Volendam (II) Historical

On August 30, 1940, SS Volendam was 300 miles west of Ireland when a torpedo from U-60 struck her. She was carrying 320 children — British evacuees under the Children's Overseas Reception Board, being sent to Canada to wait out a war that no one could predict would last another five years.

The Volendam did not go down quickly. The crew had time. The 320 children were brought off the ship, transferred to rescue vessels, and returned to Scotland. Every child came home. One adult crew member died — the single casualty from a ship that had taken a wartime torpedo with 320 children aboard.

Seventeen days later, on September 17, 1940, a German torpedo found the SS City of Benares. Of the 90 children she carried, 77 drowned in the North Atlantic. The CORB scheme was suspended that month and never resumed.

The Volendam survived her torpedoing, was repaired, and returned first to troopship service and then to HAL's postwar fleet. She was not scrapped until 1952. By then, the 320 children who had been handed into lifeboats by her crew were adults scattered across Britain, with children of their own.

She was a practical ship — 15,434 gross tons, built at Harland & Wolff in 1922, nothing exceptional about her design or her route. But on the afternoon of August 30, 1940, the crew did their job and every child aboard her survived. For a ship carrying child evacuees in the wartime North Atlantic, that was everything.

— In the Wake editorial

My mother was nine years old when she boarded the Volendam at Liverpool in August 1940. She had a cardboard label with her name and destination tied to her coat. Her parents brought her to the dock and stayed until the ship moved. She said she didn't look back — she had decided before they arrived that she wasn't going to.

She told me the torpedo story the same way she told most things: matter-of-factly, with specific detail. She remembered the noise, which she said was less like an explosion than a hard jolt. She remembered the crew calling out instructions — calm, she said, and clear. She remembered being handed into a lifeboat by a man whose name she never knew. She and several other children spent about four hours in that boat before a rescue vessel came alongside. She described the rescue vessel as very gray and very large from where she was sitting.

They were taken to Scotland. Three weeks later she came home to London on a train, and her parents met her at the station. She was home in time for the Blitz.

She never went to Canada. She never emigrated. She lived in London her whole life — and she followed the story of the City of Benares when it came out, the ship torpedoed seventeen days after hers with seventy-seven children lost. She always said the same thing about it: she had been on the Volendam, not the Benares, and that difference was entirely luck. She was right. It was.

— Patricia T., London, written 2018