictured on May 6, 1941, when she set out on a voyage from New York City to South Africa.Photograph Courtesy The Mariners’ Museum and Park

When Berta Doff met Ben Cohn, in 1936, she was twenty-one years old, tall and confident, with the diction of an elocution instructor, which in fact she was. Having attended college in Boston, she also worked as the host of radio programs, in New Haven, Connecticut, where she had grown up. On one program, she asked people questions about the news, and if they answered correctly they won a hat. Ben was running a Loews movie theatre in New Haven. They became friends, then dated briefly, but soon Ben accepted an offer to manage a Loews theatre in Calcutta, India. Berta found other lively radio and theatre people to spend time with. Still, she and Ben corresponded. “Stop playing strip poker,” he wrote in 1938, in response to a letter about her recent exploits. “Come to India and marry me.” She answered with a telegram: “Please elucidate.”

The couple married in Calcutta and held a large reception at the theatre there, at which Berta wore a borrowed gown and met most of Ben’s colleagues for the first time. In the era of Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Greta Garbo, Ben screened movies for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the Hollywood studio owned by Loews, and the couple hosted parties and dined with other British and American expatriates. Three years later, Ben was offered another position with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Durban, South Africa, managing a theatre and weighing in on which of M-G-M’s recent releases would play well overseas.

The couple returned briefly to the United States to see their families, and then, on May 6, 1941, set out from New York harbor on the Robin Moor, a three-hundred-and-ninety-foot commercial freighter, which had crossed the seas for over twenty years. Americans had fewer options for travel due to the escalation of war between Germany and Britain, and Berta and Ben were grateful to have secured one of the five cabins available to passengers. The ship carried a heavy cargo of canned goods, steel rails, radio-receiving sets, ladies’ hosiery, and bags of mail. Automobile crates labelled Studebaker and Dodge, which didn’t fit in the hold, were packed on the deck. Berta noted with confidence the American flags and “U.S.A.” in freshly painted letters on the side of the ship; as Germany was targeting British ships in an effort to cut off supplies to the island, American steamers took pains to underscore their official neutrality.

Berta and Ben anticipated a journey of almost a month, and they settled into a routine of reading, writing, and playing cards. Two weeks into the trip, they ate dinner in the ship’s saloon, then played poker with other passengers until two in the morning, pleased with their twenty-dollar winnings. They had slept for only a few hours when, at 5 A.M. on May 21st, they were awakened by loud knocking. It was the ship’s wireless operator, who ordered them to get up and to dress. There was a German submarine alongside the ship, he said, and the Robin Moor had been ordered to stop.

Berta heard hushed voices and running feet outside the door, and the gentle lapping of waves against the side of the ship. For a moment, she and Ben stood beside their bunks, too stunned to do anything. Ben said that he was sorry for getting her into this mess; she told him it was pointless to feel that way. She pulled on a pair of pants and two sweaters over her pajamas, wondering if perhaps the Germans simply wanted food or supplies. After all, she reasoned, the United States had not yet entered the war.

At that moment, the first mate of the Robin Moor, Melvin Mundy, was out on the open water in a lifeboat. Mundy, who grew up in South Carolina, was a seasoned mariner. He had been on watch that morning when blinking lights flashed the code letters “C.S.,” meaning, “What is the name of your vessel?”

Mundy responded with the four-letter code of the S.S. Robin Moor: KJJU.

The lights that signalled back indicated that the vessel was pursuing the ship, and instructed the Robin Moor not to use its wireless, and to send a boat out.

Together with several other members of the crew, Mundy rowed toward the submarine in semi-darkness. He was no stranger to belligerence. At age seventeen, he had falsified a birth certificate so he could join the military and, after the Great War ended, had entered the Merchant Marines as a cabin boy and worked his way up through the ranks. He kept a trunkful of books on seafaring and, during brief visits home to Pennsylvania, where his family lived, he sat on the porch and taught his children to navigate by the stars. By the time war broke out again in Europe, he was commanding a cargo ship called the S.S. Black Osprey, which made regular trips across the Atlantic; in 1939, it had been detained by the British, who held the ship and its crew off the coast of Dover. For several weeks they had come under German fire, until the British finally released them.

Mundy could see that the submarine before him was roughly two hundred and twenty feet long, with guns mounted on the conning tower and a painted image of a laughing cow, in red. The commander, in a brown coat and tweed pants, called out to Mundy in accented English, demanding to see the Robin Moor’s papers. When Mundy said he hadn’t brought them, the commander became upset. He asked after the ship’s cargo. Mundy answered that he was carrying general merchandise for South African ports. The commander had noticed heavy machinery on board the American ship; Mundy explained that this was simply automobile parts that did not fit in the hold.

The commander ordered Mundy to board the submarine. Somehow, as the lifeboat rocked in the rough water and Mundy climbed up from it, the U-boat shifted and crushed his ankle; jagged bone protruded through the skin. And yet he proceeded onto the vessel, apparently without delay.

The submarine commander, whose name was Jost Metzler, had been instructed not to destroy American ships; even as tensions flared over American aid to the British, Hitler wanted to avoid provoking the United States into entering into the war. Still, U-boat commanders placed a premium on sinking as many tons of shipping as possible, since their supervisors kept detailed statistics and rewarded high performers, and sometimes these incentives trumped explicit orders. Metzler, who was on his third patrol with the submarine, U-69, and had already sunk more than twenty-seven thousand tons of British shipping since the start of the year, regarded auto parts and engines as contraband. He told Mundy that the American ship carried supplies for Germany’s enemy, and that therefore he had to sink it.

If Mundy was surprised, he did not say so. He asked how long the Robin Moor had. The commander said twenty minutes. Mundy asked for more time, arguing that the ship carried eight passengers, including a small child. Metzler refused. Mundy emphasized that there were women aboard as well as an elderly couple. Metzler said that he would perhaps give them thirty minutes, but warned that, if they tried to send an SOS, he would sink them immediately.

Mundy rowed back to the Robin Moor, and the captain gave orders to abandon ship.

Melvin Mundy, the Robin Moor’s first mate, in the uniform of a Merchant Marine captain, a position he had held previously.

Photograph Courtesy Shirley Mundy Furchner and Heather Goldan

“No one was prepared for this. The atmosphere was charged with alarm,” Berta wrote in her diary a short while later. “We were all outraged and bewildered; but as we ran to our lifeboat station we all seemed to be behaving so unnaturally well, no outcries, no hysterics.”

Berta and Ben climbed into one of the four lifeboats, Berta carrying a small suitcase with a few, hastily packed possessions: sweaters, handkerchiefs, her diary, a photo of her mother, and a lipstick, which she told herself “was not vanity, but caution,” as it would shield her lips from the sun. An elderly man and woman, who had spent years in Trinidad and were planning to retire to South Africa, were guided onto the same boat. So, too, were a chemical engineer from Ohio and his wife, travelling with their two-year-old son. Berta and Ben’s boat also held several crew members, including the wireless operator, a thirty-seven-year-old from Nebraska who carried a gun, and Mundy, whose presence Berta found reassuring.

As soon as the lifeboats steadied themselves on the water, the men rowed furiously away from the ship. They had made several hundred yards when, on the deck of the submarine, they saw German sailors moving about and preparing to fire. Berta glanced at her watch. At 6:32 A.M., “a loud crack broke the silence,” she wrote in her diary. “There was a smudge of flame and smoke as a torpedo found its mark,” on the port side of the ship. Then came more than thirty rounds of gunfire. Some of the crew members feared that the Germans would turn their guns on the lifeboats, too, though the third mate reasoned that if the Nazis wanted to kill them, they never would have made it off the ship.

The Robin Moor split apart and sank within minutes. Some of the crew and passengers, including Berta and Ben, stood up in their lifeboats, as a kind of salute. This means war! they thought, gazing at the sight of burning cargo boxes and oily, black debris.

Berta allowed herself one last hope that the submarine would tow them to a shipping lane or some other place of rescue. But when Metzler came around to the lifeboats, he said simply that he would radio their position on an open frequency, and instructed them to stay where they were. He provided the captain with three days’ worth of food. He also approached Mundy and handed him bandages for his ankle. Then the submarine pulled away from them and disappeared beneath the surface. The sea churned violently, and the boats bobbed in the smoldering wreckage.

In the late afternoon, crew members lashed the four lifeboats together so that they would not drift apart during the night. Still, when night came, hardly anyone slept. Berta thought about her mother, in New Haven, who had made her own perilous ocean crossing to America from Holland, years earlier, with several small children in tow; Berta was the youngest of five siblings, the only one born in America, and the only girl. She held her mother’s photo and began to cry. “It is impossible to sleep on a life preserver, and it is cold,” she wrote in her diary. “We have taken no coats or blankets; we were so sure this wouldn’t happen.”

The next morning, the passengers and crew assessed their supplies. They had butter and a few raw onions; brown bread from the U-boat commander; eighty pounds of hard tack, a dense cracker; and ten gallons of water, which they decided to ration, allowing themselves two half-glasses each per day.

Any lingering hope that the Germans had radioed for help was now fading. The captain argued that their best chance of survival lay in reaching either a shipping lane or a largely barren island off the coast of Brazil called St. Paul’s Rock, which was six to seven hundred miles away. Separating the boats, they set sail, heading west by southwest, toward South America. The captain, Mundy, the second mate, and the third mate each commanded one of the lifeboats. Unlike the captain, Mundy had no sextant and no working chronometer; instead, he relied on his wristwatch and a small compass. “It is good to be moving; it is not certain toward what, but it is better than doing nothing,” Berta wrote.

They sailed through the night and all of the next day. When Berta and Ben were in earshot of another of the boats, they called out to ask how everyone’s caviar and champagne were holding up. The curly-headed two-year-old boy, whom Berta took on her lap from time to time, played train with her multicolored shoes. Mundy stoically tended to his ankle, rinsing it periodically with seawater. At sunset, they watched streaks of purple and gold shoot across a wide-open sky.

The passengers of the lifeboat guided by the Robin Moor’s captain, at left of center in a fedora. The photograph was taken a few days after the ship’s sinking, by Donald Schablein, a passenger of Lifeboat No. 4.

Photograph by Donald Schablein, Courtesy American Merchant Marine Museum

The following day it rained, and they were able to catch water in a dirty tarp. Straining it through two of Berta’s handkerchiefs, they earned themselves an extra glass of water each for the day. But then the winds disappeared, the sea grew calm, and, while the men rowed, a gloom settled over the boat. In the water, they saw porpoises, Spanish mackerel, and dolphins playing. They also saw sharks trailing behind them. The wireless operator, George Newton, began to talk about shooting one of them. For a time they ignored him. But then he took out his automatic Colt and aimed, and Mundy and the passengers grew alarmed, shouting at him not to fire.

The sea grew rougher, the waves swelling to fifteen feet, rising over them and threatening to flip the boat. They were soaked, cold, and anxious, and Newton bickered endlessly with Mundy over how they should proceed. “I always had an idea that under such circumstances people would be filled with goodwill for each other,” Berta wrote. “But instead we are all mentally kicking each others’ teeth out.”

On May 29th, Newton and another crew member decided that they would no longer take orders from Mundy. “They wish to strike out on another course,” Berta wrote, “while the mate [Mundy] contends that we must stick with the captain’s boat.” A terrible fight ensued.

When the captain drew near, Mundy threatened to switch boats. Berta and Ben said that if he left, they were leaving, too, since he struck them as the most levelheaded of the group.

After a tense negotiation, Mundy stayed and agreed, perhaps reluctantly, to take a different course from the captain, despite his lack of navigational equipment. The two other boats had long since pulled ahead and disappeared from view.

On May 30th, nine days after the sinking, Berta wrote in her diary, “We are alone now in this huge sea . . . Our hopes ebb and flow with the comments of the seamen, who cannot even tell accurately where we are; and we are growing weaker.”

The boat commanded by the third mate, John Joseph Banigan, was one of those that had pulled ahead. Banigan had first gone to sea at age eighteen to escape life in the Bronx, where he was the second oldest of eight surviving children (his mother had died during her fourteenth pregnancy). After several days in the lifeboat, he suspected they could not make it as far as St. Paul’s Rock, though he didn’t tell the others that for a few days more. Instead, he dutifully recorded the direction of the winds and the deteriorating mental state of his boat mates.

John J. Banigan, a career seaman and the Robin Moor’s third mate, commanded one of the lifeboats and kept a journal of the affair.

Photograph Courtesy American Merchant Marine Museum

May 30th: “When sun came out, burned through clothes. Feet and legs swelled. Night, boat pounded.”

June 2nd: “Morning, smoke spotted. Saw ship for 5 hrs. About 7 mi. off, changing course. Rags burned, kerosene smudge, but smoke blended with clouds. Cook crying, panicking others. Men rowed. Let them row one hour.”

June 3rd: “Terrific pounding. Shivered all day and night.”

On June 8th, Banigan’s boat was spotted by a Brazilian ship, called the S.S. Osorio. When she came into view, the crew seemed to lose control: “Men jumped on thwarts. Lifted center of gravity, almost capsized . . . Hove to.”

Eventually, Banigan and the others made it aboard the Osorio, where they were welcomed heartily by Brazilian sailors. They told their rescuers that they were survivors of the Robin Moor, torpedoed on May 21st—and that three more lifeboats with twenty-seven additional crew members and eight passengers were still adrift somewhere in the ocean. The Brazilian captain initiated a search of the area, but was unable to find any of the other boats.

Returning to port in Recife, Brazil, with the Osorio, the survivors of the Robin Moor were kept aboard until they could be interviewed by the American consul and a United States Navy observer. A crowd of reporters gathered on the dock, although they were forbidden to speak with the sailors. The New York Times reported of those coming ashore, “Some of the men needed medical attention, but mostly they needed hot food and sleep.”

The passengers of Lifeboat No. 4, commanded by John Joseph Banigan (holding the life preserver), were rescued by the Osorio, a Brazilian freighter.

Photograph Courtesy American Merchant Marine Museum

Banigan spoke with the American consul until almost 3:30 A.M. In a deposition dated June 11th, he detailed the sinking and provided evidence that the perpetrator had been a U-boat: “There was no mistake about its being German. I live in a German neighborhood.” He also confirmed that the Robin Moor had been flying an illuminated American flag, which should have been visible even in the early light. A flurry of diplomatic communiqués followed.

State Department officials, as well as members of Congress, began to weigh in. In March, President Roosevelt had persuaded lawmakers to pass the Lend-Lease program, which permitted the United States to provide military equipment to the British without payment; he framed it in part as a means of avoiding combat. Republican members of Congress and other prominent isolationists were still wary, however, of any episode that might tilt public opinion in favor of cutting off diplomatic relations with Germany or entering the war. As soon as news of the Robin Moor broke, several of them tried to downplay its significance. Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota, a leading isolationist, said he would be “very much surprised if a German submarine had done it because it would be to their disadvantage” to provoke the United States. He also suggested that it would not be “wholly impossible for the British themselves” to have torpedoed the ship, in order to incite the American public.

By June 12th, however, it was clear to the State Department that the Germans had destroyed the Robin Moor. Although the depositions of the survivors rescued by the Brazilians had not yet reached Washington, President Roosevelt “withdrew his injunction to the American people to reserve judgment.”

For the first time, the Nazis had knowingly destroyed an American merchant ship. The ship had not been destined for ports in a combat area, the Administration pointed out. Its manifest revealed no cargo that would violate the Neutrality Act of 1937, which restricted the United States’ role in foreign conflicts**.** (Metzler, the U-boat captain, later told his superiors that, among the wreckage, his crew saw floating airplane tires, though this claim remains controversial. He also said later that he could not remember whether automobile parts were considered contraband or not.) But even if the Robin Moor had been carrying material deemed contraband by the Germans, it appeared that the Nazis had still violated international law: in particular, they had flouted agreements, signed in 1930 and 1936, that before a vessel carrying contraband was sunk, the safety of those on board had to be assured. Legally, there was no justification for abandoning forty-six people in the middle of the ocean.

Ships within a six-hundred-mile radius were put on notice to watch for the remaining survivors of the Robin Moor. It seemed increasingly unlikely, however, that any others would be found. Over three weeks had passed since the sinking. Banigan and the other surviving crew members believed that the missing boats would likely have run out of water by now or succumbed to the elements.

As the media storm erupted, the families of the missing learned haphazardly of the news. Mundy’s wife was at home in Pennsylvania with friends when a reporter came to the door asking for a comment; it was the first she’d heard of the event, according to her daughter, who was seven at the time, and who later remembered that her mother had turned gray and screamed. Mrs. Mundy’s friends, who had come over that night for card club, rushed to help her.

Berta and Ben’s families also learned of the sinking through news reports, and were desperate for further information. They enlisted a lawyer, as well as members of the Loews Corporation, to make inquiries. One of Berta’s brothers, who was a doctor in New Haven, also sent a handwritten letter to President Roosevelt, explaining that the “lack of information . . . is torture. My parents are prostrate.” The family was frantic to hear more about the ship’s evacuation and “what efforts, if any, are being made to find those who are still missing.”

After the lifeboats had separated, Berta and Ben’s boat continued to drift in the Atlantic. It rained hard and they lay miserably with the others in four inches of water.

On the morning of June 2nd, they saw a tiny wisp of smoke on the horizon. “It looks like a ship but it seems to be going the other way, and all our hopes are dashed,” Berta wrote in her diary.

“But again, a puff of smoke,” she wrote a little while later. They tried desperately to see whether it was indeed a ship, and whether it was moving closer or farther away. It was so hard to tell.

“But no, it is coming closer and closer,” Berta wrote. “We shoot off our parachute lights and burn red flares to be sure we are seen, though it is daylight. Slowly—oh, slowly—the ship looms bigger and bigger . . . It is a British ship and they toot their horn. They have seen us. We are saved!”

They began to row hard, and, as they approached the ship, Mundy, aware that German sailors had been known to pose as civilians at sea in order to lure British ships, shouted, “We are survivors of the Robin Moor, sunk thirteen days ago at 25.46 west, 6.10 north.” Mundy had been right to do so; the British crew later confessed that they had been worried about a Nazi trap and, in fact, had watched the lifeboat from afar for several hours, debating somewhat contentiously whether or not to come to its aid.

The ship let down a long rope ladder, and the survivors stared warily. It seemed “so high and unsteady,” Berta wrote. A British officer climbed down and picked up the little boy, Robin, who cried and struggled and nearly fell from his arms. The child’s father, who sprang up to help, was almost “crushed between the lifeboat and the ship,” as both vessels rocked violently in the water.

In a photograph taken from the City of Wellington, a British cargo vessel, survivors of the Robin Moor’s sinking can be seen leaving their lifeboat for safety on the ship.

Photograph Courtesy American Merchant Marine Museum

When it was Berta’s turn, she tried to grab hold of the ladder as high up as possible and climb as quickly as she could, without looking up or down. Weak and exhausted, she felt her heart pounding and thought she might faint. Soon, hands grabbed her from above and dragged her onto the deck. It hurt to breathe, and one of the officers brought her into the ship’s saloon, where she collapsed on a couch.

The British ship was a cargo vessel called the City of Wellington, and was bound for Cape Town, South Africa, just as the Robin Moor had been. The crew members were “unutterably kind,” Berta wrote, offering them food and copious beer. The ship also circled the area, and found and rescued two of the three remaining lifeboats—those commanded by the Captain and the second mate. The rescue occurred nearly a week before Banigan’s lifeboat was found.

The City of Wellington carried guns as well as commercial cargo, and was travelling under blackout to evade detection. So while the crew could listen to wireless communications, they could not send any of their own. For over two weeks, the Robin Moor survivors followed the news in silence, feeling at times like ghosts. They learned that John Banigan’s lifeboat had been rescued, after theirs, off the coast of Brazil. They also learned that they were all presumed dead. Berta was tormented by the image of her parents in mourning, not knowing if she had drowned or died of thirst.

Survivors of the Robin Moor’s sinking pose on board the City of Wellington, after their rescue.

Photograph Courtesy American Merchant Marine Museum

They talked for hours with the British officers about whether the United States would enter the war. According to radio reports, the isolationists in Congress showed no sign of relenting. But on June 14th, just days after investigating the Robin Moor, the Administration froze German assets in the United States. And, on June 16th, it ordered the closure of all German consulates in the U.S., except the main embassy, in Washington, D.C.

On June 18th, the City of Wellington landed in Cape Town, and the world learned that the thirty-five missing had not been lost at sea. Mundy, Berta, and Ben, among others, gave exuberant interviews to the South African Broadcasting Corporation, describing their ordeal and addressing their families back home. “Hullo Mum, darling, and Pops,” Berta said. “We are in perfect health, happy, safe, and delighted to be here in South Africa.” (The interviews were broadcast in the United States, which was how Berta and Ben’s families, as well as Mundy’s, learned they were alive.)

On June 20th, President Roosevelt addressed Congress, arguing that the chance rescue of those aboard “does not lessen the brutality of casting the boats adrift in mid-ocean.” He declared that the sinking violated international law, and demanded reparations from the German government. He also said that the incident appeared to be “a first step” in a plan to “seize control of the high seas . . . [and] to drive American commerce from the ocean.”

“Were we to yield on this we would inevitably submit to world domination,” he concluded. “We are not yielding and we do not propose to yield.” Berta and Ben applauded Roosevelt’s fiery rhetoric. But, Berta noted, the impact of the speech was lessened somewhat by the fact that she—and everyone else from the lifeboats—was alive to hear it.

Tensions continued to build between the U.S. and Germany. In July, the U.S. declared a wide zone of the Atlantic out of bounds to U-boats. (According to an account he published in 1955, Metzler worried briefly that he might be disciplined for violating his orders, but, in the weeks following the incident, he sank several large British merchant ships, and in July he received an award called the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.) In September, 1941, a U-boat fired at an American destroyer en route to Iceland; it missed the ship, but Roosevelt responded by issuing an order enabling the U.S. Navy to fire at Nazi submarines on sight, without waiting for them to shoot first. In October, the Germans sank the U.S.S. Reuben James, a destroyer. Less than a third of the crew members survived. In November, after long debate, Congress decided to arm American merchant ships.

In hindsight, the sinking of the Robin Moor can be seen as an inflection point in an undeclared shooting war between Germany and the United States. Joshua Smith, a historian at the American Merchant Marine Museum, on Long Island, makes the case that in the summer and fall of 1941, while the American public was debating whether to take a more aggressive tack with the Germans, we already had done so, at sea. Smith, who has organized an exhibit for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the sinking of the Robin Moor, also contends that the intense public focus on the Atlantic conflict helps to explain why it came as such a shock when, on December 7th, the U.S. was attacked by the Japanese on the other side of the world, at Pearl Harbor, and over thirty-five hundred Americans were wounded or killed. A few days later, Germany declared war on the U.S. as well.

Safe in Cape Town in June, 1941, Berta Cohn looks through the diary she kept in the lifeboat.

Photograph by John H. Marsh, Courtesy Iziko Museums of South Africa

The shock of war reverberated among the Robin Moor survivors, some of whom felt that the aggression they’d experienced could now be reciprocated. George Newton, the wireless operator, who had brandished his gun at the sharks, announced that he wanted “to settle an old score with the Axis,” and enlisted in the Navy. As he told the Times on December 10th, “I have not forgotten that I spent thirteen days in an open lifeboat without anything to eat.”

The next year, John Banigan, who believed that sailors required better preparation for emergencies, published a decisive guide to lifeboat survival, called “How to Abandon Ship.” The book includes instructions on navigational equipment, clothing, food, and medical care in open boats, as well as a few idiosyncratic tips. (For instance: “Bring along some bottles of lime juice,” which can be placed in a mason jar to “cook” fish. And: “Be sure that no hot-headed shipmate has a gun.” As for other worries, like scurvy and night-blindness: “Forget them and sail your boat.”)

Berta and Ben remained on dry land, in South Africa, until the end of the war. Berta returned to radio work, including reënactments in which she played Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1944, Ben and Berta had a daughter; the following year, when the war was over and Berta was pregnant again, with my mother, they decided to return to the United States. Berta dusted off the small suitcase she had carried aboard the lifeboat, along with her diary. She and Ben found another cargo ship with space on board for passengers, and soon they set sail again for home.